Archive for May, 2007

I promised kitten that I’d promote this press release. She and I will be attending on the Fourth of July weekend. Anyone who is interested in going from the CU Area should let us know and we might be able to provide a ride. Here’s a wiki on the Man Himself.

It’s very hard for me to be even close to objective when I talk about how much I owe to the works of this man. My religion, my politics and my Family can be seen as examples of successful extrapolations from his novels into the real world. He was a big part of the mechanism by which I have developed from a Farm Boy to a Natural Philosopher.

“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
James Gifford

The Heinlein Centennial
Friday May 18th 2007

916.723.4765

A MISSOURI NATIVE SON AT HIS 100TH BIRTHDAY

KANSAS CITY, MO: From the classic rocketship design to the consciousness revolution, Robert Heinlein predicted and inspired major changes of the twentieth century through his writing. To science fiction readers around the world, he remains the undisputed master of the field nineteen years after his death. This July, his life and legacy will be celebrated in a unique convention in Kansas City that has attracted some unusually high profile guests.

“Heinlein constantly redefined the field of science fiction and was so popular as to cross into the mainstream,” says his biographer, Bill Patterson. “The word ‘grok’ came from Heinlein; he even invented the waterbed. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and was with Walter Cronkite when men landed on the Moon.”

That recognition extends in all directions when you consider groups of people who all worship some work of Heinlein’s as their bible: The sixties hippies who embraced Stranger in a Strange Land as a model for living, the Libertarians who cherish the political structure in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the entrepreneurs now building rockets in the Mojave Desert whose inspiration is The Man Who Sold the Moon.

“Since so many space businesspeople are in this field because of Heinlein, most of them are attending our convention,” says Tim Kyger, convention chair. “We have Dr. Peter Diamandis, who just flew Stephen Hawking in free-fall, Brian Binnie, the astronaut who won the X Prize, and the CEOs of half a dozen of the cutting edge companies that are in the process of revolutionizing how we get into space. NASA’s boss Mike Griffin and Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin will be there to provide the viewpoint of the people that have done the most in space.”

Part science fiction convention, part rocket jockey Woodstock, the three-day Heinlein Centennial will be as unique as the man it honors. Authors inspired by Heinlein who will attend include Spider Robinson (Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon), David Gerrold (When Harlie was One), and John Scalzi ( Old Man’s War). Sir Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) will appear via teleconference.

“We’ll have about a hundred presentations and panels where people can participate in everything from debates about whether Starship Troopers glorified war to learning about the latest in laser-launched spacecraft,” says James Gifford, convention secretary. “Plus we’ll have art displays, a sales area, a video room, and a gala dinner. And we’re only a short distance from Butler, where you can still see Heinlein’s birthplace.”

For more information, go to http://www.heinleincentennial.com/ “

So, Brandon, since kitten has worked as one of the organizers of this, and I expect that we’ll be a couple of the panelists, does this push me up even higher on the Nerd Foodchain? Damn, I’ve got to get my suit out of mothballs for the Banquet. [No tie, though, not now, not ever!]

Bwah-ha-ha.

Tom

The Westboro Baptist Church brings us a message we can all get behind: God hates the world.

I’m not sure I get the “You’ll eat your children” part, but, hey, it’s catchy.

I want to renew the last topic from the beginning, since I realize that the big question that I asked the readership was not answered.

First, though, some last comments on good and evil:

I found Prescott’s analogy of alcoholism to be interesting.

[Syl, if you haven't gone back that far, go back to the very end of March and read my piece called 25 Years. I'm going to be thinking about that post while writing this.]

I don’t think that people are either good or evil by nature. Prescott’s right in that evil is easy and quickly rewarding–How many of the people you see, Syl, are tempted to the dark side because they don’t ever expect waiting to give them any positive results?

I’ve spent the last twenty-five years training myself away from the easy and evil. It’s been only a decade or so since I made the willful decision to pledge myself to the Light. I see a great deal of evil falling upon America–that was the subject of the previous post in the first place–as mentioned by Fred Reed on his blog.

The biggest problem that we have as a people, perhaps, is that for the Light to fail here, all people have to do is remain silent and go on with their lives. Evil, as promulgated by our government will slowly drain any good that’s left from our culture and civilization and let us fall into obscurity and darkness.

I guess what I’m saying, (and what I tried to elicit thirty posts ago) is that good has to be proactive, while this is not necessarily true of evil. I was surprised that so many of the replies in the previous topic were changes that the co-respondents believed that the society or government needed to do in order to save the world. What I was looking for, which almost no one answered with, were three things that YOU, the reader could do to save the world.

In a lot of ways, the Heroes analogy was even better than I thought. One of the remarkable things about the writing in that series is that the Super-powered individuals are, at the end of the day, people just like us. Even the darkest of villains do not see themselves as such with their own eyes.

At one point, a Supervillain explains how the destruction of a major city would result in a better world. He looks at a painting of a shock-wave tipping buildings and mentions that to get this, only 0.07% of the population of the world had to die, and how the result would certainly justify their sacrifice.

This is a kind of evil that we need to watch for in ourselves, as well as in those that we allow to have power over our lives–pragmatism is never worth immorality, no matter how tempting its fruit.

So, I’m going to restart the discussion with the question–”How Do You Think You Could Be a Hero?” Give me three things that you can do today, as the person you currently are, to help save the world.

Tom

I found this good article discussing supply-side economics on the nytimes site. It’s an informative talk on the phrase that excites and depresses many, depending on their political instincts:

Today, hardly any economist believes what the Keynesians believed in the 1970s and most accept the basic ideas of supply-side economics — that incentives matter, that high tax rates are bad for growth, and that inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon. Consequently, there is no longer any meaningful difference between supply-side economics and mainstream economics.

Here’s some background reading on supply-side economics at Investopedia, NYU, and Wikipedia.

During the Falwell discussion, I mentioned that his recruitment of the religious in order to pressure government to oppress people who were different than the ones that Congress was currently oppressing was a bad idea.

Vox Day explains in detail why this is the case in this column.

People often wonder how I, as a witch, can be so tolerant of Christianity, since the tenets of that religion dictate that I am hell-bound. Vox answers this today in a way that’s more eloquent than anything I can come up with at the moment:

“Because God refuses to dictate right behavior through force, Christians are morally bound to do likewise except in the specific situations which God has commanded otherwise. Being freed from the Law by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, Christians are not bound to stone adulterers and other sinners, but rather to present them with the Good News. Because the wages of sin are death, those who reject it and prefer their sin will be punished in good time without the interference of the Christian.”

This is why real Christians don’t make laws designed to punish gay people or to give themselves advantages as a group within the state. Such things are of the world and ultimately will corrupt the believer who gets involved with the government.

When Falwell took the step of exposing Christianity to the evils of government, a danger that Fundamentalists had traditionally avoided like Ba’alzebub himself, he led far too many down the primrose path to perdition.

Real religion is libertarian.

Tom