Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

A Poem of Hopes and Dreams…

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Tonight I offer you a poem about hopes and dreams…

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    Safe Slumber
    by Debra Hurst


      Gently floating away to sleep
      Safely slumbering, resting with peace
      The most innocent of dreams
      Sweetly developing in my mind.

      While in my slumbering rest
      I can swim as much as I like
      I know not fear
      I’m safe, protected, at peace.

      I often hear voices
      Sweet sounds of music
      Some really loud
      Some soft

      There are people waiting for me
      Waiting for my birth.
      I have all my fingers and toes
      I’m ready to play.

      Something is thumping at my foot
      Something cold has my legs
      They are being pulled from behind
      Is it time to be born?

      Wow I feel a different world
      No water, no more floating
      I think I’m almost out
      I’m on my way.

      Oh, that hurt, not right
      Something hurt at the back of my head
      Something sharp pushed through my brain.

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…hopes and dreams destroyed by every “partial-birth” and “late-term” abortion.

[Thanks, Deb, for letting me reproduce your poem here.]

We live in world where unborn victims of Canadian infanticide have been shipped to Oregon for the electricity that their roasted little bodies can provide. We live in a world where Kermit Gosnell ran a human slaughterhouse under the name of “family planning”, with horrors too numerous and gruesome to repeat here. Want more? Look at these images of aborted babies, if you dare. How much more twisted and evil can the whole abortion situation get? How many more innocents will be sacrificed to the idol of selfishness (encompassing convenience, lust and promiscuity)?

If there’s any consolation in the genocide of tens of millions of unborn infants that was unleashed by Roe v. Wade, and perpetuated yearly by hundreds of thousands of individual males and females who refuse to exercise personal responsibility through sexual self-control, it’s that those innocent souls will go straight into the eternal grace of our Lord, who someday shall judge their killers.

Nonetheless, here on Earth, those of us who care enough will mourn the dead we never could know. How many great scientists, artists, ministers, authors, astronauts, sports stars, doctors, executives, and yes, community organizers and activists, have never seen the light of day because they were aborted? Could one of them have found the cure for cancers, AIDS, MS, MD, ALS, herpes, bipolar disorder, Alzheimers disease, schizophrenia, or the common cold? Who among them may have solved the riddles of autism or led the way to sight for the blind? The agent or detective who would have thwarted a deadly act of terrorism? The future President who would have found a way to get a true peace treaty forged across the Middle East?

What amazing things may have been discovered by those souls who never had bodies outside the womb, or by one of their own children or grandchildren who never can exist? Could one of those babies aborted in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s have been the right friend to help you with your worst troubles today, or the right spouse for the lonely, the right counselor for the broken, or the Good Samaritan who could have saved a loved one killed in a crash? What amazing accomplishments and everyday relationships never can happen because the difference-maker was aborted?

My God, what have we lost?

Prevention and Foresight: Rare Ideals

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I recently woke up to find that my PC, on which I had kept open some folders and projects mid-work, was rebooted yet again because of automatic “security” updates. Of course, formerly open windows never came back, and I had to go through the effort to reopen and re-order the array of software and “My Computer” type windows needed for the project. Fortunately, I have the foresight to save work often, in contingency of either this or sudden power outages, so that lost hours of productivity isn’t a problem when such things happen. Instead it becomes merely lost minutes. Still, that is wasteful and inefficient in principle; and even the relatively small act of having to manually save work shouldn’t be necessary. In other words…

Such things need not happen.

Why?

First of all, this is 2011, not 1986. Some programs do auto-save work or open displays at regular intervals, sometimes (what a concept!) as often as specified by the user. All should. [The software I use for this BLOG does!] Those that don’t (attention, Photoshop): learn from those that do, and make it happen. That would be an “upgrade” I would support.

Second of all, this is 2011, not 1986. How about building an OS smart enough to recognize and synergistically communicate with open programs, such that they “know” a planned system shutdown is coming and save open documents on their own, and also, to recognize and save to the profile any open windows, then re-open them all right back up to where they were, upon reboot? Duh…it makes too much sense. That would be an “upgrade” I would support.

Third of all, this is 2011, not 1986. Why the need to reboot at all? By now, I would have imagined that OS developers and hardware makers together would have figured out a way to install improvements without having to reboot. After all, PCs have existed for over three decades; surely that fundamental early flaw in the model can be improved upon sometime in that interval! That would be an “upgrade” I would support.

Finally, this principle is timeless: How about getting it right to begin with so that updates aren’t necessary? Whether the whole OS or any given program, or tangible flaws such as the upper driveway and walkway at the National Weather Center (a stretch of pavement that has undergone at least four reconstructions of various sorts since 2006), the ideal is the same. Think ahead. Do it right the first time. If the upgrade or reconstruction is that important, how about making it part of version 1?

Indeed it is a matter of principle. My TV and cable box need not download constant “updates” to keep them from being taken over by bad guys. I don’t have to call my furniture store to “upgrade” my mattress and bed frame, lest they collapse to the floor. I have a high-resolution slide and photo scanner from 2004 that hasn’t needed a single “upgrade” to do its thing with excellence; it still performs more and better (especially with film scanning) than newer models, based on online ratings.

I don’t have to bring in my vehicle (itself a complex machine) to the dealership every few weeks to get its software or hardware “patched”, lest the rotors break, the head gasket dissolves, or the intake manifold otherwise springs a leak. Do you like it when recalls happen and you have to take your car in for repairs because of faulty design? No. It’s the same principle.

Sure, occasional operator-driven maintenance is appropriate and responsible. The regular change of oil and other fluids is a good thing to remove built-up contaminants, if that’s the parallel; but it isn’t a valid analog in any way, shape or form. Software doesn’t accumulate grime. It’s either grimy and deficient to begin with, or not. The only two reasons it needs updating are if some new functions are added (a good thing, but why not have the foresight to put most of them in at the start?), or it weren’t coded robustly and securely from the very beginning.

Foresight, foresight, foresight…apparently it’s too much to ask developers to plan. Prevention, by definition, would prevent a lot of problems, from relatively small, nuisance-grade troubles such as these, to local road rebuilding, to severe weather killing people at festivals and stadiums, to gang violence in a community, to the national debt, to terrorist attacks and most wars; but alas, too many people in positions of influence at all levels seem utterly bereft of the concept of the benefits of thinking ahead.

Here’s another little example of many (just a convenient example, not picking specifically on Adobe)…


I appreciate that the developers and maintainers are willing to supply such updates for free, instead of charging for them. But such things strike me as reactive, not proactive.

Build it right the first time, and this wouldn’t be necessary, especially so stinking often:


God gave us the cognitive ability to plan and prevent; and while we’re not omniscient, the capability of foresight should be magnified and reinforced when multiplied by the number of members of a development team or group of any sort. Two heads are better than one, or at least, should be as long as laziness, passivity, fear of conflict, and mindless groupthink don’t take root. Clearly we’re not using our think-ahead capability to its fullest.

How about being proactive and not reactive? Wow, what a concept! Again, too many in government and the private sector don’t seem to understand this, regarding a gigantic variety of issues. The continual “need” for software upgrades is but one small symptom of a broader, more pervasive, indeed systematic deficiency of preventative thought in all realms.

On Mass Ignorance and Superficiality

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        “No one gives a damn about apathy!” — facetious quote by Jim Johnson

Polls consistently show that Americans in bulk:
* Pay more attention to utterly meaningless superficialities (American Idol, celebrity gossip, etc.) than to domestic or foreign affairs,

* Are grotesquely ignorant of history (e.g., can’t express the meaning of more than two Constitutional amendments, describe the Marshall Plan, associate Sitting Bull with the correct tribe, or name even one of the Big Three of Yalta),

* Are unable to identify Afghanistan — site of a major, ongoing war involving the U.S. — on a blank map of nations,

* Have no clue about the magnitude of governmental spending, nor the difference between the budget deficit and the national debt,

* Cannot name their school superintendent, city councilor, state representative, state senator, U. S. representative, and U. S. senator

* Cannot name even three correct aspects of the new “health care” law, whichever side they’ve taken.

Yet they can tell you who won American Idol, who is dating Jennifer Aniston, or the entire lyrics to a song in the Top 40. What does that say?

These form the bulk of voters, and an even larger percentage of those who don’t vote. For better or worse, your vote or mine counts the same as the drooling schlub who thinks Hu Jintao is something you eat off the Happy Garden’s buffet line, and whose greatest concern is whether he can freeze-frame the TV camera peeking up the skirt of one of the hot babes on Dancing with the Stars.

Blame money or TV if you will, but it is a collective of tens of millions of individuals who, through their own chosen manner of ill-educated, shortsighted, selfish thinking, flapping hither and yon in the breezes of their ten-second attention spans, genuflecting at the altar not of God but of their own instant gratification, that permits this condition to flourish. These are ills are directly symptomatic of a multi-decadal societal, ethical and motivational corrosion, one that pre-dates my own birth and reaches at least into the early 1960s. The result is a society consisting of members systematically bereft of:

* Firm childhood guidance at home from worshipful married parents having unambiguously defined roles, then in turn,

* The guiding compass of ethical clarity and moral certitude that arises from such, and finally,

* A system of compulsory K-12 education containing a level of curricular rigor and strict discipline befitting the sort of academic mass-excellence necessary to dominate the worldwide intellectual scene.

Instead, we’ve got this, this, and this. Materialism, indifference and self-worship reign. The lack of church- and family-magnetized moral compasses in enough members of mass media, big business and government probably is why all those institutions have become so corrupt.

I don’t foresee a cure, either, nor the unified public will to compel one. The abject failure of the Kansas City experiment has shown resoundingly that throwing money at problems doesn’t solve them. And yet, our government is throwing billions of dollars that it doesn’t have at all sorts of troubles, most ultimately arisen from greed and selfish shortsightedness, heaping further upon an incomprehensibly vast monetary debt that our descendants must pay with potentially horrifying consequences for the integrity and security of our nation and of its citizenry. The genie is out of the bottle, to the decided detriment of the inherent American role as a free nation in a position of world leadership.

Countless troops have died for the freedoms we take for granted, the greatest freedoms the world ever has known. Yet with freedom comes matching responsibility. Therefore, we also have, collectively, the greatest responsibilities the world ever has known. We are abdicating them by means of apathy! Exercising our freedom to do what we want, without the counterbalancing disciplinary temperance of accountability that motivates us to do what we should, is our undoing.

It’s not the purview of government to shape society, but the other way around. To do so requires a well-educated, aware, responsible, and faithful citizenship whose priorities are straight. Such people realize that the only honorable path to achievement is hard work. Such people realize that neither individuals, nor corporations, nor government, can get something for nothing. Such people realize that difficult, painful and unpopular choices sometimes must be made. Such people are increasingly absent in positions of leadership all across government, positions that are decided far more on personal popularity, charisma and telegenic appeal than actual merit, qualifications, earned credentials and accomplishment.

Only with an absolutely massive, society-wide paradigm shift toward honor, family-based moral and ethical unambiguity, diligence, personal and corporate accountability, and true excellence in all forms of work, can the listing ship be saved. We’ve gone too long and too widely without them. Dangerous are the resulting levels of mass ignorance, a thirst for pop-fad, flavor-of-the-moment leadership, and a decided gullibility to passionate speech without experienced substance. After all, such is precisely the civic condition that freely elected Hitler.

        “Of the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” — George Washington

        “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams