Activists often just protest and offer no solutions to fix the problems they’re protesting about.  It’s a sign of the times, I suppose.  During the era of the Vietnam War draft, we were willing to go to jail or flee to Canada for our beliefs that the war was unjust—that probably wasn’t a solution either, but it was more effective than simple protest.  People of all races put their bodies where their mouths were too, just like in the civil rights movements.  Thousands still work quietly behind the scenes trying to solve problems, not simply pointing them out—working towards peace and tolerance of others.

There’s one lost cause you don’t hear much about anymore, even at the level of protest.  We continue to wreak havoc on our environment in many ways.  We’re not attacking Gaia with drones and special forces.  We’re attacking Her on all fronts and the innocent victims will be measured in the millions unless we change our ways, not just the few innocents that the terrorists make march along with them as human shields.  A simple protest falls on deaf ears in cases involving the environment much more than any of the protests against the treatment of Manning, Snowden, and the folk hero, Julian Assange, which often get media attention but accomplish very little.  Moreover, protestors need to prioritize their causes and work on issues that can bring the greatest good for the greatest number, and not protest for protest’s sake.

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Human beings are wonderfully complex, so it’s interesting that sci-fi writers love to write about computers developing near-human characteristics (I’m guilty too—see The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan—FYI: this is a free download on Amazon starting tomorrow, June 28, through July 2; also, Odri’s starship in Sing a Samba Galactica is just another member of the crew).  But, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine an AI computer program capable of modeling the emotional ingredients that influence human decision making.  (I suppose you could argue that you don’t want emotions influencing the computer’s thinking because they so often get humans in trouble, but that’s another issue.)

Last week I was struck by the stock market’s reaction to Bernanke’s announcement that the Fed was going to halt their stimulus policies and, in particular, let interest rates rise to a self-sustaining  and steady-state level.  The best way to describe it is that it was an “oh-my-God” reaction of Wall Street and the rest of the financial world to an abrupt change in the rules of the game.  Ignoring the fact that we can’t model these emotional responses (part of the problem), we still should wonder why.  Why is it that human beings have knee-jerk emotional reactions to outside stimuli that can send their world into a vortex of disaster?

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Not an ode exactly.  I can’t write good poetry, so my odes are just blog posts, a poor substitute for those who love Grecian urns and the like.  This post is indirectly about urns, though, in the form of receptacles found in offices usually containing bad, old, and cold coffee.  When I had a day job, I fortunately had a physicist colleague who believed in a good cup of coffee, an amateur barista, if you will.  The fact that Starbucks is raising the price of their coffee products by 1% made me reconsider our and the whole world’s love affair with coffee.  I come not to bury Starbucks but to praise coffee.  And I generally wonder: what the hell would we do without it!

Coffee is a drug, although a benign one.  We use it, often in social contexts, to get a fix of caffeine, or as lonely addicts just trying to stay alert.  These are legitimate excuses for consuming a wonderful beverage.  College kids tossing down those energy drinks don’t know what they’re missing.  Drunks using coffee to cure a hangover don’t either—you have to have some mental alertness to start with in order to savor this wondrous brew.  Coffee is a stimulant, but also contains all sorts of things that the docs say are good for you, depending on the latest study on coffee from the New England Journal of Medicine.

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You win a few and lose a few in this life—and you just hope by the end the balance is positive.  I’ve always felt this wonder about life and the universe around me.  If you haven’t looked in the mirror in the morning and asked “Why am I here?” something is terribly wrong with you.  My “why?” was often projected outwards, a pitiful soliloquy to an unresponding Universe that seemed to pose great mysteries I must strive to solve, a scientific sleuth tracking down answers.  I did my small part and relished the successes of others.  I’ve never stopped wondering.

I was an avid reader from the time I discovered comic books at age four—or was it three?  I wanted to fill in my own balloons and make my own comics.  My mother helped me.  My love of reading was helped along by an older brother who joined a sci-fi book club.  Writing and wonder made for a heady mixed drink that addicted me to both science and the written word.  You might know me for the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” (my interest in mysteries and thrillers came later) or “The Clones and Mutants Series” (futuristic or techno-thrillers), but “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” my Foundation series, is more closely related to those early days spent reading books from my brother’s collection (Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun were my introduction to the mystery genre).  By the time I ended junior high, I had forsaken those comic books and perused all the sci-fi books in our public library…and decided I wanted to be a writer.

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Readers of this blog know that I’ve long supported drones and special forces as effective ways to battle terrorism.  Now these tactics are coming into question in the liberal media.  The criticism contains the usual complaint that innocents can be killed.  It also complains about due process, especially for those terrorists who are also U.S. citizens.  The Obama administration has recognized the effectiveness of these policies.  Ironically, both sides of the political aisle are criticizing.  Maybe not ironic, but absurd—it’s as if all those NRA supporters in Congress have suddenly become vocal sycophants of the ACLU.

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Although I doubt any gun fanatic reads this blog, if you think you might be one, read the following characteristics.  Please note that I’m not talking about a gun enthusiast (simple hunter, skeet shooter, authentic target-range aficionado, etc.).  Again, if you don’t understand the difference between fanatic and enthusiast, read on.  For other people, some of the characteristics below might be amusing, others just plain sad…because there’s always truth in humor!

1) Go to a gun show and watch how a buyer picks up and caresses the weapon, whether he buys it or not.  If the gun seems to be just an extension of you-know-what, he’s a fanatic.  Don’t be surprised at the number of men you see doing this, even if their bathrooms aren’t loaded with porno pics.  Note that this doesn’t apply to women unless she has a particular kind of Freudian envy.  Or, she caresses the weapon while smiling at him.

2) If you’re out in the woods and run across a deer hunter—or any kind of hunter, for that matter—and he tries to convince you he needs an assault rifle to bring down his intended targets, you have a gun fanatic.  This definitely applies to women too.  By the way, what the hell are you doing in the woods during hunting season?  Hunters kill other people, even ones dressed in those loud orange clown suits they’re supposed to be wearing.  Without that suit, you’ll just look like game to them, even if the hunter you meet is like that sharpshooting GoDaddy CEO who’s out to kill an elephant.  Although most hunters, like Dick Cheney, can only hit the broad side of a judge, you can’t count on that!

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The death of Neil Armstrong at 82 from heart operation complications is a nail in the coffin we’ve been building for humanity’s adventures in space.  Some consider this only another example of public apathy or antagonism toward science and scientists.  I consider it a concerted effort to end a dream on the part of individuals who need to use their imagination more.

Another nail was the cancellation of the shuttle program.  But, even before that, the cancellation of the Apollo program was a bureaucratic castration—step 1, if you will, a pulling back from the great adventure.  The shuttle program’s cancellation was step 2, as the incompetent asses in government continued to opt for military expenditures over science in their clumsy and insane budget choices—the budget ax fell on the easy targets with special interests and lobbyists prevailing (call it the military industrial complex, with double meaning intended).

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There are many important issues in the never-ending battle between the 99% v. 1%.  One such issue is likely to affect the 1% just as much as the 99%–the environment human beings live in.  Worldwide, many of the 99% live in poverty, experiencing war, famine, and filth without shelter and clean water.  This could be the future of the 1% too—when Gaia suffers, we all suffer.  Gaia, Mother Earth, or whatever you call Her, is currently being violently gang-raped by the 1% for power and profit.  Her silent scream is what I see in the famous Edvard Munch painting.

The 1% and its power brokers, i.e. most conservatives, America’s GOP, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are notorious Gaia rapists on America’s most wanted list of environmental criminals who are repeatedly indicted for their sociopathic abuse and lack of concern for Mother Earth.  To be fair, some born-agains, a large constituency of the GOP, have expressed concern about environmental issues.  Even some Republicans revolted against Romney’s leadership and voted for tax breaks for wind farms, a small victory probably aimed at vocally environmental constituents they need to appease in order to be re-elected to a second term.  Nevertheless, the political sycophants to the 1% generally turn a blind eye to Gaia’s rape.

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Trekkies know that there were two starship Enterprises, the first named after the aircraft carrier and the second after the first.  I claim there are three.  In a few days, the true first starship Enterprise will end its life as a museum on the decks of the old aircraft carrier Intrepid berthed in New York City’s harbor.

The demise of NASA’s shuttle program ranks as one of the most asinine decisions the government has ever made in its mismanagement of science funding.  Another, of course, was the cancellation of the SSC (short for “Superconducting Super Collider”).  The first killed America’s capability to put an astronaut in space, thus all but ending an all too brief era of space exploration.  The second ended U.S. dominance in experimental particle physics.  The Higgs particle, if it exists, won’t be discovered by American scientists, at least not by those working in this country.

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#149:  Those readers who have read my Soldiers of God and, to a lesser extent, some of my other books, know I’m concerned with both kinds of terrorism, home-grown and imported.  In fact, Soldiers portrayed the dangers of the home-grown kind long before the DHS made it a priority.  In that book and elsewhere (including the articles in this blog), I have discussed the distinction between spirituality and fundamentalism.

Many people, from U.S. presidents to megachurch ministers, claim to talk to God, to have a one-on-one with the Old Lady who can explain everything science can’t possibly explain.  I always thought this was part of spirituality and, in some sense, admired people who could do it, although I knew the Old Lady had to be really good at multitasking to talk with everyone.  Now a new book by T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, paints this as something belonging to neither spirituality nor fundamentalism (by the way, the eBook breaks my price barrier since it’s priced at $14.99).  From what I understand about Mr. Luhrmann’s thesis, the person who talks with God is simply having a schizophrenic conversation with a section of his mind he or she has created and called God.

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