Our Founding Fathers Would be Amazed.

The constitution that our Founding Fathers left us is a liberal document, providing freedom of speech, religions, assembly and property - about as liberal as anybody was thinking back in the late 1700s.  Yet, if they could come back today they would be amazed.  They would also be lost.  We often talk about  them as if they were creatures of our world who had solved the bulk of human problems, had foreseen our mission in the world and had built our current nation.  However, they would however probably feel more at home in the world of Julius Caesar than in the United States of 2011.  Forget the airplanes, TV, computers, internet, forget the amazing inventions like the revolver, the repeating rifle, and nuclear weapons,  forget also strange new words like “germs”,  “GPS”,  “Typewriter”,  they might be more intrigued by words like “California”, “Idaho”, “Nevada”, “Oklahoma”, “Alaska”, “Hawaii”.  They didn’t even think about healthcare since germ theory was undreamed of, inoculations were not a realistic factor,  and even though some of our Founding Fathers lived to a ripe old age, the average life expectancy  of the citizens of their new nation was probably around 35 years.  The words that they wrote down were written with a feather from a bird with the juice from a berry, and were carried on the back of a horse or across the sea by the wind.

Our Founding Fathers lived in a world in which natural resources were an extremely serious problem - because there were way too many of them.  The available resources actually impeded the nation-building process.  The legacy they left us provided for the pollution and careless disregard of the world’s greatest storehouse of natural resources in less than 120 years - by then the great forests were gone, the great plains were gone and the world’s richest topsoil had blown into the sea.  The great rivers were all polluted - some so badly that they would catch on fire.  

The total population of the United States that the Founding Fathers created their constitution for was less than 4 million people, about the same number as now live in Atlanta or Houston or Boston or Dallas, it was only about 1/3 that number of people who now live in the greater Los Angeles area or  less than 1/4 of those who now live in the greater NYC area.  Almost 700,000 of them (more than 15%) were slaves, and probably about half of them couldn’t vote - why?  Oh, because they were females, of course.   Almost all of the population  (95%) was rural and farmed for a living.  The largest city, Philadelphia had 44,000 people.  The entire population of the WORLD itself in 1770 was less than 800 million people or  about 2.5 times that of the United States  today.  The legacy left by the “Founding Fathers” was a clear  trail of disaster for Negroes, Chinese laborers, and worst of all for the Native Americans who were victims of genocide and subjugation. 

Guns Don't Kill People . . . ?

People Kill People.  Yes, we all know how that goes.  We’ve heard it enough.  And it’s true.  Englishmen kill other Englishmen, Spanish people kill Spaniards, Germans kill Germans, Frenchmen kill French people.  But notice how it’s a kind of a one-on-one affair with most of the world.  Not so with Americans.  If an American has a problem with another American, he may take an assault rifle out or an extended clip and kill not only the person he has the beef with but everybody else around too.  Not to mention the wounded, many of which will spend the rest of their lives trying to return to where they were before the bullets started flying.  

This also happened in England not too long ago, and also in Norway, I think, 10 to 15 people killed and wounded - again with a gun.  More and more in America these shootings don’t even seem to involve the shooter and another individual he actually knew, it is often between the shooter and other people - most of which he did not know, and could not have known.  It’s just his way of screaming.  

Most of these shooters - one might categorically say all of them, are people with mental problems.  Other people who knew them usually say afterward that they were not surprised.  Yet those shooters can still buy guns and ammunition with no problem.  

Well, enough for me to say.  Mark Shields has said it far better than I could in his column here referenced:  http://www.creators.com/opinion/mark-shields.html?columnsName=msh

The Real Reason for the Christmas Season

Now that Christmas is over we can reflect for a moment on its meaning.  And I am referring not to the classical definition but to a practical observation of what the Christmas period actually produces and how it has changed over many years.

Mankind has celebrated the “rebirth” of the sun in the darkest days of the year for thousands of years.  How did they  know when the days started to become longer?  We don’t know how that all began but we may be sure that they watched the movement of heavenly bodies much more closely than we do today.  Some people probably made these observations before the general public became aware of them and thus gained a “priestly” status from their predictions.  

We do know that perhaps 1000 years BC, many people in the northern hemisphere “celebrated” this change of the seasons with festivals and gifts.  Pagan gods began to "have been born" around this time we now would call the third week in December.  Eventually Saturn’s "birthday" became dominant and the festivals were often called Saturnalia, and his "birthday" became the main reason for celebration. 

Jesus’ birth, according to the Bible is mentioned only in Matthew and Luke.  Luke, like Mark, never met Jesus and did not know him personally.  They were clearly writing the words told to them by other people, perhaps because Mark and Luke were literate.  John apparently, did know Jesus very well but he was illiterate.  His work is written some 30  to 40 years after Jesus’ death and is clearly a transcription.  Matthew was not only literate, but also wealthy, and apparently knew Jesus very well.  His account of the birth is entirely in the beginning of his gospel.  

The possibility of jesus having been born on December 25th is very unlikely, and the stories surrounding the birth are illogical.  Sheep and shepherds have never been in the fields in December in that part of the world and it would seem doubtful that any census would have been taken during that period because of the difficulty of travel at that time of year.  The history of that census has been lost and no record of it has been found.  Also no record remains of a star that remained stationary, and there are no independent records of angels appearing to anyone at that supposed time.  

Jesus’ birthday was apparently added to the collection of pagan gods who celebrated their birthday around December 25 some time around 200 to 250 years later,  and that was documented for the first time about 345 AD.  Now that Jesus had been "promoted" to equal status with many pagan gods, religions struggled for dominance.  A period of "holy wars" broke out, and they ended in the establishment of Christianity as the major religious force in Europe.

As the Twenty-first Century gets firmly underway,  we find another new god moving in on Jesus and claiming priority as the real reason for the celebration of this season. This new entry is the god of corporate commerce.  This god does not claim it was born in this season, but this season is the reason for its salvation.  Merchants refer to the beginning of the Christmas shopping period as “Black Friday” because for many of them it is the “Christmas sales” that  begin to move their yearly ledgers from the “red” side over to the “black”.   Meanwhile, commercial preparations for Christmas have moved forward (or backward) in time.  Many years ago, the first commercial signs for Christmas began appearing soon after Thanksgiving, then before, then they became visible right after Halloween.  Now some of the Christmas advertisements can be seen well before Halloween.   But this god is not a jealous god, it will accept Jesus, and pagan gods and other symbols too like Santa and Rudolph and trees brought into houses and decorated  as long as it can use them to help push their sales.  

So if you want to go to church on Christmas day, that’s fine with this new god, but just don’t take Jesus’ message to heart because that would definitely hurt sales, and of course, you should attend ONLY after you have paid your tribute to the new god.  

Where Are We Going?

This picture was made on our way home from the airport after returning from Europe,  that land of high-speed trains, intercity trains, long-haul buses and short-haul buses, trolleys, subways and street cars.  

Probably all of the cars in this picture, certainly most of them, have only one person inside, and many of them have no large purchases they are bringing home.  They carry one person who could be reading a paper or book, or be perusing a laptop computer (many trains in Europe have wi-fi) if they were not driving - or starting and stopping and starting and stopping.

We are being left so far behind the rest of the developed nations of the world that we will probably never be able to catch up.  It is not so much that we are “eating their dust” as it is that we are coming to resemble the concrete we have covered our land with, slowly hardening into place even as it - and we - also show signs of cracking.

And we must realize that those “third world” nations that are now beginning to flex their muscles are not going to model their infrastructure after ours, but will pass us quickly by as we remain attached to our gas guzzlers and concrete roadways and traffic jams.


Obama was going to introduce high-speed rail and inter-city rail, but great forces are determined to prevent that from ever happening.  That power comes from large corporate-political organizations representing the gas, highway construction and automobile production industries.