Fight the Amoral Fight

Wandered through a bookstore the other day in O'Hare airport looking for something to read on the plane. I was predisposed to buy something, because I liked the store, and I spent more time looking than I might have otherwise.

Ultimately my search yielded negative results, and I wandered rather forlornly back out into the hustle and bustle of the concourse. It was all the excuse I needed to find a bar and have a couple of beers instead. :oD

The contents of the store boiled down to three categories:
1) stuff in which I was not interested,
2) stuff I liked but had already read, and
3) interesting stuff that I did not want to buy.

Among the items in category three was Redshirts. I was willing to accept your recent comments as a recommendation, but I did not want to plunk down $25 for a hardbound edition that I might not even want to keep. I think that instead I'll keep an eye on the local library's New Books shelf. There might be one or two worth checking out.

Whatsa SP booster blog?
About Santa Paula, maybe.

Hi sp,
Been waiting for this blog(page) to turn because I want to link page 1 to my blog. Hope that's okay. Also want to thank you again for the inspiration!

Weather at your house sounds great. Heat here but not like last summer, thankfully.

Just followed the David Brin link. Surprised by his non-fiction title, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?

Have you read it?

So does that mean no info about Julius or Quintilis? That's just not right :)

Happy 4th to wu!

That's OK, sp, take your time, and have fun knitting in the sun(sounds like a song title, lol!). We'll be around, unless TWC decides blogs aren't value-added! :P

Happy 4th!!

SP, thanks for finding and sharing the link in #42 to that Jeff Daniels speech from The Newsroom. I just went back and listened to it again. A lot of good dialog followed in later comments, too.

I think maybe Ylee's heart is in the right place, but like many others, he doesn't differentiate between patriotism and egotism -- no offense intended, Ylee. I am a patriot, even though I don't think the U.S. is the greatest country in the world.

It seems to me that it isn't much different that a person who thinks they're the greatest person in the world. If you're the greatest, there's nothing to strive for, nothing to achieve, and then one forgets about having goals and trying to become a better person.

I think the same is true for people who say this is the greatest country. When too many people think that way, we stop investing in the future. When we as a nation stop investing in our future, as evidenced by a general unwillingness to pay taxes to build infrastructure and fund research, we lose more than a competitive edge, we lose a vital spark.

We used to be the greatest nation. We can be again. But not until we recognize that we aren't the best at anything except bragging and funding the military-industrial complex. We need to get better at a lot of things. I hope I live long enough to see America revitalized.

Independence Day is a good time to feel patriotic and start working toward a better tomorrow for this country we love.

Okay, I've been putting this off because we were near July, are in July etc. So to keep up a tradition of posting when the blog changes over, here is another knitting video.

BriarCraft's comment got me thinking about how one would choose the greatest country in the world. As with most things described by superlative adjectives, it's a value judgement. Unless we choose and define some kind of objective measure, the ranking will be subjective.

Unless things take a turn for the worse (and in a rather obvious and nasty way), and unless it happens fairly soon (so that I am still capable of making sound decisions and taking decisive action), I plan to live out my days in the good old U. S. of A. That is a subjective decision, but it is based on the objective facts that I was born here, I'm a citizen, and I know how to live here. If I were to emigrate, I would have to learn a whole new set of expectations about politics, culture, geography, climate, ecology etc., and I might have to learn a new language. I'm getting old to tackle that much novelty at once. Fourth of July notwithstanding, my choice is driven more by habit than by patriotism.

I can remember feeling a great deal more patriotic than I do now. Some of the change is surely internal. Most of us are raised on fairy tales after all. After a while the glitter wears off, the cobwebs blow away, and we see the world more clearly. It's a byproduct of age and experience. We learn to discount the rhetoric and watch what actually happens. A great deal has happened since the 1950s. I honestly feel that we, as a nation, have lost something fundamental, a vision perhaps. I'm not sure where it went or whether we can get it back. But the United States used to be about "We, the People". Now it's about money and hype. I can't help but regard that as a grossly negative development.

One thing we Americans like to brag about is our wealth. We can attribute our good fortune to smart trading and Yankee ingenuity, but let's not forget that at our founding we had a whole new continent to exploit. The frontier is closed now, and we have only our ingenuity to rely on henceforth. Will we still compete as capably as we did when we had vast undeveloped resources? Consider, for example, the people of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. What sort of future can they build atop the mine tailings?

Here is a link to a page at Wikipedia, which displays lists of countries by GDP per capita. There are three lists from different sources. I offer this as one kind of objective measure of greatness. The United States is among the top ten countries on all three lists. On no list does it crack the top five.