Blogging has been lighter than light

I could have posted that blogging was light, but that would be wrong.  It was nonexistent yesterday.  That's the first time in a year or more since that has happened.

Why?  Nothing wrong here, but the thought flashed into my mind that blogging is an utter waste of time.  So why bother?  It's almost as if I had given up finally.  The blog is going nowhere and there seemed to be no point in doing it anymore at all.  The traffic had built up and then fell off a cliff.  The reason for that made no sense.  It wasn't the quality of the posts, because I think the quality of the posts I'm putting up is getting better all the time.  Besides, the traffic has risen and fallen before, that's not exactly what was bugging me.

That last post kinda figured into it I was feeling.  What I read in that link was so bad that nothing is going to matter anyway since everybody is going to be in a world of excrement.  And here I was writing about outer space when nothing like that is going to happen.  The people running things have so thoroughly failed that the system is going to fall apart.  Who the hell knows where it will all lead to.

So, I spent most of the day yesterday watching DVD's.  I watched Deliverance, because there's a scene in there where Lewis says what I just wrote above. "The system is going to fail."  And I thought about the current state of events and it looks like that may well be the case.  The law of the jungle will be the only law as it was during parts of that movie.  It was a struggle for survival- until they got back to civilization.  What happens if there's no civilization to come back to?

My thinking has gone through all sorts of permutations.  But it always comes back to the same thing.  Money. Yet, it seems to me that it is not an evil thing in and of itself.  Money is only the medium of exchange.  There's a saying that money is the root of all evil.  But money can't be evil.  Nothing inanimate can be evil, as evil can only exist in the heart of a moral being.  Money is inert, it is a living being with a knowledge of good and evil that can make an inert thing like money into something good or evil.  It is not the thing itself, but what is done with the thing.

You need money to make this system work, but that isn't enough.  You need a moral system so that the money can be handled properly.  It is the breakdown in that moral system which is what's creating a problem. Money isn't being handled properly and the system is going to fail because of that.  The cause isn't the money itself, it is the lack of morality that makes the money system workable.  When the money system fails, the whole system must fail with it.  That's because money is the lifeblood of the economic system.  Money makes this world go around and if it is sick, we are all going to be sick along with it.

In the frontier days here in the USA, most people would farm their own land.  If the money system failed, there was still a way to grow your own food.  With a roof over your head, you could make out OK.  During the Great Depression, which my mother lived through, she, like most people at that time, lived on a farm.  She told me she didn't know that there was a depression.  They had everything they needed on the farm.  But we have gotten away from that.  What happens when the wheels of commerce fall off because of the money problem?  People can't get food, then you've got a big problem.  A stable society is now destabilized.  People do desperate things when they are desperate.  With no food nor no prospect of food, people will start getting desperate.

I watched some of the Republican debate last night.  I turned it off when the topic seemed to be switching towards Gingrich's marital problems over the years.  This discussion reminded me of something I read about Abraham Lincoln.  The story went something like this: some objections were being made about General Grant and his drinking.  Lincoln said he couldn't spare this man, and besides, he understood that Grant no longer had that problem.  But if that were not the case, Lincoln said that he would find out what Grant was drinking and give a barrel of it to all his generals.

I think that serves as a good example of what is what's missing when the discussion gets to Gingrich's moral failings.  It doesn't have anything to do with the problem we are facing. It is analogous to the Lincoln story. Gingrich's marital history is irrelevant.  But people are treating it as if it were.

Who do you pay attention to?  I think you should deal with relevant issues, like how to solve the money problem.  Gingrich's marital history hasn't got much to do with the money problem we are facing.  Yes, it is a moral problem, but not much to do with how to handle money.  That's the point.

Martial problems are longer range problems.  The near term is going to be more urgent.  The money problems are relevant now.  How to solve them and who is the best one to solve them should be the focal point of the discussion.

Wouldn't it be tragic that too many people disqualified Newt Gingrich because of his marital history, but he was the only one who could lead us out of this mess?  It would have been tragic for the USA if Lincoln replaced Grant with another general because of Grant's history with regard to his drinking.  Lincoln was wise to keep Grant. Is it wise to disqualify Gingrich because of his moral failings?  As if everybody else was morally fit enough to sit in judgment of him.

I didn't know Gingrich was interested in mining the moon.  He was, and yet it seemed to be treated as if it were a joke.  Why is mining the moon not being taken seriously?  The resources of Earth are limited, but not the resources of the solar system and beyond.  Isn't scarce resources given as the reason why we must conserve?  But what if resources were not limited, but were unlimited?  Then the capacity for growth would know no limits.  I would rather have that choice than the choice for limitations, which could lead to a diminished standard of living for all of us.

If we didn't need to mine the Earth anymore because we could get everything we needed from space, wouldn't that be a good thing for the Earth?

You could start with energy.  There's more energy in space than we could possibly use on Earth.  But if we conquered space, we could make that energy available to us all. If you had enough energy, you can do just about anything.  You could grow your own food, desalinate seawater, clean up pollution, and so on and so on.  Lots of energy is required for a high standard of living.  It would make much more sense to get more of it than to act as if it were limited and impose limits upon the use of it.

It's too expensive to do this in space now.  But why should that be an obstacle.  Plenty of things were expensive in the past, but not expensive now.  If it is a good thing to have, then ingenuity will find a way to make it available at a reasonable cost.  That's what creates wealth and that can help us solve our money problems.  But we won't get there if we insist on being blinded by our own misconceptions and refuse to see what is possible.