Traveling in Time, not yet or are we?

Carl Sagan in an interview with Nova on Time Travel discusses time travel and why we can or cannot time travel, yet.  Perhaps future time travelers can only go back to the time when the time travel machine is invented but no further.  It doesn’t mean that it can’t happen, just not yet. He also indicates that perhaps the cost is too great to go too far back into the past, but I don’t think that argument holds water. If we have people who can buy a trip to the space station, time travel is not cost prohibitive. Nova also asks Sagan about the Grandfather Paradox, where if you can go back in time, and kill your grandfather before he sires one of your parents, do you exist?  If your grandfather is dead, how did you get into the future to go back and kill him?  Sagan does not believe this is possible, hence the paradox, but could you not meet your ancestors and affect how they live their lives for better or worse which in turn will affect how the offspring turn out, in essence, you. We do travel in time, every year, every month, every day, every minute and every second we are moving into the future.  I find the concept of time travel to be intriguing.

Can I Trust a Thought?

The brain is an organ that keeps the body on auto pilot because without the brain doing things for our bodies automatically, like breathing and heart beating, we would be overwhelmed with trying to tell the body what to do all the time. As it is, the mind which is the psychological part of our humanity never shuts up.  It can be the voice that is always talking to yourself about your inner child, your sexy self, your worker self, your mother self or any other self that you might think about.  But I want to know where those thoughts come from?  Where do those ideas stem from?  Does the subconscious mind receive signals from the Mother Ship to put thoughts in our mind to invent some new time saver vacuum machine? Can I believe that this is my own idea?  Even in sleep, I know my mind never quits. There are some days I wake up more tired than the night before when I went to bed.  I am not a scientist of the mind so I do not know these answers but I have always wondered where these things stem from.  A child will do something over and over, to see if they get the same outcome.  Can that experience stay buried in the mind and work on us until one day we realize we have figured out a problem that perhaps started when we were a child. Is it a truth I can believe now? 

Hip Hop Drag

The more Hip Hop is discussed the more perhaps I understand it.  It has become the mainstream of music venue of not only black people but white people and women as well are using this type of poetry mixed with music.  Mr. Chang discusses on KQUED public radio The Forum the growing role that hip hop has played in society today.  Hip Hop has been identified with inner city turmoil but over the years as the inner city society has moved to the suburbs it is now in many different cultures. Hip Hop, according to Chang, speaks of politics, cultures and political activism. Dwayne the caller on the show believes that hip hop has become so mainstream and prominent that it has overshadowed other types of black forms of music.  Another caller, Cecil, thinks that opportunities for a black person to get into the business of writing or music is the problem and hip hop was the answer as hip hop started as an oral tradition on how to tell stories. On NPR this morning, they introduced a new website similar to Wikipedia but involving hip hop lyrics, http://rapgenius.com/ which explains rap lyrics.  Even NPR thinks hip hop or rap is important enough to have a discussion about it but also to have assistance on understanding the words and what the words or phrasing means. 

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R503151000

I Love Trees

I love trees. I love rocks, and rivers, and mountains and the ocean.  They are important to the earth.  Trees help to regulate the wind and the temperature of the earth.  Humans have been cutting down trees faster than they can grow them.  There are so little trees left that wood harvesters are chipping them up, and manufacturing wood products to use.  Humans are not recycling as much as they could or should.  Unless there is a state law, like in Oregon or California, people do not actively reduce and reuse.  Millions of bottled water bottles are dumped in landfills instead of being recycled back into bottles. We have a recycle box that is provided by our waste management company, but they never come to pick up the recyclables.  My flattened cardboard and washed cans sit on the side of the road.  Our state does not require the people to recycle, it is a suggestion.  If we could recycle the cardboard that ends up in landfills, we could stop cutting down trees. I love trees, I feel them weeping with agony as they are stripped of their limbs and cut from the land and their family and I am always saddened when I see those logging trucks full of trees hemorrhaging their life essence down the road. I love trees.

The Prison Institution

Prisons are archaic and barbaric places designed to correct behavior of members of society by removing these persons who have committed some crime against society and placing them in dormitory type of cages.  The problem is that young criminals are then taught how to be better criminals, even if the person incarcerated wants to be a productive member of society. Once the criminal has been released from prison, he is put back into the environment he came from with no new skills on how to make a living. He has been taught only how not to get caught again. But he does, and is thrown back into prison beginning a cycle of recidivism.  If the purpose of prison is to correct the behavior of undesirable persons to be productive members of society, why do we take a crew to the side of the road to pick up trash usually in the hot sun? Or they may have to do janitorial duties, or washing dishes in the kitchen, or in the laundry.  While these jobs are noble, and someone has to do them, there are not too many calls for janitors, or trash pickers in society.  And if the person has a criminal record following them about, many employers are reluctant to hire them because of the past behavior.  Many employers are aware that ex-convicts have no skills, and would just as soon as steal again as work for a living.  The prison has failed the convict but society demands that criminals be isolated away from the people and so prisons continue because  prisons continue to produce the same results according to Michel Foucault, by isolating and organizing in an enclosed and penetrable setting.