June 2014 – Auxiliary Memory

Could You Love A Robotic Puppy?

If you could buy a robotic puppy that was indistinguishable from a real puppy except that it didn’t eat, drink and go to the bathroom, would it be as satisfying as having a real puppy? This is probably theoretically, because I don’t know if they could ever invent a robot puppy that smelled like a real puppy, but let’s imagine they could. One that felt, smelled, sounded and looked just like a real puppy. I’m assuming people don’t taste their pups, but roboticists could add that feature too if needed. If this imaginary puppy was a bundle of energy, friskiness, that squirmed and played, licked and nuzzled, just like a real little doggie, would you want one?

Recently I read that a growing statistical segment of young women are choosing to buy small dogs rather than have babies. Small dogs and puppies trigger our gotta-love-the-baby response, so many people find puppies a good substitute to love. What if what we liked about puppies is having this baby love button pushed, and what if a robotic puppy pushed the button equal to a real puppy? If a robot puppy triggered your need to love something cute, and it felt like it loved you unconditionally, like the way we want dogs and small children to love us, would it fulfill your needs so you no longer needed a real baby or real puppy?

Recently in Great Britain they conducted a survey asking people if they’d have sex with a robot. Imagine being able to buy an android that looked exactly like the movie star you find most sexually attractive. Would you bother dating if such a robot took care of all your emotional, sexual and conversational needs?

The Japanese are working on robots to be caretakers for the elderly. If you were old, and living alone and your children didn’t visit much, or not at all, and you couldn’t get out much, would you find a robot good company?

In all these cases I have to ask: What is real? If we can trick our brain so we satisfy its need for cuteness, receiving and giving love, sex and companionship, will we feel it’s real enough? I’ve been thinking about getting a puppy, but when I think about how many times I’m going to have to watch it poop & pee, or take it for a walk, I tell myself I’m crazy. But on the other hand, I’d feel that if it didn’t poop & pee that I’d be missing out on the real experience.

There’s a vast difference between current robotic puppies and real pups.

But what if a robot puppy was as cute and cuddly, warm and fuzzy, wiggly and smelly, as a real puppy, would my brain not urge me to pick it up and play with it? What if it was an intelligent as a dog, could learn, and was as self-aware as a dog? Would it be easier to love a robot if we thought the robot could feel our love?

Little children will play with dolls and stuffed toys for hours as substitutes for babies and animals. Adults will read books, watch television shows and movies, and play video games that simulate reality no better than current robotic dogs. Drug addicts will seek out their drug of choice to replicate sensations, moods, emotions and feelings they can’t find in real life. Many people eat junk food rather than real food. We’re already quite used to fooling ourselves.

Obviously, we’re creatures with urges, appetites, impulses and desires that can be fooled by substitutes for what evolution originally programmed us to seek out. And what explains our desire for work that has no relationship with nature. Why will some people spend hours doing mathematics? In other words, we have created new, novel, and unnatural forms of stimulus to occupy our brains.

I write this essay to contemplate why I desire certain inputs and stimulus for my brain. If you love puppies, have you ever wondered why?

JWH – 6/30/14

Do You Dream About Dinosaur Attacks?

By James Wallace Harris, June 29, 2015 (Updated 5/9/21)

I hope this doesn’t reveal some sort of deep embarrassing Freudian complex, but my whole sleep last night was filled with dinosaur dreams. Ever since I was about five years old I’ve had occasional dreams about dinosaurs. They aren’t real common, but they happen now and then, and they vary in details. Last night’s dreams were somewhat typical. I’ll be with a bunch of other people, at home, school, work, outside in a city location, on a crosswalk, etc., and suddenly a dinosaur or dinosaurs would show up, and everyone panics.

In the dream we all know the way to avoid being eaten is to be lying down, don’t move, and be quiet. But there’s always someone nearby that keeps blabbing or moving around that draws attention to the dinosaurs causing me to fear for my safety and makes me very annoyed at the noisemaker. For some reason, the dinosaurs won’t notice us if we don’t move or make noise. I never get eaten myself, or the people I know, but I’m always afraid some dumbass is going to get me, or us, killed. I’m always annoyed in these dreams that other people are not freezing and shutting up.

The funny thing is I had these dreams all night long. Even after I got up and went to pee, and went back to sleep. Even very early in the morning when I was waking up over and over again, every time wondering if I should get up. Each time I fell back asleep I had another dinosaur dream. It was one scene after another, with different groups of people, in different locations, and in each scene, there was a dinosaur attack. One scene involved my sister, and another my wife Susan, but it was always strangers causing trouble. I don’t think I ever saw a dinosaur eat someone, but I knew they were in the distance, so the panic to hide was strong. These dreams last night weren’t quite nightmares, but they did involve a kind of anxiety.

If dreams are sorting through the day’s events and filing long-term memories, what did I do yesterday to deserve dinosaur dreams last night? And do other people have dinosaur dreams? I hope these dreams don’t indicate some kind of weird psychological disorder.

When I was young, I guess around five, I had my first dinosaur dream. I lived out in the country in South Carolina in an old two-story house. My family didn’t use the second story, but my three-year-old sister and I would go up there to play, but it was creepy. I would dream about those upstairs rooms as if they were evil. That was one of my earliest reoccurring dreams, along with dreams of flying. But it was during this time that I had my first dinosaur dream. I and other people were working in this huge gravel pit, and we were slaves to dinosaurs and had to stand in dinosaur shit as we worked. Later on, when I saw The Flintstones, the pit we worked in reminded me of this show. But this dream was three or four years before The Flintstones appeared in 1960.

I’ve always wondered when I first learned about dinosaurs. My oldest memories of dinosaurs are from these dreams, but how did I learn about dinosaurs to dream about them? I remember as a kid after I started having these dreams, of playing with plastic dinosaurs and learning their names. My little buddies and I liked to collect and trade these plastic dinosaurs, and we seem to know all about them. I don’t remember being taught about dinosaurs in school, or even reading about them. I’ve always assumed knowledge about dinosaurs is imprinted in little boys’ brains, like some kind of ancestral memory.

I’ve written about dinosaur dreams before, back in 2008. I had completely forgotten I had written this, and the dream I described. The dream back then was somewhat different, a more science-fictional version, because people were protected from the dinosaurs by force fields.

Does dreaming about dinosaurs mean anything? At Dream Moods, which has a page explaining animal symbols in dreams, it says this about dinosaurs:

To see a dinosaur in your dream symbolizes an outdated attitude. You may need to discard your old ways of thinking and habits.

To dream that you are being chased by a dinosaur, indicates your fears of no longer being needed or useful. Alternatively, being chased by a dinosaur, may reflect old issues that are still coming back to haunt you.

I wonder if I have a problem with outdated attitudes? But this commentary seems no more scientific than astrology. I am not the only person troubled with dinosaur dreams as reflected in the Yahoo Answers column. It’s odd, but a couple of people who replied copied the statement I quote above, and it’s repeated on other websites. Just shows how bullshit spreads across the internet. At least at the Dream Dictionary, they had something a bit deeper, but still on the woo-woo side. It reassures me that other people have dinosaur dreams, so I ain’t the only crazy one here. In fact, there are many dream interpretation sites that cover dinosaurs in dreams, and many people posting about dreaming of dinosaurs. At Jurassic World, they even have a page collecting dinosaur dreams.

Are dreams even symbolic? I have no idea. It seems my dreams are saying something very big will destroy me if I stand out, and that other people are constantly being destroyed for making themselves known. Hunkering down and being quiet sounds rather cowardly to me in waking life. When I was young and had nightmares I used to kill anything that tried to hurt me. The violence of my dreams was disturbing because it was like the violence of modern video games, but these dreams were decades before such games were invented.

I can’t think of anything I did or experienced yesterday that would trigger dreams about avoiding death, or large issues. I had a nice quiet day of reading books and listening to music, and then last night my friend Anne came over for dinner and we watched Empire Falls, an old HBO mini-series based on the Richard Russo book. Empire Falls is about a man with a repressed past that never speaks his mind. I did identify with Miles Roby, the Ed Harris character because I hold things in to avoid emotional conflicts. Are the dinosaurs of my dreams potential emotional conflicts? At least this theory works with dreams because the way to be safe in the dream is to be quiet and avoid attention. Also, the people who get eaten by dinosaurs are the loud people who won’t shut up.

This is embarrassing because now I am revealing something.

I guess I’ve got to wait for the dinosaurs to show up.

JWH

Update 5/9/21:

I had a dream last night where aliens were attacking people in the same way dinosaurs attack people in the dinosaur dreams. Instead of eating us, they zapped us with some kind of energy gun. I’ve had similar dreams where giants were attacking people, and they killed people by crushing them. In each of these dreams hiding is the key to survival, and those people who stick out are the ones caught by dinosaurs, space aliens, and giants.

I realize now that the role of T-Rex, space alien, and giant are the same in all these dreams. They represent the bad things in life, threats that kill people. And the message of the dream is some people do survive by avoiding these dangers of life. Evidently, my subconscious is telling me to keep a low profile because that’s the best way to avoid getting hurt or killed.

However, I think last night’s dream was inspired by reading chapter 3 of Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande. That chapter was scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote. It’s about how our bodies decay as we age and how we become less capable of taking care of ourselves. This was illustrated with horrifying case studies. Gawande does give an overview of how society has helped the elderly over the years, and what people can do to help themselves, but death is the only escape from this fate. There is no avoiding old age by hiding like I do from the dinosaurs, giants, and space aliens.

Why We Can’t Know Jesus

It’s almost a certainty that anything you think you know about Jesus is wrong because what you know has gone through two thousand years of constant reinterpretation with additional imagined added facts through suppositions and speculation. And if by chance you held just one right fact, it would be impossible to know which one it was because there are almost an infinity of possible imagined facts about Jesus to confuse you.

I’ve read a lot of books about Jesus over the years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for us to know the truth about what Jesus was like. Absolutely impossible. Every book I’ve read gave the author’s imagined interpretation of what Jesus was like based on all the books they had read, each of which was also an interpretation. Since Jesus left no writings on his own, and all the gospels were written long after the fact, by people who got their information from hand-me-down sources, we have no foundation of verifiable knowledge to work with. In fact, each of the four gospels are different, written at different times, with new interpretations and added material.

All this is obvious, and I should have concluded it decades ago, but the nature of Bible study makes it fun to try to figure out the truth. Everyone wants to solve the puzzle and is only too eager to add their interpretation with new speculated possibilities. Just look at how many early Christian sects there were, and how much the Catholic Church has changed over time, and how many differ protestant denominations there are, with their own splinter groups. Every church has a different view of Jesus, and so does every human being. There are billions of different Jesuses – will the real one please stand up. It reminds me of that old short story by Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God.”

All this became more obvious to me when I was reading Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography by Bruce Chilton. Now, I’m an atheist, so you might be wondering why I’m reading a book about Jesus. The origins of Christianity is a minor interest of mine, as a study of history, like how some people study classical Greece for a hobby. I was intrigued by Rabbi Jesus because the book claimed to have a deep understanding of Judaism of the times, and to use current anthropological knowledge about the time period Jesus lived, to create a biography that jived with the Gospels. Here’s a quote from Craig L. Blomberg in his review of the book:

There are strengths to Chilton’s work to be sure. Prompted by his editors he has eschewed formal, detailed footnoting for brief references to key literature for each chapter and has written in highly readable, even gripping prose. His descriptions of the customs and geography of Israel bring the stories of Jesus alive as few other writers have done. His portrayal of the probable thoughts, motives and behavior of such characters as Caiaphas and Pilate is more vivid and compelling than any I have read. Over and over again, one senses that one is seeing the Jewish milieu of Jesus more clearly and accurately than in countless other “lives” that have been produced over the centuries. But when one asks what Chilton actually claims Jesus to have said and done, in what sequence, for what reasons and by what power, most of the answers are at best speculative, without the kind of defense and documentation to make one convinced of them. At worst, they simply seem baseless. In a classic understatement, Chilton recognizes in his foreword that he “will doubtless make both Jews and Christians apprehensive” with his portrait of Christ (p. xxi).

Chilton is able to paint a very vivid picture of Jesus with lots of links to related established knowledge, yet in the end it’s all speculation even though the book is very convincing. If you haven’t read very widely with similar books, this book would be very persuasive in making you think you knew Jesus better.

Another recent controversial biography is Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. Aslan is a scholar who takes another approach to finding the truth about Jesus. That’s the game here. Use all the available knowledge you can to paint a supposedly accurate portrait of Jesus. But just read what Wikipedia said about the book:

Dale Martin writes in The New York Times that although Aslan is not a scholar of ancient Christianity and does not present “innovative or original scholarship”, the book is entertaining and “a serious presentation of one plausible portrait of the life of Jesus of Nazareth”. He faults Aslan for presenting early Christianity as being simply divided into a Hellenistic, Pauline form on the one hand, and a Jewish, Jamesian form on the other. Martin says that this repeats 19th-century German scholarship which now is mostly rejected. He also says that recent scholarship has dismissed Aslan’s view that it would be implausible that any man like Jesus in his time and place would be unmarried, or could be presented as a “divine messiah”. Despite these faults, Martin praises Zealot for maintaining good pacing, simple explanations for complicated issues, and notes for checking sources.^[6]

Elizabeth Castelli, writing in The Nation, finds that Aslan largely ignores the findings in textual studies of the New Testament, and relies too heavily on a selection of texts, like Josephus, taking them more or less at face value (which no scholar of the period would do). Near her dismissive conclusion, she writes: “Zealot is a cultural production of its particular historical moment—a remix of existing scholarship, sampled and reframed to make a culturally relevant intervention in the early twenty-first-century world where religion, violence and politics overlap in complex ways. In this sense, the book is simply one more example in a long line of efforts by theologians, historians and other interested cultural workers.”^[7]

The summary of these two reviewers shows that speculation about Jesus is a kind of academic game to scholars, but to religious people, knowing who Jesus was is very serious. These two books give us two different Jesuses. Both are from scholars claiming to work with the latest knowledge about the past. Both books seem to present reasonable results. If you read a hundred scholarly books about Jesus and they all invent a different Jesus, who is right? Do you just average the 100 and assume Jesus was something like all of them? Or assume he was like none of them? If it was possible to extrapolate what Jesus was like from current knowledge don’t you think most of those 100 books would produce a standard Jesus?

Most of the faithful ignore modern books and just study The New Testament. But if you study New Testament scholars like Bart D. Ehrman and his latest books you’ll only feel doubtful about what is actually supposed to be the word of God.

I’m quite a fan of Ehrman having read Jesus, Interrupted, Misquoting Jesus, and Forged, and was about to buy and read How Jesus Became God, when I stopped to think about what I’m writing here in this essay. Why read another book about Jesus? Well, this one promises to be a history of the history of Jesus, so it’s not quite the same, but I’m now asking myself should I give up even studying the history of this whole era. To me studying the early centuries of Christianity is like studying how half the world went insane believing a massive fantasy about a guy they can’t even know, but think they know through the lies they believe are the truth. It’s like driving past the largest car wreck ever and trying not to look.

One reason I keep reading books about Bible history is I’m trying to completely exorcise Christianity from my brain. Forced early exposure to Christianity caused mind-washing at the lowest levels of my brain and I’m trying to deprogram myself. Every time I read another Ehrman book I delete a few more lines of old code running in my head.

I keep wondering when is humanity going to be free of the evils of religious fantasies? Then I hear about the Sunni-Shiite conflict in Iraq and realize probably never. Many atheists hope by studying religion they can explain it’s illogical nature to its believers. But would any amount of facts convert Iraqis away from their war? Would any number of lectures convert evangelicals to science?

I’m starting to feel that completely ignoring religion is my best course. I’ve sufficiently deprogrammed myself that I’m now free of such thinking. And I don’t feel obligated to deprogram others—I think that’s something you must do for yourself. Wouldn’t I be better off mentally, and more productive if I studied other areas of history? I think society has a sense of guilt about knowing all history, or a sense of obligation. But how much history do we really need? Wouldn’t I be better off studying the history of science and mathematics?

I think I’m over trying to figure out who Jesus was for whatever reason. It’s all speculation. Jesus is impossible to know. If only they could invent a time machine to go back and filmed his life, then we’d have the answer, but that ain’t going to happen.

JWH – 6/25/14

The Many Robert Heinleins We Remember

When I was twelve and other kids were getting religion, I got science fiction. Robert A. Heinlein was the prophet of my faith—the Jesus that explained reality. I was a geeky kid who moved around a lot because my father was in the Air Force. Because my dad always worked extra jobs and I didn’t see him much, Heinlein and science fiction became the father figure guiding my adolescence. Now that I’m older I can say using fiction as my Bible is no more practical than using holy books. Substituting outer space for heaven, and aliens for superior beings is just as crazy as seeking life after death.

I just finished reading the second volume of Heinlein’s authorized biography, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2 The Man Who Learned Better | 1948-1988 by William H. Patterson, Jr. Imagine, if you will, getting to read an authorized biography of Jesus based on his diaries—you’re going to want to read it, but it might reveal that your prophet lived a much more mundane life than revealed in his parables and gospels.

William H. Patterson gets to chronicle Robert A. Heinlein’s life by the details Heinlein left behind in file cabinets. Sadly, Mr. Patterson died April 22nd this year, just before the publication of the second, and last volume of his biography on Heinlein. Patterson was born a month before I arrived on Earth in November of 1951, and in a way that explains a lot, because I identified with his passion to know Heinlein. For science fiction fans of a certain generation, Heinlein was a very influential writer. Growing up I always hungered to know more about Heinlein, and wished that I had met him. After reading this large, two-part biography, I realize it was probably well that I never got to meet my prophet face to face, or even correspond with him. Heinlein was overwhelmed by his followers, and he really didn’t need another sappy fan bugging him, plus I probably would have pissed him off with my politics and beliefs.

Heinlein never wanted his fans to pry into his life, and this authorize biography reflects his wishes, and that of Heinlein’s widow Virginia Heinlein. Patterson was given complete access to Heinlein’s papers and got to know Ginny Heinlein who died in 2003, and who was Heinlein’s pit bull protector in life and death. Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century is an excellent defense of Heinlein and a summary of his life through his papers, but not the kind of intimate biography that fans crave, especially if you were a true believer.

I believe William H. Patterson was completely sympathetic to Heinlein’s wishes for the most part, until the very end in Appendix 2, volume 2, “The Good Stuff” where he quotes letters from a woman that had known Heinlein during his breakup with his second wife. I’m positive that Heinlein and Ginny would have hated this addendum, but it’s about as close as readers are going to get to an uncensored view of Heinlein in this biography. And even then, the letters only have a few lines that hint that Heinlein had faults.

I liked Patterson, and his work, and I understand the constraints he worked under. His biography of Heinlein provided a huge amount of details about Heinlein for me. I subscribed to the Heinlein Journal when Patterson was publishing it, and I always envied him his access to Heinlein history. I’d have loved to have gone through Heinlein’s papers, but luckily Patterson did all the work for me and put them into a very readable summary. I’m very sorry that Patterson didn’t interview more people who knew Heinlein. There’s a few, but not many. I got the feeling that Virginia Heinlein told Patterson much of the glue that holds the facts together. I would have loved to have heard other people’s opinions, but I assume that wasn’t allowed. We’ll have to wait for Heinlein’s next biographer for that.

Heinlein and his books have always inflamed people’s opinions, and Patterson deals with many of the famous brawls in his book. He carefully presents Heinlein as the rational man, while not giving other people their chance to have their say. Patterson tries to resolve much of the criticism Heinlein has received over the decades, but there’s one problem. If Heinlein was right, and rational, why did he get into so many personal battle of words? The two volumes of biography end up being a long lists of incidents where Heinlein butted heads with other people. As a blogger I know it’s very easy to get into arguments over nothing, but Heinlein seemed to take everything very personal. Evidently he was an emotional man, because the book often mentions his anger, and that he often cried over romantic and heroic incidents.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading these two books, but I was also disappointed. I wanted more information about Heinlein writing his books. Patterson provides a lot of publishing information, but little about the content. Usually when he did, it was about how Heinlein got the idea for each book. Evidently Heinlein didn’t leave much in his papers about thinking his way through plots and character development, or what they meant to him later.

I wished the Patterson had included an Appendix 3, one where he interviewed Alexei Panshin. Panshin was the fan I wanted to be. He wrote the first book on Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension, which Heinlein hated—not because he read it and disliked it, but because he hated Panshin and didn’t want Panshin to write about his life or work. Heinlein and his close followers have always closed ranks in their hatred of Panshin. I always thought Heinlein in Dimension was a love letter to Heinlein. When USENET News came out, the alt.fan.heinlein carried on the grudge match decades later. Panshin is mentioned several times in volume 2, angering Heinlein several times over a period of years, and it was obvious that Bob and Ginny hated to even hear the name Panshin mentioned. Which is sad, because Rite of Passage, Panshin’s Nebula Award winning novel is as close to reading another Heinlein juvenile as I’ve ever read. I thought Panshin deserved to be heard from in this biography, but I guess Patterson felt that Heinlein did everything to keep Panshin out of his life while he was alive, he wouldn’t want him intruding into his authorized biography after he died.

But this brouhaha explains a whole lot. Heinlein was loved by millions, but Heinlein didn’t always love his fans. Nor did he think the science fiction community understood his books. The biography suggest that Heinlein tried to separate himself from the genre during the last decades of his life, and resented always being known as a science fiction writer. Heinlein wanted to be remembered like Mark Twain, just an American writer. I doubt that will ever happen. Patterson works hard to promote Heinlein as a significant figure in the 20th century, but he wasn’t.

Heinlein’s books are still shelved in the science fiction section, and Philip K. Dick’s books were the first to be collected into volumes of The Library of America. When Heinlein finally made it into the LOA, it was with one of his lessor known titles, Double Star, as one of nine science fiction books that the Library of America collected into two volumes to remember 1950s science fiction. I’m not sure Heinlein is going to be remembered outside his hardcore science fiction fans like me. Volume 2 came out June 3rd, nineteen days ago and it’s only #7,313 on Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank.

I often write about Heinlein at Auxiliary Memory but those posts get very few hits. I guess the way I will remember Heinlein is not by trying to get to know the man, but by rereading the Heinlein books I love. What’s interesting is the number of Heinlein books I keep rereading has dwindled over the last fifty years. I find it fascinating when encountering other Heinlein fans that we all have such different favorites. There are Heinlein books I hate that others love. Whoever Heinlein was, and what his books meant, it’s very hard to figure out.

And do you want to know what’s hilariously ironic? Heinlein in Dimension by Alexei Panshin, published in 1966, still gives me the best biography of Heinlein I’ve ever read. The Heinlein I loved was reflected in the stories, and not the one who walked the Earth. Heinlein hated Panshin with a passion, yet Panshin’s summary of his work up until The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is exactly how I knew Heinlein in my youth. Patterson’s biography chronicled the writer, the man who married three times, often got sick, worried over bills, fought with his editors and publishers, had feuds with his fans, gave money to needy writers, built houses of his own design, but completely missed the magic of the books. Heinlein in Dimension summarizes the stories and novels in a way that rekindles memories of the sense-of-wonder Heinlein I discovered at age twelve.

Heinlein and his true fans hated that Panshin pointed out there were clunky places in Heinlein’s stories. The trouble is, if you’re a prophet and you and your followers think you can do no wrong, then I can’t trust you. Heinlein would have been a much better human if he had just endured Panshin as an over zealot young fan, read his book and said “Thanks kid, good job. You found all the holes in my stories, now go write you own books that don’t make those mistakes” and then just forgot about Panshin. Panshin was Heinlein’s St. Paul, and all Panshin got for his love was a kick in the balls by his master. Man, that must have hurt.

If you go to Google and search for reviews of Patterson’s biography of Heinlein, you’re going to read a lot of varied responses. Heinlein was an elephant to all us blind folk feeling him up. None of us ever see that he’s an elephant, but we all chronicle, sometimes in great detail, what we did discover from our fondling a small section of his hard hide. Unfortunately, there are many Heinlein haters who only got to finger his asshole. There was much about Heinlein I didn’t like, especially in the later books, but I saw no reason to vilify the man. Like most of us, Heinlein did the best he could, and his best was often far better than most, but occasionally he made some fuck-ups, like we all do. Too many in our society judge people only by their mistakes.

The complexity of Heinlein in my memories is vast. We all need to deprogram ourselves of the religions that infected us in our youth, and Patterson’s biography helped me clean out years of clutter in my head. Ultimately, we Heinlein fans each will remember a few books we loved, and eventually, the literary world at large will decide if any of his books are worth remembering at all. I don’t think Heinlein, Patterson, I, or any of his other fans, knew, or know which Heinlein books will become classics in one hundred or two hundred years. But I find it fascinating to imagine humans hundreds of years from now seeing the 20th century through Heinlein’s eyes.

Ultimately, I have to say that Heinlein convinced me that heaven is colonies on the Moon and Mars. That’s the promised redemption of his religion. The emergence of private space programs is the real legacy of Heinlein’s prophecy. I don’t know if anything else matters.

Other Takes On Valume Two

JWH – 6/23/14

Consuming Inspiration 2

The internet is about sharing, and I find much on the internet that is inspirational. We’re seven billion souls sharing the planet and the internet lets easily communicate what inspires us in a kind of mass journalism—making us all reporters. We don’t create the content, but pass it on. I guess that makes us all a kind of a wire service. I’m retired, and I spend a lot of time alone, and most days are routine, one is like the next, but what makes my day distinctive, are these inspirational news stories, the documentaries I watch, and the books I read. A documentary a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

I need air, water and food to stay alive, but I think it’s inspirational stories that really make me feel alive. Now, one man’s inspirational story can be another person’s depressing tale. I find inspiration in people overcoming adversity, or someone inventing something very clever, or even an economist coming up with a fascinating statistical chart. Here are some more examples.

Tattoos That Go Beyond Art

I’ve never really liked tattoos, especially on women. I guess that’s showing my age. But I came across this story at The New York Times about a tattoo artist Vinnie Myers who has given up his artistic work to create 3D nipple tattoos on women who’ve undergone mastectomies and breast reconstruction. Caitlin Kiernan wrote and filmed her transformation in “A Tattoo That Completes a New Breast.”

At one point in the film Myers said he wanted to give up doing nipples all the time so he could return to inking art again, but then his sister got breast cancer, and he stopped worrying about going back to art to become a healer full-time. Now his daughter wants to learn this new trade that is part artist and part healthcare provider. Be sure and read the comments, they are very inspiring too.

Inequality in America

Most people when they talk about inequality in America think about helping poor people, but strangely it’s really about helping the middle class, and even expand the economy to make more rich people. A thriving middle class is what drives our economy. That helps both poor and rich alike. But for decades the American middle class has shrunk as all the wealth has moved to a very few people. We all share one giant pie, however that pie can grow, but it only grows if the middle class thrives. Look at this video:

Robert Reich, Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor came out with a film last year about this problem, Inequality for All. It’s available from many sources, including Netflix streaming. Here’s the trailer.

The film describes the problem, but does not really go into the details of solving it. Reich appears with Bill Moyers and they discus some solutions. Watch this video below if you have the time, but definitely rent or buy the documentary Inequality for All because not only is it educational, informative, inspirational, it’s also very entertaining. Robert Reich is a very charming guy.

Most people are turned off by economics, but that’s a shame. The numbers are so mind blowing. For instance, during the economic recover of 2009-2012 the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans took home 95% of the economic gains made during those years. What that means is most Americans got poorer, while a damn few got much richer. Do you ever wonder why the rich are against taxes, social security, Medicare, Obamacare, K-12 education, etc.? Those are big pools of money that they haven’t gotten yet.

You might not be concerned about inequality of wealth in America because you believe it’s about poor people. Well, except for the very rich, everyone is much poorer than they used to be, and getting poorer, including you. It’s like the frog in the pot of boiling water. We just don’t know how warm it is. Reich points out we’ve hidden from this problem by two family incomes, working longer hours and having more jobs, and by going into debt. For many people, options to adjust to declining income have run out. If you play that Wealth Inequality in American animation above you’ll understand why.

Black and White, And Dead All Over

The newspaper was the answer to the old riddle, “What’s black and white and red all over?” Well, newspapers are no longer read all over. I didn’t worry too much about this change in society until I watched Black & White and Dead All Over. What these writers reminded me of that I didn’t know, was corruption in society has always been checked by investigative newspaper reporting. The trouble is investigative reporting is very expensive, and as newspaper began to loose money publishers often cut those reporters first. Every town needs a paper that watches over local politics and business, but that’s disappearing. Hundreds of papers have gone under in the last decade. One of the big differences between the United States and the rest of the world is we have much less corruption. I’d hate to see that change. We still have lots of investigative reporting at the national level and a handful of big cities from the few remaining big papers, and from television news programs, and even documentary makers, but ever shrinking coverage everywhere else.

I caught this on PBS but it appears you’ll have to buy a copy for now to see it. It is free with Amazon Prime, and just $3.99 on YouTube.

This film made me feel bad for not subscribing to my local paper, but I feel it’s a waste of natural resources to print newspapers, especially when I read so little of each one. The film did profile ProPublica – an non-profit service that claims it is “Journalism in the Public Interest.” They syndicate their stories to papers to defray the cost of investigative reporting. What we all need to do is find out who does the investigative reporting where we live and support them.

If you subscribe to Netflix streaming, keep an eye on their documentaries. They have zillions. After Breaking Bad finished I’ve hungered for another intense TV show to watch every night, but I haven’t found one. However, documentaries are filling the void, and some of them are as intensely good as watching the adventures of Walter White.

JWH – 6/19/14