End of this Blog (Concentrating Efforts Elsewhere)

When I started this blogging thing I thought that I would keep the different sizes of my personality in different blogs. (Just like I once had several web sites for different purposes). Instead I am reverting to just two blogs.
If you want to keep track of me in the future then please visit:

ActiveAlert.blogspot.com
and
ActiveAlertTravel.blogspot.com

Flatlanders attempt to chew gum and walk at the same time

Good article by Michael Hirsh on A Nation of "Flatlanders" at Truthout.org. He writes about the apparent inability of the United States and its politicians to multi-task and work on more than one problem at the same time.

the responsibility of the person in the Oval Office is to oversee, day by day, a vast, multidimensional international system, one in which economic, security and social problems are all intertwined and must be balanced against each other. It is a mind-bogglingly complex job, the hardest task in the world.

After ranting about inability of Palin / McCain he mentions that for Obama "until his campaign, he's never run an organization bigger than the Harvard Law Review or his Senate office." The whole country has suddenly lurched from concentrating on Iraq to doing a massive bailout. No one seems capable of concentrating on two problems at the same time.

The smartest people on Wall Street and in Washington know that the real targets of these bailouts are not the U.S. investment banks and insurance companies, and the intended beneficiary is not the U.S. financial system per se. They are the foreign funds, the "sovereign wealth funds," that keep America's financial system afloat by giving us the money fixes that allow us to continue our rampant consumerism at zero savings rates. Unless these funds get reassurance, the great game is over. So is our long period of growth and power.

This made me think about the idea that many -- including one or two of my friends -- have that the Gulf Arabs are all screaming around in their air-conditioned Hummers and Range Rovers while good hard-working Americans are lining up to buy $4 gasoline for their Ford pickups and Dodge minvans. Actually things are far from that simple. 

Yes, I agree that it is outrageous that there are so many desert dwellers living in incredible luxury while teaming populations just across the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea are fighting for scraps and suffering from every disease know to man. But certainly that is only a few degrees worse than the fat North Americans living off the work of the teaming masses across both the Rio Grande and the Pacific Ocean. 

Americans have no more inherent right to live in luxury than Arabians do. The USA does have great intellectual capital but recent events hardly prove that population in general has great intelligence or knowledge. The US is now a net importer of oil and most natural resources. So how can they claim to have a natural right to superior wealth and standard of living. Why should the world bail them out? Of course as a Canadian observer I should hardly claim superiority over the population to the south. 

 I hardly have a superior preferred share claim on wealth and luxury myself. (I managed to spend $2000 on gas for my Hyundai this past summer). I am just a Cassandra pointing out an example of wrong thinking. If I ever get some good ideas how to change things for the better I will be glad to happily pass them along without charge.

Henry A Wallace and Thomas E Dewey

I was reading some Internet articles on picking VP candidates when I stumbled across the career of Henry A Wallace. He was some interesting dude. Republican farmer and then a Democrat Secretary of Agriculture. Later he was American Vice President from 1941 to 1945. 

Where it got interesting is when you read of his disciple-like status with a very strange Nicholas Roerich; Wallace's apparent love of Communism in the late 1940s; and his bid for election with the Progressive Party in 1948. According to Wikipedia, his platform advocated an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. Imagine what things he might have tried if he had been VP when Roosevelt died in 1945! 

 One of the most amazing things about Henry Wallace was that he apparently admitted that he had made mistakes! In the September 2, 1952 issue of This Week Magazine of the New York Herald-Tribune, he wrote an article titled Where I was Wrong. That must be an almost unique occurrence in the history of American politicians and I will try and find down a copy. 

 I was partly intrigued since last year I read an interesting book titled Journey to the Far Pacific by Thomas E Dewey. It is a less than perfect but reasonably perceptive analysis of Dewey's visit to East Asia in 1952. Until I read the book the only thing I knew about Dewey was the famous headlines when Truman beat him in the November 1949 presidential election. 

 The book showed a progressive thinker who also just happened to be -- like Henry Wallace -- an upstate New York Republican farmer. This all brought to my mind how some of history's losers had the possibility of greatness within. (Of course these same people also had the possibility of being complete raving loonies!) It shows how even the American Republican party has occasionally put forth leaders with a potential for greatness. (So why have they gone so wrong lately?)

Which version of history? People and history forgotten?

I have been studying for some history courses the last few months.

It has been fascinating discovering the way that events are filtered through the fog of history. We look at something like the civilization of the Minoans on Crete. As far as I can figure out there is almost no decipherable records on these these guys.

Even the name of this civilization is unknown. Old Arthur Evans -- the man who dug up Knossos and claimed all the credit of discovery -- really seemed to be winging it a lot of the time. He knew that the darn thing was a palace so spent a lot of time and money making everything fit with his imagination. He was a classic scholar, he had read of the Minotaur and sure enough this place had a few bulls in prominent places. So, presto, this just had to be the labyrinth and the culture was named after Minos. (As one web site puts it, at least he wasn't as bad as the other guy).

Another mystery civilization that I had not heard of until recently was the Srivajaya. This is an entire civilization where any kind of description, even at 'Srivajaya Totally Explained'[Link lost], includes the liberal use of words such as postulated, forgotten and suspected. Basically they are basing the whole civilization on a half dozen references to places named Sanfoqi, Yavadesh and Javadeh. My photo shows the coast of Sumatra near the equator crosses the East Coast. Or at least as close as I could figure it when we sailed by in 1975.

So my point is that if we can't be sure that an entire civilization with thousands of people actually existed then how much harder is it to be exact in our knowledge of s single object or person. I have also been studying some art history. There sure seems to be a lot of artists who are named 'Master' whatever after their most famous works or location of where they worked.

I have been more museums and art galleries than most people so how could I have missed out on someone like Jan van Eyck, as seen at Britain's National Gallery, or Rogier van der Weyden as seen at the Prado Museum. Sure I love Rembrandt and Vermeer but there were men painting wonderful painting, just as advanced in technique and style, in the same general area, almost two hundred years earlier. The big difference is that we know a lot more about the personal stories of Vermeer and Rembrandt. Just because an artist's personal life is a big blank though does not mean that he should be forgotten and ignored.

I was joking with a friend a few days ago about alien visitations. Erich von Däniken was famous for writing that alien assistance was necessary to build the Egyptian pyramids. But since they were apparently at least partially made of concrete then alien or divine intervention was hardly required. But I think that I just discovered something that is completely impossible to create unless you have a big microscope and some kind of alien photocopier.

If you look at this book hidden in New York's Metropolitan Museum and click on the enlargement you will see a near full size image. The pages are only 3 1/2 inches high and I refuse to believe that anyone without superhuman abilities could have actually painted this in the 14th century!
What do you think? Could this have been done by a Medieval human being?

So in conclusion, there are a lot of academics and a lot of students writing complete drivel based on conjecture and little evidence. If we can't explain the creation of a simple prayer book by anything other than divine or alien intervention, and if a complete civilization can be nearly forgotten, then how can we believe that our perception of the historical truth of anything else is not complete fabrication and conjecture?