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Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 10:19:10 -0500

  Mike,

Yes, very enjoyable.  Brought back memories of where I grew up (quite poor, etc.).  Way out in the boonies, rats were a big problem.  They would move in and infest everything.  We had two cats in the house, and they were great "mousers" -- rat catchers, since these were the all "wharf rats" type.  I vividly recall that, for some of the big rats, it took both the cats to get one of them.  So often at 4 years old I would be asleep in the bed (the house only had an inner ceiling on one room, a combination bedroom and living room, very small).  The rats would gnaw in the walls all night, and the two cats would go up over the ceiling of that one room and jump one of the big rats.  My, the squealing of the rats and snarling and growling and screeching of the cats.  But they would get one of the rats, in spite of the others jumping them also, and down the wall would come tumbling two cats with one each big rat caught, and often with a dozen other rats struggling. Sometimes made for an interesting night sleeping.  I actually learned to "sleep with one eye open", just coming up into a "twilight sleep" state and saying, "ah, it's okay, the cats got them and got away with it" and going back to full sleep.

My favorite cousins (about eight miles away) had a barn and raised sweet potatoes, where they stored the sweet potatoes in that barn on and in pine straw.  That was a Mecca for the rats! Sweet potatoes to eat, and lots of cover over their holes in the ground underneath.  The big rats would den in that straw and in holes and tunnels in the ground underneath it. We often spent the night there (eight miles was a nice walk to see them, and to have some time we would stay overnight and then perhaps walk back the next afternoon).  At age 7 to 14,  we would have a "rat hunt", where we boiled water in an old iron wash pot used to wash the clothes.  Then we would take the boiling water and pour it into the rat holes in the barn, etc. to flush out the rats.  With five or six kids with clubs and three or four hound dogs and three or four cats, the rats would scurry out en masse and the darndest cat and dog and rat and kid fight you ever saw would ensue.  On "rat-killing" day or days each year, we would often do away with from 100 to 200 rats.  That was the only way we could keep the rat population anywhere near under control.

And yes, no one has a "lock" on truth and beauty, but lots of folks and organizations and institutions proclaim they do. It's amazing how many folks claim to know exactly what God is thinking all the time, and it's astounding how much God has to depend on them to "get it right".  Why, I'm sure he has to check in with them every evening, just to be sure it's okay to go to sleep!  I'm very surprised he was able to get that sun and moon and planets finished back there without them! It would be wonderful if all the world had some semblance of a sense of humor, and realized that all our vaunted knowledge is just a "model" at best, rather than absolute.  But there seems to be something ingrained -- maybe primate dominance in nice terms or just "who's going to be the big bad monkey" in simple terms -- that drives humans to inflict their own personal model on others, and to insist on it at the point of a gun.  Probably more people have been killed over the centuries in the name of "good" than have been killed in the name of "bad". And they're still killing them for that "reason". Islam, e.g., specially imprisons women and children, even in the "moderate" countries like Saudi Arabia. Lots of other places in the world effectively have child slavery, with the children sold into indentured bondage for slave labor at an early age. If one really wishes to judge a culture or society, examine the way it treats its children and its women.

Seems we have another episode of the large scale re-emergence of such long-festering West-East, Islam-Christian, etc. conflict now.  Whether they like to say it or not, there has been ongoing and unceasing conflict between Muslim and Christian for many centuries.  So long as the children grow up being fanatically conditioned to hate, then war, murder, and destruction are the crops that are reaped from what is sowed.  Including deliberate murder of civilian populaces.  In the mind's eye, it's "here we go again" time, it seems, and we will probably see a bloodbath over the next years unparalleled in all history.  It also is going to last for decades and decades. One thing is certain: the West with its great centralization of things is deadly vulnerable to decentralized hit-and-run warfare (polite name these days is "asymmetrical warfare".)  That's particularly true, e.g.,  in the monstrously centralized energy infrastructure --- on which the entire national economy depends.  That entire infrastructure is so easily laid in the dust with simple means -- few guerrillas and demolitions guys with C-4, duct tape, and timers -- that the nation can readily be brought to its knees by that means alone.  It is significant, I think, that with extensive (20,000 or so) assets already in country here, these assets are not yet largely being committed for such easily done things.  So it can only mean that the foreign controllers are holding back their assets, waiting to do something else or waiting till the right time. They can do it anytime they wish to.  Hence my strong preoccupation with trying to get a decentralized solution -- energy from the vacuum, from "universal fuel" easily extracted anywhere.  It may come down to where either that gets done, or civilization itself perishes.  Of course, that's just ONE mechanism now set to do in civilization as we have known it.

Meanwhile, we just do whatever we can.  Just now, maybe a small dent in the terrible problems of the Earth and its peoples can be had if we can just resolve the energy problem once and for all, or get those sharp young grad students and post docs on the way to solving it and turning the old fuddy-duddies presently in control of science back out to pasture.  From the energy solution we get a transportation solution (both ground, air, and space and antigravity as well) as a bonus.  Then the medical problems are waiting in great urgency and with extraordinary, heart-breaking need.

Then, perhaps, there may even be sanity enough regained to tackle the human problem of the inhumanity of one human for another. Here we shall have to beat those already into that, but into it with respect to using what could be the solution to become the new great problem of total enslavement: the perfect ant society.

Ah well!  Gives an old dog plenty to try to work on in his old age! The most heartening thing of all is that others understand it also, and are also highly dedicated to getting it done.

Best wishes,

Tom

 

Tom It seems, then, that truth is indeed "beauty, inexpressible," and noone has a lock on it, much to the dismay of theologians, scientists, artists and musicians. Blake stated that "since the Flood, there are only three gates left open to Paradise...art, dance, and poetry." (Paraphrased) Which sounds pretty poetic, but I'm sure, it's all the same...inexpressible.

And we, like moths to the flame, would trade all for a glimpse, a moment, a lifetime wrapped in beauty and unfathomable truth. But time does not allow.

When we lived in Hawaii, in the countryside, we lived on five acres of oceanfront property, in the center of elephant grass and keawi trees. There were field rats around us and as well, in the attic of the small beach house we rented.

Every evening we could hear the rats. They scurried overhead from one end of the house to the other. And then back again, their claws scratching at the ceiling above us.

We puzzled over this for some time, wondering what and why they ran back and forth like that. It seemed for no reason. We laughed when we discovered the answer...it was "the rat race." Every day, day in and day out.

And so it is with us.

Well, enough of this, I hope you enjoyed my story.

Michael