Natural Birth Campaign Idea Birthing Clinic

My wife is a CNM who also happens to be pregnant with our third child. After two relatively successful home births (I speak as one who played passive roles in the events) she is considering experiencing the world of hospital birth, something which she approaches with as much trepidation as many of you might approach natural birth. These images are simply a concept that came to me as a result of my artistic interests and attempts to replicate some of the awesome stuff I see out there on the interweb. Some of the sources used in producing these pieces were a photo taken of my wife pregnant at 7 months gestation and a forest photo used from an internet forest picture. There are three different background and fill versions. Let me know which one you like best.

What's In Store

"Hey you, look around can you hear that noise it's a rebel sound!" the radio blasts in my ear as John Rzeznik points out, "we've got nowhere else to go." My thoughts are momentarily distracted from the ideas and facts put forth in this recent article published on The Atlantic, "What If We Never Run Out of Oil?" As a resident of the near East I spend a lot of time thinking about the impact that fuel has had on this part of the world. Living in a country that has not drilled significantly for it's own fuel but still is significantly influenced by it's neighboring fuel producing countries I have often wondered why the locals haven't started harvesting and selling their own resources to themselves and the highest bidders.

As I read through Charles C. Mann's article I was surprised to come to a conclusion about US consumption and supposed dependency on foreign oil that was not mentioned in Mann's article. I spent a good hour working through the article and consumed the information thinking about the policies of the United States government. The more I thought about reasoning the more I realized that we are not dependent on foreign oil, we are rather employing the J. Wellington Wimpy philosophy of macroeconomics. When we move from the practice of paying first and using our earned resources we are instead opportunistically using up the resources of countries more willing to part with their resources for global favor. The favor of those perceived as strong in the present political and cultural setting is the only intangible in a world of concrete services, products and materials.

The United States while seeming to be the gluttonous and lazy fool, willing to disregard its future for the sake of its present comforts, comes across instead as the very "Spirit of Opportunism" that demon which motivated our forefathers to immigrate, explore and innovate. The interesting dichotomy is that the opportunistic spirit is one that flees the general concepts of favor. Let me give you an example. My brother and his friends in college were too poor to pay the dues needed to join a prestigious social club in college. Instead of getting a job or borrowing money, they fled the spirit of favor choosing instead to form a new social club. Now four years later the social club has a status that is autonomous of the other social clubs at his university. That is a microscopic example of the large scale spirit of opportunism that motivated the immigration of millions of our forefathers. The dichotomy is that we who were the innovators escaping the shackles of favor seeking have become those promoting favor seeking in the world economy today.

"And why not?" I can hear you asking yourselves. Why should we not benefit from the position of our country. It is understandable that we allow the fleeting whims of favor seeking to bless our country while we still have our national day in the sun in the annals of history we'll be judged to have been on par with every other great empire, nation or kingdom. It is therefore expected that we would allow other countries to empty their store houses for us while we continue to sit on hundreds of other kinds of resources. I believe this is wise and right. The problem is we're reinvesting our favor earned resources on things that put nothing away for the future. There was a frightening statistic in the article by Mann that showed the disparity between the amount of research and preparation of infrastructure of Japan and that of the United States. Granted need is a great motivator, our preparations towards the national harvesting and use of these alternative fossil fuels should be funded by our opportunistic use of the resources of favor seeking countries. Presently we receive the favor of countries eager to part with their resources for payment on a Tuesday that may never come.

As long as our credit is good we will spend and when the resource runs out it is our intention to file for bankruptcy what fool would expect us to do otherwise. The only question is what are the other countries doing with our favors? No one can sing with such resolve what Rzeznik claims in the chorus of his Rebel song but it does seem to encapsulate the philosophy of a softening group of opportunists, "You can take everything from me, Cause this is all I need."

What are you buying with your favor?

I Removed Some Friends Today

I really didn’t want to do it, it was an unpleasant event for me today and I even questioned myself for doing it but today I removed some friends who were promoting gay rights on their Facebook pages. I think it must be a special day or week in the Unite States and as I don’t live there I’m unaware of the specifics of this reason for promotion. I went so far as to do a cursory search on Google to see if there was a gay pride week or some bill being put through congress and in my brief search came up with nothing conclusive. Anyway, I don’t know which side of the whole Same Sex Marriage debate you come down on, and I believe you have the right to your own opinion in the United States, you even have the right to promote your own opinion. Like most everything it takes a good PR department and a slew of lawyers to help any movement make it from the absurd and marginalized, what homosexuality was thirty years ago, to the accepted, what homosexuality seems to be in the U.S. today. I also know that many people, much smarter than I , have weighed in on this topic ad nauseum. It is not my intention to correct the masses on the internet. I imagine there are many with my exact same views and many who have published their editorial remarks with much clearer acumen.

My purpose in writing this is to give a clear reason for my particular actions on Facebook today. I doubt most of the friends I had will even notice that I removed them from my friend list, but if they do notice and are somehow following my blog then they’ll have someplace to go for an answer. I do not hate or believe that these people are no longer my friends. Most of them are people I had pleasant acquaintance with more than 20 years ago. I now enjoy for the sake of nostalgia seeing pictures of them and their children on Facebook. There is something to be said about having a wide pool of friends on Facebook - your pool of interesting factoids, shared links, cute photos, witty status updates and social news can be much richer for the wide variety. But, unless I’m posting a like or a comment, I probably wouldn’t bother to try and correct the thinking of one of these people. Not because I don’t care about them but because I believe that if I were to try to say anything in this medium to these people it would only come across as judgmental and condescending. I do believe that a true friend should be able to speak their mind and share their feelings about such things in a way that would not come across this way but, as you may all know, Facebook doesn’t breed true friendship it breeds a following and a platform for those who are networking savvy.

Since my knowledge for the last 10 years has only been as a result of these “friends’” Facebook pages, and I find myself limited in being able to respond to such public postings I feel myself required to remove them from my friending. This does not mean that I bear them ill will or that they have no place in my life. I would love to meet them again some day and see what has transpired in the decades that have passed, but I imagine I will not see them again. This is disappointing to me because it was not simply that my now lost friends think Gay Marriage is right that I unfriended them but because they felt it necessary to promote such a thing with internet memes and profile photo support thus promoting to me their beliefs on my news feed.

I know I could easily remove their news stories from my newsfeed and continue to have them as silent friends I visit when I begin to feel the pangs of nostalgia, but in the case of these friends I would have never thought to look at their pages if it weren’t for my news feed. So, my friendship with them exists merely as a way for them to promote what is important in their life. The things that stood out today was that they had joined the masses and begun promoting Same Sex Marriage.

As my writing is beginning to take turn in the direction of babble and not meaningful writing I am going to steer back to what I believe to be the main issue. Our generation is severely tied to consensus, if there is not consensus we feel so uncomfortable that we must ostracize those who are causing the incongruity in our unanimous voting. Think about the ideas and inventions that have spurred this generation towards a consensus based life:

1. Everything related to mass media has allowed education to no longer be locally determined but rather large networks determine the propaganda we are fed on a national and sometimes international level.
2. The Internet and social networking have allowed movements to quickly and efficiently draw up sides and promote their viewpoints.
3. Censorship is required to deal with an overabundant source of content now available to the public through the internet.
4. Universities, give lip service to diversity while promoting a very specific World View
5. If your World View does not match that of the majority tech savvy enough to have a online presence then you seem to have lost the promotional battle.

I’m not saying that any of these behaviors are evil but they do promote an atmosphere where consensus or ridicule are the only obvious options. Well I’m not afraid of ridicule, that is one thing that in several arenas I’ve been trained not to fear. I learned the hard way living always the outsider in many countries around the world. Some countries have gone so far as to remove access to unwanted, censored, material for their citizens. China and Turkey are two countries that come readily to mind while I’m sure many more could populate the list. I believe that some censoring is needed and am thankful for countries that attempt to promote a moral code rather than a code of consensus that has such meager standards as more than 50% wins the argument.

Our legal system would not let someone be put to death unless the voting was unanimous, and with good reason. If consensus can’t be had why risk making a wrong decision? But in the social arena in the public opinion poles we can cast our votes willy-nilly without a thought of the outcome and without any solid foundation for our argument. We make snap decisions about what feels right and believe ourselves above reproach if public opinion favors our opinion. Unfortunately this phenomenon is true for conservatives with regard to the law and liberals alike.

There’s a reason that the battle for same sex marriage is being fought in the social arena instead of the legal one. The social arena is not a place of fact but rather a place of consensus. If you can get a majority to agree then you’re close enough to consensus to promote your idea as fact. Fortunately we have not yet changed our legal system to match our information and promotional platform, but we are not far from it. When we do change our system from a unanimous vote to a vote just above the average then facts will no longer matter, and the minority however right they may or may not be will be oppressed. Presently Gay Rights Activists claim they are being oppressed by law, and they are oppressed, but not by human law. Homosexuals are oppressed by natural law:

1. The marriage or legal sexual pairing of two life partners of the same gender will produce no offspring. What court can change that?
2. The marriage or legal sexual paring of two live partners of opposite gender in many cases will produce offspring. What court can change that?

Some may argue this an egregious inequality, but science and nature show little interest in the concepts of equality - interdependence maybe but equality certainly is not a natural concept. If it was we would not have gender or race, countries or ethnicities, economic strata or regional resources. Consensus and Equality are myths, and although we’d like to believe that they exist we’d be better off learning to cope, admit to, and accept the inequality. Once we can accept that life is unfair, then possibly we can provide the proper benefits needed for those of any class, creed or sexual inclination. The purpose of law is to protect the weak from the sins of the strong, one cannot promote that kind of law without suffering the debilitating effects of self-limitation.

The true power for change comes not in your ability to overcome the law with your ideas by way of consensus but to exemplify, if possible, the ironic negative outcomes of a life lived completely by the law. The only way to prove a system doesn’t work is to completely give yourself to it. Unfortunately, no one is ready to give up their ego to fail miserably, and only one source could possibly be trustworthy enough to impose a global law. I wonder who that could be?

Then the question would be, “who has the right to interpret that law?” Well, I’ll deal with that question at a later time. For now I have to succumb to the physical laws on my body which require me to rest my eyes for eight hours in a 24 hour period. I hope you have found as little as possible to take offense at in this article but since I believe that consensus and equality of thought are improbable in this world I’m sure someone will take great offense and others will take no offense, it’s an inevitability. Until next time -

Accept your inequality and learn to protect those who are on the low end of the rights and freedoms spectrum by sacrificing your own freedoms rather than trying to amass your strength so you can take the freedoms of others and give it to those lacking. Robin hood was not righteous because he was strong he was righteous because he remained poor. So I must be poor in friends if I am to continue to believe what I believe.

Blind Skateboarder: Commentary on Faith

BRAVE from EyEFORcE on Vimeo.

I was checking out my video of the day and the videos of the day over at Devour, something my brother suggested to me as a neat resource for inspiration, informational and interesting short videos. I really appreciated the video today on the analysis of the NASA space walk film and a logical and somewhat snarky refutation of the skeptics who would push for an alternate and highly suspect version of history. This is the nature of history - always ready to be questioned and brought into doubt. For this reason we turn to the witnesses of each event and hold fast to their testimonys. We can neither reject nor refute events in history without bringing to the center of any argument the witnesses. Our whole construct of law and history revolve around the imperical evidences we gather from the witnesses.

Without those evidences we are like this young man. Blind on a board flying over concrete surfaces and probing with our hands to see if we can trust the next precipice. We can learn to fall gracefully but can see no further than our own memories. Like this young man, one must be ever vigilant in protecting themselves and very brave in stepping out into the dark unknown.

But there is an alternative to being bound that is trust. To trust the collective witness now more and more available for perusal thanks to writing, books, libraries, film, video and the internet. We are ever growing into a society that does not need to believe the written word or the spoken testimony but who are able to do a search and have evidence presented within seconds. And although one would think this makes us a more trusting society and a more honest group, it has not. In fact I would argue that we are ever more skeptical of truth, reality and the testimony of first hand witnesses.

There is a point when evidence grows beyond the point of presenting credibility to the point of exasperating the hearer and building doubt in ones mind. When my friend tells me he's sorry he couldn't make it to my party but he had to work I might believe him or I might choose to doubt. If he gives me one or two examples of projects he was doing I might begin to be more inclined to believe his story. If he gives me four or five stories about why he was late I might begin to think he is overdoing his story and if he tells me one more thing after that to corroborate his story I might think he feels guilty and is covering a lie.

This is not so important when my friend is trying not to hurt my feelings about missing my party but when someone does this in a marriage, to their children, in religion, in politics and regularly experiences such trust shattering experiences they build up for themselves an arsenal of emotional padding. And soon although they set out blindly into the world they no longer have real contact with the world. Their joy is diminished, their fear is diminished, their hope is diminished, there love is extinguished; they're a flame covered over with a vacuous shield of doubt.

It is for this reason that Abraham while holding the soul of poor Lazarus told the rich man who overlooked him that there is a limit to how much evidence an almighty God should show to mankind before it becomes a desperate plea and a seemingly deceptive proving of oneself. For reference you can check this link from Luke 16. While the main message of the passage is speaking to those who would overlook the needs of those surrounding them distracted by their wealth, the underlying truth about persuasion is represented well in the final statement of the chapter by Abraham - essentially, if one does not believe the lesser testimonies than the greater testimony will be discarded as incredible as well.

Taking a step back to the main subject of allocating our wealth to those in need I would like to consider the  I think that is the reason the third video that caught my eye on today's video list was this one about the world's poorest president. The president of Uruguay could be considered eccentric, but for many he is the image of healthy contentment. While not having wealth to flaunt his lifestyle shows a responsible ethic for consumption. The character piece states that Jose Mujica', president of Uruguay donates 90% ($12,000) of his annual income to charities. I assume the BBC is a fairly credible source and that they double check their facts before publishing, so I'm going to trust their statement and say that this man is doing something few world leaders have ever done, he is using his position as a platform for his example rather than using his position to exemplify his platform.

Most world leaders will boast all the positions they've held as a reason why they would be trust worthy leaders. For this reason most campaign trails spend a lot of time focusing on the experiences of the candidates. While some attention is given to the character and practices of candidates. Ultimately, whether you're running for office or not, you will have to give account one day for the myopic blindness you've had that has hindered you from seeing the poor in your neighborhoods and sitting outside your doors. Wake up, open your eyes, notice the need and feel something rather than being callous let your emotions move you long enough to make an irrational donation to the cause of the poor. If that's not enough, do some deep thinking about where you'll be 120 years from now, and rationally figure out what to do with your excess.

Either way, you're just a blind skate boarder looking for more padding or a trustworthy guide to lead you through this skate park of a life.

-Until A Later Time

Merry Christmas 2012

Simply wishing you and yours a wonderful Christmas season from T1OT.

Fishing Style

Saw something similar to this on someone's Facebook profile and decided I wanted to try and recreate it. This is my version of the ichthus fish with a fisheye lens style distortion that I added after I finished the lighting. :) 

Landslide

Sometimes life itself can feel like one uncontrolled landslide after another. In times like that I gain peace from the fact that at least that is constant. The downward flow of time taking away the frozen waters that have formed around our hearts and minds may just one day reveal we are a living mountain again ready to be moved by the spirit buried deep beneath our snow covered hills.

Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there, especially mine :)...