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Dad's day

This is my dad, taken about 2 years ago. He is 78 this year.

This kind of goes with my last post about survivalists. My dad comes from 400 years of Mennonites, and is part of the Alexanderwohl group. His mom came over on a boat when she was 3 years old, and he grew up speaking Platte Deutsche and learned English in school.

My dad can do *anything*. He has ranched on farms hundreds of acres big and owned a motorcycle shop and hauled freight nationwide. I've seen him do the impossible so many times, and I've always trusted that he could solve any problem. One of his brothers owned a VW garage and built a biwing from a kit and took Dad up for a test flight, looping around till Dad got sick. I got to meet a famous pilot because of that. Another brother handcrafts fine silver and turquoise jewelry and can play 7 instruments expertly, and regularly performs. Another brother was a real gold hunter, panning for gold in the mountains, and hanging out with the cool 'creepy' people in the mountains. They've all had such interesting lives.

Dad told me a story once of parking his rig for the night and then being held up by a guy with a knife. Dad laughed at the guy for waving such a 'small' knife at him. If that guy had known my dad was comfortable with machetes and had patched up his own nearly cut off finger and had butchered hundreds of animals in his lifetime, he might've been afraid to come near him. But Dad just laughed and handed him some money and said there would be more if he'd help him unload the next day. Dad was always fair and kind, and saw every encounter with a stranger as an opportunity to discuss religion and politics. Most people run screaming after a few intense hours of conversation. He taught me to debate, play chess, to use my head and never to panic in an emergency, and the logic of kindness. He also taught me how to survive off the land. My dad learned a lot of stuff the hard way, but has always lived to tell about it.

Now that Mom is living in a nursing home, Dad goes to have lunch with her every day for the last 3 years. The staff has never seen such devotion. He combs her hair every day, adjusts her clothing for her, brings her fresh fruit and vegetables to keep her healthy, and helps her practice remembering and talking. He is such a celebrity in that nursing home that they do anything he asks.

My dad is a rare hero in this world. He has never drank or cheated on mom, never beat us kids, never cussed out of rage, never cheated or double crossed anyone, and never gave up no matter how bad anything got. He doesn't believe in doctors and just keeps going. He's looking forward to the world ending, is very excited about prophecy, so we have some pretty interesting talks. He's a true relic of the past that bridges time over from when our nation was still being established to our modern society.

Dad isn't big on holidays and doesn't own a computer, so this is basically for me to have around for a remembrance.
- 10:11 am
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survivalists- end of the world, 2012- mach II

Burt Gummer.

Jack Bauer.

Me.

What do all these people have in common? None of them are afraid to kill, gut, and skin a rabbit with their bare hands.

I have to laugh at all the direct referral hits I've already gotten to my previous very tongue in cheek post, end of the world, 2012, from not only from places like New Jersey and Connecticut, but countries like India and the United Arab Emirates. Some of you probably thought that was silly. I guarantee you, there are a LOT of people in this world who are counting down to December 21, 2012, especially when the solar storms start happening.

Some of you (and me) are mostly blowing it off, thinking it'll just be another one of those creepy prophecy things that get a bunch of people jumpy, and therefore affect the rest of us in negative ways. But others of you are seriously hoping you'll be raptured before chaos ensues, or thinking some crazy terrorists are going to take it all as a sign to act, or simply just scared out of your minds that whatever happens, the grocery stores and gas stations will run empty and the hospitals will be full and communications will be zapped out and people will panic and start shooting one another.

I mentioned that it's important we all get chickens to survive this. An alert reader told me rabbits might be better. They are quieter and easier to hide from looters who would steal your food supply. I concur. Get rabbits, too. And while you're at it, compost their droppings with trays of earthworms. You never know when you'll need a worm.

My dad grew up in a unique and very short era of U.S. history, after land was pretty much settled, shortly after technology started sweeping the nation, but before we were truly united into a homogenous mindset via talk shows and x boxes. Dad graduated from the 8th grade with a high school diploma after a final exam that makes our college entrance exams look pretty wimpy, then moved on to become a real cowboy in Gunnison, Colorado. He once saw a man shoot a dog dead from a bucking horse with one shot. Why? Because the dog was irritating the horse. My dad and his brothers were called the Black Hat Boys, and they lived in a bunk house on the ranch and everything.

When my dad was a boy he had a pet coyote, and he shot a lot of rabbits. Rabbits were a real problem to crops back then, and could ruin a farmer nearly over night, so he has a LOT of experience with how rabbits live, hide, run, and get caught in little snares.

When I was in high school we lived on a fairly big acreage, and one day Dad caught a rabbit and showed me how to survive if I was ever caught away from home without a knife and was able to catch a rabbit. He said they are the hardest animals on the earth to kill off, but the easiest thing to kill once you've got one. And it really was easy, as long as you aren't squeamish about it. So I'm going to share with you here how to kill a rabbit with your bare hands, in the event that you get caught away from home without a knife, and the world all around you is falling apart and forcing you to starve. It's up to you to be watching those Survivorman shows and learn how to start a fire and catch the rabbit in the first place.

So if you don't like details and icky stuff and feel terrible about eating Thumper, close your eyes *right now*.

If you are right handed, once you've pounced on your rabbit (watch out, they claw and bite like mad), grasp the back of the neck real good so you can get hold of both hind feet with your left hand, and stretch it out on its belly so it has to quit fighting. Hold it up, left hand high, and when it will dangle when you let go of the neck, make a real fast and hard karate chop at a 45 degree angle down on the skull just behind the head. That can actually pop it's head right off if you are strong enough, but mostly it's to break its neck and kill it. If you are squeamish and make a wimpy chop, you'll feel awful that you just caused the rabbit a great deal of pain and drop it while it squeals in terrible anguish and alerts the whole world to your presence, so be tough and get that chop right the first time. It would suck if you were a wuss and starved to death.

Ok, the rabbit is dead, so the next thing is to get the skin off. Easy peasy. The skin will pop apart at the ankles on the hind legs, and you pull it inside out right off the rabbit over the head, if it's still attached. At this point, you really need to snap that head off. If you want to keep the skin, toss it messy side up out of the way so it won't get sticky and full of crap that's tenaciously hard to get off later. If you want to know how to fix up a rabbit skin to wear for makeshift moccasins, in the event of the world coming to an end, again, it is your responsibility to be watching the proper tv shows *now*.

The skin is off, but you still need the guts out. While you are still holding it up by the hind legs, poke a hole in the uppermost part of the soft belly area and rip down, making an opening from the tail to the ribs. Then, if you are very good at stuff like this, you can swing that carcass down toward the ground and fling those guts right out. No kidding, I actually saw my dad do this. Didn't have to get his hands messy at all.

Now you are ready to put your rabbit on a stick and toast him over a homemade fire.

My dad did every bit of that in less than 10 seconds flat. Snap, skin, guts. Good to go.

Remember, we are Homo Sapien Sapiens. We come from a long line of survivalists. Using our bare hands to make a rabbit sandwich actually comes very natural to us. If you want to use a stick or a rock, that's fine, but if you happen to have a knife in your pocket, awesome. Might slow you down, though.

I don't think it's going to be that hard to survive the world ending in 2012, but just in case, you'll at least know how to get a rabbit ready for a snack.

I appreciate that some of you might not find this kind of post entertaining, but let's be honest. Whether the world ends in 2012 or not, this can't last forever. This utopia of super highways and the nearly instant transport of goods and services by sheer comparison of, say, getting through the ice age, simply can't last. Our earth is not made to stall into one temperature zone that perfectly fits our lifestyles, our sun can't be tamed not to screw up our Tom-Toms, cell phones, and satellite reception in a couple of years, and we've all seen the endless flooding and earthquakes and stuff. Unless scientists and engineers and trillions upon trillions of dollars can mold this earth into a homo sapien dream world pretty quickly, it's really not going to take a whole lot to mess it all up again, and it's not going to be because you left your car running to keep it cool while you run into a convenience store for a soda pop.

Humans have spent tens of thousands of years scraping an existence out of the rocks. Yes, bunnies are cute. It's wonderful that we are able to live in an age of mankind where we can even stick up for bunny rights and refuse to eat them. But deep down, where you came from was kill or be killed. Do or die.

Don't laugh at the survivalists. When things start going wrong, they'll be ready. In the meantime, enjoy your pizza and your World of Warcraft that other people made possible in your lives.
- 10:10 am
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time as a self correcting system

First a disclaimer-- I'm not a physicist, just a physics hobbyist. I'm not a new ager or spiritualist, but I was raised by religious parents. I guess I'm more of a logical thinker, although I'm not into philosophy. This idea I'm working on is all mine, as far as I can discern, but since there are over 6 billion brains on this planet, it's highly probable several other people are already working on this and I just don't know it.

I have been thinking about time since I was a young child. I have a degree and have studied systems theory as applied to the field of sociology. At its most basic, systems theory says that within a whole there are sets of systems, and all systems interact in one way or another to affect other systems. A good example is your body. There is the endocrine system, cardiovascular system, nervous system, digestive system, etc. In sociological terms there is the educational system, the transportation system, the health care system, and etc. You can apply this to any field and even cross fields with it, as in solar flares affect not only our solar system, but our communications systems in our daily lives. Or you can bring it down to a personal level and view your own household as a variety of interacting systems that form a whole.

Time as a construct has always fascinated me. Is it real? What exactly is it? It seems to be a measuring of linear progression, as in change over time. It's even been given its own dimension. We fantasize about it running backward, or skipping around through it, about changing the way it works.

Time flows like a river, it's a wall you hit in middle age, it purportedly heals all wounds, it stops during breathless moments, it lags, it flies, it takes forever to arrive, and puts terrible pressure on us. But is it really an entity in itself? We measure atomic time and the speed of light time and the time it takes to cook dinner in our microwaves. We can slow down light in a lab, and we can say time slows down for people traveling near light speed, and we can be out of time. We buy and sell time as a commodity and talk about the time all the time. What the heck is time?

To be outside our universe is to be outside of time itself, or so some say. But then we'd be watching other bubbles form with their own times inside. And to watch the bubbles means that time is passing outside the bubbles as linear progression continues. If you aren't up on the latest physics, don't worry about this paragraph.

Time seems to be all about progression. Even when progression stops, time is not necessarily 'frozen' or 'standing still'. Time seems to be entirely independent of the progression, but the progression seems to be entirely dependent on the time.

Spacetime is likened to a fabric, as in 'the fabric of spacetime'. No matter how you wad it up, it is itself, like a bedsheet that gets twisted in the wash, fluffed in the dryer, folded on a shelf, or pulled around on a bed. Although spacetime contains its own universe, it appears that it's not particularly inert from 'outside' jostling from other spacetimes, or a barrier against 'quantum flux', where particles pop in and out of existence. Spacetime can be dragged around a black hole and stretched, it can be wrinkled, it can have waves ripple through it, and one end of it can affect the other end in the minutest and yet most important of ways.

The light cone of events kinda defines what possibilities there are along a line of progression, or time. But all through that we see time go in a straight line. But all possible worlds has evolved into the idea of time bifurcating into parallel worlds, all with their own timelines, but all still running 'straight'. In this model, every second of every possible probability becomes a bifurcation, a split into two or more possible worlds, but if you think about it, every second would become a plethora of new time lines, and those would... etc. Just a big fuzz of everything exploding in all directions.

So I concern myself with just one timeline, this one that I am consciously aware of following somehow. Now I feel like I'm on a train on a train track, and I think that's just as misleading as all the other pictures in my head.

C.S. Lewis wrote a story called The Dark Tower in which the timeline in an alt dimension ran at a 90 degree angle to that of our familiar forwardly progressing time, and the inhabitants of a world in that dimension were using physical artifacts and markers like buildings to line the times up to intersect so our world could be connected to theirs, allowing people to trade places. The people there were much different, of course, and their laws of physics appeared to be different to some degree.

Have you had moments where time felt like it stood still? When people fall in love they use the word 'forever' a lot. They want to hang on to the lovely moment forever. Well, what if they can? What if each moment can be bisected and another time runs sideways? What if all moments are like this? What if what we instinctively feel as 'forever' inside of a tiny little moment is really real?

Douglas Adams used a character named Dirk Gently to explore alt worlds, but in such a way that you could see they are interconnected. He followed the gods back to Valhalla by adjusting his perception by the slightest amount and slipped behind a molecule.

Many people have been obsessed with the concept of time and what it means to our existence. Einstein had a heck of a time (haha) accepting that a particular 'now' is meaningful to a consciousness, when all times are essentially now. I once got extra credit in a logic class for simply mentioning I own a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time. Camus was obsessed with absurdity of being, Kierkegaard was obsessed with existentialism, Nietzsche unwittingly inspired a new genetic variation on humans in the Andromeda series. Honestly, I really wish there were a real Mr. Spock and a whole planet of Vulcans to bounce these ideas off of.

So, I've spent a lifetime wondering just what time is. While we are in these bodies, we are caught in the progression of time in this universe. The only way out is to die. But what then? Some seem to think we keep progressing along with this timeline, going from life to life as we continue to learn, or being stuck here as a ghost, or existing in another level still adjunct to this world. Are we necessarily only able to move 'forward' with this world as spirits? I'm getting the idea from several sources, including remote viewers, paranormal investigators, and savants that time may not necessarily be linear like we think, although we cannot fathom what else it could be.

Lightning seems to come down from the sky. Frame by frame imaging shows lightning exploding up from the earth to meet more lightning in the sky, something our eyes are usually unable to see. Could time be happening like this? Could it leap around and then 'spacetime' fills in the gaps as needed? Some ancient religions agree with quantum physics that unless there is an observer, the possibility will not 'collapse' into a measurable state. I'm not worried about who the observer is and whether it has to be corporeal. Some say the universe is observing itself. That's kind of moot since we can't observe the observer, but certainly leaves open the idea that maybe Time is the observer, a record of events, if you will.

Our bodies work continually to self adjust to a default. When the default is upset, we become sick. Hormones go out of balance, sugars and minerals are not properly utilized, liquids become trapped, and entropy cascades as the immune system can literally tear the body apart trying to do something about what it cannot fix. Cancers, auto-immune and genetic disorders, and cytokine storm can be our own biggest nightmares. The body as a self correcting system is out of control.

What if time did that? What if everything as we knew it began to crumble apart into a big jumble of lunacy? In Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, a cosmic storm swept spacecraft through 'time storms', and timelines were changed because of that. But what if time storms could happen on a smaller level? What if just down the block time were changing things all around, as if it were raining over there but not at your house? Wouldn't it be cool to see a new scifi series based on that idea?

Time, from our point of view, seems to be coherent and immutable. When it isn't, then we assume something is wrong with our brains.

What if time is a system? What if time, which can apparently go on whether it is inside or outside our universe and regardless of whether any change happens, is actually a system that interacts with stuff like energy and mass on a level we are not yet able to understand? What if time is part of an overall systems network that maintains itself within preset parameters?

Ok, ok, these are called the laws of physics. But seriously, what if time really is TIME? What if it really exists on its own whether there are universes or not? Not just as a concept, but something that has always somehow existed? What if time is not just a byproduct of something 'happening'?

I'm dangerously close to anthropomorphizing, and I hate that. I think it is terribly erroneous to attribute personalities and motivations to things we don't understand, although I love it when Terry Pratchett does it.

I guess if you're still with me, you are just as intrigued by this stuff as I am. Is time on my side, like Mick Jagger says? Just how many songs of his use the word 'time'? Aspie on a tangent here. Coming back from googling.

It seems that time is important to us. We need to take the time to stop and smell the roses, or the coffee. We invest our time in something we like or believe in. It wasn't that long ago that humans had no such concept of time. Without clocks in every house, before watches were invented, before nations were synchronized, and with only day and night to go by (and especially before tv and gaming systems), there was plenty of time around, only it took a lot longer to get anything done or travel anywhere. What do you do all day? Create fabric. Grind grain and make bread. Talk. Think. Pray that harsh weather doesn't suddenly destroy the little garden before anything ripens. Figure things out and invent things. Time savers...

I don't know how to end this. I guess I could say my time is up.
- 11:18 am
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bluejacky

I've started transferring my survey posts over to Surveypalooza so people coming in from search engines on mobile devices will be able to see the surveys.

Apologies for the missing vids, another upgrade during the server migration swept through like a scan sweeping through the Enterprise. I'll fix those later, kinda busy...