“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us -- and those around us -- more effectively.
-- and they show evidence of a basic morality, without billions having to be slaughtered for refusing to follow one of some several sets of rules carved into stone and clay tablets 20-60 centuries ago.
For the people who are all, "All law comes from morality which comes from the Bible" and "My Bible is the source of all the best morality and law", here it is: evidence of morality being useful for perpetuating animal societies. And that means animal morality could predate humans even walking on this earth by eons and eons ago, which means human morality was probably there for hundreds of millennia too -- long before Moses, Solomon, Muhammad, Hammurabi, Solon, or any lawgiver.
But I guess it shouldn't be all that surprising. Any social animal has to have some basic rules for how to behave within its society. You see it in cats all the time, for example, who have very complex social interactions. It is only a small step from social rules to morality after all.
You know, on the study of economics, once you push past the really boring stuff, you get to the concentrated black magic and calculating evil of the whole thing: all money is loaned into existence, and all debt is a claim on future labor that assumes the future will be perpetually greater than the past. It is definitely a conflicted art, since almost all measures of progress are economic ones, in the forward march from agricultural to industrial to post-industrial societies.
Yeah right. Much better for understanding where future battlefields will be. After all, mapping out the entire world's oil reserves did nothing to stop the oil wars wreaking havoc today. I'm sure all the Nestles of the world and other corporate water concerns will be using this UNESCO atlas in formulating their short and long-term strategies, with government rubber stamping along the way. (Since they've probably been doing it for years now to sell you bottled water.) I wouldn't be surprised to find out if most of Ted Turner's land purchases in the recent years, the ones that made him the largest landholder in the US, were selected for the aquifers they sit on.
Cool fact for the day. Did you know the ocean is more gel than liquid? Closer study shows your average drop of ocean water to be a sugar colloid of long-chain polysaccharides, which have trapped water within them; that's even on top of a list of microorganisms from plankton to bacteria to viruses. So maybe we should call it the world's largest Jell-O rather than "the drink."
Guess it's a lot easier to see life originating in the ocean when it's viewed as a teeming gel of sugars and proteins, rather than just seeing it as the world's biggest assembly of hydrogen, oxygen, and sodium chloride.
Exhibit A. The 42nd US President: caught in a lie broadcast in public media and under oath, regarding an activity that was immoral, BUT NOT illegal -- and led to an immediate investigation and call for impeachment, which has stained his legacy.
Exhibit B. The 43rd US President: proudly and publicly admitted to a number of felonies and war crimes, along with his vice-president, his two secretaries of defense and two attorneys-general, declared the ENTIRE executive above the law, and declared the vice-president accountable to no one in the government, except to the president, retroactively changed laws in an attempt to clear their wrongdoing when the immorality and criminality became obvious to even the most simple-minded American person passively watching the evening news -- AND YET Washington is still united behind moving on with NO prosecutions or investigation.*
Wow. What a difference a decade made.
* This is despite the fact that the US has more than once pushed for prosecution of foreign and domestic agents who used waterboarding as war criminals in the last decade.
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Feb 17, 6:22am
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