CNN reports that cloned meat is okay to eat.

CNN reports that cloned meat is okay to eat.

CNN reports that cloned meat is okay to eat.

CNN reports that cloned meat is okay to eat.

CNN reports that cloned meat is okay to eat.

CNN reports that cloned meat is okay to eat.

My Latest Desktop Image

Just one of many to follow.

A Digital Landscape

This was created in Bryce 5.0, and rendered in it as far as I know. Most of the time, when I do an animation, I usually export a geometry file to Lightwave, and do the animation there, but in this case, I was doing a still picture, and Bryce renders those pretty well. It's also got a dedicated system for doing textures, and I was going for that detail.
 

My First Movie

This was my first animation, done on an animation program called Lightwave. This was done on version 5.5. back in 2000 or 2001. The current version of this program? Version 9! That'll tell you how old this is.
Enjoy!

Sorry, I misunderstood the picasa interface. This is just a screencap. I'll work on getting this back up.
Okay, I looked at it, and so far, Picasa does not support video posting. New feature for updates, right?
 

Marketing the Real

Language can be a femme fatale in Public Relations. The beautiful story is often the most dishonest. In the real world, the truth can be ugly. Words can be molded to create stories we want to believe, and which resist removal by factchecking, despite our better judgment.

I think this has something to do with the reconstructive nature of memory and imagination. A good story tells you just enough for you to use the rest of what you know and what you recall to fill in the gaps. Dishonest communications often play on this, grafting tales that have the intuitive flavor of correctness to our pre-existing knowledge, creating a robust combination that resists easy, uninformed skepticism, and reinforces false beliefs for the uncritical.

This phenomena aids those who want power, but who also like to treat it like a zero-sum game, where their customers, their constituents, and their investors are on the losing end.

The trouble is, lies become their own traps. An Enron executive or Bush Administration official who tried to act on what they knew to be true would find that their actions drew attention to their lies. Liars detest exposure, so they often are forced to avoid doing what's right in order to preserve the illusion that what they're telling people is true.

Acting on truth requires a culture prepared to take such action. In absence of the will to act on truth, the cultures develop to do what people are told to do, and to cover for the things that the liars do not want to see the light of day. Almost by default, that becomes an avoidance of truly productive behavior.

The price of cultural dishonesty is dysfunction, and all the evils that come with it. Worse still, the price is also the fact that one day one must turn back towards the right and the true, or face disaster. Like it says in Star Wars: Once you succumb to the darkside, it forever dominates your destiny.

What do you folks want to dominate your destiny?

The Idols of Human Logic

I'm a serious fellow. I've been told more than once in my life that I think too much, and probably have merited that assessment on a number of occasions. Being a person who can't help it, though, I do have the added benefit of knowing the limits of ivory tower logic, limits learned through hard-won experience.

There are benefits to being serious, to trying to reduce things in life to singular causes. If that weren't the case, our society wouldn't be what it is today, with our highly refined, well developed technology. With that in mind, even scientists are finding that some systems cannot be well understood from their component's characteristics alone. We call those kinds of systems, which are quite common in the real world emergent.

Trouble is, much of our philosophy and our attitudes are shaped by those centuries of time in which our culture alternated between romantic irreducibility, and pragmatic reductionism- people either believe that the world was a big mystery which the logic mavens did not understand half as much as they liked to believe, and those who believed the Romantics overlooked much of the undergirding order of the world. The cliche of both being right and both being wrong applies here.

It's not a very meaningful way of approaching things, on either end or in the middle. Additionally, neither side really has an approach that takes advantage of the way things really work. Of course, you could say each side must necessarily be an abstraction of the way people really work, and I guess you could say that is true. Unfortunately, in times of stress, people can sometimes run home to their philosophical momma, and start applying their perspective on the world with a vengeance.

America prospers, I think, in large part because it doesn't allow one way of thinking to exclusively rule the roost. From individual freedom emerges a robust discourse, with redundant backups, if you will, ready to take over when the former majority opinion loses favor. Some, though, react to that prospect with fear, and so try and push their ideas relentlessly.

We see such a situation in politics today, but not just there. We see it in the arts, particularly in the movie business. We see it in business culture, and even in religion. We see people who believe that they can reduce the good conduct of all these things to a list of rules, or at the very least a philosophical system.

Folks try to apply scientific methods (scientific in that they draw a conclusion by scholarly and/or systematic methods) to enterprises that are quite human in character. It can work to a certain extent, but only to the extent that people are willing to be skeptical about their own conclusions and how they came to them.

In trying to unravel the character of the world we live in and the things in it, we must recognize that we human beings can imagine the counterfactual quite easily. We must also recognize that in dealing with our fellow human beings, there are some facts which cannot be freed from subjective perspective, but which nonetheless have as great if not greater influence on the way things work than the cold, hard facts themselves.

We're flawed creatures, who can misjudge the world around us. This is why we have to keep both our eyes and our minds open as we try to establish the character of the world around us. This is also why we must do this on a permanent basis.

Only when we allow ourselves an awareness of how fragile our hold on reality truly is do we appreciate what an intellectual sin it is to have no room for error or different opinion in our plans. We need our discourse to be more fluid. Critics of what I say here may point out that not all new or different ideas have equal quality. This is, in many ways, all too true- in fact, that sensibility informs my argument here. What must be understood, though, is that the approach I suggest is all-inclusive in its skepticism. Both new ideas and old can be and often are wrong, in part or in the majority.

In fact, if you take a long enough view, all our ideas are wrong, illusions that cause us to stray from appropriate action. You could in fact call this original sin, if you are religiously inclined, though you could also call it human fallibility if such a morally drenched term seems over the top. Either way, like a ship on the sea, there is the course we intend to take, and the direction our vehicle of thought takes on the seas of reality. It is important, every now and then, as a sailor might do on a long voyage, for us to gauge where we really are, where we're really going, and what conditions our journey is taking us into.

Which brings me to this point, and the reason I portray the necessary course of action as neverending: As with sailing, a course correction cannot erase the path the vessel has taken to that point, nor make the current position a different one in the blink of an eye. It can only serve to reorient ourselves towards the right course for the destination we seek.

The relief from the consequences of the errors we make, to the extent that we can have it, is dependent on the quality of our next assessment of the situation. We can get that wrong, and remain off course. Or, more worryingly, a change in the weather or in the certain conditions along the leg of a journey could invalidate the course we are on, forcing us to reconsider what if any path could bring us to our goal- that or dare the approach anyways, our pride justly or unjustly refusing to buckle against the obstacle.

Regardless of all that, finding the right course to take, maintaining it, and deciding whether to keep to it or abandon it, is a dynamic process, especially if we put a premium on getting things done right. The corrupt, the lazy, and the unmotivated find no reason to make a friend of change. To those who wish to get things accomplished, to fulfill the noble impulses, and to keep a system pure, change (or at least it's potential) is their best ally.

Change, though, is not achieved all at once, nor are our current means of bringing it about always the best. If this sounds like it complicates things, it does, but these are complexities that were there to start, like a car engine is under the hood. The exterior may allow us the illusion that the car is a simple, unified entity, but that doesn't change what we find beyond the chrome. What we are rendering more complex is our appreciation.

But the complexity does carry with it costs of mental overhead. We get into what Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart call Ant Country, where a reductionist approach leads us to bewildering uncertainty as to how to manage things. The fearful approach to Ant Country is part of what motivates people to react and move towards romanticism and it's philosophical relatives.

This brings us back to a quality that we've long neglected: judgment. Critical thinking, rather than just procedural. It's easy once we've fallen into our mental arrogance to head in this direction- after all, if you've figured it out, why bother wasting the effort to refigure things? But since our notion of things is often imperfect, it's necessary and advantageous for us to peer past the veil of ignorance that surrounds us and reassess things. What brings many to fear this is the requirement that one exercise personal, subjective judgment. It becomes a practical moral act, rather than the inevitable result of a process that can't be wrong as long as you follow it.

The trouble is, conditions can and often do change in the world, and many of the systems that we attempt to address with these approaches are both dynamic and emergent in their character. Even if such process works once, it doesn't necessarily follow that such processes will remain a way to do the right thing. The process can become not unlike the food pellet system in a lab rat's cage, rewarding folks for doing things a certain way arbitrary of true utility of their actions. This is the hidden trap of the market, of any political party, of any means of managing people that does not reward open eyes open minds, and a sustained involvement with the going-ons of the world.

We have to be willing to risk being wrong to do things right, and having taken that risk, we must face up to the consequences of our actions with integrity, courage, and humility. To wall ourselves off in process and argument will not preserve us from error, it will only serve to sustain us in it.

Let's shed a little light on my extracurricular activities.

In the midst of all pontificating about politics and philosophy, it's understandably difficult to think of me for what I was trained at college to do: Make movies. Video. Digital Photograph, and as the character of that Image above demonstrates, Digital modelling and animation.

I will take some steps, at this point, to remedy this from time to time, now that I've found the means to do so. I hope this will serve two functions: give me an audience for my work, and give you an additional layer of meaning and enjoyment as a reader of this blog. 

Opening Up to Our Non-Ideal Past and Present

We would like to think our ancestors were fair-minded, and harbored none of the out of favor biases of our age. That is the bias of our age. I believe our modern rejection of many of the sins of the past- racism, sexism, etc- are justifiable and noble in spirit, but they cannot change the fact that they were evolutions in thought from mindsets that were not free of these prejudices.

The tendency among some educators is to try and smooth these things over, conceal the extent to which western culture and our nation in particular once had these qualities. Frankly, I think that's a mistake.

This is especially true when dealing with the books of the past. Some folks commenting on The Chronicles of Narnia noted the sexism and the occasional racism dealing with the Arab/Muslim analogues known as the Calormenes, and held it rather harshly to task.

Were this a modern book, I could see where the criticism would be just. This is The Chronicles of Narnia, though, and it is representative of its times, not ours. It is the product of Mid-20th Century England, and all the attendant prejudices and values. Not all of these beliefs are alien to our own, but quite a few are guaranteed to be, because of the source of this work.

It's important that we recognize two things:

1)the intentions of authors in the past were like ours: good bad and indifferent.

and

2)That we ourselves are not perfect.

Our values didn't spring from nowhere. They are the result of how people thought and lived before us. We have the tendency as human beings to view the past through the lense of the present sometimes, and that is to some extent unavoidable. That said, we can be conscious of this tendency and take a compensatory approach in our analysis, or we can leave the numerous errors in that, and suffer the consequences of having such a distorted picture of things.

One such consequence is that we do not recognize these prejudices in ourselves. We assume the irrationality of racism, and forget that there are often very rational ways of justifying the bigoted and the unfair, traps for the unwary thinker. We ourselves probably hold such prejudices without even realizing it. Another consequence is that we will often shape our attitudes toward such groups in ways that allow us to believe that we are without blemish, but which nonetheless allow some form of uninformed belief through. Witness the blandly uncritical way some multiculturalist have of examining foreign societies, neglecting their darker sides, even while their opponents focus on nothing else.

The important thing to learn here is critical thought, and an appreciation for not just truth about how things are, but also about other's viewpoints. In trying to push toward a better and more just society, it is insufficient to understand one's own viewpoint alone. We need to understand what we we are persuading people from, as well as to. The thing is, it is difficult enough to understand other folk's points of view, if we fail to withold judgment until we understand their thinking in their own terms.

Christ in a Free Speech Society

Every few months or years, we hear about one program or another that's run afoul of the self-appointed Guardians of Christian Decency. Another news program runs with a story of how us nice Christians are pouring a nice warm glass of vitriol down the backs of yet another liberal/secular/atheist filmmaker. Another station cuts off an unwanted show unseen. Another movie gets picketed because it's content is offensive, sacreligious, or whatever else.

And what do we gain? A reputation as being stiflers of culture, backwards mouth-breathers whose anti-elitist sentiments drive us to tear down other in our intolerance. Worse yet, there's another unintentional effect. strong, or even casual religious expression in movies becomes radioactive, as both sides threaten filmmakers with boycotts and picketting for daring to put something more than lukewarm spirituality on.

In a way, we Christians are somewhat responsible for the lack of Christian content and religious values on the air. We simply make it not worth the trouble for people to get their hands dirty with it. Yet one movie after another successfully plays on themes present in religious material, and evokes spiritual sensibilities during their run times. What's going on? There's obviously a market for transcendance, for religious experience in the cinema and on television.

The thing is, though, we're not providing nearly enough of it. Typically, we're either getting ham-handed with it, making hysterically bad or mundane films. The real values of Christianity are not being presented in the dramatic fashion that values of character and philosophy are on a regular basis. Secular values, being more universal, and unradioactive enough to be regularly pondered upon, are presented with both greater grace and greater saturation. Artists and thinkers are encouraged among the more secular to think for themselves, to take exciting new directions. These are the things any culture should do, if they wish for it to remain alive in people's hearts and minds.

The solution of some folks is to surpress the offensive, but that not only carries with it the negative connotations, that encourages groupthink and stagnation, as people rest on their assumptions. For values-based thought to come back to the fore, it has to be more than a spirit of weak, didactic, message-sending. It has to be a full fledged dive into the problems and concerns from which our cultural responses emerge.

But to do that, we have to give people the freedom to mess up, and to say things we don't want them to say. We have to give the broadcasters and moviemakers the freedom from controversy that would encourage them to treat your average piece of cinematic religion as no big deal.

There are some who would worry that such an approach would encourage antagonistic messages. It could indeed, but that's the price of carrying messages that are antagonistic to other folk's beliefs. This has always been a matter of competition between different ideas, different views, and not usually in the neat sort of camp vs. camp fashion. The charisma of the different works is what carries them forward. Because of the vibrant cultural melieu that constitutes secular society in America, they are more free to experiment, to dare, to be visionaries. They can present movies to people that have power, narrative drive, which ask questions, and reveal new corners of humanity. Some may look at that and resent it, claiming that it represents an ominous temptation to the unwary. Whatever it is, though, we would be well advised to confront it with something else than just scorn. We need to confront it with a new culture of ideas and charismatic artistry of our own.

Otherwise, we have no excuse to talk about the direction our culture is taking, since we won't be doing enough to truly take it in another direction.