How not to eat the rich

Boy sucking girl's finger, from the anime Amagami SS

Eating the rich, one finger at a time!

There is something absurd about the Left’s fantasies about taxing the “super rich” to fix the broken economy. It is not specifically that it is evil – that is a matter of different opinions – but that it is impossible.

As I have mentioned before, the real super rich are not like Disney’s Scrooge McDuck, who has his money in a silo full of coins and bank notes he can bathe in. Rather, their wealth takes two basic forms: Stocks and bonds. Stocks are part-ownership, mostly in running businesses. Bonds are money lent to other. There are also various derivatives of these, such as the option to buy a stock or a bond at a certain price at some future time. But it really boils down to these two types.

Now say you decide your economy is so messed up that you need to grab 10% of the wealth of the super rich. It is not really sad for them, they still have more than they need for a thousand years of comfortable living, which the Light is unlikely to grant them in any case. But let’s look at what happens when they try to pay their taxes.

Alternative one: They try sell enough stock to finance their extraordinary tax. This is done on the stock exchange, as the name implies. Suddenly there is a glut of sellers and a lack of buyers. This is what we usually call a “stock market crash”. We had one in 1929, heralding the Great Depression. We had another heralding the current troubles, which are the troubles that motivate the Left to want to eat the rich in the first place. So the solution is another stock market crash?

Well, this may seem harmless enough if you are 25 and unemployed. Seeing Wall Street crash and burn, figuratively at least, will probably be satisfying. Not so for your parents: All pension funds are heavily invested on the stock exchange, and everyone’s future pensions will start to unravel before their eyes. This is not a good idea to sign into law for a President who plans on a cushy retreat position as, say, anything other than a panhandler.

Well, how about the bonds? Some of these will mature – the loans fall due – over the course of the year, so these at least should be easy. Just take the money and don’t lend it out again, pay your taxes instead. Fine. But credit has become a bit of a cornerstone in society. Factories or shops that don’t get their credit extended  have to close their doors, even if they otherwise run a profit. In fact, the infamous “financial crisis” that threw the rich world into recession recently was caused by a lack of credit, rather than anything else.

Let us quickly mention the fact that states also depend on credit these days, and a credit panic would cause them to be unable to pay civil servants, state pensions, food stamps etc. Of course, they could just compensate by taxing the rich more…

It is not that it is impossible to tax the rich without the world going down the drain. Many countries tax their rich more than the USA (and a few tax them less). That is not the problem. The problem is the time scale. You can’t confiscate 10% of their wealth one year, or the economy will start spiraling toward death and destruction. You could grab 0.5% each year for 20 years and get the same money with no measurable disruption. But the problem with this is that it won’t solve your problem right here, right now. Even shooting every one of America’s super rich and taking all their money – provided you magically could do this without causing a panic – would only be enough to keep the US debt at its current level for a year, rather than the usual skyrocketing increase. Stealing a measly percent or less simply has no noticeable effect, but it will insult the corporate overlords that wines and dines the politician class. Not worth it, in other words.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It’s the same with eating the rich. You have to start doing it a generation before you are going to spectacularly mess up your economy. With the current scarcity of time machines, I don’t see a great past for this in America. (Of course, we did it in Norway. We do everything right in Norway. We are simply the best. We were created in God’s image, and then we evolved. Just ask any of my fellow Norwegians.)

Divine intervention, it seems

Who on earth am I?

Who on Earth am I? I seem to be the guy who, instead of a normal conscience like most people, have a Guardian Angel or something mess up my electronics until I stop making excuses for my greed.

See yesterday’s entry for context. Today I took my 1 day old Galaxy Note back to the shop where I bought it. They fiddled with it for half an hour or so, trying various settings, then trying the SIM card in another phone, then the other card in the Note. Conclusion: This particular Galaxy Note was faulty and had to be sent for repair. Be sure to bring everything that came in the box.

Now, me having bought this at that same shop 1 day ago, I reasonably proposed they simply replace it with another. I even reset it to factory settings, erasing everything I had downloaded or written to it. Unfortunately, they could not do that. They claimed to not have any left, although I wonder if that would have been the case if I were there to buy one instead. Possibly – the overwhelming majority of Norwegians have more money than I, and it is close to Christmas, and the model is brand new.

With the Galaxy Tab, it took weeks to even be allowed to buy it, and even to the day I got it there were mysterious delays. So I don’t hold it unlikely that it will disappear for weeks, or months, or forever (I better get some kind of written statement as to having handed it in).  Or I suppose I could just keep the defective unit and use Opera Mini, which for some obscure reason worked when I tried it this afternoon.

It is a pretty tiny tribulation compared to poor Batsheba and King David, who lost their first son even though David (at least) regretted his sin, fasted and slept on the floor. Of course, my lust was not anywhere near King David level, and I didn’t have anyone killed to get my hands on their Galaxy Note. Although it does seem that I, unintentionally, have deprived some poor guy of his Christmas present (if they really did sell out).

Oh, and for those who wonder why God would punish an innocent baby for his parents’ adultery, the answer is probably that God didn’t. The baby has not yet formed attachments to this world. When its spirit returns to Heaven, angels receive it and welcomes it home. That is what I believe. If you have any doubt that babies come from Heaven and belong there, just look into their eyes.

But for a parent, the loss of a child is more or less like the loss of one’s own life, except it goes on for a long time. Poor Batsheba. But that’s another long story which is not mine to tell. Probably. I should probably not preach about religion, but lie low for a while and lick my wounded pride, if any.

On the other hand, the instruction booklet reminds me to not bite or suck on the Note’s battery. It also warned me to not destroy my nails when taking off the back case. I wonder if I really am the target group for this one… And evidently, Heaven is not convinced either. But then Heaven rarely is when I do impulse shopping of electronics. I should be used to that by now.

Galaxy Note: Cute when it works

Samsung Galaxy Note, lock screen

I don’t think the quill picture was meant to imply primitive. And generally it isn’t – apart from the browser. And it is just mine, or so say the rest of the world.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note datapad (large mobile phone / small tablet).  After all, it is the kind of invention I wish the future to have. I am known to happily lose money to support something that fits in my vision of the future, such as e-books (before they became popular),  speech recognition (before it became good) and neural activator control (which never became popular, I’m afraid). Oh, and SSD-only netbook. Android smartphone. And now this, a thing that is half smartphone and half pad/tablet.

I don’t have extreme qualms over losing money on it, in that perspective. But I’d like something in that price range to work. Or if not, I’d like to know why. I am not that fortunate. But as with so many things in my life, it just might be a message from the Author. That’s what happens when you’re a … well, not exactly Main Character I hope, but a viewpoint character at least.  Like the weird clockwise dying light bulbs I recently wrote about. Not quite a miracle, but kind of suspicious. And of course there were the long, long string of strange coincidences when I bought the original Galaxy Tab. In comparison, this is very simple.

The browser does not work on 3G. It works like a charm on Wi-Fi, even if the Wi-Fi is actually another tablet running in hotspot mode. Conversely, when I use the Note as a hotspot, it happily provides my desktop with all the bandwidth it needs to power two simultaneous browsers working simultaneously. But it cannot keep its own browser from timing out. That is a bit absurd.

In all fairness, once in a while I get a page up, but it can take half an hour. And it is not specific to the internal browser (which gets high praise by reviewers, who evidently don’t have the same problem). I tried with Opera and it was, hard as it is to imagine, even worse. Once again, it was very happy to work on Wi-Fi.

Other Internet-based applications work well enough: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, even YouTube in high quality. There may be a slight delay in startup, but no denial of service. Only the browsers are left broken and bloodied. And only on wireless broadband. (It uses 2G, 3G etc seamlessly.)

I have seen no mention of this in any review. It may be particular to my machine, although that seems strange, given that other applications work fine. It may be a problem with the ISP (NetCom, a Nordic Telecoms company). Or it may be divine intervention, given that I am evidently now a Very Important Person. At least as far as electric things go. Let’s hope this doesn’t spread to the rest of my computers.

Oh, and I have not lost a tooth this time. Just a filling. Dentist appointment tomorrow at 10:30.

 

More LED bulbs

Lamp with 5 light bulbs, one of them dark

Two of these are different.

Now for the reason why I was in the electronics supermarket in the first place. You see, the last few weeks the light bulbs in this house have started dying off at an alarming rate. See the picture above? In it, there is only one of the original light bulbs left, the one to the right of the dead one, the one with the yellower light. You know what? Between me taking that picture earlier this week and now, it went out too. On the other hand, I have replaced the one that is lacking in the picture.

What is even more disturbing than them going out merely days apart, is that they did so one after another with the clock, always the one to the side  of the newest bulb, always the same side. It is like a conspiracy.  Is it a mysterious message from beyond the universe? If so, I don’t understand it, so I’ll just ignore it. Write clearer messages if it is important, Beyond The Universe!

Lamps like these are actually ideal for the new LED age. You see, one big difference between LED and incandescent bulbs is how they handle high output. This is more or less the default for the old type of bulbs, although technology has made available small, weak bulbs for flashlights etc eventually. The first ones, however, were big. With LED (light emitting diodes) it is the other way around. The first were the tiny on/off lights on electronic equipment, barely visible in daylight. New technology has increased the output, as well as the energy consumption.

The largest direct replacement LED bulbs I could find were 7W, which corresponds roughly to 40W incandescent. There will probably be stronger ones eventually, but it won’t be easy. Basically you make stronger bulbs by cramming in more diodes and using blue light, which is converted to white by the coating.  But weaker lights are cheaper to make and more energy efficient. You can retain the higher efficiency, but at the cost of changing the shape of the bulb to get more diodes, for instance in a long rod in the middle of the bulb. But if you want to keep the same shape and size, there are limits currently to how strong they can be.

That’s where lamps with multiple weak bulbs come in handy. They put out plenty of light, but they don’t do so all at one point. 3W LED bulbs easily replace a 25W bulb of similar size and shape, shave almost nine tenths of the electricity cost, and last for 30 years. Or that’s what they say – the technology has not actually been around for that long. Actually there is no reason why they should not last for a century, but unfortunately I am unlikely to find out.

You may have heard about how incandescent bulbs were made with planned obsolescence through a conspiracy among bulb makers. There is a long and seemingly reasonable video freely available on the Net revealing the conspiracy, which stretches decades back. Reality is slightly different. Not that there wasn’t a conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy of standardization rather than simply exploitation.

You see, with incandescent bulbs, longevity comes at a cost. Two costs, actually. For bulbs to last longer, you need a slightly thicker filament (the glowing wire part). The thinner it is, the more fragile. But the thicker it is, the less efficient. You get less light per watt with a thicker, sturdier filament. This isn’t rocket science: The copper wire that leads to your lamp does not shine in the dark and does not melt off the plastic insulation. Because it is much thicker and offers less resistance, it does not even grow hot. The thinner and the more resistance, the hotter and brighter. So you can have incandescent bulbs with longer life, but a higher utility bill or less brightness. The companies standardized on a certain proportion, the 1000 hours bulb. It may not have been incidental that it also got them more sales, but why would they have less sales when the utility companies reaped the difference?

In any case, with LED bulbs having a lifespan of 15, 20 or even 30 years, there is no economic incentive to planned obsolescence at all. By then, the current leadership of the company is likely to be gone, the shareholders will also have changed, even many of the employees. There is simply no point in adding the electronics to keep track of the age of the bulb and make it go poof after 20 years. So it is more likely it will still shine brightly when you and I, dear reader, have both gone to our eternal home and moss covers our headstone, if any.

But if, as I sincerely hope, my eternal home waits until well after I have left this particular house, I’ll probably bring my LED bulbs along, or at least as many as there are lamps in the next domicile. Not that I have any in the sight right now. It’s up to the landlord now – the rent is up for revision at the turn of the year, and if he is too greedy, I’m out. With my LED bulbs, Light willing.

 

Gadget lust

Samsung Galaxy Note - Marketing photo

Infatuation is the illusion that something outside ourselves will make us happier. In this case, a Samsung Galaxy Note.

The other day as I was at the cheap electronics chain to buy yet another LED bulb, I passed by the shop of Netcom, in this case the Nordic mobile telecom company. They not only sell subscriptions, but also phones, and any combination thereof. And they had the Galaxy Note!

If you have not heard of Samsung Galaxy Note, that may be because it has just recently arrived. According to Wikipedia it has not yet come to the US, but it could be Wikipedia is not updated yet. It has come here to Norway, and it has caused quite a stir.

Galaxy Note is either the largest smartphone or the smallest tablet running the rapidly spreading Android operating system. As for its hardware specifications, those are fit for a tablet, going at the throat of the iPad. Or perhaps it goes for the eyes.  The physical size is 5.3 inches, but the screen resolution is 1280×800, more than iPad 2 has on its 10 inch screen! For another comparison, on a TV it would qualify as “HD ready”. In other words, that’s an extremely detailed display, and the vivid colors that Samsung pack into its displays don’t hurt either.

This is the closest thing yet to the “datapad” that I have predicted as the upcoming all-purpose entertainment and communication device.

Normally this would just give me a case of mild curiosity, but then I came home and found that I had used up my fast download quota on the mobile phone in the exact middle of the month. I also have the old Galaxy Tab, which I now use for my Internet use. But even if I pace myself – and I generally do – it will probably run out sometime between Christmas and New Year’s. If I were to add a third mobile broadband, I would be able to watch as much YouTube and listen to as much Spotify as I wanted. Conveniently that could go along with a brand new Galaxy Note…

Or I could, you know, watch less YouTube and spend the time in prayer and fasting, or whatever people do who don’t have three mobile gadgets at any one time.

Believing the impossible

Maybe I'm alive because a whole bunch of mysteries came together

Maybe I’m alive because a whole bunch of mysteries came together. Still, I prefer to be alive in a world I don’t completely understand, rather than completely understand a world that is so simple that it has room for neither life nor thought.

This fall in Norway, one of our leading intellectuals wrote a short essay in Norway’s leading “conservative” newspaper (for Scandinavian values of conservative, where Bill Clinton would fit right in). She referred to a question she had got from a journalist, about how she as a modern, top-educated Norwegian woman, could be a Catholic. She had replied: “Your question shows your prejudices”, and the journalist became agitated.

So did the readers of the essay. The comments are a sight to behold: “You believe in thousands of years old fairy tales”, “You believe that a man walked on water and you drink his blood, I cannot take seriously anything you say about anything”, “Christianity and especially Catholicism is the worst thing that has happened to humanity”. This kind of thinking is actually very normal among leftists, certainly it is the norm among those I know. They seem to fantastically imagine that they alone don’t live in a fantasy world.

Rather my message today is that all humans, ever, have believed in the impossible, and all humans now alive do so as well. We just believe in different kinds of impossibilities.

***

One fellow, with whom I share several interests, told me that not only does he not have a soul, he also does not have a mind. He just has a brain, and it does all that we usually call him, all on its own. This is a pretty extreme case, but it is the basic belief of all materialists, even those who don’t like to talk about it. There is no free will, you can read frequently in popular science magazines. It has been scientifically proven that free will doesn’t exist. So I guess those folks who work for the magazines are simply doing this in an instinctual attempt to survive and reproduce. That would explain so much! No, not really. It is more like the years when science had explained that bumblebees could not fly, but the bumblebees hadn’t read it and kept flying. (We now know how they do it, by the way.)

But just as I think I am talking with a slab of meat, it gets weirder. It is not just the soul that doesn’t exist, neither does the body! Most obviously, atoms enter and leave every cell of the body at a frenetic rate. Most of our bodies are actually replaced in weeks rather than years. Although it is not impossible that some atoms may remain (or have returned) even after many years, they are certainly not enough to give you any kind of identity. And not only are the cells renewed: Most of them die and are replaced gradually. Even in your brain, cells die off over time, but it turns out that new ones show up as well. (Stem cells in the brain were only discovered a decade or so ago, so older textbooks may not have this.)

It should have been needless to say, but the atoms do not change in any way when they become part of your body, or when they become part of a living being in general. They are the same, and they obey their few and simple laws slavishly. They bond with other atoms to attain the optimal number of electrons in their outer electron “shell” or “cloud”. Some atoms need only share one electron with others to be complete, while others need up to four.  Carbon is one of the most social of them all, and so all known life has a decent amount of carbon in it. But that does not mean carbon is alive or has any choice about which atoms it will bond with. It simply follows the law of electromagnetism, completion by sharing electrons. In other words, life does not exist either.

It is bad enough that your mind, your body and life itself don’t actually exist. It hardly gets better by the fact that matter doesn’t exist either. The atoms, despite their name (a-tomos, non-divisible) are almost completely empty. The electrons don’t circle around the nucleus like planets either, the way our grade school physics books told us. Rather, they simply have a certain probability of being at a certain place at a certain time. But less known is the fact that this applies to the nucleus as well. It is composed of smaller particles (protons and neutrons) which again are composed of quarks which are down in the probability level of quantum physics along with the electrons. While they certainly have a higher probability of being somewhere than elsewhere, it is far from absolute. And in any case, the overwhelming majority of the volume of an atom has an extremely low probability of containing any particle whatsoever. It is almost completely empty, and what is there at all, is in constant flux.

In fact, subatomic particles that don’t exist, often show up anyway. Because of variations in the null energy in vacuum, electrons and positrons can suddenly pop into existence on borrowed energy, and then disappear again a moment later, paying back the energy. Some believe this is what happened to the universe, which itself started at a subatomic size. Perhaps it came into existence on borrowed energy, and when this falls due, it simply disappears. It is hard to know, since we haven’t seen it happen yet. On the other hand, we have seen the opposite scenario: Actual particles temporarily cease to exist, and then pop back into existence on the other side of a barrier.

So basically, you don’t exist, and you have no choice in whether you believe in this or not. Not only do your mind and your body not exist, neither does the visible world in which you make your rounds, or the starry sky above you. Things that exist sometimes take vacations from doing so, and the same goes for nonexistent things.

Some 95% of the universe is now assumed to consist of “dark matter” and “dark energy”, so named not just because they aren’t visible, but we also don’t know what they are. There are some theories about what “dark matter” may be, but for “dark energy”, we only know that it probably is there because the equations require it. Normally in school when this happened, my teacher would tell me to go back and do the equations again, but the brightest human minds have done so for a while and come to the same conclusion.

It is possible that the brightest human minds (which, I need to remind you, don’t actually exist) are not all that bright after all, and we really don’t understand reality and never will. But if that happens, believers will be the last to stop trying. For we believe we are created in the image of the Creator, and that our minds are adequate to the Absolute and the Complete, and will never be fully satisfied with less. So what if God does not exist? Neither do we, but since when has that stopped any of us?

We all believe in the impossible. But which impossibility do you believe in? One fit for humans, or one only for scientific measuring devices? Poetry or binary? Or some of each?

“Your question reveals your prejudices.” We could not live if we only believed in what we can understand. We don’t even know how we can decide to get up in the morning, but most of us eventually get up anyway. We have to live on, and we do so by believing in the impossible. Not just I, but you too.

LeanBack 2.0

Title picture from Economist slideshow: LeanBack 2.0

Lean Back 2.0 – the written word undergoes a phase change?

Meme of the week, at least for some of us, is “LeanBack 2.0” – not a software product, thank goodness, with that embarrassing name, but a concept by The Economist Magazine, in a slideshow that has made its rounds on the net.

The “lean back” part refers to the traditional leisurely approach to reading, where people would read in a good chair, in bed, during long travels and other times when they had time on their hands. The leaning back in a good chair was contrasted to the leaning forward in the office chair in front of the computer, where we consumed (and sometimes produced) content on the Web.

The 2 part comes from the rapid spread of reading tablets: Amazon’s Kindle, B&N’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android tablets. These reading slates are largely used like books in the sense that you hold them in your hands, read them in a chair or in bed etc. But at the same time, they are similar to the Web in that you can view many different sources on one device. Statistics gathered by The Economist  show that users of reading tablets differ from both of the previous groups, while having some similarities to each.

Perhaps most notable: Tablet readers tend to read in-depth articles, and prefer long texts to newsclips and soundbites.

Is this a result of the technology, does it change the behavior of those who use it? Or is it rather that this technology attracts a specific type of users? I have an opinion on that, of course, being not only a more or less daily user of the Galaxy Tab, but also having predicted the rise of the datapad ten years before the iPad and Galaxy Tab appeared (the Kindle and Nook came a little earlier but were more specialized).  I think those who have followed my ramblings here will realize that I have always liked “walls of text” if they seem to have a point.

But it is not impossible that these devices may “enable” a behavior that was discouraged in the Age of the Web. It certainly looks like Amazon’s Kindle, at least, has caused a surge in book reading not only in America, but around the world wherever it is shipped. Kindles are still running like a river out of the factory, a million or more of them each week! That’s one for every family in one of the world’s large cities, in just a week. And the people who have bought a Kindle, start buying more books than they did before they had it. Intriguingly, they don’t just substitute e-books for paper books. They actually buy more books, and spend more money on books, than before.

I strongly believe this is a good thing, overall. Not all books are good, but people reading books is generally a good thing. As an online friend reminds us in her signature: “Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.” (Quote from Dewey Denouement: The Penultimate Peril)

This is one of those “the future has already begun” things that I sometimes write about. Five years ago, I was still regarded as a bit of a gadget freak because I read books on my mobile phone. Now, e-books are rapidly outselling both hardcover and paperbacks. It is a tide rising, changing things gradually but irresistibly. But as the presentation says: We had centuries to get used to the printed page, a few decades to get used to the Web; these new changes take place in months.

It’s the end of the world as we know it – and I feel good enough to lean back, at least.

Walking away from Skyrim?

"One does not simply walk away from Skyrim"

“One does not simply walk away from Skyrim” – picture commemorating the scene in Lord of the Rings where it is said, “One does not simply walk into Mordor”.  Unless I misremember, that was more or less what happened.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Skyrim, and could probably continue that way for some hours a day for the rest of my natural lifespan. That, however, would not be a good idea. I am more mature now than I was during the years spent in Daggerfall. There is more sense of urgency in my life. Not in an outward way, I don’t really have any ambitions in this world in the form of career, family or prestige. I mean inwardly, the transformation of the soul.

Also my precious few readers. I want to be here for you, of course. ^_^

The dissonance between the violence and sorcery and other hellish things in that lower world on one hand, and on the other hand the life and thoughts of the saints I am studying, well, something has to give. I may or may not return to the game for one reason or another (the screenshots for example) but right now, I’m starting to walk out of Skyrim, following the light.

A failed attempt

I have tried repeatedly to write an entry about a topic that is sensitive to many people (though I don’t feel that way personally). Despite the time I have spent on it, I have not had the conscience to publish any of my attempts. This is simply to inform you why the entry isn’t there.

Why education?

A forced training facility for boys and girls!

A forced training facility for young boys and girls! The Shugogetten, an ancient protector spirit, discovers a modern high school and decides it must be razed to the ground for the good of the poor prisoners. I am sure some of them would agree.

These days, most people go to school for a dozen years or more. And yet many have never given much thought to why we are receiving all this education. What is the purpose of education? What is education good for?

When we are small, we go to school because we are told to do so, and because everyone else does. Also, if the school is even reasonably good, it satisfies a natural instinct in children: Curiosity. (It also satisfies their social instinct – children, and many adults, get very uncomfortable if there are not other people around, preferably several other people.) It is also pretty obvious that reading and writing are useful skills, reading especially. Even comic books become better when you can read the speech bubbles!

At the other end of the long corridor of education, when you approach college, you probably have a specific career in mind. And even if it is not very specific, you probably believe that higher education improves your chance to get a job at all, but especially a well paid one. So a good many people see higher education as an investment: You spend time and money in the hope of earning more later, and (perhaps not least) get a job that is interesting and has social status, rather than hauling parcels at some warehouse for the next forty years or more.

And that’s where it usually stops, it seems to me. But that is to underestimate the value of education, and to miss one of its main purposes. Education, properly understood, aims to make us human.

That is not to say that we are not born human. But our human potential is to a large degree just that, potential. A child raised by wolves is actually highly unlikely to build a city (contrary to legend) or indeed experience any of the joys of civilization. Culture is mankind’s attempt to answer that terrible question that arose some time in the dimly lit prehistory, when a human first lifted its face, looked around, and thought: “I exist! And I know it! OMG what am I going to do with this discovery?”

Since then, the fact that we can think has been a constant source of trouble, and to this day some highly respectable friends of mine sit down regularly trying NOT to think, a process known as meditation. But if that was the sole purpose of meditation, then trees and stones would have us beat already at the starting line. Rather, in meditation we seek to reclaim our selves from the myriad distractions that draw and quarter us, consume us and scatter our ashes while we are still alive. Its purpose is to make us whole, a word related to both “healthy” and “holy”.

Now seems a good time to ask what side our education stands in this. Does it make us whole, healthy and holy (inviolate)? Or does it scatter us, pull us from side to side or to different sides at the same time, distract us,  confuse us, remove us from our very selves?

This is not a rhetorical question, although sometimes it may seem so. Education can work in either of those two directions. And as we grow older, each of us has more and more responsibility for making sure we truly benefit from our education.

The philosopher James V. Schall has written a book to this effect, saying in its subtitle “How to acquire an education while still in college”, without too much irony.  In the rush to become high-earning adults, it is easy to forget the curiosity that made our heart beat strongly on our way to our first school day all those years ago. And not all have been privileged with teachers who protected that flame of curiosity, fed it without overwhelming it, and encouraged us to eat knowledge and grow rather than just carrying it on our back as an ever heavier burden.

I might finish this with a brilliant conclusion, but that would defeat the purpose of writing it. Rather, this is the time for my thoughts to step aside so yours can emerge. If you are undertaking an education, or even educating others, it is time to ask yourself: Are you gathering or scattering?Are you building, and if so, what? Are you growing, and if so, who will you be when you are grown?