Don’t believe in education

Don’t believe in long-term parenting

Swing low

Who Listening Now?

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Substantial History of Diverse People Thriving Together on your Land

To Ukrainians and “Russian” Ukrainians, Tartars, Cossacks, Greeks, Armenians, Romanians, Poles, unnamed communities including religious, remember there’s real history of diverse peoples thriving together on your land.

Reptile, insect, and primate natural histories show that controlling territory is vital and disruptive. The powers and benefits gained by territorial control are rarely shared equally by resident peoples. The cultural tectonics’ fostering humanity’s thousands of ongoing, festering, and bloody land claims are easy to compile. Yet there’s a real success story here.

Success Story

Billions of Homo sapiens are willing to peacefully coöperate with previously unknown or disrespected neighbors in our global hood. A message for Sri Lanka, Korea, India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Rwanda, Belgium, Spain, USA, and China (every nation) is to remember how civilization at its best demonstrates muscular progressive capacity for diversity to flourish in its midst.

The Crime in Crimea

The crime in Crimea is forgetting humanity’s frequently demonstrated capacity to redefine neighborhoods, and then get along. The territorial crisis in Ukraine, along with many others, can be peacefully resolved.

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Blend into our lives like life in living tree trunks

Encompassed, restricted, contained

Bound in wood flesh

Enslaved by mammal inadequacy

Yet saturated by spring’s volition

Growing sacred freedom

In progressive rings

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“Until the late nineteenth century the question of woman’s ability to profit from or even survive higher education was controversial. Vassar College opened in 1865 was often described by its first president as an experiment.… as late as 1871 an MD at Harvard Medical School published a book on the dangers of higher education for girls, he doubted the achievement was worth the cost from their psyche and procreative powers.”

From: Carl N Degler, In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1991

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An active constituency insists that civilization would be better off with no religion. This anti-religion constituency has grown in numbers. They claim religion is mumbo-jumbo. They remind people about centuries of dastardly behavior, violence against weddings and worshipers, pilgrims and patients, students and children committed in the name of some religious brand. They remind us that even today, religious people continue to inflict an encyclopedia of horrors upon their own kind.

They observe that religion’s dance with power and money is like a year-round prom.

Reverse Witnessing

A friend recently offered his selection of anti-religious propaganda online as if he totally agreed with it. He “witnessed” in reverse. He cited as a fact that “most scientists are anti-religious.” Yet his anti-religion narrative is based on mumbo-jumbo fantasies of his own. If the“delete religion” campaign is successful, who does the anti-religion constituency imagine is going to do a better job of managing civilization?

Doesn’t removing one power always means replacing it with another?

The anti-religion constituency often fails to take responsibility for centuries of dastardly behavior committed by nonreligious people, including Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s camps, and Mao’s blood Red Book, which were violent crusades for “secular divinities”.

I ask my anti-religious friend, “aren’t the put downs emanating from religion one of the qualities you find most objectionable”?

Avoid put-downs when possible. Follow your own better ways.

His “opinionating” reminds me that some religious and anti-religious people are inclined towards righteous judgment, too easily condemning perspectives other than their own.

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So why my tears on Mother’s Day? Tears on Mother’s Day because I miss the way mom was to me in infancy, childhood, adolescence, college, and towards my marriage, children and grandchildren. I’m sure mom misses lots too.

Tears on Mother’s Day because I remember my wonderful grandma Annette Needleman, Auntie Rose Skurka, mother-in-law Mary Ferguson Shugart, and my mom’s sister-in-law Natalie Langner. What a blessing for me to be nurtured by such loyal, loving, smart, practical and faithful citizens of humanity.

We capitalize Mother’s Day, but we don’t capitalize sacred mother? What happened to female divinity? There’s evidence of mother God worship going on for tens of thousands of years. People stomped Earth mother worship out of existence comparatively recently.

Infinite divinity extends infinitely beyond our mammal genders. Now is a practical time to give up on male only club divinity. Women make up half the human family. Gender alliances need re-balancing in families, neighborhoods, nations, and globally. So let’s open every job group to all, for example let everybody share in human mothering. God knows we need as many nurturing mothers we can find.

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So, what do you think of the new chancellor coming in July 1?  A woman!  Seems long overdue in terms of gender, but maybe no one saw a qualified one before now — I’m not sure about that!

Allen (UNC 1962) responds:

God bless the new chancellor.

Our new state government shows signs of under-appreciating the value of this great university, which is practical analysis. Temporarily empowered anti-intellectual forces take the university to be a cultural enemy, while undervaluing the historic contribution UNC made and makes to North  Carolina’s reputation and success story.

How did the role of women in civilization come to be so rigidly defined? My guess is that for most of the past quarter of a million years, members of both genders did everything because communities were small and scarcity was common. Survival ruled. To suppress talent was an impractical option.

The division of labor associated with the rise of civilization probably fostered more rigid gender role restrictions. And the then ongoing epidemic of mother and infant birthing deaths, which ended recently, may have fixated emphasis on female reproductive responsibility.

The opportunity for women to be anybody is brand new. The emergence of self-definitive womanhood is one of the most critical new resources for civilized progress, far more important than oil and gas reserves or new technology. Self-definitive womanhood is going to play a leading role in “saving” civilization in the 21st Century.

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What does this prayer mean? The tsunami wave reached the unimaginable height of 133 feet in Miyako in Tohoku’s Iwate Prefecture. Should our brothers and sisters in Japan build a 150-foot-high wall around their entire coast to protect themselves? And what walls can humanity build to protect against devastating interpersonal violence emanating from primordial rupturing embedded in human nature?

You don’t have to be a crime scene investigator to identify the natural disruption that caused the largest number of human deaths from the beginning of the 20th century. It wasn’t the terrifying 1918 flu epidemic, which killed up to 50 million people in one year. It wasn’t the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed 20,000 innocents. It certainly wasn’t the raging solar storm featured in this week’s headlines, which sounded scary, but killed no one.

Death by Nature

The deadliest natural disruption of the past century was the Second World War. Estimates of deaths caused by World War II range from 62 million to 78 million men, women and children. Interpersonal violence, especially war, is the most dangerous natural disruption threatening humanity. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties.)

Our situation is critical. Interpersonal violence erupts from human nature like molten magma from a volcano’s deepest core. Civilization is like a patient suffering from malignant cancer, praying for a cure. Cancer is a tumor that destroys itself. War is the most devastating cancer known to man.   Interpersonal violence continues to play a deadly role in human history.

Interpersonal violence is as natural as earthquakes, tsunamis and solar storms. We’ll learn more about how to control and even eliminate interpersonal violence by accepting its natural origins. Denying the nature of interpersonal violence inhibits rational diagnosis, treatment and cure.

People investigating crimes gather and scientifically verify evidence, test hypotheses, draw conclusions, shut down perpetrators, and devise ways to prevent recurrence. Treating interpersonal violence resembles crime scene investigation. Civilization is accumulating data to measure many categories of interpersonal violence, including infanticide, child abuse, bullying, beating, rape, murder, suicide, and war. The self-inflicted violent behavior we think we’re managing ends up harming and destroying millions and even billions of people.

Managing Human Nature

The treasure of life extension (increasing longevity) is a direct result of the better management of human nature. Reliable supplies of peace and healing have been essential ingredients in civilization’s winning formula since the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It’s obvious that relationships are healthier when violence has no part in them. The healthiest civilization enjoys peaceful coexistence.

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