Inspiration

No, I haven’t died. I’m at sea on the Carnival Inspiration, and relaxing a bit too much for serious writing on the blog. We steamed out of Tampa Monday night to fairly rough seas with some ill effects to many on the ship, but none to our family. Tuesday was about 6’ seas which the 850’ stabilized ship handles with very little sense of motion. It is very nice to be able to leave the snows of Minnesota (at least when we left) for mid 80’s and a lot of Sun.

Wednesday we were parked off shore in Grand Cayman with four other cruise ships. The Island really took a hammering from Hurricane Ivan, and is still very much in reconstruction. Lots of roofs on houses that are easily worth the multiple millions of dollars still have work to do on them, and huge tracts of vegetation are just flattened and dead. We enjoyed a little outing to “Hell”, a sea turtle farm, and out to swim with the stingrays. The water has that wonderful “fake blue” that is so pretty it seems that it couldn’t be real.

I finished up “The DaVinci Code”. I tend to not to that much of what most consider “fun reading”, although I find most all of my reading to be very enjoyable. The Dan Brown is a good writer and I very much enjoyed the mystery, the ties with history, the codes, and all the twists, connections, and conspiracy. (as he said more than once, “everyone loves a good conspiracy”) What is sad is to see people look at a book like that and consider it “truth” vs “fiction”. In this case, it is identified as fiction, but for those with doubts short consideration of the same paradigm that I use with the works of Noam Chomsky gives pretty good evidence that can’t be true. The book exists and the author is alive.

In cases like the DaVinci Code and Chomsky, if what they said were true, the authors would be dead, and you would be unable to read the book. If the Catholic Church were really powerful enough to keep the “truth” that Jesus was married, fathered a child, never claimed to be more than man, it seems pretty likely that we would know ALL about it by now. In fact we “do”, if we want to read all the books that make those claims (fiction or otherwise), they are available and not suppressed at all.

Noam doesn’t claim to be fiction, but if 5% of what he claims about the US was true, he would have been dead long ago. A nation as much ruled by a conspiracy of the rich, the media, and the military would have very few qualms about having something “accidentally bad” happen to old Noam.

I suspect that Noam, Brown, and Howard Zinn (author of “A Peoples History” of the US that I'm reading now) would all agree that we would be much better off living in a Goddess Worshiping Eden, where there was no private property and no competition. I just wonder if we would have cruise ships in that world?