I want to get some paint to fix a scratch on my car, or on my wall.  I want to go to the store and not buy a quart or even a pint:  I just want a half-ounce.  I’ll take it home and try it out.  If it’s not right, I’ll go back to the store and put another 50 cents in the automated paint mixing machine, type in the code for the exact shade (out of 16.2 million colors) that I tried last time, and then follow the software instructions, one step at a time, to (1) Lighten (2) Darken (3) Add more Red, (4) Add more Green, etc.

You cannot end poverty because people who have money are selfish.  They weren’t necessarily born that way; money makes them that way.  Comfort makes you less able to understand and sympathize with the failings and mistakes of other people; and as you experience fewer mistakes and failings, you tend to become even less able to sympathize.  In other words, the people who have the ability to end poverty are not going to be inclined, on balance, to do so.

The people who have the understanding needed to end poverty tend to be those who are somewhat on the lower end of the income scale themselves.  This includes not only poor people, but also social workers and the like, who tend not to be paid nearly as much as other kinds of professionals.  These people have the desire to end poverty, but they lack the power.

In order for the people who want to end poverty to develop the means to do so, they must become more wealthy and powerful.  In the process of doing so, they will tend to lose sight of what it was actually like to be poor, and why people are poor.  On the other hand, to get the people who have the power to make the move and do their bit, you have to put them into an inferior socioeconomic position — at which point they have the sympathy, but no longer have the power.

Genesis 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. . . .

3:2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

3:4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

5:4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:

5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

The basic idea with wind chimes is that you have something that sounds nice when the wind blows.  It could be helpful to choose the weights of the different chimes so that they ring on regular windspeed intervals.  When the wind is blowing 1 MPH, one little chime rings.  2 MPH, two chimes.  And so on up to 5 MPH.  Then a heavier chime rings at 10 MPH, an even heavier one at 15 MPH, and so on to 25 or 30 MPH.  Then graduated by intervals of 10 to 20 MPH.  When you hit hurricane speed, you get a gong.

There ought to be a law, or an accreditation requirement, or an FCC regulation, or something that would require universities to spend as much time and money promoting their specific academic achievements (i.e., not their vague reputations) as they spend promoting their sports teams.  For every billboard on the highway, every highway sign, every radio commercial that talks about the sports team, and for every minute of interviews granted to a college athlete or coach, there should be an equivalent billboard, sign, commercial, or minute of interviewing granted to — or, if necessary, purchased by — the university on behalf of its scholars, undergraduate and graduate programs, faculty members, and libraries.

Certainly sports have a place at universities.  As a parks & recreation graduate student, I feel recreation has an important place.  But so do academics, for heaven’s sake.  Sports provides a huge amount of money and attention for colleges.  To some extent, that continues to send the wrong message to young people, on the question of what they should aspire to achieve.

In this game, you sit in a circle and take turns.  The first person says, “I bet that, since this game started, someone in this circle has had the thought that they hope they will win the game.”  Everyone in the circle who has had this thought raises his/her hand, gets a point, takes a drink, or whatever.  If no hands go up, then the speaker loses a point, takes a drink, sheds a piece of clothing, or whatever.  You go around the circle, each person betting that they know of a thought that at least one person in the circle has had since the game started.  You play until someone reaches the winning score (10 points, maybe, or 21), or whatever.

Then you start back at the first person and ask him/her to repeat the thing that s/he bet first.  In the example just given, the first person would say to the winning person, “OK, John, I bet that someone in the group had the thought that they hoped they would win.  You raised your hand.”  Then the next person for whom John raised his hand would repeat the bet that s/he had made.  You go around the circle until you’ve repeated all of the bets that John raised his hand for.

Now John has to describe the thoughts he had, in response to each of the bets, and explain how one thought led to the next, or provide other details about the thoughts he claimed to have.  Then people in the circle vote on whether his story is believable.  If they think he’s fibbing, he loses his winner status, or gives up his points, or is out of the circle, or whatever.

Students from other countries come to the U.S. to study and earn undergraduate or graduate degrees.  Those who come from relatively familiar (e.g., European) cultures may benefit from this experience.  Those who come from relatively unfamiliar (e.g., Asian) cultures are at greater risk of having an experience that is counterproductive in some regards for them and for the U.S.

These students often study hard, excel, and in many cases go on to fill important positions in the U.S  They may stay here many years, or they may return to their homelands after a few years in the U.S.

Those who return home after school, immediately or after a few years, can easily go back with negative attitudes toward American people, values, and policies.  This has been especially likely during the Bush years, when there have indeed been many American college students and professors who would share their distaste for seemingly foolish, wasteful, and destructive American behaviors.  But even during those years, a different approach to international students from relatively unfamiliar cultures could have achieved better results in some cases.

The Bush Administration is not, in itself, solely responsible for some international students’ failure to become engaged with American life.  It is entirely possible for an Asian (or, perhaps, a Middle Eastern or African) student to come to the U.S., live on campus, hang out almost exclusively with other students from his/her homeland, maintain virtually no friendships with Americans, speak his/her native language in most of his/her daily contacts, watch TV from back home rather than American TV, improve his/her English only marginally over a span of two or more years, and go back where s/he came from with an enhanced knowledge of bad rather than good examples of American people and life.

A student of that sort can easily be a net loss for America, for American students, and for American universities.  They may return home with hostility toward and/or disappointment in America, in place of the admiration that brought them here.  In classrooms, they may sit silently, unable to follow the rapid give-and-take between students and professors, or they may pipe up with observations that demonstrate that they largely do not understand the discussion.  They may supply tuition dollars that help pay universities’ expenses, but in exchange they can easily be a drain on the level of energy, camaraderie, and interaction in the classroom.  Certainly they are not providing the international interaction that educators may hope American students would experience.  Such international students may also be unlikely to support the university in extracurriculars (e.g., sports, campus events).  And they, themselves, may not be having such a great time.  They are human beings too, obviously, and they can get lonely and feel excluded when they are so far out of the loop.

Of course, such observations vary from one situation to another.  Many international students do become intensively involved in school and classroom, interact extensively with their classmates and with other American people, media, and businesses, and generally participate as well as anyone could hope.  Many classrooms do facilitate active involvement by international students of any level of language ability and cultural orientation.  It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that any of the foregoing concerns apply to international students across the board.

Such caveats notwithstanding, it remains true that many American universities now make it possible for international students to keep themselves fairly isolated from Americans, and that that is in no one’s interest.

An alternative arrangement would admit students to the university only after demonstrating that they are capable of participating in meaningful discussion at the university level.  This demonstration might include some revised form of standardized test; the tests presently used are plainly not insuring sufficient language ability in international students.  It might also include interaction with, say, American tourists who visit their homelands.  One example of the latter could feature ten-minute conversations involving two would-be students and one tourist, where the tourist would be asked to state which of the two students spoke better.  A student who came out worst in each of three such pairings (with different American visitors) would hardly seem a likely candidate, while one who came out best in all three might merit some presumption of language and cultural competence, sufficient to understand and, hopefully, to become engaged in university life.

A different approach would be to allow or require would-be college students to begin with an American high school experience.  Much of what international students fail to understand, in typical banter, is of a cultural rather than merely linguistic nature.  There is so much slang in our speech, and there are so many obscure references in many classroom discussions (though of course these observations, too, vary greatly from one academic discipline to another), that it can take years before an Asian student begins to understand what we are talking about.  A response in that case would be to send them to high school before letting them into college, if necessary, so that they can have a fair shot at having a good and well-rounded college experience.

Some numbers seem to recur in people’s lives at times.  For example, a person might coincidentally live at two different houses numbered 1012 (e.g., 1012 Main St. and then, years later, 1012 Green St.).  It’s probably just coincidence.  Still, it could be interesting to see which numbers appear most frequently in one’s daily materials.  A program running in the background on one’s computer could process all of one’s electronic letters, e-mails, and other data sources, capture all of the numbers appearing in those sources, and map them in terms of (a) their frequency and (b) the statistical likelihood that those particular numbers would recur at that frequency.  Of course, there may need to be some adjustments (for e.g., one’s present home address, or for numbers in frequently-used spreadsheets).  Some such adjustments might consist of a simple weighting according to the number of seconds during which such numbers are visible on the computer screen during a given month.  At any rate, the idea would be to create an appropriately weighted map that would highlight the most frequently used numbers, perhaps for comparison with similar number charts generated by other persons whose numbers might interest the person, for whatever reason (e.g., one’s spouse, a celebrity, someone of the same astrological sign).

The exploration of paradox was an important development in philosophical logic during the 21st century. People gradually quit thinking that contradiction proves or disproves anything. This momentous change meant that, for the first time in some 2,000 years in some cultures, people began to realize that things are commonly true and false at the same time, in various regards. It was no longer that there might be black or white or shades of grey; it was, rather, that there were black and white and shades of grey.

This philosophical development had an important ramification in the realm of slavery studies. With the practical abolition of contradiction, it came to be recognized that people are always simultaneously free and enslaved. The question was no longer whether someone would be a slave; it was, rather, how s/he would be a slave. The strong – most of the strong, that is, in most times and most places – would generally be willing and able to force most of the weak to serve them; but in what ways?

The modern manorial movement grew out of the very belated realization that people specialize. Some are very practical; some are not. Some of the world’s brightest people cannot figure out how to dress themselves in the morning. Those who were given power over others, as a result of the manorial movement, came to have it because of their practical skills in arranging affairs of this world. They were, for the most part, highly competent in what they did, but one would not generally confuse them with the truly brilliant or insightful type of person.

Practicality, combined with the mandatory concern for people’s welfare and balance of competing priorities, explains why so many of the first liege lords were drawn from the ranks of the old judiciary, as it existed up through the early decades of the 21st century. As a prominent jurist of that era pointed out, “The judge’s essential activity . . . is the making of a large number of decisions in rapid succession, with little feedback concerning their soundness or consequences. People who are uncomfortable in such a role – and perhaps they are the most introspective, sensitive, and scrupulous people – do not become judges, do not stay judges, or are unhappy judges” (Posner, 1990, p. 192). Certainly practicality had a place in this business, along with an ordinary – that is, not to say a passionate – concern for the general welfare.

One thing these liege lords recognized, from the outset, was that people were just not very good at taking care of themselves. They were, in particular, not very good at deciding how many children they could raise properly. Those least suited for the responsibilities involved in heading a nuclear family of the 20th and early 21st centuries were, too often, those who got themselves most deeply mired in it – starting their families young and keeping at it for entire decades, often with insufficient food, clothing, attention, love, and even interest in the bare existence of all those kids they were begetting.

The liege lords, meanwhile, were the sort who were comfortable with making sweeping decisions in such regards. They did tend to bring a certain cultural perspective into that sphere. Research has demonstrated (too late, as often happens) that they frequently imposed their own values in ways that were destructive of entire cultures and lifestyles among certain socioeconomic groups. Regardless, by the middle of the 21st century – by, that is, their early years in operation – the liege lords had already perceived clearly that, according to their standards, this state of affairs among child-bearers could not continue.

One of the driving factors behind that conclusion was the life expectancy gap that had emerged and widened during the previous half-century. A widening wage gap was, of course, old news by the dawn of the Asian Century. Everyone knew – indeed, Americans had long expected and accepted – that the most highly skilled and sought-after leaders would command incomes vastly greater than those paid to the entirely replaceable individuals of the rank and file. This much had been part and parcel of American capitalism since at least the 19th century. But by 2010 the backlash against overpayment of top executives brought stockholder groups into cooperation with anticorporate and antiglobalist groups in the call for change. Such groups’ motives differed, of course – the stockholder groups believed that overcompensation sometimes had a counterproductive effect on executive competence – but from that time forward there were fewer extremes of executive overcompensation.

The wage gap that concerned most people thus tended to involve, not the infrequent extremely overpaid chief executive officer, but rather the gap between what came to be known as the Living Wage and the Dying Wage. While economic well-being could be (and was) measured in theory as a continuum, in terms of the numbers of dollars available per person within a household, in practice people tended to be drawn toward standards of living that either were, or were not, conducive to their continued survival and well-being. At a certain point, the combination of economic numbers and psychosocial conditions tended to demonstrate a statistical differentiation between a surviving middle class and a struggling and dying underclass – even though, in the affectation of the time, people who called themselves “middle class” out of pride had long been, in fact, far below a middle-class standard of living.

In any case, though, it was not the wage gap that forced a change. The change element was, again, the life expectancy gap that became more evident, and grew wider, following the collapse of the so-called middle class lifestyle. After an extended period during which the life expectancies of ordinary Americans grew steadily longer, the trend began to reverse itself for the increasingly visible underclass. People without sufficient resources to afford increasingly expensive health care, freshwater sanitation, and natural foods – forced, that is, to rely upon the relatively primitive artificial foods of the time, and to accept a certain amount of daily exposure to drug- and antiseptic-resistant viruses – found themselves increasingly vulnerable to lethal maladies that their overburdened health care sector could no longer address effectively.

As stated by an epidemiologist of the time (Srinivar, 2024, p. 117), “Detroit is the new Calcutta.” A population driven especially to coastal and Great Lakes cities by drought in the interior, concentrated in city centers by contractionist theories of burban development, and no longer able to live off the land – to subsist, that is, on the surviving disease- and drought-resistant but inedible supergrains without sophisticated processing – found itself experiencing, on those city streets, a form of existence that had been assumed to be a thing of the past. For the underclass, life expectancies began to decline precipitously, and continued to do so for some time.

Power rides upon principle. It is not certain that the liege lords would ever have been able to secure the sweeping authority they did acquire, even under such conditions of hardship, if they had not been supported by a rather virulent responsibilism. The land, said many, should not be expected to carry people whom it, itself, cannot support, and parents should not be burdened, by self-destructive sociocultural habits and expectations, with children whom they, themselves, could not reliably raise, feed, educate, and otherwise perpetuate in survival. Thus, in a new development in the ancient argument between Plato and Aristotle, it gradually came to be accepted that a child was, in fact, both the responsibility and the property of the entire community, rather than of those who created it.

On that basis, parenthood came to be seen, not as some unwritten birthright, but rather as a natural condition, like the ability to become intoxicated, that may appropriately be indulged by some people, sometimes, but that should not become a general habit and should perhaps never be practiced by those who cannot do so responsibly. Later, under the care and guidance of the liege lords, people became more or less naturally associated with a private rather than public overseer in all capacities of life; hence the ascendance of the liege lords and their tendency toward population restriction.

These were not, after all, times in which people would support themselves through manual labor on the land. A larger population did not mean greater prosperity. To the contrary, what could be produced was being produced, nearly as efficiently as possible, by a relatively small population. The rest were surplusage. They would literally eat into the resources of the city and, later, of the liege lord. The quest for ever more habitable lands argued strongly against the previous century’s rapid despoilation of the countryside; now there were the sons and daughters of liege lords who expected their own manors upon attaining majority. In short, the entire productive system of the 19th and 20th centuries was turned on its head, with views of excessive population being an important aspect of the process.

It would be incorrect to represent this process as entirely peaceful and gradual. There was one additional, important development. Declining life expectancies brought increasingly casual attitudes toward survival. Where life was cheap, it was easily spent. People who might not have dedicated themselves to violent attacks upon the middle class and its supportive authorities, if they had expected themselves to live into their sixties or beyond, were increasingly willing to undertake such attacks as their life expectancies dropped well below that. Such statistics meant that, in practice, angry young men and women all knew someone who had died or been killed in some way that, they believed, was not supposed to happen to “middle-class” persons. They realized that the same sort of thing might happen to them next. Thus the tradeoff between conformity and resistance began to be recalculated by underclass Americans en masse. A “protecting” mentality took root, not only among those who needed protection, but also among the better-off individuals who saw “protection” of the poor as a way to neutralize the more radical voices among them.

There should be a website that provides a link to each known global database.  One example of a global database would be a global listing of parts available for purchase.  Another would be a universal basic biography website.  A Google search (for e.g., “global database”) could work, if it wouldn’t also turn up so many other pages that are not global databases in this sense.  The basic purpose would be to provide a quick start into a search for anything that should be listed in a global database.