October 2004:

I’m a happily married Black American male living in southern Spain with my wife and 3 year old daughter. She was born here and I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. I graduated from college with a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. After working for 16 years (11 with a contractor at Edwards AFB, California) as an environmental chemist, I started a small consulting company which allows me to travel extensively.

I have been a lifelong Democratic and have subsequently changed to become an Independent. I value discussions about facts, reasoning, and logic and am a “lost lamb” Catholic who has friends of all faiths and belief systems. I attribute America’s success to the framework established by our founding fathers and still view them very highly.


February 2006:

Given a choice, 98% of people will select religious/ethnic/tribal identity over a “much better” alternative.

From a scientific perspective,

Satan = Ignorance, callousness, selfishness, indifference, etc.
God = Intelligence, empathy, selflessness, compassion, etc.

If the world’s people would only focus on what’s valued by its beliefs……but then there’s pyrite and “Satan”.


December 2006:

My son was born about 2 weeks ago. I'm now European and center-right but open minded. I tend to agree with the farewell speech of President Dwight Eisenhower and I therefore proudly represent that "philosophy" as an American here in Europe.


January 2007:

To pick-up or not to pick-up, that is the question.

My son is two months and one week old and I’ve had to make my first major decision (well, I give input and my wife makes the decision). The best advice from the Internet along with our observations suggest the following……..

“Your child will cry for basic necessities such as to eat, problems with gas, excreting feces (taking a dump), and being too hot or too cold during the first two months. From two months onward, your child will cry as his brain develops due to the human world he has entered. When deciding to pick him up or let him cry, consider giving him LOVE and SUPPORT while developing a sense of INDEPENDENCE. Therefore, make sure he hears the same voices everyday and experiences the same environment. He should then be okay. If the environment changes too much, pick him up and comfort him. If the environment changes only a little, talk to him and make your presence known while he is in his crib.”

In a political and governance sense, “if FEAR is a better motivating force than LOVE, life is probably not good as everyone has FEARS and can do very destructive things to others based on that FEAR. If LOVE is a better motivating force than FEAR, life is probably very good and people tend to exist at the highest level known to mankind”.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1774232/posts?q=1&&page=151

Thanks FRiends and special thanks to Jim, who I personally emailed (when a post was pulled when I first started with the FR community) and who had the courage to repost it.


November 2007:

The White Flag

Well, I finally surrender and submit…..to human life. I tend to think that if any human men (2 or more), no matter how perfect, no matter how spiritual, no matter how intellectual, no matter how physically perfect, now matter ……., if they work together to create any “complete philosophy”, it will become a mafia over time and cause harm to humanity. So my personal guiding philosophy will be to “love” as much as possible (although it’s extremely difficult) and to “hate” as little as possible (although it’s extremely difficult) and to laugh at life and the imperfect human condition as much as I hope some higher deity loves and laughs at the human condition.


January 2008:

The most challenging and rewarding "Job" in life.

My lifelong observations as a single man was that if a woman never had a loving relationship with her father then sex was easy but a relationship would be difficult. The opposite was also true. So I tend to give my 6-year old daughter a lot of love but I act as a very strong man when I think she needs it (and sometimes I just get mad and it works as well).

My lifelong observations with men is that if a man didn’t receive love in his life during his early years it would be very, very difficult for him to reform his life in later years (just go to wiki and look at the lives of Hitler, Stalin, Sadaam, Mohammed and other similar “leaders”). So I tend to think that when a child first starts to experience pain (such as teeth forming), he needs a lot of hugs and kisses as this starts the development of the complexity that is “love”. So my strategy going forward is to comfort him when he feels pain but also develop his sense of independence. I want him to be a fully developed, sensitive, caring, empathic, intelligent, strong, independent, fun loving teenager at 18 and basically encourage him to leave home.

January 2008:

A good lesson learned…

Humans as products of genetics and social conditioning:

Use information similar to that contained within the link below to understand and manage relationships with people from different cultures.

http://www.executiveplanet.com

Humans with “spiritual” influences:

Drugs, alcohol, fascism and other group identities tend to be temporary fixes to the perceived incomplete nature of humans. However, long-term development can be achieved where the lowest spiritual human on the planet can become the highest through a mechanism that will probably never be known to mankind. So the bottom line is never use information (for example executive planet) via stereotyping to characterize and manage a relationship with an individual human.