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CYBERNATIAN |
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  Quadrennial                                       |
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                         A Quadrennial American tradition.            n a great tradition unheard in most countries the world over the acceptance and the reverence to the verdict of the ballot box was exhibited by the willingness of the vanquished to secede claims and endorse the winner and the winner’s willingness to accommodate the legitimate concerns raised and reiterated by those who lost. This American tradition to let the winner take all and accommodate and inculcate the issues of all the rivals and opponents on one side of the great divide have maintained above anything else the dual party system to the abetment of the formation of ineffective coalition governments that often break before their term is up. It is not, I feel, to be far from the truth to assume and assert that the dual party system and the stability and effectiveness in governance stems from the flexibility and malleability instilled in the two party system to be susceptible and embrace a wide range and spectrum of variant socio economic outlooks and interests un heard of anywhere else in the world. This attests to the fact that whether we move west ward or east ward whether we rotate clockwise or anti clockwise to get to a point established in a spherical universe there are but two and only two opposed ways and the 3rd and forth or any other could not at least be the shortest paths and indeed we live in and on a spherical universe. The acceptance of the trophy of winning and cessation of it at a defeat with humility and knowledge of the availability and chance of a next time around makes both a defeat and a win so much of a sweet and sour event. In general and in conclusion these are the lessons I learned and these are the lessons I teach about this event of the great American tradition.
What went wrong? &where are we headed? Since the beginning the formation of the modern national state and for some and for other since the beginning human social activity and social division of labor, nations and national states have been building and forming social institutions and mechanisms by which they co-ordinate, plan and execute their inter and intra national activities and interests that transcended generations and consecutive political governments that were and are subservient to varied ideological outlooks and forms in formal and informal ways. Partly or in most cases by far the biggest problem that plagues some of the most problem nations in the world seems to steam from the fact that at one point or another all and every remnants of their past social and political institutions have been destroyed by either a political turmoil social upheaval or foreign intervention and occupation. In any modern or semi-modern society however crude there are semblances and real differences between the government at any time and the rest of the social institutions and the bureaucracy the latter being subservient to the former. This relationship has been proved time and again by many governments that come and went on the scenes of political arenas of many of both the advanced worlds and developing countries. The institutions of social governance, political rule and social security and welfare are not things that could be manufactured with a specification, custom or otherwise they are rather works of years of deliberate design and evolutionary and incremental growth. Overwhelmingly today and in the yester years the difference with those countries and nation states that were spared of such disastrous destruction and the rest in managing and moving their society forward is and was as clear as a day and night. It would be rather foolish to assume that there is no real or minimal separation of purpose and duty between government and the national institutions of governance and social welfare in any modern and semi-modern nation or nation state and guide an attack or support with something equally punitive, destructive or helpful and supporting of both will have severed a country or nation from itself and the rest of the world. In every nation and nation state the national bureaucracy is both malleable to those who come to power and a grinding and refining machine to them as well that anyone who comes to power as much as he changes it will have been changed and refined at the end. In that it becomes the essence and measure of a nation and the best and the worst face of it. Within these duality lies from the national Ethos, culture, belief, know how, and the binding identity. These of coarse are not things that could be gained or shaped overnight or over decades, but are built over millennia and are custodians of all that is national and of a nation. It shall be born in mind that often all of them or part of them as they often are forced to serve political masters in manners and forms incompatible to all or some of the ideals of their formation and existence. Even when they are mastered and managed top to bottom by those who are at odds with the interest to whom they are endowed to serve they remain indispensable for they are the treads that hold the nation as an entity or the set will crumble to the elements, and often did we witness that. In the examination of the Iraq the much talked about winning the war and losing the peace might have its roots in the inability to have distinguished between the long standing institutions of state government and the government and the party that governed the country? The Iraqi state machine was the same state machine that served the kings and queens if there were any, that predated the Bazz party and its chieftain Saddam Hussein and it would have served who ever came to power after him with some fine tuning and some weeding of none malleable elements form amongst its ranks and files. There are ample examples that that malleability is in abundance among many of the state machines and institutions that were under brutal dictators in spite of the very hard efforts of the dictators to have shaped and filled its ranks with petit images of him or themselves. That being one grand opportunity lost to have weeded out from the top down and maintain a working state machine subservient to the new masters, it did not take long I feel to realize that members of the past state had the knowhow, wisdom and skill that was passed on down from generations before them that is important enough to be recalled in for duty in an effort to sew the past to the future. After all, all the efforts of the present are nothing more than and effort to bringing the past and the future to the present and live it. Every human stride forward to me is a stride to the past and to the future, to the beginning and to the end, a dual directed journey of a sort learning history, making history. Note These are as usual comments and observations of a layman subject to criticism, correction and rejection by those who are learned and non-alike. Morality, Mortality, Self Regeneration, Self Replication, Cloning and Embryonic stem cell research:- sep7,2002
It has more than any time in our written and spoken history we are directly confronted with real equivalencies and none equivalencies in none equivalent trends principles and practices in our effort to remedy the ills and short comings that has necessitated the very acts, practices forms and entities that we hold so sacred and intend to protect with our deer life to save our soul and our body. The struggle here is a struggle to preserve continuity. What is held in high esteem and regard no matter how and in how many ways and terms said, is nothing more than continuity itself? The Irony is that continuity has never been a product of continuity or even maintained by it, but by discontinuity. It has always been perpetrated by the mere fact and realty of discontinuity. It was the inability to do away with terminality that imposed on us and everything else the sacred act and ability to initiate. It is it seems that rather this convergence of termination and initiation causes for the big bang in our thought and in what we are accustomed to and have lived with the entire known human and any other living forms history. A truth that have shaped and perpetrated our entire universe of living beings seems under treat by this unlikely convergence of what has otherwise been and believed to be always divergent a process. It is the confusion that has emerged and is emerging out of the ability to prolong a life indefinitely and recycling of what is, independently of the changing conditions and the always forward moving dreadful time and the need of course to renew the genetic pool by the combination and recombination of what is at hand and of what is to be to cop with the changing times and conditions, and yet still the need to curb and limit the total number as to sufficiently allocate the ever dwindling resources on the third front. These are the balances that cry to be kept and that seems to be offset by the efforts as described in the heading. Every living being and not limited to humans, have thus far reproduced and regenerated it self to cop up with changing times and conditions and resources available to it. The essence of life to any living being is and always been the continuation of its survival and ever survival in its present form or in different, yet the guarantee of its survival has been the ever driving engine of reproduction and self multiplication with mutations when the need arises. Morality is nothing more than the justification for the survival and ever survival of human being and other species as they are and as they will come to be. It is the convergence of how they have known to preserve their survival and how they will continue this tradition, obligation and duty that is at the “X†roads as we discuss cloning stem cell research and morality. None of the afore mentioned process and acquired knowledge negate the other in intent rather are all attempts to better serve or compliment what have ever been true of human, animal and plant reproduction and regeneration except that some have only equated self duplication to self regeneration or self reproduction. It is important to note that the equivalencies are rather discrepancies and big ones too. Self-duplication is too linear to be equated to self-reproduction. In parallel it has been a while now since the merits and demerits of stem cell research has been on the minds of many and most who tried in the past and present to make sense and justification of the ethics of medical and other scientific advances. The issue of stem cell research has been revolving wrongly or rightly around the time of the beginning of life than the beginning the human being. If we were to discuss the beginning of life it is to take us and everything else a long way to an unreachable distance. Yet for our practical, and if we even wish theoretical purposes, life exists in descript forms and time segments. Thus I feel it is rather appropriate to discus when did a human become a human being than discus when did a human being’s life began and start an endless journey of a sort. A human being became human when he break away from his ancestral primate and assumed the rudimentary functions of a modern human being according to the evolutionist theory and a human being became in to existence when Adam was first made by God and let us not forget that Adam was created alone and first according to the scriptures. What is important here is not whether the first human was made of an already existent living creature or whether he was made out of clay for both can’t escape the fact that they ultimately are earthen organic and inorganic materials, but what made him human and different from every other living thing and animal. It is my firm belief that resolving this issue helps pave the way for resolving the dilemma whether stem cells are humans and whether stem cells should enjoy the legal protection of the state and whether doctors should be burdened with the moral dilemma of experimenting with stem cells. It seems rather clear that a human being is so because he has specialized organs the work in coordination with each other, a brain as a coordinating organ and above all a mind, a cognitive ability, a feeling and an emotion that comes about from a joint and combined function and interaction of these specialized organs and parts. Contrary to the scriptures assertion that Adam was created alone the first man a full man, proponents of the preservation of life tend to argue that human life began when an egg and sperm fused or a dipole cell is infused to an inoculated egg. Until such time that the stem cells divide and form the specialized functions and coordinate their function to create an emotional and cognitive ability they remain to me ‘would be humans’, but till then just life forms deserving of may be the protection of any and all life forms, but not of humans. After all that cord, that bind us to life forms is endlessly long if we were in pursuit, it will take us to the egg, the sperm and the proteins, the chromosomes, the genes and compounds that led to their formation and the food eaten etc. etc. each stage with its own descript form and content in its life. It is there fore important to take in to account the time it assumed its form and content to the time it looses its form and content by virtue of growth, association, assimilation, integration disintegration and decay, it was not what is before then and it will not be what it is after. By
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