George Washington Cable & Matthew J. Mancini on the post-bellum Convict Lease system in the former Confederate States.

"In studying about a year ago, the practice of letting out public convicts to Private lessees to serve out their sentences under private management, I found that it does not belong to all our once slave States nor to all our once seceded States. Only it is no longer in practice outside of them. under our present condition in the South, it is beyond possibility that the individual black should behave mischievously without offensively re-arousing the old sentiments of the still dominant white man. As we have seen too, the white man virtually monopolizes the jury-box."

"Add another fact: the Southern States have entered upon a new era of material development. Now, if with these conditions in force the public mind has been captivated by glowing pictures of the remunerative economy of the convict-lease system, and by the seductive spectacle of mines and railways, turnpikes and levees, that everybody wants and nobody wants to pay for, growing apace by convict labor that seems to cost nothing, we may almost assert beforehand that the popular mind will-not so maliciously as unreflectingly-yield to the tremendous temptation to hustle the misbehaving black man into State prison under extravagant sentence, and sell his labor to the highest bidder."

"After the erroneous takings of the census of 1880 in South Carolina had been corrected, the population was shown to consist of about twenty blacks to every thirteen whites...what is to account for the fact that in 1881 there were committed to the State prison at Columbia South Carolina, 406 colored persons and but 25 whites? The proportion of blacks sentenced to the whole black population was one to every 1488: that of the whites to the white population was but one to every 15,644. In Georgia... there were 115 whites and 1071 colored... Yet of 52 pardons granted in the two years then closing, 22 were to whites and only 30 to blacks."

"This system springs primarily from the idea that the possession of a convicts person is an opportunity for the Sate to make money... The mitigations that arise in its practice through the humane or semi-humane sentiments of keepers and guards, and through the meager est of legislation, are few, scanty, and rare: and in the main the notion is clearly set forth and followed that a convict, whether pilferer or murderer, man, woman, or child, has almost no human right that the state is bound to be at any expense to protect."

"(The system) is not intended to imply that the long-term convict inside the prison is likely to serve out his sentence. while among a majority of commitments on shorter periods, men, women and children are frequently sentence for terms of 15, 20, 30, 40, and sometimes even of 50 years, a prisoner can rarely be found to have survived ten years of this brutal slavery either in the prison or in the convict camp. In Alabama, in 1880, there were but three who had been in confinement eight years, and one nine; while not one had lived out ten years' imprisonment. In Mississippi, December 1, 1881, among 77 convicts then on the roll under 10 years' sentence, 17 under sentences of between 20 and 50 years, none had served 11 years, only two had served 10, and only 3 others had served 9 years. There were 25 distinct outside gangs, and their average annual rate of mortality for that and previous year was over 8 percent... in Louisiana, in 1881, 14 percent perished."

"If anything may be inferred from the mortal results of the Lease System in other States, the year's death-rate of the convict camps of Louisiana must exceed that of any pestilence that ever fell upon Europe in the Middle Ages. And as far as popular rumor goes, it confirms this assumption on every hand. Every mention of these camps is followed by the execration's of a scandalized community, whose ear is every now and then shocked afresh with some new whisper of their frightful barbarities... it kills like a pestilence, teaches the people to be cruel, sets up a false system of clemency, and seduces the State into the committal of murder for money."

-George Washington Cable
The Convict Lease System in the Southern States
The Century; a popular quarterly. / Volume 27, Issue 4
Publisher: The Century Company, New York, Feb. 1884

"Some measure of cruel treatment seems to be an unavoidable element in even the finest systems of penal administration, bu the routine cruelty which characterized the convict lease system in all its years of operation raises important questions of analysis and interpretation. Convict leasing, in fact, is best understood not as part of the history of prisons but as part of the elaborate social system of racial subordination which had previously been assured by the practice of slavery. That is, the lease system was a component of that larger web of law and custom which effectively insured the South's racial hierarchy. Seen in this light, the brutality of convict leasing fits clearly into a more comprehensive pattern of intimidation and violence, and it can be seen as an intrinsic part of that system rather than an aberration."

"In addition to its social usefulness, leasing had numerous and very obvious economic advantage as well :it took the care an d expense of thousands of prisoners out of the direct purview of the state, it provided a large pool of extremely cheap labor, it permitted the easy exploitation of natural resources, and it helped attract northern capital with which business leaders in the post-bellum South were so obsessed. In 1880 Enoch Cobb Wines, the outstanding crusader for prison reform, reported that, barring the states in which convict leasing was practiced, about tone-half of the expenses of penal administration came from prison income. That is, taxpayer were in most states paying part of the burden of incarceration. In states where leasing was practiced, by contrast the average proceeds constituted 372% of costs. These figured represent only the expenses saved by the state governments; they do not begin to tell the story of the profits amassed by mine owners, railroad builders, lumber merchants, and other capitalists in the impoverished South."

"So convict leasing was not just an expedient by which Southern states with depleted treasuries could avoid costly expenditures; it was also one of the greatest single sources of personal wealth to some of the South;s leading businessmen and politicians. The economic and social justifications for the convict lease system were thus mutually reinforcing. for nearly half a century they combined to stave off repeated attempts of abolition."

-Matthew J. Mancini
Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing
The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 339-352
Published by: Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, Inc.

The Pigs Finally Crack Down On Some White Folks For A Change.

See these young Caucasian gentlemen on the Left? They are the type of chaps that would never fall under any type of drug suspicion. Not because they don't do drugs, but because they're White, and no Pig, either Black or White is going to ruin' the future of some White boy who's just trying to get high and have some sex and party a little bit before getting a multi-million dollar job working for their father.... but read below, because several White boys in this photo of San Diego States Theta Chi Fraternity, just got busted for selling' drugs supplied to them by Mexican Cartels.

Now, even without a crystal ball, I can tell you that many of these folks will get a slap on the wrist, some will skate, and it's absolutely beyond reason to assume that any of these promising young White boys will get life sentences as is customary for hard core drug sales in Louisiana. No doubt can be had that many of the 75 mostly fraternity members will post bail, hire the best lawyers, and the "mitigating evidence" will "move" the jury to light sentences with rehab, probation and speaking engagements. Regardless of what they find, it's more than likely that by the end of it, they'll martyr any and all of the minority students that are involved.

We already know (As illustrated in The Woozy's Angola paper), that as of 2001, although Black's comprise a mere 12% of the population and 13% of drug users, they comprise 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, 44% of those prosecuted, 59% of those convicted and their sentences were 49% longer than Whites who did the same exact thing. So I'm not just playin' the race card in my prognostication that these White boys will get preferential treatment in the criminal justice system. it's an established fact.

As more and more Black men and women are getting locked up in this racist drug war, three news articles in the headlines, on Tuesday illustrate the racist drug enforcement's lopsided and misguided policies and the thinly veiled focus on martyring the entire Black community in the name of conning the American public that America, it's Pigs and it's politicians are "tough on crime". The reality is that White people do just as much drugs as Blacks. Hopefully we can start to tear down some of these free drug use zones that seem to exist in every white neighborhood, white college and white vehicle.

Not surprising, the Racist Manhattan Institute, and it's dapper cadre of racist pseudo-intellectuals have jumped into the fray to defend the practice of focusing on Blacks and their neighborhoods solely in the drug war. I have a long standing hate of the racist propaganda that emanates from this shithole, and it's all-star assholes like the Thernstrom's and Uncle Tom in residence, John McWhorter. But that comes later, If you read the excerpts from these three articles and think about it, it's clear that we have a serious flaw in our national drug enforcement policy, and once again, racial discrimination and America's long standing class system and it's determination of the value of Black and White lives is at it's core. Read on.


San Francisco Digest:
SHARP RISE IN JAIL'S BLACK POPULATION
By Cecilia M. Vega
Published: Tuesday, May 6, 2008
(05-05-08) 19:36 PDT San Francisco -- As San Francisco's population of African American residents has decreased in recent years, the population of black men and women locked up in the San Francisco County Jail has increased dramatically. More than 60 percent of all prisoners are African American. And of the 282 female prisoners, 67 percent are Black. About 42 percent of the jail population is in custody for drug offenses, the study found. In contrast, 6.7 percent of San Francisco residents are black- a number that has been in steady decline. Sheriff Hennessey said the criminal justice system and the war on drugs are "disproportionately adversely affecting San Francisco's African American community."

O.K., so that's the first part, now, let's turn to the New York Times...


The New York Times:
REPORT FINDS RACIAL GAP IN DRUG ARRESTS
By Erik Eckholm
Published: Tuesday, May 6, 2008
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates. Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon. But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks. Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men.

And just for good measure, here's some of the rather astute commentary...

“The way the war on drugs has been pursued is one of the biggest reasons for the growing racial disparities in criminal justice over all,” said Ryan S. King, a policy analyst with the Sentencing Project who wrote its report. “The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of its report. “If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we’ll continue to see this enormously disparate impact,” Ms. Fellner said. Blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.

And here is the aforementioned racist spin/justification from the Manhattan Institute...

Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving members of minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life. “The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” Ms. Mac Donald said.

Impairs the quality of life? Tell me, what impairs the quality of life more, smoking' some dope, or life in prison? The reason why folks in the ghetto are getting' high is because they've already been impaired by the effect of everyone they ' know either getting' blown away, or arrested, or incarcerated not to mention the fact that they have more than likely already been blackballed by a criminal record, life in foster care and expelled at school, only to go out into the world and not being' able to get a fucking' job, education, help, services, treatment, justice or a fucking' chance in Hell in this 500 year history of American "fuck over every fucking' Black motherfucker" Philosophy. Let's face it, fucking' over Black Folks and blaming them for everything that's wrong in this country is as American as George Washington's underwear.

The Manhattan Institutes's young commenter seemingly pays no attention to the fact that drug laws are on the books because drugs are illegal. If violence occurs, then there are other charges that can be called into play. If you read her statement, she's essentially saying that White drug use is inconsequential, assumedly because it is "responsible" drug use. However, San Diego State's recent bust has shown what we have known all along. White folks use just as much drugs as Black folks. I applaud the thoroughness of the investigation, the number of undercover sales, the further search into the sale of illegal weapons and the tracing back of the drugs to Mexican Cartels, because when they bust your ass in the hood, all they're interested in is putting your Black ass in jail. There is a concerted lack of focus on drug distributors, the weapons trade that goes along with it, and the larger network of importers and high level and mid-level distributors. To me, it seems obvious why the police do this, and it's because they want arrests to justify the number of police on the streets, and if they cut the head off the beast, then they essentially put themselves out of work, and make it that much harder to arrest the street level user. Anyway, here's the final article in the trifecta expose of drug enforcement disparity.


Tuesday, May 6, 2008 (AP)
Newsweek:
DRUG PROBE AT SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY NETS 75 STUDENTS
By ALLISON HOFFMAN, Associated Press Writer
Published: Tuesday, May 6, 2008
When a 19-year-old freshman sorority member died a year ago from a cocaine overdose at San Diego State University, campus investigators set out to find out who was dealing drugs to their 34,000 students. It turned out their targets were on Fraternity Row, where authorities say unassuming facades of houses emblazoned with Greek symbols concealed thriving networks that may have used profits to finance fraternity operations. Undercover agents arrested 96 people, including 75 San Diego State students, during a five-month investigation into drug dealing on campus. Students at three fraternities were arrested. Twenty-nine people were arrested early Tuesday in raids at nine locations including the Theta Chi fraternity, where agents found cocaine, ecstasy and three guns. Eighteen of them were wanted on warrants for selling to undercover agents. San Diego State suspended Theta Chi and five other fraternities.
University police launched their investigation into drug sales on campus after Shirley Poliakoff, 19, died from a cocaine overdose in May 2007. Investigators discovered many students in fraternities were aware of organized drug dealing within their houses. Grams of cocaine were on sale for as little as $35. More than 130 undercover drug buys were made at locations including fraternity houses, student parking areas and in student dormitories during the investigation by university police and the DEA, authorities said. Authorities seized several guns, at least $60,000 in cash, marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, hash oil, methamphetamine and illicit prescription drugs, the university said. Some drugs bought and sold by students were traced to gangs linked to Mexican cartels, according to the DEA. Agents collected about $100,000 worth of drugs, including cocaine, ecstasy pills, hallucinogenic mushrooms and high-grade marijuana that were being advertised in "resale quantities" between members of the fraternity and other students.

Like I've been saying all along, the police need to get off their asses, and get up in those gated communities where White folks are using drugs in a shroud of safety and free from arrest or any other type of enforcement. Hopefully we'll see some of the White drug users pulled into the shit along with Blacks, because right now the "Drug War" is a Race war, and it shows no sign of diminishing.

They say...

theoretically speaking, the "big bang" released almost completely pure energy at incredible temperatures....

In this release of energy, almost equal amounts of matter and anti-matter was released...

And matter outnumbered anti-matter by a ration of only 1/1,000,000...

So only 1/1,000,000 of the energy released in the big bang is in existence, and this composes the known universe...

Of the "known" universe, only between 1-6% of it, is in the form of elements represented in the periodic chart..

And most of this "stuff" is held in vast clouds of gas, asteroids, planets, stars, black holes, etc...

The other 94-99% is in the form of what has been referred to as "dark matter".

It is called dark matter because although we "know" it exists through it's effect on gravity and the shape of the universe, however, it has never been seen, or directly observed...

Theories of it's composition range from vast "invisible" objects, to sub-sub-atomic particles, so small, plentiful and fast moving that millions of these un-detectable objects would have to be passing through each of us at any given moment to account for it all...

To appreciate the vastness of the known universe... if the known universe were the size of the earth, then in relation, our solar system (the size of pluto's orbit around the sun) would be the size of a single small bacteria, which would be about 1/100th as large as the period at the end of this sentence. But even though our solar system would be the size of a bacteria in that scale, it would still take us over 10 years to travel less than halfway across that period in the fastest spacecraft to date (Nasa's New Horizons) which takes an hour, to travel 1/6th the distance that light travels in a second.

The number of stars in the universe is so great that there are more of them, than there are grains of sand, on all of the beaches on earth... in fact, there are over a million stars in our universe for every grain of sand on the earth... and in this analogy, the total number of stars visible from earth with the naked eye, would amount to less than two tablespoons of sand.

But for the vastness of the known universe the vast majority of it is empty space.... for example, if the sun were reduced to a scale of slightly less than one inch, Pluto would be 100 yards away and 1/50th of an inch across... in this scale the speed of light would equal about 1 inch every 5 seconds...

The vastness of outer space is dwarfed by the vastness of inner space... if the nucleus of a hydrogen atom (a single proton) was slightly smaller than an inch, the electrons would be about 210 yards away and 1/150th of an inch in size... about the size of a grain of sand... imagine that, a single grain of sand, orbiting an object less than an inch in size, millions of times a second, at a distance of over 210 yards...

And the star closest to our sun is Proxima Centauri. To give you a feel for how far away we are from everything else, if our sun were the size of a period printed on a page (.5mm), Proxima Centauri would be the same size, but 8 miles away. In this same scale, the closest sun to us with planets (Bernard's Star) would be 12 miles away, or in terms of the bay area, if our sun was represented by a period printed on a page in Oakland, CA. City Hall, Bernard's Star would be a period printed on a page in San Francisco, CA. City Hall.

But perhaps the most incredible number, is the age of the life contained within every living human. Each human on this planet, represents an unbroken chain of life extending back 3.5 billion years (which spawned plants and animals 550 million years ago)... each human that is alive today, represents an unbroken chain of between 215 million to - 550 million lifeforms that were born, lived to reproduce, and nurtured and (for higher level life forms) protected young that then lived to reproduce, and so on, and so on... and each human that lives, and does not reproduce themselves, represents the end of a line of life, that endured at least 3.5 billion years, to the day that individual died...

Is it no wonder, that the desire to reproduce, is the strongest urge and strongest desire on earth, save the perpetuation of ones own life?


I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
-Ecclesiastes

The Amazing Life of Tunis Campbell

Tunis Gulic Campbell 1812-1891

Tunis Gulic Campbell was one of the most important, fearless, politically astute Black men in the history of the United States. His skill for leading, community organizing and political acumen are the reason why he will be the next Black individual elevated to "Black God" status by The West Oakland Opportunity Zone.

Tunis Campbell was one of ten children born to Two free Blacks, John Campbell, a blacksmith, and his wife in Middlebrook, New Jersey. In 1817, when Campbell was five, a white friend worked to place the unusually self-aware Campbell in an all-white Episcopal school on Long Island. At this school, Tunis was trained for work as a missionary in Liberia by the American Colonization Society. Soon though, Tunis began to see that he disagreed that Blacks, who had been in the United States prior to virtually all other peoples of the world, should be repatriated as a solution to the race question.

At age eighteen he followed his conscience and began to lecture and preach against slavery, colonization, alcohol, and prostitution. To support himself, Tunis made a living as a hotel steward and head waiter in new York and Boston. He was so effective at this profession that he wrote the first book on hotel management to be published in the United States.

Campbell's greatest legacy is as a political leader in Georgia, where he lead one of the most remarkable experiments in democracy in the history of the United States, by organizing a large community of freedmen into a model community of self-sufficiency and self-governance. This all came about In 1865 when Campbell was appointed Freedmen Bureau Superintendent of the major islands off the coast of Georgia. On January 12, 1865, General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, met with Tunis Campbell and 20 of Savannah's black clergy to discuss how to help blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom. The meeting in itself had no precedent. White leaders, meeting with Black leaders, to discuss and organize the transition from slavery to freedom. Tunis and others argued for self-sufficiency and that Blacks be given a chance to govern themselves and not be governed or managed. All they asked for was freedom, protection, land and the opportunity to take part in the great experiment of democracy that whites had enjoyed for the previous 200 years.

Based upon what was shared, discussed, General Sherman issued the most important Order in the History of Blacks in America, Special Field Orders No. 15., promising all blacks 40 acres of Low Country property and a military mule. It was General Rufus Saxton, director of the South Carolina Freedmen's Bureau implemented the program, and over the next several months, over 40,000 blacks were settled on 40-acre tracts along the North and South Carolina Coast.

The experiment flourished, the crops were planted, homes built, government officials elected and churches ministered over their recently freed parishioners. In an amazingly short time, and under the leadership of Campbell, the communities bonded; however, due to the forgiveness of President Johnson of former Confederate soldiers, plantation owners and former slave owners, many of these lands were returned to their previous White owners. The great Black democratic experiment in freedom and self-sufficiency was over, and eventually, Campbell was summarily exiled from the Sea Islands.

Once the Black were turned out of their newly given lands, A program was implemented to force the freemen into labor contracts with white investors. The land was either returned to its Confederate owners or leased to Northern entrepreneurs. Freedmen who protested against outrageously unfair contract stipulations and inflated prices at the White-run company stores, or who resisted signing the contracts, were arrested, punished and many were worked to death after they were leased to public works projects, road gangs, levee construction and railroads.

Campbell managed to regroup on the mainland at an abandoned plantation he purchased and was joined by a hundred people on the land to form the Belleville Farmers Association. For several years, this project was troubled by bad weather and poor harvests and inadequate support by private agencies.

Some positive changed did take place and it seemed for a while that Blacks would experience a reprieve. In 1867 Radical Republicans gained control of Congress and overpowered the conservative president Johnson and a number of Reconstruction acts were passed over veto.

Among these acts, the former Confederate states had to
--register all qualified voters, under federal supervision;
--elect delegates to rewrite the state constitution into compliance with the united States Constitution;
--elect new state legislatures;
--ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which established full African-American citizenship.

Under these federal guidelines McIntosh County fall of 1867 elected Tunis Campbell, and along with 37 blacks among 170 delegates to the state constitutional convention. Campbell developed a voting bloc to propose and enact legislation favorable to freedmen, such as passing a bill eliminating imprisonment for debt.. With the new constitution Campbell and two other blacks were elected to the Georgia State Senate.

Although success was sweet, it was short lasting, for on 12 September 1868, Campbell and other blacks were expelled when racist argued that "the right to vote did not imply the right to hold office".

In December 1869, in response to the steady rise of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, the United States Congress restored military rule in Georgia. The expelled legislators were reinstated, and for what remained of his term Campbell served on committees on education, the penal system, and the military. he introduced fifteen bills furthering black rights, most of which were unsuccessful. His great concerns were access to voting and education.

Campbell lost his Senate seat in 1872 in an election mired in fraud. He continued to serve as a justice of the peace; in that capacity he was most prominent defending the rights of black sailors on the ships docking in Darien, an active port. His vigilance on their behalf, and his willingness to fine and imprison the white ships' captains who abused them, incurred the wrath of local whites.

Campbell had been a major irritant to the white power structure for years. they recognized his influence over McIntosh County African Americans, and they despised him for it. Planters claimed That Campbell's opposition to contract labor and his constant advice to the freedmen cost the planters hundreds of thousands of dollars. By the mid-1870s the momentum of national politics was conservative again, and white "Redeemer" forces, dedicated to restoring the "'old order," were seizing power throughout the South.

The former Confederates engaged in a plot with racist Judge Henry Tompkins, a Confederate veteran sworn to destroy him. He indicted Campbell for falsely imprisoning white men (the abusive ship captains in Darien) and set the bail so high that blacks were not able to redeem Campbell, who was thus forced to serve one year of hard labor in Georgia's penal system.

Conditions in these camps were appalling, and the treatment accorded the men were brutal. In the late 1870s, convicts leased to one railroad company in South Carolina suffered a 45% annual death rate; the death rate across the South averaged between 16 and 25%.

There were some attempts at exposure and reform: in one such brave effort, a United States district judge examined the court records of one Georgia county for one month and disclosed that 149 people--almost all of them black--had been sentenced to an average of 19 years each at leased labor for crimes no more serious than walking on the grass and spitting on dirt streets. The maverick Southern reformer George Washington Cable published and lectured against convict leasing. But the system was too profitable for both the state and the contractor for reform to have a chance. In the mid-1889s Georgia's United States Senator, Joseph E. Brown, held a twenty-year lease on three hundred, "healthy" convicts, for which he paid the state the sum of seven cents per man per working day.

Tunis Campbell entered that world in January of 1876 Tunis Campbell entered the dark world of convict leasing when a plantation owner bought his labor contract from the state of Georgia for $8.75.

A petition for pardon was offered to the Governor of Georgia, James M. Smith, for Rev. Tunis G. Campbell. The facts of the case seemed to warrant an effort to obtain clemency but it was denied.

After little more than a year, Campbell was released in January 1877 and moved to Washington, D.C. where he lobbied for federal protection of African American rights. He returned to Georgia briefly in 1882 for a Republican convention in Atlanta and visited McIntosh County and was received by the local colored population with "support and affection." Campbell never returned to Georgia and died in Boston 4 December 1891.

Evolution, Creation and Intelligent Design.

Although the title of this seems to indicate that some type of summation or analysis will take place, that is not the case. Only if you think in terms of the above, or accept the dialectic, would you assume that there is a debate brewing. I'm here to tell you that such is not the case.

Something about the above, I find quite troubling.

Evolution, although definitely, seemingly could plausibly serve as an explanation, So can Creation.

Clearly, something exist. Was it created? We can assume such. But, we actually can not say that anything was created, for we have no knowledge as to whether creation itself was created, or if it has always existed. In a sense, we can say that to the extent that the possibility that creation existed, may be the same, in a sense, depending on how you look at it, as saying that it has always existed.

If I hold in my mind, for a number of years, the idea of the wheel, and only decades later "create" it, does not my thinking about it, in all of it's nuances, technical details, manner and method of it's construction, not also represent an "existence"? And as it's assembled, surely the items used to assemble it, have already existed, and so, does this newly put together item, truly represent something that did not exist previously? in a sense, absolutely not, and in a very, very small sense, we could say that it did not exist before...

But that's not what this is about. My beef is with Intelligent design.

It sounds intriguing at first, but only until you know the history of Intelligent Design.
Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection". It is simply put, a new age explanation for the existence of God.

Something that is equally as asinine is the U.S. National Academy of Sciences debasement of intelligent design, in which they state, "intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own.

That seems to me to be equally silly. So, we're going to limit "reality" those things which can be tested by experiment, predicted, and can propose new hypotheses?

I don't know that the universe needs to bow at the feet at man to be understood.

the theory of evolution, is the scientific result of painting oneself into a corner.

Clearly, despite entropy, there is something that is not only able to survive, but to evolve, to change, to become stronger, more complex, more perfect, without any seeming, outside entity being observed, in any fashion, to serve as an intervening agent.

And so, the logical conclusion, is that there is a force at work that drives this effort, that moves it forward, that protects it, informs it, makes it aware, and causes it to react.

I find it quite curious that as entities, made up of this very same stuff, that we, on a new order of consciousness, have succeeded in creating creations by utilizing our understanding of things.

but, the complexity of existence, is more complex, more subtle, more perfect. Chemistry, is, "the science of the composition, structure, properties, and reactions of matter, especially of atomic and molecular systems."

molecules, depend on the structure of atoms, atoms, on the structure of subatomic particles, cells, on the nature of multiple entities, and so on and so forth. What seems clear to me, is that as the higher ordinal constructs are continually created, they are all dependent on the potential of their constitutional parts, and that only if constructed, and put together in certain ways, are the higher ordered entities able to "work".. and so, our consciousness, is in essence, the consciousness of creation. Although we may live a short time, we are constructed of the ageless.

We don't have enough time to solve the other riddle. (the real riddle is the riddle of self and coming to know self. the other riddle is the chase to unlock all of the secrets of existence).

So what do we have time to do?

We have time to be true, to give it our best shot, to do what we know, what we feel, what we think, to be right.

And when we die, we can know that we did our thing to the fullest.

the strangest thing, is this little bit of awareness that we have. and how it dominates our existence. And even, how we interpret this bit of awareness as being so incredibly important. And strangely, how completely right and wrong that interpretation is.

Do we really need to solve the science of creation? What answers will that inquiry yield? and what meaning? Will we be capable of inner peace? of super-consciousness? or perfect unions between man and wife? or immortality?

I wonder what we will achieve when we find, and isolate the power, the reason, the truth of existence, and have "proved" it, tested it, and made hypotheses based upon our understanding and it all checks out.

Will we be happy? Will it change anything? how could it? how could it change anything?

It is incredibly sad, that this experience, this happening has occurred, and we are alive and a part of it, and yet, so fully mired in insanely neurotic rituals that reign in, harness, and subjugate the delicately ever-blooming flower, of the ever-present "now".

Maybe I should save myself, and suffer what will be.

it's so hard, because even the most sage will tell you, that it is all suffering

But there is a way to save yourself, find the truth, know the truth and end all suffering. The Buddha's taught, The Four Noble Truths. suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end; and it has a cause to bring about its end.

I don't know about you, but I'm stuck on quenching the thirst for desire. My life has been standing by the door with it's hat and coat on, waiting for me as I continually look over at it and say, "I'll be there in a minute, I only need one more." The simple fact is, that there's always a good reason to grab one more, and the only reason I can see not wanting to grab one more, is because one is somehow satisfied.

Now, what Buddhism has to do with who we are and what we are, I do not know. My suspicion is that it's not so much about who we are, as it is about accepting it. You can not tear apart the doll to see what is in it, and accept it at the same time.

But I think we've worked it all out, because we are only going to smash a few atoms, and leave the vast majority of them, intact.