In front of me is a cup. It is made of paper and covered with wax. It is light blue with a black design. I say these as I consider “what” this cup is. I consider its nature. But at any time I can turn my attention away from “what” it is and consider the fact “that” it is. When I do I cease to consider its nature and consider instead ontology which is clearly metaphysical - meta ta physis.

To the left of this cup isn’t another identical cup. Now I can consider that the identical cup, by hypothesis matches exactly the nature of the first cup I described in all ways Nothing is different save that the second cup does not exist.

Carnap’s thought, and it’s decendents are absurd. (Consider Donald for example and his relationship with his suicidal brother, and unloving father, his interpretation that he has superior genetics)

Statements like Carnap’s are not as innocent as they seem for our biologies are possessed by powerful survival instincts. In fact there is a struggle between those who experience existence, and awareness of it, as itself the core value of a person, and those like Nietszhe, that attempt to define the good of a person by considering the nature of the person. There are very deep insights that are lost, and the loss was demonstrated in the attempt to suppress metaphysics. You can hear it even now at places like MIT. One must be “suspicious” of metaphysics. No my engineering friends, one must be suspicious, very suspicious, of the lack of metaphysics.

The idea that metaphysics is suspect is involved in religious issues like Maya, or the Catholic doctrine of original sin, the fallen-ness of man, or the forgetfulness of being described by Heidegger. It is not just a bad or incorrect idea - it is a kind of sickness of the mind and of the culture and ultimately of our biology.

So too satori, the sudden awakening of a person into awareness of existence, the attainment of enlightened awareness and associated ecstasy, the opposite of Carnap’s thinking in a sense, belies any claim to lack of meaningfulness.

Poor Wittgenstein! A monk trapped! The only things saving him his honesty, his art, his urge to poverty- “Tell them I had a wonderful life” to paraphrase his final words! Wonderful? If only that damn British dismissal had not taken root!

They have eyes but they do not see. You might say that of Carnap but not Wittgenstein, yet he remained trapped never realizing his potential! All because he lived before we realized the disaster of that thought!

We tend to think of all change as occurring in time and creation ex nihilo as occurring like an event. I think contemporary metaphysics realizes that it is creation ex nihilo cannot be a temporal event - or if there is one, then it is not ex nihilo in the sense that it is meant.

Creation ex nihilo is the creation "of time" not "in time".

This turns on the word "before". It does not refer to time but rather is more like the steps in a mathematical proof whose validity is eternal. Becasue of natural causality (not ex-nihilo) we can set up causal chains extending infinitely backward or at least for some period of time but those proofs fail to take into account the fact they they are contingent and therefore not ex nihilo. They just happen to be..

The real question is why there is the existence of anything at all. To make it hader the question is not answered in the same way as a regular question. The "answering", if you can call it that, is more like a awareness of the eternal deficiency of all contingent being and is more like the awareness of a question than an answer. Sometimes we refer to that as mystery.

No "cause" is posited as a contingent being for that would, in religious terms, make God a creature and require a further cause of God. Instead there is a kind of question that becomes and a realization of the superfluousness of nature itself. The very existence of being is the "answer" but it is not like being was there and created beings. Rather being is an awareness of the facticity, the emerging and enduring in the eternal sense of all contingent beings.

In human being this question is not superficial. It engages the survival instinct in unusual ways and reproductive intimacy becomes involved.

It is imoral to frustrate an individual will unfairly wilh restriction derived from traits that are not a result of his or her own decisions. It's how you ID the citizens not the border. Borders may not be imoral but certainly citizenship by birth AND borders are.

It is difficult to see how you can justify saying some poor baby born in the Phillipines cannot move to Seattle to work if he or she wants to.

Too bad there is not some way to force that great red stain of shame from the heart of the land of liberty for their un-America choice to embrace the frustration of the freedom of others. Citizenship by embrace of an ideology is so much fairer.

It is such a tragedy that that great light of liberty in New York harbor is being extinguished and a wall intending to set up an exclusive gated community is replacing it as the symbol of America.

Doubly tragic becasue it will not in the slightest help economically and is in fact as damaging to supporters as critics. Those people who think they can bring back outmoded forms of work instead of competing are just fooling themselves. That "again" in "Make America great again" is a colossal mistake. We could have, were, in fact, moving to a better future, but now? Don't worry reds, you lack of education and employability will certainly be compensated for by stopping imigrants from competing with you. De-globalize the whole border and you will still be unemployed - and much, much poorer.

The only market in the world that is not globablized in name is the labor market. What we need is completely free markets and borders with labor and capital and we need people to associate by ideology and defend their borders that way. Citizenship by belief in freedom. Demonstrate you are against it and you should be deported from America.

So much treasure, blood, and lives down the drain. Even if we are often, no usually, hypocritical, the ideals of America, the land of the free, were something to behold. I have been travelling the world for about three decades and it was amazing how much hope I used to be greeted with and how much sympathy, as if I have had a death in the family, I am greeted with now.

Ah well, we always were hypocrites. Biological warfare against the indians because they were indians. Enslavement of blacks because they were black. Destruction of lives in South East Aisia because they were gooks. Destruction of innocent civilians because they were Tajihs. But now the population is shifting and the whites are scared...It's ok if "they" die just not ok if "we" die.

They have no hope of winning the way they are going. Greatness just doesn't come cheap.

We'll see how it all turns out.