TED Community » Paul Lillebo

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Renewing the American experiment in democracy, which has lost its way.
Peace on Earth.
Environmental protection.
Improving the human condition.

An idea worth spreading

Our government is not there to rule, but to serve.

Politicians are not the elite, they are our hired help. The people are the elite.

Talk to me about

Democracy, politics, environment, science, society, history...

Comments

• TEDCred score: +5.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Conversation: What is the purpose of life?

  1 day ago: You may be right that this is the most asked question both on Earth and on TED. To me that's odd, because I can't make heads or tails of the question without more specifics. I would want to know, "Whose purpose?" and "Whose life?"
  
  You're surely not thinking about either my purpose for your life or your purpose for my life, so it seems to me you're asking about your own purpose for your own life. Fair enough, but that's really up to you and your loved ones, you set your own purposes, if you wish.
  
  Perhaps you're wondering about what "purposes" other TEDsters are trying to relate to for their own lives. In my own case I would say that "purpose" is too broad a word, "aims" or "goals" work better. For me, these change pretty frequently, though the aim of trying to influence the world and my local area toward improvement is an underlying theme. If I manage that even a little, that's satisfying. Looking for a broad purpose in life might just be frustrating, and is probably not useful.

• A reply on Conversation: How long will we experiment with shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing in populated areas and allow people to be the guinea pigs?

  May 10 2013: Ownership of land is normally limited to surface land down to a rather shallow depth, and generally excludes mineral or petroleum rights in the deep subsurface, which may be licensed by the state to extraction operators. The licensee is prohibited from causing damage to surface resources. The surface owner may have rights of use of deep ground water, and could perhaps carry a complaint of degradation of the quality of those waters, but it's often difficult to prove the cause of changes in deep ground water.

• A comment on Conversation: History tends to repeat itself. Empires rise and fall in a vicious circle of greed, tribal thinking, prejudice, misunderstandings and envy.

  May 5 2013: Live locally, that's where happiness happens. In the end, it's your home life that matters. It's always fun to discuss Spenglerian notions of cyclic (evil) empires, but it's hardly worth stressing over. While it's true that we should learn from the past, imposing perceived past patterns of civilizations on the future would have the same success as predicting the stock market from past patterns - not much, in other words. We just don't know the future, and we don't know when, where and whether history repeats itself, even though we can always pick out such seeming patterns in history - after the fact. It's a little like finding fulfillment of past prophesies - a piece of cake.
  
  Facts more important that fiction? Perhaps not. It may be that belief is the most important of all. It seems to motivate most people, without much regard to whether it's factual or fictional - and the latter may be predominant and therefore most "important."

• A comment on Conversation: What do you think about the tragedies that occured this week?

  May 5 2013: Every day something like 300-400 thousand people die, probably several thousand of them under very painful or violent circumstances. I just don't have the emotive resources to expend on empathy with them all. Perhaps a true news service ought to print the names and histories of all these thousands daily, so we could choose a few to weep over. Or should I read the newspaper and empathize with the couple of cases of violent death that the editor has selected for that day? Then how about all those who will miss my empathy?
  
  The same day that 3 were killed in Boston, 30-some were murdered in the U.S., while some dozens were killed by bombs in Iraq and Syria. We never even heard their names. And that was OK, because I just can't make their horror my horror. It doesn't serve me, them, or any other purpose.
  
  Let me ask your question back to you, about all those murdered every day in our own country (U.S.) - amounting to 11-12 thousand every year: "what thoughts do you think when something like this happens?" Do you weep over them, or only over the few that are highlighted in the news, like the three in Boston?
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: How does scanning headlines affect your mood?

  May 5 2013: Scanning the headlines usually makes me want to be doing something more productive.
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  A comment on Conversation: Why do we bother with spelling?

  May 5 2013: If everyone spelled correctly, Jay Leno would be without his Monday night "Headlines" bit.
  (For non-Americans, Leno amuses millions of TV viewers with particularly embarrassing print errors from newspapers and magazines.)
  
  I once saw attributed to Thomas Jefferson a quote like "I have nothing but contempt for someone who knows only one way to spell a word."
  
  It's worth remembering that most of the words in our language (any language) that differ in meaning or spelling from the source language got that way by mistake, some time in the past. Mistakes made the language we're so proud of.

• A comment on Conversation: News on television and in newspapers has an enormous influence on people's ideas and options. What is the function of news?

  May 5 2013: I see this conversation is dominated by cynicism about the news media. I'm afraid I have to join that chorus. Any idealism about the function of the news media just won't survive the effect of experience. You use the word "function," and you could have said "purpose," because all news seems to be reported with a purpose, whether the news source is a state monopoly or a private commercial station or newspaper.
  
  For one thing, millions of things obviously happen each day, and the job of an editor is to select a few things to report on. This selection can't possibly be made objectively, and never is. As Ed has already said, the commercial source wants to maximize readers/viewers (i.e., profit), and print/shows what will attract these. They love a "serial" story - one that can carry readers/viewers' interest over many days or weeks, like a war or a criminal case. They love so-called "celebrities," (who are rarely worth celebrating, really), because they supply a source of gossip material and general titillation. You will note (and this must be discouraging for a journalism student) that very little of what's reported is actually of importance to the average citizen.
  
  Naturally, where the state controls the media, one gets the state's version of the "truth," which is always "massaged."
  
  Another modern effect of the news media is our saturation with worry. For a hundred thousand years, until just the past couple of centuries, our daily concern was limited to ourselves, our family, and our village. That was probably just enough to stress about. But now, every disaster anywhere in the world becomes part of our psychological burden. I suspect that this can't help but add to the stress of modern life, which is already considerable.
  
  One can perhaps best deal with the news media by ignoring them as much as possible. I'm not advocating ignorance, just a refusal to let the news media determine our concerns and priorities.

• A reply on Conversation: Does permitting same-sex marriage lead to permitting polygamy? And so what?

  May 5 2013: I'm sure you're right that there will not be any great demand for a right to polygamous marriage in western countries. But in the U.S., we do have a number of persons who practice this form of marriage, although illegally. And it only takes one person to file a court case demanding his or her rights, to get the case labeled a constitutional issue that may go all the way to the Supreme Court. I wonder, after the various restrictions on who may marry whom have all fallen by the wayside, if the Court would not find that the restriction by number (two persons) is also untenable and must yield, thus allowing plural marriages. Of course, my question and our discussion of it is only an intellectual exercise, like most questions here, and "future history" will settle the question one way or the other. I still find it interesting to muse on.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Being sentient/functional at an old age and the fear of death within the individual (EDITED). Previously "How old is too old really?".

  Apr 29 2013: I see you're having a hard time getting a clear answer to what you asked. You're probably wondering why that is. My take on this must start with my own answer to your question:
  
  "I don't know." There's a clear answer. And I think it also suggests the reason why you're not getting clear answers.
  
  I'm not in the situation of your infirm 60-year old. (I'm only 72 and in great health, as long as we're sharing ages.) And because I'm not in his situation I can't know what I would do if I were in that situation. When I was 21, I would have known what do do if I were a 60-year old near-vegetable. But not anymore. When you have lived a goodly number of decades and are at all reflective, you recognize the impossibility of determining well ahead of time what your sense of your present, past, and future will be at a later age. You only know that it will have changed.
  
  I appreciate your recognition below (if you weren't being ironic) that experience with life does bring some understanding with the years. Many 20-somethings seem to lack that recognition, though they all think they're smarter than they were five years ago.
  
  Hope the discussion has given you something to chew on.
  Cheers,
  Paul L.

• A comment on Conversation: Independence of economies

  Apr 29 2013: I suppose you mean a national economy.
  Take away from your society all the things that were not invented or made in your own country, and see what you're left with. Away with all electronics, cars, airplanes ... In fact away with most things we live with. Pretty sad.
  We certainly need trade and international investments. We must get used to the fact that we depend on one another, which is not a bad thing in principle. Whether we have the wisdom to manage the potential drawbacks and prevent exploitations that may arise from globalism is the flip side of the coin. That may take centuries to work out.