Warning:
I don't know what this post is about.  It might be more about semantics and philosophy than it is about ethics.  I don't think it is about morality, but it is hard to discuss ethics without straying over into morals. 

After learning that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals don't think it is ethical for us to hitch our huskies to sleds and race them, but consider themselves ethical when they kill dogs and cats in the shelters they run, and that although they think it is ethical to kill animals, they don't think it's ethical to eat them, personally having come from a culture that considers it unethical to kill something unless one intends to eat it, and living in a state where it is illegal to kill a game animal and waste its meat, I felt a need to learn more about ethics. 

In the Google search box, I entered "define:ethics".  Google gave me a lot to choose from. 

This one from a history professor more or less works for me, in a general sense:

The next one is pitched toward translators and interpreters, and also works, generally:

The most extensive and exhaustive definition came from a fertility clinic in Australia, and in the context of a dictionary of medical terminology, it takes on a defensive tone:

Okay.  Are you confused yet?  Just wait.

Professional ethics are viewed as separate from personal ethics, and note how "the profession" comes before "the general public."  I was naive about this until about twenty years ago, when I was listed in the National New Age Yellow Pages.  That directory was placed in numerous public and institutional libraries, and in metaphysical bookstores all over the country.  As a result, I was invited to join a professional organization of psychics.

I felt honored by the invitation.  I was ready to submit my application and pay my dues, until I read the Code of Ethics.  It prohibited criticizing other members or their work.  That conflicted with my personal ethics, and the personal ethics won.

Many of my colleagues follow the Wiccan Rede:

I wouldn't have quoted Selena if that hadn't been there in the Google definitions.  She screwed up that rendering of the Rede any way you look at it.  "An it harm none, do what thou wilt," is how I have always heard it.  "An" is an obsolete way of saying "if" or "in so far as," and, disregarding the spelling issue, if she wanted to use the obsolete term at the start, it would have been correct to give the latter clause an obsolete rendering as well.  *sigh* 

Life is not easy for a Wiccan.  In addition to being mistaken for Satanists by religionists who believe in Satan, and taken for head-in-the-sand reactionaries by those who think all religion is stupid, their Rede doesn't help them when they face a decision where either way they go, somebody will get hurt.

Regardless of what I think of Scientology itself, I can't disagree with that definition of ethics.  Society and social institutions may penalize one for violating their rules, and a professional establishment may censure someone who doesn't conform to the ethics of the majority, but from day to day, in the decision making process, it is one's own code, one's "moral compass" if you will, that determines behavior.

The next definition of "ethics" comes from an anti-abortion group:

Rightness versus wrongness, ends versus means... obviously, I'm not done with this subject yet.

Hasta luego, mis amigos.

Yesterday evening, we had a sudden and exciting thunderstorm.  Flashes and booms were coming almost simultaneously, and the thunder was rolling in long waves, right overhead. Heavy rain drove several wet cats into the house.  Otherwise, it has been quiet around here.

I surprised myself by sleeping late today.  It was after 6 when I got up.  Since the days grew long, I've been getting up most mornings between 4 and 5.  So, I've been out of bed almost 3 hours, and I'm still not fully awake.  I don't know what that's all about.  Brain fog has me socked in solidly.  Focusing is more trouble than it's worth.  I sat here and blearily clicked from here to there and saw a few things that amused me.  Maybe they'll amuse you.

Methuselah, here, is a young date palm grown from a seed that was about 2000 years old, found at Masada.  He's a record holder.  The previous record was held by a lotus grown from a seed a little over half as old.  The image and story came from the Discovery Channel

I don't remember this picky piglet's name.  Reportedly, she won't walk in mud without her wellies.  She and the other images below are all from telegraph.co.uk.

In Las Vegas, Siegfried and Roy have acquired half a dozen or so new tiger cubs.  According to the Telegraph, they will be therapeutic for Roy, who was badly mauled by a tiger several years ago.  I think they are adorable.

This old guy on the right, in Washington, DC, is participating in an international nude bike riding event, to protest gasoline consumption, oil depletion, air pollution, etc.   The young women at left were doing the same thing, in the U.K.

The next two photos, below, are from the Royal Ascot.

 

HERE is a photo gallery of  these and other fashion faux pas sure to get a lady turned away from the Royal Enclosure.

Anyone who has never had the benefit of time spent in an exemplary, psychologically sound, drug rehab program, or in psychotherapy with a reputable and knowledgeable therapist, probably will not realize how much ordinary everyday psychopathology is expressed in his or her own personality.  Without such experience, it is much easier to observe other people's craziness than to see one's own.

Anyone who has had the benefit of good psychotherapy, or who has been trained as a therapist, will recognize psychopathology in the behavior and interactions of nearly everyone he or she encounters socially, in the workplace, and online.  One of the craziest ironies in our society is that those who have undergone treatment for mental illness are stigmatized and can be legally discriminated against in housing, education, and employment, and yet the odds are good that such a person is generally more mentally healthy than most people who have never been treated for mental illness.

In case it's not obvious, the pathology I'm talking about here isn't severe psychotic stuff or the products of organic brain damage or congenital abnormalities.  I am referring to those things that once were called neuroses and are now defined largely within DSM-IV's Axis  II, along with a few from Axis I.  I can't cover all of those disorders today, and I won't be zeroing in on any particular disorder.  Instead, I'm targeting a behavior that is always a distinct observable marker for some sort of underlying psychopathology:  defensiveness.

Briefly, defensiveness is an argument or smokescreen that is thrown up to deny, rationalize or justify some past event, or past or present behavior, that a person either feels is wrong, or has been programmed to believe is socially unacceptable, or simply does not want to examine because there is some guilt or psychological trauma associated with it.  One example:  suppose a group of women are discussing breastfeeding and one of them speaks up in defense of bottle feeding even though nobody has mentioned it or criticized the practice.  She (a) bottle fed her child or children (or intends to) and (b) feels either guilty or unfairly stigmatized for doing so.

Therapists love to see defensiveness.  It is like finding an end sticking out of a snarled ball of yarn; it gives us a starting point.  We are trained to look for and recognize it, and some of us are trained to poke around and try to bring it out.   One reason it can please a therapist to observe defensiveness is that it signals some awareness, even if subconscious, of a problem.  People who are not defensive about their pathologies have a whole 'nother layer of pathology there, and are more difficult to reach.

If I were being paid to ferret out defensiveness and the sick secrets it guards, I would apply myself wholeheartedly to the task.  Since I'm not being paid to do that, I don't work at it.  Nevertheless, just in the innocent pursuit of blogging my days away, I inadvertently bring out defensiveness almost every time I write about anything meaningful.

To try to avoid that would require me to censor myself severely, and even then I probably would be unable to prevent ruffling somebody's feathers from time to time.  Whenever I write about any issue that has more than one side, even if I don't come down on one side or the other, somebody usually reacts as if I had taken a position against her.  (Please disregard the gender of pronouns from here on.  Defensiveness is an equal opportunity display of pathology.)

I can't help noticing defensiveness when somebody waves it in front of me.  I can, sometimes, and sometimes do, stop myself before I point out to a defensive commenter that her neurosis is showing.  Right about now, several of my readers are wondering if I am aiming this post at them.  A few of my close friends and/or family members are probably pretty sure right now that they are the undisclosed recipients of a pointed message here.  My dears, if the shoe fits, wear it, but please let me assure you that nobody in particular is being targeted here. 

Anyone who is defensive and knows it, has a head start toward healing or transcending whatever it is that the defensive reaction is covering.  Anyone who is unaware of his defensiveness deserves the favor of having it pointed out to him, but there are all sorts of pitfalls and hazards awaiting a friend or acquaintance who tries to give anyone the benefit of such insight. 

It is altogether easier and more comfortable for one to work through one's own defense mechanisms before one starts working on anyone else's.  Otherwise the friend whose defensiveness you decide to confront might know you well enough to strike back at your own most closely guarded sick secret.  Such things happen every day, as anyone who gets around much on Xanga can attest.

Any questions?
   

...no, wait!  This is June 13, right?  It was fourteen months ago that I posted my historic historical thing on Friday the 13th.  Go on, click.  Don't be afraid.

That's me.  That's also the "new" ergonomic office chair Greyfox picked up for me at the "free day" last week at the Big Lake thrift shop.  The old one had lost one of its wheels.  First the cats removed it, then after we'd replaced it numerous times and they'd removed it each time, they hid it and we've never found it.  To keep the raw end of the chair's foot from poking a hole in the floor, we had set it in a small melamine bowl.

This "new" chair has all its wheels, but doesn't have all its bolts and screws, so it's creaky, shaky and wobbly, but I like it.  It is lighter and will adjust higher than the old one, so it's easier to see through my bifocals without craning my neck.  All-around, it's a better chair, unless it falls apart.

Greyfox was here this morning, delivering the chair and some clothes he'd picked up at the free day.  Gotta love a thrift store that once in a while just gives everything away to make room for more.  He also brought groceries, and 100 stun darts for the blowgun.  Stuff had been collecting at his place, waiting for me to get to town to pick it up, but I haven't been up to making the trip, and the stuff was piling up too much, so he brought it to me.  For his effort, I gave him a bowl of beans for lunch, let him use the computer for a while, and let him take leftover beans home with him.  He seemed happy with that.  Gotta love him, too.

Now, I gotta get off this chair and into my bed.  Even though Greyfox and Doug did most of the work, I did enough to fatigue myself.  My next task is to get Doug on task to move the old chair out of here and put some more groceries away. 

Mañana, mis amigos.

Can we dispense (for now) with those thoughts of interspecies sex?  Yeah, we know it happens, and sometimes, such as in the mating of peach and plum to make nectarines, the outcome is splendid.  I'd just rather wait until Mercury isn't retrograde and Venus isn't square Uranus, before I tackle that topic.

Today I'm thinking about affection and partnership, and the way they often transcend biological boundaries.   Interspecies cooperation helps get work done and can make life more sustainable and satisfying for everyone.

Up until about fifteen thousand years ago, archaeological evidence
suggests that our relations with other species were all of the
predator/prey variety, or as competitors for territory and food.  The earliest evidence of animal domestication involves dogs. 

 When I was a kid, the prevailing theory was that humans adopted
orphaned wolf pups.  A more recent, and to me more credible idea is
that wild canids moved in on our garbage heaps, and then their affiliative, big-eyed puppies moved into our hearts.    A recent genetic study suggests that all present day domestic dogs are descended from "three females near China," about 15,000 years ago.  By 14,000 years ago, dogs were being buried with their people in Germany.

Genetic research suggests that cats also domesticated themselves.  They show up in the archaeological record as far back as 12,000 years ago, and their importance to humans is shown by ancient Egyptian cat mummies, and respectful burials of cats alongside humans in other cultures.

Sheep and goats were first domesticated around the same time or shortly after cats were  What I have been learning about the way dogs and cats domesticated themselves has made me wonder if maybe some sheep or goats might have wandered into a human shelter during a storm.  Another possibility is that the dogs and cats gave us the idea, and we took it from there.

Donkeys and horses were domesticated at around the same time in different parts of the world.  At Krasni Yar in Kazakhstan, the earliest (7,000years ago) archaeological signs of horse domestication are pens with lots of dung.  Those horses could have been penned for food.  Evidence of horse riding first shows up in Kazakhstan and the Ukraine, about 5,000 to 5,500 years ago.  It consists of bit wear on teeth in some horse skeletons.  The relatively small numbers of skulls showing bit wear suggests that some horses might have been ridden for purposes of herding the others.

Genetic data traces all extant domestic horses to one ancestral stallion and/or his close relatives.  Matrilineal diversity is much greater, and it would have taken at least 77 ancestral mares to produce all the lines of currently extant wild and domestic horses.  Sorta reminds me of Genghis Khan.

How do you like these pictures I found to go with this topic?  I had a lot of fun collecting them.  This one is of Jeff Guidry and Freedom, the eagle he nursed back to health from injuries that included two broken wings.  They have been together for ten years.  Just as the photos above illustrate that interspecies love can involve many other species besides our own, this one shows that there doesn't have to be any long history of domestication for animals and humans to form loving bonds.

Kamunyak, the lioness in this photo, during the summer of 2002, adopted five separate oryx calves.  It wasn't such a great thing for either the lioness or the calves, because some of them were killed by other lions, and some had to be taken away from Kamunyak by rangers because they were too young to survive without their mothers' milk.  Every time she would lose one calf, Kamunyak would go find another one.

It isn't uncommon for any mammalian female to adopt whatever little thing comes around, especially at times when her body is flooded with oxytocin, such as when she has just borne young.  I found videos today of two different cats cuddling baby chicks along with their kittens.  In addition to countless dogs and cats, I have mothered broken birds, a raccoon, an opossum, orphaned lambs and calves, and a tubful of tadpoles, among other things.  Sometimes, I stop and ask myself if that is nuts, and the answer is always, "Maybe so, but it feels great."

Mammals and birds aren't the only ones who can develop odd interspecies relationships.  Mzee, this 100 year old tortoise, adopted Cosmo, an orphaned baby hippo.  Cosmo is now much bigger than Mzee, but they are still friends.

I'm not going to go very deeply here into the moral or ethical issues surrounding our interactions with animals.  I've done it before, every March for the last few years, when the Iditarod is on.   The benefits of interspecies relationships can be one-sided, or they can come down on both sides.  People are as capable of being inhumane to other species as we are to our own kind.  I don't understand that.  For me, happiness is a warm puppy.
 

While I'm working on today's post, I just wanted to pop in and say that my inclusion of the words, "I'm from Xanga Welcome Wagon," in the comments I leave for new members, has cut down on the numbers, but not entirely eliminated the stupid, "hu r u?" comments that are left on my posts. 

I have yet to think of anything that is going to defuse the anger and relieve the anxiety of all those returning Xangans who are being threatened with having their usernames recycled because they have neglected their blogs for years.

Later... with a real post.

I have a few curmudgeonly friends who would say that I'm happier than I have any right to be.  They're wrong.  Everyone has a right to all the happiness he or she can muster, and I pity the fool who believes that one needs a reason to be happy.  Nothing can beat the euphoria of just being happy despite all the bullshit and pain.  It actually makes the bullshit easier to confront and the pain easier to deal with.

So, let's confront some bullshit.

Is working a fate worse than death?  That's the thought that popped into my head when, during this year's Iditarod, someone commented to me that PETA and the American Humane Society, who vehemently oppose sled dog racing and show biz animal acts, run shelters where they kill unwanted pets.  Where is the logic in that?  Put those puppies to work, I say.  My experience with numerous working dogs and horses suggests that the more tricks they are taught, and the closer their association with their trainers, the happier they are.  Cats... well I can get a laugh out of imagining a sled hitched to a team of cats, but beyond that, I just don't know... spay and neuter, I suppose.

Creationists versus evolutionists:  isn't it possible that the universe was designed to evolve?  I enjoy reading the thoughts of The Brights, whose, "worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements," but I just can't join them, because I would feel handicapped without my "mystical awareness" (for want of a better term).  I'm all for a world without the supernatural, and for a language which could discuss weird shit without resorting to mystical mumbo jumbo.  In my universe, anything unnatural just doesn't happen.  We don't need a physics police force, because natural laws cannot be violated.  If there's an apparent violation, we need an editor to fix the law, not a cop to apprehend the violator.  I am all for demystifying precognition, telepathy, psychokinetics, etc.  I am not in favor of rejecting any aspect of reality just because we don't understand how it works.

Do you think that whatever is usual, ordinary, customary or comfortable for you is "normal"?  Well, it might be, or it might not be.  If you have been in on the current Featured_Grownups challenge, you may recall that I have discussed this issue from several angles.  Some people would prefer to let it go, but my mind thrives on thinking about anomalies, paradoxes, contradictions, and the like.  With Greyfox's help, I have come up with an analogy that might help clear up the matter.  Usual, typical, customary, and similar terms are like pride, while normal is more like arrogance.  Pride is something you can feel and express all by yourself, but to be arrogant, you need someone to relate to, even if you don't pay much attention to those inferior beings to whom you are relating.   Norms are collective things, describing the beliefs and/or behaviors of various groups.  Maybe your customary behavior is consistent with that of your group, and maybe not.  If you want to be normal, just pick a group that thinks and acts the way you do.  If you want to be abnormal, plop yourself down in a group where you are a misfit.

Okay, I have other stuff to do now.  Seeya later.

In the dream, I'm on an island, either in Southeast Alaska or the Aleutians.  As part of some local celebration there's a kids' race, and everyone is having a good time.  After the race, I'm talking to some of the children and parents when a man comes over and offers to show me a local landmark, a big old building overlooking the harbor.

He's middle aged, with an authoritative air.  He wears a dark suit with matching vest.  We walk to the ground level landward entrance to the building, which sits on the edge of a high cliff.  An old man comes to the door and opens it for us.  The suit introduces him as Sam.  He wears work clothes and is apparently the caretaker, but his attitude toward the building is very proprietary.

The old guy leads us to an elevator on the side of the building that overhangs the cliff.  The first man and I enter the elevator, and the old man walks away.  I look around at the signs of age, peeling paint, and rust on the metal walls.  As the doors close with a lot of creaking and clanking, and the elevator starts down, I ask who maintains the thing.  The man gives me a blank look as if he has no idea what I'm talking about.

The machinery is making a lot of noise and the elevator accelerates downward at a rapid rate.  I ask if the old guy is the one who maintains the equipment.  The suit just shrugs.  By this time, we are accelerating so fast I'm feeling almost weightless.  I look around for the elevator inspection certificate that I know is legally required, and there is none.

Uneasy about the increasing acceleration and the suit's blasé attitude toward mechanical maintenance, I start thinking about what might be the safest spot to be standing when we hit bottom.  I flex my knees to absorb the shock.  The guy in the suit has a hand out, leaning on a wall, and is looking a little green in the face.  Then I feel the acceleration begin to decrease.

I tilt my head to the side and look up at the guy, and say, "Feel that?  We're starting to slow down."  He looks relieved as the elevator gradually slows and comes to a gentle stop with hardly a bump.  Irritated, I ask, "What was that all about?  You like to amuse yourself that way with visitors?  Do they all get worried about the machinery?"

"No," he says, with an uneasy half smile. "They are usually terrified.  They scream and cling to me.  I think I'll go ask old Sam about the maintenance."

This week's subject, suggested by Stixandstonz, is

What's on your head?

In my case, it is usually a bandanna to keep my (longish, red) hair out of my way.  In cold weather, I go for warmer knit hats.  In my hippie period, I wore headbands.  Right now (no photo available), it's just tousled hair and a few dead mosquitoes.  Of the photos below, I can claim credit only for the top one and the three at the bottom.  The hippie shot was captured by my ex-husband, and the two directly below it were by my son, Doug.  The capped baby me in the profile pic (you need to be on the comment page to see that one) was by one of my parents.