Brewed Fresh Daily

I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it until I'm blue in the face. Brewed Fresh Daily has great readers who leave the best comments. Martha Shaw is someone who should have her own blog. Check out this comment that she left:

On Pacific islands after WWII, some native populations became referred to as "cargo cults" because they built bamboo replicas of planes to "attract" the planes that had once inhabited their island. The world labeled such efforts as "naive", that these aboriginal populations did not understand that it was the mind and the idea of the once-visiting culture that was the original impetus of the planes coming to the remote island - the world knew that no bamboo replica - even if it looked like a plane - was going to work to bring back real planes to the remote island. Building a concrete building will not give the Northeast Ohio area the advanced education which a population needs to attract bioscience and hi-tech industry interest. Building a concrete building will not engender a new, innovative idea. PEOPLE create ideas, and well-informed and educated people create innovative ideas and new industries. The financial rewards they reap from these products of their mind are the result of their innovation. If we want to create innovation and new technology businesses in Ohio, we will have to invest in the people of Ohio, in educating them on special topics and a background of science and technology and deep, rich, innovative thinking, which will be the tinder for their subsequent new sparks of insight, which will create new business and new ways to employ Ohioans. Building a concrete building is a distraction from the root need to provide grants for Ohioans to learn new facts and exercise their minds to think of new ideas. Education has become expensive, and so many intelligent people can't afford it. When education becomes a luxury item for the privileged few, the many intelligent people who might have that incredible idea are displaced into a servitude which they don't deserve, and which does not serve the purpose of creating the industries of tomorrow. We need to invest in the minds of our citizenry! And we need to start investing in them now with a variety of non-traditional and innovative education so that we can capitalize on the insights these trained minds will make in the near future. Ultimately, their achievements will fund the concrete buildings which these professionals will then need. Remember the truth about cargo cults - first came the trained minds. Their result was the planes. And once they were gone, no bamboo plane-shaped replica could bring a real plane back. All you had were a lot of hopeful people gazing at the sky and hoping for a miracle from the gods. If I had the money, I'd be studying chemistry right now. I'd be enrolled in a robotics course. But I can't afford it - the needs of my kids have to come first. I dream of new energy sources, but I don't know enough science to effectively invent a prototype. With the rising cost of eveything, there have to be a lot of people like me out there today: we have the will, we have the urge to learn. All we lack is the money to afford the learning.

Mark Schumann comments as well, but he has his own website, which I might add hasn't been updated recently. By the way, the emphasis is in Martha's comments are mine. I think it's a shame that people with ideas like hers go unfunded. Martha, let me know when you want to start that blog. BFD points you to a book about the metaphor Martha starts with: Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society