Economically, and therefore culturally, the planet is a mess. Way too many nations are on the brink of revolution, starvation, oppressive war by authoritarian governments or destructive, violent, militarized guerilla groups. Human rights are declining – including in the United States. More rapidly the assets of the world are being sucked into the secret coffers of the planet’s oligarchs. In the US, children are routinely shot; across the Middle East women are brutalized.

Further, in the book “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, he lays out how ‘nation states’ will be replaced by internet-enabled ‘network states’ run from the Cloud.

This universe sucks.

Our saving Grace is in the universe of hobbies. The hobby universe has different physical laws. For example, time flows at arbitrary rates controlled by the hobbyist; global dynamics simply don’t exist; hobby ambition and success are forces in the atmosphere and with a good location, the troubled universe completely disappears.

But one must be serious about this path. One needs a noncritical subject in which to invest serious attention and dedication. The whole object of the hobby universe is to escape the troubled universe, to forget everything except the target of one‘s hobby. Before all other thoughts and emotional interests, except for family and very close friends, the hobby is foremost in one’s mind.

Give a moment to consider what noncritical activity has drawn unusual interest in the past; what interesting thing floats in your mind during casual moments? Perhaps you are fortunate to have a hobby but haven’t made it the most important activity in your daily routine.

Once the hobby is chosen, it requires religious intensity, a desire to engage in the hobby at every chance. There are many subjects that are common for hobbyists: one thinks immediately of handiwork such as woodworking, pottery, glass blowing, metalwork, restoration of an object, art, weaving or building furniture.

There are activity hobbies like gardening, fishing, competitive biking, stock car racing, canoeing, hiking, camping, golfing and neighborhood sport leagues. There are social hobbies like working for charity building homes, cooking meals and providing transportation. Intellectual hobbies include activities like reading, becoming a world class expert on the dung beetle or mastering a new musical instrument; perhaps private tutoring or a part time librarian. If one has room, animal husbandry.

The key, however, is to walk through the warp door into the other universe. Desire. Determination. Curiosity. Achievement. As the old Eddy Arnold standard says, ‘Make the World go away’.

Ancient Mariner

֎ If the reader hasn’t checked in on science since their days in high school and college, they may need this update:

“B mesons come in many varieties, but all have a constituent called a bottom antiquark. One way in which these mesons decay is by the transformation of the bottom antiquark into a so-called “strange” antiquark and a pair of leptons.”[1]

֎ The answer to Y men die younger than women:

“As men get older, they don’t just lose their hair, muscle tone, and knee cartilage. They also start to lose Y chromosomes from their cells. Scientists have linked this vanishing to a long list of diseases and a higher risk of death, but the evidence has been circumstantial. Now, researchers report that when they removed the Y chromosome from male mice, the animals died earlier than their Y-carrying counterparts, likely because their hearts became stiffer.”[2]

֎ The Villages in Florida or homesteading in Alaska aren’t the only escapist real estate options:

“The virtual real estate market has really taken off in the last year, especially after Facebook’s decision to focus on the metaverse. Real estate sales on four platforms alone — Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Somnium – topped $500 million in 2021, according to MetaMetric Solutions.”

֎ If you didn’t learn cursive the first time, you can’t learn it now:

Cursive handwriting is no longer necessary. With computer-based writing exams as part of the Common Core curriculum, typing quickly and accurately is becoming more important than writing in neat script.

For the really old folk like mariner, typing is no longer a productive skill. What’s next? Can the reader imagine a class of students all talking at once as they use their voice-to-print app?

֎ Schools don’t teach cooking and home economics anymore. Will they teach students how to order tonight’s dinner through a voice-command box? [Mom already knows. Here comes Grubhub.]

So much to catch up on.

Ancient Mariner

[1] Economist magazine 7/22.

[2] Science Magazine/Weekly News.

Mariner hasn’t posted since the three-horse series (except for a quickie about undetectable spyware on smartphones; mind your personal pornography). Dealing with negatives without a break isn’t fun – noting public polls express the same sentiment when stating a significant drop in news broadcast viewership.

Of immediate concern is this matter of inflation. It is insidious. Today’s reports show inflation at 9.1 percent for the nation and over 10 percent in Baltimore, Houston, Miami and Seattle. One can say, “It’s only a dime out of a dollar” but the same math says, “It’s only $100 out of a thousand”. A typical salary may be around $3,000/month – that’s a cut in income of $300 to cover the monthly budget. Add to that the fact that wage increases lag behind inflation by more than 2 percent.

– – – –

Starvation is by far the greatest uncovered news story in the world – including the United States where poverty is growing rapidly. Insufficient wages alone can bring down a nation; in the news at the moment, consider Sri Lanka and Madagascar. It’s a plight the world around: falling populations (Australia), collapsed labor markets (dozens of countries in Africa, South America and Middle East) are causing government instability.

Yet these tragic conditions, which are responsible for 36 million people dying from hunger this year, do not get press. In the United States, the richest nation in the world, 1.6 people in 200,000 die from starvation and 41 million suffer lack of access to minimally adequate food.

True, these are turbulent times in the world today. The US is no exception having to deal with Covid, Trump, shooting children, runaway capitalism and no national identity . . . small potatoes compared to the issue of poverty and starvation. The struggle is one between critical judgment and compassion. Compassion loses every time.

Ancient Mariner

The public service is to keep the reader informed about violations of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution which states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Below is an excerpt from Politico’s tech newsletter:

Mobile phones are becoming more essential and more powerful. But they aren’t keeping up with phone spyware, which is getting more aggressive and harder to detect.

As it does, an unsettling vision of the future is arising: One where we all carry surveillance devices without intending to.

It sounds dystopian, but that future is more or less arriving now. The mobile devices of politicians, human rights defenders, journalists, and other individuals have been compromised — all by so-called Pegasus spyware made by Israeli company NSO Group, which the Commerce Department blacklisted last year. This advanced spyware can be installed on devices through what are called “zero-click” vulnerabilities, where the spyware installs itself without the targeted individual clicking on a malicious link or doing anything to activate it. And once Pegasus has infiltrated a phone, there’s no easy way to tell it’s there.“

When someone steals your personal pornography or pants size, you ought to be reimbursed at market prices.

On other good news, three Gen Zers are running for Congress. It’s about time! One is a Trumper, two are progressives (Zs are born between 1997 and 2012).

Ancient Mariner