Category Archives: Culture

Best measure of national content

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Generally speaking, the way a nation measures its economic health is by measuring its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is an economic phrase that means ‘how much profit ls generated’. Since the Second World War, the US economic strategy has been ‘big is better’ leading to large, monopolistic corporations, international trade control and sustaining controlled inflation/deflation. Donald reminds us of how profit is manipulated through tariffs. As things stand today, the United States is the wealthiest nation in the world.

But something doesn’t seem right. Would it then be true that small is worse? Does this delineation lead to hoarding the better and ignoring the worse? Afraid so, that’s how capitalism works. Charity is okay as long as it is voluntary. Mandated charity (Is that like a penalty for being wealthy?) is verboten.

GDP is just one item in a long table of contributing issues as to what makes a nation happy – not just wealthy. In population polls of all the nations, the US is ranked 16th to 23rd in most polls and one source reports the US at 63rd) as a ‘happy’ nation. It is interesting but clearly demonstrative that certain elements of society play a larger role than ‘bigger is better’. Eleven of the top twelve happiest nations are dominated by a similar social structure. They are:   Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand and Costa Rica.

This conclusion is based on Gallup polling data collected over the past three years from 143 countries, with researchers evaluating six critical factors: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption both internally and externally.

֎ GDP per capita. ‘Per capita’ means per person rather than the typical use to measure a nation’s situation. This measurement is the average income of all citizens individually. It includes not only well-to-do citizens but citizens from all income levels – including those with no income.

֎ Social Support. This category includes government programs that support the citizenry, e.g., Medicare, Social Services, child care, social security, food stamps, minimum wage, etc.

֎ Healthy Life Expectancy. This category focuses on price controls for various costs related not only to health and prescriptions but also to assisted living and living conditions generally.

֎ Freedom to make life choices. Distracting issues like racism, class discrimination, sexual constraints like birth control, abortion and homosexuality, education policy, restrictions caused by disruption from zoning, home owner associations, tax and insurance policies, and corporate intrusion all impose on an individual’s desire to make independent decisions about life choices.

֎ Generosity. There are two types: government and citizenry. It is a matter of behavioral attitude for both. Governments can be oppressive and finite about social policy or they can adopt some awareness of social need and exception. A US example is the battle over minimum wage, which is far behind the effects of inflation. Food stamps and rental policies which avoid competitive pricing are other examples.

On the citizenry side, Housing Associations are notorious for constraining individual desires. Another is the atmosphere of unanimity in communities. [In a recent post, mariner alluded to the influence of a common industry and multi-generational families contributing to a unified society.] Large corporations can choose to support employee needs outside the workplace by ‘joining the community’ or simply impose their presence in a way that can, in the extreme, wipe out a whole neighborhood.

֎ Perceptions of corruption both internally and externally. This category is likely to be the real reason the US is ranked as the 23rd happiest nation. Corruption is de rigueur in the US. Since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, unions have been busted, the tax code is dangerously imbalanced, elected officials see their own security and lifestyle as more important, rental prices are not competitive, Corporate America is completely self-managed and owes no support for American society. Lest we go on . . . .

Many times mariner has heard the comment, “If Trump buys Canada, where else can I move?” Try Finland, perpetually the happiest nation in the world.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Where is everyone?

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Mariner has written many posts about how social relationships are affected by economics, industrialism and technology. Most often, the relationship turns out to be a visible impact on specific generations. Because of the age break in generations, typically twenty years, and because the average active lifespan of humans has been around three generations, he has proposed that every sixty years a community will have significant social and economic changes.

For example, small to medium rural towns have followed the ‘sixty’ rule for three successions. The first significant change occurred around the turn of the century (1900) when automobiles and tractors changed farm practices and opened direct marketing of farm products to a much larger territory. Suddenly, in just a few years, farms had to be much larger to accommodate supply and demand. Access to a railroad line was a big advantage.

This shift in economics took an entire generation’s time to buy and sell farms, switch from horses to machinery, and to modify farm production. The population did not shift notably because these changes required lots of rural support from family farms to family banks to farm industries.

Forty years later World War II intervened. Farm families experienced the first significant migration away from rural population to factories in cities and joining the military which offered generous college benefits to GIs.

Rounding out the first 60-year loop, a large industrial influence was an active era of building US highways, interstates, train, bus and air services. This made it easier for an entire generation to leave local areas to seek better income and education. Many GIs took advantage of college benefits to leave farming for other careers.

This was during the 1960s. In 1964 Mariner moved from a big eastern city to this small town. The social structure still was dominated by large, multi-generational families. But something was missing. In the sixties, almost an entire population of high school graduates left for college and commercial opportunities elsewhere. Mariner was able to enjoy a still-functioning farm culture, a unique experience for him. But by the 1970s and especially into the 1980s, ‘family’ farms no longer existed; not only did high school students leave but many families sold smaller farms because of economic pressures.

The third 60-yearloop, until today, has seen a further drop in population which caused most small businesses to disappear, churches began to suffer from dropping attendance and the active farm culture was not the social influence it once was. The town, slowly through to today, has become a residential neighborhood where jobs are found elsewhere.

Mariner and his wife, now seasoned members of the town, have noticed the final phase of the third 60-cycle: Friends are dying; family members are dying; most of the town is populated by newcomers. No one knows everyone anymore. It is becoming a town which has no connection to its past.

When he moved back to town, mariner memorized all the street names in the town as an aid to finding his way around. Still, old folks, when he asks where someone lives, most often will say, “You know, over behind Carl’s old house.” Mariner lives in a section of town where until many decades ago a farm was across the road; older residents still cite that farm.

Mariner and his wife are losing friends and relatives rather frequently. Where is everyone?

Ancient Mariner

Collections

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What does the reader collect? Books of fiction? perhaps many cookbooks or manuals or business notes or hobbies? Mariner’s wife is a librarian, an avid fiction reader, and has a collection of books about authors. Mariner’s life has been a knock about life jumping from job to job, from hobby to hobby, from theology to physics to Pogo comic books to collections of tapes, discs and books about TV shows and popular music.

Mariner and his wife have built a tornado shelter made of books and CDs. But it is that time. It comes for everyone: the collections gather dust; some books have vanished from memory until they are found among boxes of books kept in the attic because the bookshelves are full, many books are inherited from parents and family, many reflect hobbies and interests long past their time. But time and circumstance persist: it may be the right thing to pare the collection to a needed minimum.

This is a hard moment. Books are part of our existence. Books are full of memories just like our brain. As an experiment, pull out an old book from a certain time in your life. Leafing through its pages, you are transported to another time, another version of your life. These are meaningful memories.

Mariner’s habit of using metaphors may explain, perhaps, why one feels so protective of their collections. First, a description of the example: Telomeres are tiny hairs on the end of each chromosome. Their job is to count the number of times a chromosome can reproduce itself. Eventually, the hairs fall away and the chromosome will stop reproducing itself. The term for that is ‘aging’.

That is exactly why collectors are hesitant to give away their collections: a book is a telomere. Casting away the collection is paramount to acknowledging the end is drawing near. We are no longer producing our lives.

But the ‘chromosome’ will, at a given moment, surrender its telomeres for practical purposes – usually when having to move to another home.

Yes, like a telomere, books are part of our internal life experience. Nevertheless, time requires the transition.

Ancient Mariner

Dormancy

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One doesn’t usually think of dormancy as an active response to a situation. It is common to recognize dormancy in bears and frogs and of course in the plant world where endless species shut down to a dormant, death-like state for the winter. Even Homo can use dormancy, a dormancy with gradations.

For the last two weeks of zero temperatures, sleet, bitter winds and snow, mariner chooses to be a bear – almost. He does sleep a lot more, a privilege of being a retired bear, but he is restrained to his lair. He peers out the window of his lair to see a barren, white world. The only sound is the wind whistling against the window.

It would be nice if, like the bear, Homo could gather fat in warmer times then use it to pay for heat in the winter.

Homo has learned to use dormancy as a tool. For example, attics and basements are put in a state of dormancy on purpose. Another example is spring cleaning. Does this mean we would be a dirty bear all winter? Of course not – we borrowed this style of dormancy from the frog who hibernates in soft muck just below the frost line.

In the final analysis, though, Homos aren’t hibernators. If Homos aren’t careful about their style of dormancy, that word converts to loneliness, depression and even ill health. Homos are forced to continue to live an active life that energizes, that socializes, that sees the end of dormancy. Otherwise, we live the life of the sparrows, many of which don’t make it to greener times.

Ancient Mariner

Mother Earth’s Code of ethics

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Mariner has been reading and watching educational shows more than usual because the rife of today’s world seems beyond the pale. One is horrified when one sees how much of humanity lives life in ten square feet of bombed ruins with no water and no dependable food sources.

One thinks of the atrocities put on Native Americans, slaves and oppressed conditions even today subject to rape, physical beating and forced labor.

How did the American buffalo deal with forced extinction by humans? How do lobsters off the coast of Connecticut deal with warming water that forces them to migrate to Canadian waters? And the Coral Reefs, a sizable community of many types of plant and animal life – how do they feel about looming extinction?

Then there are the billions of years that passed before us; what did all the reptiles think when an asteroid changed the planet forever?

It seems that the core morality of Mother Earth responds to a different code of ethics than her inhabitants would like. Are humans too brash when they discount life in the same manner as Mother Earth? Have humans adopted the planet’s ethical model that allows disregard for normalcy and slower evolutionary change? It makes one think of the Holocaust where thousands of humans were disposed of without acknowledgement of the value of human life. One learns that on Planet Earth, buffalo and humans are equal in value.

Ancient Mariner

About Era shifting

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Greetings, Readers

It has been pleasant, if not rewarding, avoiding television news. Watching headlines is a lot like taking slaps to the face over and over. Mariner does keep track generally through his own news email services and a number of trustworthy magazines. Television still has its saving grace through shows like NOVA (PBS) and documentaries on Netflix.

Just the other night PBS ran a show about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two early presidents who had different perceptions about the structure and role of the emerging United States. They fought tooth and nail and were brutal politically. Honestly, there were as many dirty tricks as one witnesses with politics today. An important difference was that back then, each political battle added to the Constitution with the intent of strengthening the nation whereas today it is petty payback and disassembling the Constitution without a plan to improve it.

The general observation mariner took from the show was that moving from one era to another, whether presidents, migrating fowl or coral reefs, it is grotesquely disruptive to normal expectations. There is abuse at the individual level. New rules are yet to be known.

So it was with those early days when Europe, Russia and The United States (and indigenous natives) had several wars to determine how the new world would be split among nations.

Similarly, today a new economic future that has little to do with contemporary practices has led to a global scramble to acquire a dominant position in the ‘new world’. What frightens mariner is that the planet has its own Trumpian plan to force human life to pay for the ‘borrowing’ of too much of nature’s resources – including global warming, overpopulation and gross extinction of the planet’s biomass.

Under the circumstances, the best one can do is to love family, share with the community and be careful about insecure assets and income.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner

Good AI perspective

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Virtually every commentary about AI approaches the topic at a too low perspective: the impact on jobs, privacy, energy vulnerability, etc. In fact, AI is a global issue that will change global politics, global trade and a new era of feeding the world. Below is an expert’s insights as to how AI will change the world – worth reading. From AXIOS:

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-167e2440-d545-11ef-86f8-718f1121da12.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Ancient Mariner

How does Holy Father Trump sound?

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The only daily news mariner reads are the email titles from news websites. He avoids television news. However, given a decent education and actively pursuing information during two presidential elections, he has a perspective about the way things are going. More than once he read headlines about two billionaire preachers trying to turn the US government into a theocracy – an awkward interpretation of the spirit of Jesus similar to what Rome did 2,400 years ago.

Anyone who takes the New Testament even half seriously asks about billionaire preachers. Isn’t that a blatant oxymoron? How can a representative of Jesus’ instruction that one is with God only when giving, sharing or helping become a billionaire? Remember the main parable about the Good Samaritan? Samaritan Jews and traditional Jews did not get along well (sort of like Protestants and Catholics} but a Samaritan is traveling in traditional Jewish neighborhoods when he comes upon an injured Jew by the side of the road. The Samaritan gets the Jew to an inn, pays his housing costs and assures the innkeeper that he will cover medical costs. Mariner is pretty sure the Samaritan is not a billionaire in Rome-dominated Israel.

At a minimum what the preachers are doing is even worse than what Donald is doing. Metaphorically, if the nation were a shrub, Donald is using shears to cut it to the ground but is possible that the shrub will grow back; the preachers want to pull the shrub out by the root.

Of course one of the benefits is that the US congregation will have its own pope – probably a billionaire.

Ancient Mariner

Are we tongue tied?

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As many folks may experience, a sound sleep may be disturbed by a brain chasing some weird thoughts during the night. Mariner experienced this phenomenon last night when he was disturbed through the night by his brain struggling with language.
This time it was the troubles humans have because they must use the same sounds over and over again for different words because the human limits on making different sounds cannot handle the billions of words humans have invented. So humans have to use the same sound for many different words and meanings. Just a few simple one-syllable examples:
Cow, now, sow, plow, mean, bean, lean, tree, flee, see, flea, sea, etc.
If one sounds out the vowel letters in the alphabet (a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y, which is redundant to i), that’s about the limit of different noises a human can make. Humans try to stretch these sounds so they can invent more words. That is called slurring, or respectfully, dialect.
So humans use five sounds over and over and over again by attaching distortions of the throat, mouth, tongue, teeth, lips and jaw. These noises are called consonants.
Twenty-six letters constitute all the letters one is supposed to need to make words. But it isn’t that easy thanks to the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between 1400 and 1600. The shift made it easier to invent more words with the same vowel noises. Check these examples:
plough as well as plow, slough as well as slough – tricky, one uses the ‘ow’ sound, the other uses the ‘u’ sound; the other direction to make more words with no more vowels is to combine words, allowing vowels to be used more than once in one word. For example, tie dye as a simple one and Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a complex one that means ‘fear of big words’, something about which Icelandic and Welsh languages have no concern.
What would it be like to be a crow and have to develop an entire vocabulary based on ‘caw’ noises. They have, you know.
So mariner can understand the problems ChatGPT (which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) has trying to capture nuance and relevancy in human languages.
The dialect piece can be entertaining. Jimmie Carter and Fats Domino never end a word with the ‘ur’ sound; mariner’s friend from Boston puts ‘ur’ noises wherever he likes.
Thinking further, one wonders how the vowel noises are represented in sign language, There are only so many gyrations of the face, arms and hands.

Ancient Mariner

Thanks for reading the post

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No doubt readers have had enough fantasizing about archaeology and the role of humans. Today the post is about the behavior that keeps humans and communities bound to one another. This bonding is not limited to humans but also includes many of our mammal friends.

Mariner’s daughter, an excellent published author, came across a poem that she shared with her family:

Small Kindnesses
by Danusha Lameris 
 
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk 
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
An sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. 
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead – you first,” “I like your hat.” 

It is remarkable how this poem calms us and makes us feel secure. Our interpersonal behavior, at its most intimate and respectful moments, is the strong glue that holds society together. These simple, often automatic comments are what strengthens complex ideas like “equality”, “all men are created equal” and “one man, one vote”. These gestures and comments should reflect out into our political behavior.

The presence of weaponized politics is the absence of small gestures that are above ideology.These gestures and comments also lie beneath bonding – a desire to unify and find security in belonging by sharing similarities rather than differences. Everyone likes to be respected, to feel valued, to feel uniquely important. How powerful is the effect of offering a seat on the bus to an unknown person. Do you know they murdered their mother? Of course not but bonding goes beyond prejudice, beyond race, beyond station. Bonding is the glue of civilization.

It is our human responsibility to sustain community by acting in the manner of Danusha Lameris’ poem.

Ancient Mariner