Oh Dear

A few days ago mariner was visiting the local establishment with a relative. A point was made that saying ‘dear’ to a woman is a mild form of sexual assault, an assumption that there is more to the relationship than simple conversation. Oh dear. It is true that he likely would not address a man using ‘dear’ but the use of the word in conversation, depending on the tone of course, implies appreciation and respect – at a minimum a word of acknowledgement. Mariner asked the woman behind the counter if she objected to being called ‘dear’. She said, “No honey, you can call me dear anytime”.

Oh dear. Will ‘dear’ go the way of ‘gay’?

It seems the American language is undergoing truncation. Mariner read that the Z generation has cut the word ‘charisma’ to ‘rizz’. Everyone already knows about ‘woke’, the word describing educated democrats – what happened to ‘elite’? Before we know it, we’ll all sound like we’re from Philadelphia.

On the other hand, Donald uses vitriol in his speech to extreme, punitive ends. While his use of these words may not imply sexual assault (at least mariner doesn’t think so), he abuses the courtesy expected in any conversation. It is no wonder Donald has been ordered to cease and desist by the courts. Donald should learn how to say ‘dear’.

Ancient Mariner

The Plastic Christmas

Mariner is just old enough to remember when an important holiday event included acknowledging the religious significance of the season. Church services and the rituals of Hanukkah and even of Kwanzaa were a not-to-be-missed event during the holidays.

Except in the most ecclesiastical circles, this is no longer the case. Why? The cultures of the entire planet seem to be melting away but nothing seems to be taking their place.

It is his speculation that participation in spiritual rituals is a personal, perhaps private experience. Rituals are for restoring order and allegiance to ‘absolute’ reality, for realigning faith in self through unity in universal holiness. He suspects that the importance of survival and continuity in daily life may be the provocation for realigning one’s life with spiritual guidelines. Each of the religions mentioned has a common thread that says “faith will make you whole”.

Yet the human experience over the decades has been one of disbursement, of dissemination, and of decreasing need for societal relationships, even with the Holy spirits; diversity has diminished the intimacy that one has with universal faith. Without spiritual judgment, the dissolution of unity has made faith less important. Metaphorically, it is as though the beans of spirituality have been run through a grinder, leaving a formless, powdered society.

Much of this feeling may be attributed to those in the Silent Generation, a generation from a culture that disappeared long ago. Still, where is the new faith? Where is the spiritual bond with the Universe that makes one whole? Is modern society a ship without a compass?

Ancient Mariner

Communal life survives

The holiday season has begun and the town is enjoying itself with many appropriately focused activities. The willingness to volunteer is widespread. The churches, of course, are providing special dinners and services; the town has a day called “Merry on Main Street” where many commercial businesses are providing space and resources. There are locations where children can buy presents for their parents; a soup supper at the fire station; the library has Santa and Mrs. Claus; the local bank has a treat stop with cookies and other treats; there is a dance performance, and a truck and trailer that tours the streets, replete with Christmas lights and loud speakers, and a band playing Christmas carols. All volunteer.

Mariner visited a nearby town to hear a volunteer choir. The event is to support the continued survival of an old church whose architecture is historical. Those who participate provide many hours of practice and perform two shows and provide an open meal on the shore of the Mississippi River. All volunteer.

How wonderful is this reality compared to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, smart phones and Alexa, and 24 hours per day of horrific news broadcasts.

The magic comes from an honest desire from each individual to share themselves with the community. The motives are intensely apolitical and not commercial. Sharing is the spirit; a chance for individuals to share and identify with their community and its citizens.

These events are an excellent chance to get out of the house and the work rut to meet citizens in an informal and nonthreatening environment. Mariner’s use of the Cheers theme song rings true: “Every one is glad you came and everyone knows your name!

At a library sponsored Christmas dinner for its staff, Mariner met a probation officer! Mariner once was a probation officer, too (1970s). The two of us shared war stories. Now, how often does one meet a probation officer?

This communal world is really what a supposedly democratic philosophy is all about. It is locally managed, innocent, non-money-making, non-self aggrandizement that our government should be protecting. Dictatorships won’t do it; the current scary republican party won’t do it; a dysfunctional, weaponized Congress won’t do it.

Vote on behalf of your local community’s well being. The reader has an especially serious responsibility to get it right on voting day.

Ancient Mariner

More on systemic adaptation

In the last post, mariner used the transition from cash to online as an example of how humans shift behavior because that is how everyone else does it and there is some benefit attached. Money, credit cards and online shopping are obvious systemic adaptations – even the first telephone was a systemic adaptation. However, systemic adaptation is more complex when it is political, emotional or behavioral conditioning.

For example, is the MAGA movement an example of systemic adaptation? Why has a significant portion of the citizenry modified their behavior in a very similar fashion? What happened in our society that provoked this unified behavior?

Even more subtle is the shift in attitude within the democratic party. Why did the party become elitist and forget its roots in labor? Was it because everyone was behaving that way, aka systemic adaptation?

Why is it that rural folks typically are conservative while city folks tend to be liberal? The common behavior is too precise to be an individually determined mindset. Why is there a distinct difference in assumptions when comparing a rural town, a suburb and a slum?

It turns out that systemic adaptation is the same awareness that explains how a flock of thousands of birds can swirl through the air without breaking formation. It is a common subconscious ability in any species that requires social awareness – birds, mammals and even some fish.

Giving the frontal lobes their due, conscious manipulation of the environment is a survival skill that requires conscious focus and abstract reasoning – just like beavers, mice, magpies, monkeys and apes.

But most of our survival is managed by a deeply complex subconscious machine which requires an approval before anything is decided – frontal lobes included. It is the subconscious that allows humans to behave as they do – good or bad; the subconscious mind can be flawed like anything else.

Given a rare and extremely unusual reasoning power, humans are capable of complex uses of systemic adaptation. Hence, humans, clearly a social creature, adjust their behavior in many ways (MAGA or democrat? bowling league or flower club? college graduate or service worker? engineer or poet? parent or single?) adjusting social behavior accordingly.

What has motivated mariner to ponder systemic adaptability is the paradox in the last post: Do politicians, economists, and corporations control our systemic behavior or do we as citizens allow them to do so because of our indifference – in itself a systemic adaptation?

In any case, the trope is true: birds of a feather . . . .

Ancient Mariner

 

Catch up

Greetings, Readers

Real life distractions have drawn him away from the blog. Perhaps a few catch up thoughts should be offered.

Guru passed along some thoughts. Electing Biden for the first term was the right move; his personality, leadership style and long experience in Federal Government were the right move to heal Donald’s abrasions to government operations and establish momentum in national politics. Joe has done that despite COVID, inflation, the border wars and a prejudiced Congress. He moved policy toward dealing with global warming and several discretionary programs that were important to the citizenry.

Guru believes Biden made a serious mistake when he kept Kamala Harris as Vice President. Joe has a lot of dissatisfied democrats for several reasons, the most important being what democrat will take the lead in 2024. Joe was supposed to heal and leave. In 2024, he is facing rebellion among the state parties and progressives; he is suffering generally from public opinion about his age. Further, a slowly growing rebellion is showing up in Latino citizens, who, like the MAGAs, were never made welcome in the elitist democratic party. It was Biden’s duty to create a new democratic leader for national politics. Guru believes that if Biden had made his Vice President a strong leader personality three years ago, especially if that leader had good relations with Latinos, the 2024 election would be a landslide for the democrats. Imagine if the next democratic candidate for President took the stage and said, “Hablo Español!

Amos complained most about the Federal Government being grossly incompetent when dealing with artificial intelligence, health and welfare, corporate monopolies, all global warming issues from drought in the west, flooding in the south, reduction of oil dependency, etc., and wonders why Marjorie Taylor Greene has so much influence in Republican issues.

Has anyone seen Chicken Little? Please don’t say the word ‘apocalypse’.

Ancient Mariner

Doodling

Doodling is when the brain needs a new battery or an oil change or something. It is a state when one is compelled to think about something when there is nothing to think about. This is a major disease for mariner. Think of Atlas holding up the world; mariner can hold up the world, too, so he has time to doodle.

Take the issue of snails. When mariner was young, he was playing in Grandmother’s garden with his toy soldiers and trucks when he came upon his first garden snail. He was mesmerized by the odd shape, funny face and the just ‘trotting along’ nature it had. The snail is a wonderful item to doodle about.

Did you know snails are hermaphrodites that can bear children alone? Thank goodness – no time for slam, bang, thank you ma’am with snails.

Doodles can be brought into a dimensional world by sharing them with others. For example, he is blessed with a good friend as his PCP and with his staff. Upon each visit, mariner will stop by the office space where administrators and nurses are busy with their computers. He  clearly interrupts things to introduce any silly topic, usually a silly puzzle or a pun. For example, “What does the world look like through snail eyes?

On one occasion, mariner pondered, “Are any of you old enough to bear children?” (trust him, they all were). “Here is a simple puzzle you may take home to your children to see if they can solve it:”

A man stands on one side of a river; his pet dog stands on the other side of the river. The man calls the dog to come and the dog comes across the river to his master. What is interesting is that the dog is completely dry when it arrives beside its master. There were no bridges or boats, etc., how did the dog cross the river and still be dry?

[The reader may take time to doodle]

Everyone at the nurse’s station knows the deliberate, annoying interference by mariner upon very busy folk is a joke and as such has been accepted; it has become a fun tradition. The rule is to keep the whole experience to less than two minutes.

Doodling is best, though, keeping it to yourself. Hmm, what does the world look like to a snail? Snails and humans both know a good cabbage when they see it. Hmm, does the snail ‘see’ with its foot? Do snails have smell? Did humans first discover cabbage with smell or taste just like a snail? Does a cabbage leaf look the same to a human and to a snail?

Ancient Mariner

News can be distracting

McCarthy kicked out, eh. Talk about distraction! Today’s news is becoming so diverse and scattered across the subjects of human life that one may need advanced degrees to understand the nuance, detail and motivation of daily news – maybe even a cheat sheet with meanings for fancy words and acronyms. What follows are a few samples of distraction caused by diversity:

֎ Did you know New York City is sinking? Not just flooding but sinking, too. Here’s a clip from NASA:

“Mapping vertical land motion across the New York City area, researchers found the land sinking (indicated in blue) by about 0.06 inches (1.6 millimeters) per year on average. They also detected modest uplift (shown in red) in Queens and Brooklyn. White dotted lines indicate county/borough borders.”

֎ The new computer/human relationship. Computers are about to be released into the quantum physics world; bits and bytes are passe. Very soon computers will be able to make decisions at the speed of light. Information will not need algorithms, it will capture the shift of electron states. Yes, distracting because no one knows what that means. To assist, mariner copies from an old post metaphor about quantum physics:

Driving down a highway, in front of you a car enters the highway from a ramp; it appeared to you as a known entity called a car.

However, Quantum says, “No, not so fast”. The car just didn’t assemble itself out of nothing the moment you saw it; what events caused the car to appear at that moment?

For example, did the car turn on the highway just over the hill or has it been on the road for two days coming from New Jersey? How did the driver come to be in the car at that moment? Why is it a Subaru? Why is it on that highway? What time did it depart so that you would experience it at that moment?

Quantum computers know all these answers simultaneously. What quantum computers respond to is a change in electron relationships, not the electrons themselves – just like you did when, at the speed of light, you saw a car.

No busy person enjoys wandering around in quantum physics but the point here is that computers will think the exact same way humans do. Will computers do irrational things that Donald or Elon would do?

Ancient Mariner

We are in debt

Mariner and his wife were talking about things in general when a meaningful metaphor emerged:

Every animal on the planet has to pay cash. Humans, however, have a credit card and it is maxed out.

Humans have, to be succinct, trashed the planet and its resources without paying for it. Suddenly, overdue statements are confronting humans – bills for global warming, oligarchical hoarding, fractured social mores and irrational distribution of populations.

Got any cash?

Ancient Mariner

Roller-coaster history

֎ The first significant example of a railroad train was in 1825. By the 1860s trains had replaced most canal and river trade. Unless one was engaged in commerce, daily life still was limited to how far a horse could travel, how fast, how much weight it could pull, how much it could lift, and was the only means to travel into town.

The first marketable automobile was built in 1886. It wasn’t until 1908 when Henry Ford began mass production of automobiles. Before then, daily society was dependent on the limitations of the horse to execute daily chores and social life.

In 1969, just 63 years later, men were walking on the moon. Interstates, automobiles, busses, trucks, trains, farm equipment, airplanes and shuttles left the horse and its associated cultures in a forgotten past.

֎ The first public radio broadcasting network was established in 1924 when AT&T linked 12 stations around New York City using telephone lines. The first global network using telephone technology was established in 1950. Televisions were a public utility by 1954.

A computer was taught to play checkers in 1951. The actual development for broad use of AI was in 1956.

The first satellite global network was launched in 1958.

The internet was launched by the military in 1965.

The first Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM) was implemented in Finland in 1991.

The original social media application occurred in 1975, Facebook began in 1995, Twitter in 2015.

In 2023, just 72 years after the first network, the entire planet is in the midst of a massive culture change affecting every behavior from war and the definition of a nation to everyday life with artificial humans. Will marriage to a sex doll become legitimate?

Oh, for the limitations of a horse.

Ancient Mariner

Time Travel

If you remember the melody, sing the lyrics – out loud with enthusiasm!

[Verse 1]
Oh Stewball was a racehorse
And I wish he were mine
He never drank water
He always drank wine
[Verse 2]
His bridle was silver
His mane it was gold
And the worth of his saddle
Has never been told
[Verse 3]
Oh the fairgrounds were crowded
And Stewball was there
But the betting was heavy
On the bay and the mare
[Verse 4]
And a-way up yonder
Ahead of them all
Came a-prancin’ and a-dancin’
My noble Stewball
[Verse 5]
I bet on the grey mare
I bet on the bay
If I’d have bet on ol’ Stewball
I’d be a free man today
. . . .
Peter, Paul and Mary, 1963
. . . .
Ancient Mariner