Category Archives: Science

NASA Website

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A very interesting place to visit once in a while is the website of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). There are many articles shedding light on global conditions around the planet. The mariner lists three to whet the reader’s appetite:

(NASA) released a study of the Earth’s aquifers using new satellite technology that studied the 37 largest aquifers from 2003 to 2013. The study reported that one-third of the aquifers are stressed. The most stressed are in heavily populated and frequently poor areas. To see map and report go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwater-basins-in-distress

Another study reported that it would take 11 trillion gallons of water to replenish California’s loss during the four-year drought. Go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/december/nasa-analysis-11-trillion-gallons-to-replenish-california-drought-losses

Study shows increasing carbon emissions could increase US droughts. Droughts in the U.S. Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study. Two very good videos are available showing the drought regions:

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/february/nasa-study-finds-carbon-emissions-could-dramatically-increase-risk-of-us

There are many more NASA reports about the condition of the Earth. It’s worth a visit once in a while.

Ancient Mariner

 

Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere

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The mariner was reading one of his touchstone websites http://esciencenews.com/ when he came across an article about the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It turns out that there is little trace of dinosaurs in the tropics. The only life in the tropics was small predecessors of alligators and crocodiles.

This was due to the high fluctuations in weather, going from extended periods of drought and devastating fires to extended periods of wetness. Most dinosaurs were unable to survive the variability and stayed away from the tropics.

The carbon in the atmosphere was six times what it is now. For reference, that is 2,400 parts per million 200 million years ago and 400 parts per million today. Nevertheless, we have an insight as to how weather patterns will slowly change as carbon levels increase. The Amazon rain forest is in the tropics….

A closer analysis that comes from current data suggests that energy in the atmosphere will continue to grow in coming decades. This means weather will have more severe differences between high pressure systems and low pressure systems. Further, big storms like hurricanes, monsoons and shear wind speeds (along with the accompanying tornadoes) will occur more frequently and more intensely.

The weather in Texas and Oklahoma (where much fossil fuel is produced – is there poetic justice here?) this year is not a measure of long term consequences. Individuals often mistake one year’s activity as a trend (consider Jim Inhofe throwing a snowball in Congress, suggesting that global warming is a myth).

But the warning flags are up. It will take a long time to bring together enough nations to control Big Oil. It will take decades. All the while, carbon builds in the atmosphere. Even if we humans can live with it (have you seen news clips that show Chinese citizens wearing breathing masks?), the creatures in the oceans cannot. Carbon Dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere by the ocean. The ocean can only absorb so much Carbon Dioxide before acidity becomes a destructive environment. Coral reefs already are dying at an alarming rate; reefs are the source of life for literally millions of creatures in the oceans.

The mariner, a lover of the ocean and all that is in it, fears the indifference of Homo sapiens. He knows if the oceans die, humans will be extinct. Don’t let computers and technology fool the reader – the Earth is in charge.

Ancient Mariner

Po Pouree

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Know Thyself – Read the Comics

Today, Sunday May 24, 2015, the mariner’s local newspaper defined him, in his entirety, with only two comic strips, one following the other on the same page. The first strip was Peanuts, a rerun from 1968; the second was Dilbert.

The mariner has maintained throughout his life that comic strips and single-pane cartoons are the most important section of the newspaper. The comics have a sly way of slipping through one’s prejudice, ignorance, and lack of emotional maturity to plant the seed of a new insight. Think for a moment how comics reflect basic angst that often affects each of us. Think for a moment how comics can reflect an entire segment of our culture in one cartoon. Think for a moment how narrow minded we would be if we could not laugh at ourselves. Simultaneously, comics are irreverent, biased, simplistic, insightful, hilarious and wise.

Each of us is a complex conglomeration of evolution that began billions of years ago. It is no exaggeration that we entered life as no more than a cluster of chemicals that could replicate and today we are warm blooded, mammalian, intelligent (relative to other creatures although we lack the skills they possess) and now we stand on the edge of a future that will allow us to manage our own evolution. God forbid.

We have brains that use deduction and induction in an unbelievably powerful way, reducing complex knowledge to a few simple terms; who defined motion across the entire universe with the formula E=MC2 ? Each of us can read a thousand words in a momentary facial expression. Each of us – well, most of us – can deduce years of history from a single cartoon. As complex as we are, each of us can be fully defined in one comic strip with faster speed and more acuity than if defined by a psychiatrist.

John Nash

Tragically, John Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in an automobile accident yesterday. Do you remember the movie A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe as John Nash? The mariner became a big fan of the movie, John Nash, and the subtleties of game theory. Nash won the Nobel Prize for Mathematics in 1994. Game theory studies interactive decision-making, where the outcome for each participant or “player” depends on the actions of all players individually. Consequently, whether an individual, business, government or sewing circle, we play game theory in virtually every activity – even buying groceries, a game between us, the market and the producers. Nash was able to prove mathematically that ‘equilibrium’ is an actual state of being at all times, like a chess board is always present no matter who wins the game or how they play it. However, the chess board limits squares in such a way that a player must consider what the opponent’s strategy is in order to make his or her own best move.

The most familiar demonstration of game theory is applied in virtually every cop show on television. It’s called The Prisoner’s Dilemma:

The police interrogate two suspects separately, and suggest to each that he or she should snitch on the other and turn state’s evidence. If the other does not snitch, then you can cut a good deal for yourself by giving evidence against the other; if the other snitches and you hold out, the court will treat you especially harshly. Thus, no matter what the other does, it is better for you to snitch than not to snitch — snitching is your uniformly best or ‘dominant’ strategy. This is the case whether the two of you are guilty or innocent. Of course, when both snitch, they both fare worse than they would have if both had held out; but that outcome, though jointly desirable for them, collapses in the face of their separate temptations to snitch.

The mariner apologizes for being pedantic; his dominant strategy was to share why John Nash is important to everyone. The mariner snitched.

Oh, Those Promiscuous Neandertals

The following is an excerpt from Scientific American letters to the editors. The mariner sent it to a few family members in an email. They just will have to read it again. He included the writer’s response because it shows how we can be caught up in our own value system without including peripheral knowledge simply because it doesn’t fit easily into our values:

When the mariner was in his thirties, the scientific explanation for red-headed Homo sapiens was due to occasional inter-species sex with neandertals. It has been proven by DNA studies that we do have a small piece of neandertal in us. However, “occasional inter-species sex” has been thrown out. Read the response to a woman who wrote of neandertal ‘dalliances’ in her February article in Scientific American.

“OUR MURDEROUS ANCESTORS
Kate Wong’s suppositions about what brought about neandertals’ extinction in “Neandertal Minds” are contrary to the known history of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (that is, us). Her assertions that neandertals were just out competed and that the 1.5 to 2.1 percent neandertal DNA within people outside of Africa is the result of occasional “dalliances” would be historically unlikely.

The most likely scenario would involve waves of immigrating anatomically modern humans taking over land and causing death by plunder and disease, as Europeans discovering the New World did. And it would be naive to think that our neandertal DNA was the result of consensual dalliances when rape went hand in hand with the pillage of every other civilization.

It would be wise for us to give up the notion that we are, or our ancestors before us were, a benevolent and sharing species.

ROBERT E. MARX
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine”

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Lingering Themes

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The mariner hasn’t written much lately. It’s a combination of spring gardening labor and the tsunami of events around the world. There are several old sayings that go along the lines of “What you think isn’t worth a spit in the ocean.” Sadly, that is true. The only tool any one of us has is our vote and our desire to volunteer beyond a normal commitment.

When Justice Roberts said money is the same as speech, he cleared the last obstacle to oligarchy. Some can speak much more loudly than others.

Well, one has seen the benefit of voting. The mariner wonders how untrustworthy his fellow voters have been given election results and the fact that millions follow Fox Broadcasting, Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Laura Calder doesn’t bother the mariner because all she can do is character assassination; little of what she says has content. Then there’s Sarah and Michele Bachman. Only the presence of Jon Stewart has kept us sane – and Jon ends his show August 9th.

We will see what the future brings as 22 republicans and 1 democrat vie for the next Presidential term. The mariner says one democrat because the few democrats running beside Clinton are more interested in raising liberal issues and keeping Hillary as far left of center as possible. In retrospect, history has shown that the Clintons are survivalists first, pragmatic centrists second, and ideologues last.

If you are a regular reader, you know that the mariner is firmly opposed to fast tracking the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership). The reason that progressives, unions and liberal organizations like AARP and women’s advocacies are opposed to fast tracking is the fact that no one in the negotiations represents the common man; the worker; the issues of minimum wage and benefits.

The argument presented by Obama is that TPP will create more jobs in the US and provide more opportunity for export – not to mention that most American workers won’t make much more than minimum wage. There is no opportunity to discuss worker issues similar to equal pay, employee-owned, retirement benefits, profit sharing and other economic devices that will lift the middle class to where it belongs.

Another issue in the news, that sadly shows the nasty side of capitalism, is the number of oil wells and railroads built within 1,000 feet of ICBM silos in North Dakota. Properly, this alarming situation can’t be represented here. The mariner suggests you watch Rachel Maddow’s video report at

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/oil-trains-alarmingly-near-nuclear-missiles-444408387996

Six workers have died due to lax (and illegal) safety regulations.

Lastly, climate change speaks more loudly as the days roll by. Nothing will be done by the United States until the ranking democratic member (Barbara Boxer (D)) becomes chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Currently the chairman is Jim Inhofe (R) Oklahoma – the senator who threw the snowball in Senate chambers, who scoffed at the existence of climate change. Does the mariner sense the influence of oil contributions? Inhofe received a 5% approval rating from environmental advocates.

Enough of dipping one’s toe into the tsunami wave of current events. Perhaps the mariner is safer just limiting his engagement to spitting.

Ancient Mariner

 

Economic Warming

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The mariner has been posting www.iowa-mariner for a couple of years. If you are a regular reader, you know he sees impending chaos on all sides. The mariner will follow in the footsteps of his favorite prophet Amos (a country fellow who raised sheep and had fleas) and the prophet’s fictional counterpart, Chicken Little.

The storm clouds are visible on the horizon and bad economic weather is predicted by conservatives and liberals alike. When the solution from each side is redundant, that in itself suggests chaos.

The mariner has read books by two expert authors each of whom starts from a different premise and arrives at similar conclusions.

The first book, The Colder War by Marin Katusa, (John Wiley and Sons, 2015) follows along the line of economic prophets who fear the Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) alliance and the use of non-US dollars in world trade. Katusa predicts a slow demise for the US because of its seventeen trillion dollars in bond debt and, more importantly, because BRIC production of fossil fuels easily will dominate the US Petrodollar market. What will happen slowly (Katusa uses the decline of the British pound over thirty short years, finally yielding to the American dollar at the end of the Second World War) is that holders of US treasury notes will cash them and buy rubles, reals, yuán or some worldwide derivative based on BRIC dominance. In simple terms, this means the US is headed for at least 15% inflation of the dollar and will lose the float advantage of using US dollars around the world.

Katusa spends a lot of his book on Vladimir Putin’s plans to encompass the entire Euro-Asian land mass in a “Common Economic Space.” In other words, replace the US dollar-supported euro, the oil-rich something-stan countries, the Middle East, Asia and most of Africa into a giant free trade zone – all without using US dollars.

Katusa suggests the following remedies – which he doesn’t guarantee will be successful:

  • “Stop runaway government spending. If the growth in government debt is held below the growth rate of the economy, the dollar’s ability to withstand attack will strengthen mightily.
  • Stop accepting everyone’s invitation to participate in everyone’s conflict.
  • Stop everything – especially tax rules and handouts.
  • Stop allowing superstition-based regulation to interfere with the development of domestic energy resources.”

For each of us, Matusa suggests:

  • “Trade some of your dollars for gold and silver and don’t store it in a bank.
  • Open an account with a non-US bank to make it easier to obtain cash in foreign currencies.”

Obviously, Marin Katusa is a fiscal conservative. His underlying strategy does not include economic transition away from fossil fuels but rather suggests ways to put sandbags around the US economy. His perspective can’t be totally faulted; he is one of the world’s top fossil fuel negotiators.

 Now on to the second book, This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (Simon and Shuster, 2014). As prolific a writer and advocate as Katusa, Klein challenges the fossil fuel profit model. She suggests the greedy pursuit of oil-based economies will collapse under the hidden costs of global warming, costs related to health, fragility of depending on one economic resource, and the profound shift of weather patterns that will impact most temperate zone nations dependent on crops – the northerly ones like Canada and Russia will have improved crop opportunity while those in lower latitudes like the US and Southern Europe will have more extreme weather conditions, frequent droughts and flooding.

Similar to Matusa’s book, Klein spends the first third of her book identifying the antagonist: not Putin but the conservatives who deny global warming. The following quotes set the tone for the entire book, which is heavily footnoted:

“And for many conservatives, particularly religious ones, the challenge goes deeper still, threatening not just faith in [capital] markets but core cultural narratives about what humans are doing here on Earth. Are we masters, here to subdue and dominate, or are we one species among many, at the mercy of [geophysical] powers more complex and unpredictable than even our most powerful computers can model?”

The author cited a statement from Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project:

“The Yale researchers explain that people with strong egalitarian and communitarian worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong hierarchical and individualistic worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all get pretty much what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.”

Klein then moves her focus to the disastrous liaisons between “environmental” organizations and corporate partnerships. Many examples are cited not only in the United States but in virtually every country including the United Nations Environment Program. One example involved the Nature Conservancy (NC), the largest and richest environmental organization in the world and 2,303 acres along Galveston Bay in Texas. The acreage was donated to the NC by ExxonMobil in 1995.

This acreage was important to environmentalists because it was the last habitat for the Attwater Prairie Chicken. The bird population, estimated at over one million before the twentieth century, due to oil exploration had dropped to threatened extinction by 1965. The Nature Conservancy proclaimed recovery of the Attwater Prairie Chicken as its highest priority. Four years later the NC drilled its own oil well in an area that would have direct consequences on critical habitat. When this oil well was discovered by NC members, it attracted national press coverage. NC said they could drill without hurting the bird population.

By 2003 only sixteen birds remained. Still, when the first well ran dry, the NC drilled a second well. In 2012, the Attwater Prairie Chicken was extinct.

The Nature Conservancy had succumbed to the desire to make millions of dollars to be used in behalf of worldwide conservancy. Klein’s point is that the NC had good motives but capitalist solutions do not solve a global problem. In fact, capitalism accelerates climate change.

Klein makes this point across several similar examples. In every case, capitalist solutions failed. Cultures are so bound to profit as a solution for everything that global issues like carbon emission are a distant second and have no chance to transition to non-fossil fuel. Global warming is caused by fossil fuel profit. Any progress must be collective in nature and further must reduce the petro economy to a scant size of what it is today. In the US, petrodollars keep the wealthy growing wealthier and allow the US government to borrow 46% against its gross domestic product.

Benevolent billionaires offer little hope for a genuine shift in economic culture. Among others mentioned by Klein are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson and T. Boone Pickens. In every case, these billionaires advocate solutions that will benefit their corporate investment in alternative solutions. Again, these endorsements use a capitalist model as a solution – first, there must be profit.

Global issues like carbon emissions and warming oceans are not part of any profit model. The expense must be covered but not by opportunistic means. This is a new phenomenon in economics: profit is not part of the financial model. Global warming is neither a national issue nor a GDP issue nor a profit versus loss corporate issue. It is pure overhead that must be dealt with collectively by 7 billion humans in 196 countries.

It is this very kind of solution, fraught with corporate restraint, government regulation and spending, and suppression of the largest profit sector in the world that frightens capitalists and advocates of individual freedom.

In the mariner’s opinion, Klein’s book roars like a lion until the part where solutions are offered. Klein cites a growing number of blockades where the local people literally stood in the way of fossil fuel operations. The author feels that growing civil interference will continue to have more influence with those who must deal with the overhead of fossil fuel extraction. An example to watch is the Keystone XL pipeline intending to move sand tar oil from Alberta to Texas. There have been several protests along the path of that pipeline; Obama does not support it. We will see how much influence blockading will affect a republican congress.

Naomi Klein is not an economist. Unlike Matusa, she does not provide financial detail about the impending crisis. Still, one can image what will happen to corporate profit and national GDP if the petrodollar is greatly diminished. On this point – the tremendous shift in priorities as well as economic models – Matusa and Klein agree: financial instability is something everyone will face in this century.

Finally, Klein cites a truism:

“It is often said that Mother Nature bats last, and this has been poignantly the case for some men who were most possessed by the ambition of conquering her.”

 Did someone mention that the sky is falling?

Ancient Mariner

Dismantling the Petro World

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The last post implied, if the reader did not take the content as factual, that the future for the western coalition of nations faced a collapse of its economies and would be fortunate to be called second tier nations. The reason that the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations will overwhelm the western economy is because they have the oil, gas, and the population growth to take over the world economy – somewhat like Walmart, Target and CVC moving into a neighborhood. Any local retail outlets that survive will be less than robust for sure.

Aside from nations, the petrochemical industry is the largest set of global organizations in the world. Asking them to go out of business or scale down to ten percent of what they were is not a winning strategy for global warming. Yet this is the fear that those who deny scientific information hear – that the petro economy is a common source of wealth and making the changes in corporate behavior, the way neighborhoods are built, the way every person consumes food, energy, space and nonrenewable minerals must undergo a transformation that challenges capitalism and suggests something more akin to socialism. So, global warming doesn’t exist.

While searching the Internet, the mariner came across an article in the Nation Magazine for November 2011. The article was written by Naomi Klein, a Canadian author who writes books on the climate and its confrontations with capitalism, human nature, and disappearing resources, including the disappearance of national economic policies. Klein’s current book, “This Changes Everything, Capitalism versus the Climate,” is on the best seller list at the moment.

The entire article is available at

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=0,2

 

In the Nation article, Klein makes a six point case that makes a reader think it is easier to climb a cliff covered in ice than to change the petro paradigm:

  1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere

…Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all of our collective muscle—to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

  1. Remembering How to Plan

…Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.

  1. Reining in Corporations

…But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

  1. Relocalizing Production

…Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an end to the reckless form of “free trade” that governs every bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more good news —for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

  1. Ending the Cult of Shopping

…This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is “decoupling”—the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And “green growth” advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to “make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure…”

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume.

  1. Taxing the Rich and Filthy

…That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister “world government”).

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter…

Naomi Klein pulls no punches in this article in the Nation. The quotes provided here by the mariner provide an insight into her perspective but a great deal of reasoning remains in the article. He recommends that his readers go to the link provided above and discover the whole painting and all the colors in it.

Ancient Mariner

Oneness I

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ONENESS

Why write this?

The author is in his middle seventies. The culture of his lifespan is collapsing all about him. The decades have marched by. After the war, the forties and fifties saw the end of the quiet, home town culture – the last days of Norman Rockwell and radio. By the time the author was ten, he no longer had to carry ashes from the basement furnace or empty the pan under the icebox. The telephone had five call letters and seldom rang.

Television had little to brag about early on; he did not realize how fine it became before expansion and capitalism began to whittle television down to the nothingness it is today. Today, the “best” shows are the ones that capture audience share – if only for a season or even one event. The unfathomable power of television to heal, educate, provide factual history and improve the human mind has disappeared. Only PBS holds down the fort – and just barely. Under the hands of entrepreneurs, quality is gone but the profits have soared. The TV cow is milked dry, replaced by a mechanical cow with artificial milk. Today, in 2014, broadcast television itself is under attack as entrepreneurs compete for profitable schemes similar to Netflix, ESPN, HULU, HBO and internet channels.

The sixties and seventies foretold the increasing conflict between government, business and citizenry. The Viet Nam War became an icon for an American society that was beginning to shred American gestalt into pieces divided along generational lines. Still, we were a conglomeration of equal, if conflicted, citizens until the Reagan years. Reagan opened the government to big money, corporatism and unbridled capitalism. It was no longer a government that belonged to the citizenry. The author still weeps at the resultant devastation that has made our government a mockery of democracy and a blatant, troublesome oligarchy. The movie that brought it all together was The Matrix. Individuals were nothing more than batteries in coffins – surviving only to make the powerful even more powerful.

What stopped working? How did greed and prejudice in all it manifestations take control? It was because no one is interested in reconciling the best solution with a larger ideal as a guide. The American society has lost its ethic. We are rootless with no means to set a standard for goodness, ethics, and morality – whatever word touches you as something that isn’t around anymore. Would Andy and his son Opie survive today? Or Pogo or Opus? Or Omnibus? What happened to news programs that were not required to be profit centers? No wonder the only news is sensationalist police chases, wars and murders with a bit of schmaltz thrown in for variety. What a different world it would be if government had not caved to the likes of Rupert Murdock.

One expects cultural change but not the slashing, manipulative and greedy bashing the American citizen has experienced in the last fifty years.

We must learn how to pursue oneness. We must learn how to build a positive gestalt just as a bricklayer lays brick – one at a time; one opportunity at a time; one commitment at a time – to oneness.

The question is this: Technology has obliterated the cultural foundation that began in 1890. What does the new foundation, including its ethical standards, look like? What will be right or wrong? What will be the standard for fairness?

Ancient Mariner

Oneness

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Throughout the winter months, there will be a series of posts on oneness. The focus of the series is an investigation into how we can improve our decisions with the use of oneness as a problem solving tool. Other topics may be posted as well but the series can be identified by the title: Oneness I, Oneness II, Oneness III, etc.

The format presents the outline first, and then follows with an expansion of the outline in paragraph form. At the end of each post, a general question will be offered for your perusal. The mariner will not answer this question.

The first series is the Preface. It begins below. No question follows.

  • –

 

PREFACE

Oneness has a bad reputation. It suffers from association with many religions, is perceived to be weakness in business, a phenomenon in mystic pseudo-sciences, misinterpreted as togetherness, and is associated with cuddliness and romance. Truth be told, you and I would not exist except for our dependence on oneness. Mammals would not exist except for oneness. Oneness is not a social term subject to romance or derision. It is a genetically embedded requirement for survival of Homo sapiens.

Language and writing would not have emerged were it not for oneness. Human skills like invention and discovery would not have emerged without oneness. Families, tribes and nations would not exist without oneness. Fairness, truth, justice, and morality would not exist without oneness. If humans existed otherwise, life would be barbaric at best and murderous violence would have no restraint. Under these conditions, it would not be long before humans were extinct.

Even cattle have a sense of oneness. It is an instinctual oneness but the herd instinct has enabled cattle to survive millions of years. Except that an unnatural predator wiped out the American Bison to make hats and coats, the bison would have survived into the ages. The presence of seven billion humans, soon to grow to twelve billion, is in itself destructive and stupid. The author will leave the issues of excessive humans to another author, Elizabeth Kolbert, in her book The Sixth Extinction, An Unnatural History. The book is a necessary volume in every individual’s library.

In his book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Dacher Keltner makes the case that empathy is a firmly placed factor in mammalian genes (see post ‘Evolution of Faith’, May 2013). It takes empathy to nurture offspring until the young one can deal with the world on its own. Empathy is a critical element of oneness. The flip side, the action verb, is compassion. While empathy helps the species survive, it is acts of compassion that enable the world to survive as a healthy, nurturing environment. Kindness creates a powerful enhancement to manifest the destiny of a moral, thinking species like Homo sapiens. Yet, the power to be compassionate, to generate oneness, is a perpetual battle against those who choose not to be compassionate. Given knowledge of passing time and self awareness, the power to choose separates humans from other mammals. The power to choose oneness or pejorative abuse is the soap opera of human history. This discussion is presented in the hope that soap opera will diminish and oneness will increase.

Ancient Mariner

 

The Judge

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Having just seen the movie “The Judge” with Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr., the mariner felt more like Robert Duvall than Robert Downey, Jr. In other words, he felt old. Like Robert Duvall, the frontal lobes were intact and contained a lifelong establishment of reason, morality and a command of human behavior. Still, the body was finished; the brain confused by drugs and memory lapses. The shower scene “done me in,” as a Broadway play once complained; it was the last straw – the mariner, too, had outlasted his biological lifespan.

To make matters worse, the mariner came home to read a frightful edition of Smithsonian, describing the bright ideas that will shape the future. The mariner has always considered he was an agent of change. Indeed, his career was just that, bringing large corporations into new worlds of automated business management.

But technology has caught up and passed him by. Not so much the technical engineering but the changes in what human beings will be subject to in a world where reality and automated fantasy are combined in a smudged and inseparable pseudo-reality. One article in the magazine claimed to implant false history in a mouse brain. The mouse believed it had been severely shocked while standing on a steel plate. Placed in a box with an easy way to escape, the mouse stood frozen in fear that it would be shocked and would not move toward the exit. Yet the mouse actually had never received such a shock.

Translate this ability to alter reality to humans. The claim is a cure for Alzheimer’s, dementia, psychological disorders and other ailments of modern life. If one is paranoid of government and corporate prerogatives, one can see manipulation driven by foolish laws and corporate procedures – a capability that can be used for cure or curse.

In any case, one’s knowledge of one’s self may not be real. One’s history that has built an identity of self may be artificial – the self being lost among artificial memories and erased traumas and confrontations that make us who we are.

The mariner longs for that sailboat that will take him away from the modern world and travel among the shores of places that still are behind the technological curve – where real is real.

There are two concepts that dominate international culture today: We do it because we can – and the individual is not the solution. This mixture reminds the mariner of the early industrial age, where human rights were trampled in the name of progress.

Inept governments around the world are not interested in protecting human rights. Profits account for much more than personal freedoms.

Change is always traumatic as new processes displace old ones. The world will change under our feet even as we try to stand upon solid ground.

In the movie, Robert Duvall passed away due to advanced cancer. One could not help but share his release.

Ancient Mariner

Homo sapiens: Reagent of Planet Earth

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Frequent readers are aware that one of mariner’s favorite subjects is “reality.” Reality, seemingly simple on the surface is a collection of facts representing a moment in time yet simultaneously a complex amalgam with nuances from the sciences to the arts to the senses of each individual. Reality is a conundrum to say the least.

Let us travel out into space, perhaps halfway to the moon and look back at Planet Earth. We see weather patterns floating about over land and water. We see Earth turning in its rotation every 23 hours and 56 minutes. It appears to be a blissful scene. It could last forever.

But it won’t. Did you know that 250 million years ago it took only 22.8 hours for Earth to complete one rotation? Each century, the rotation slows by 1.7 milliseconds. Avoiding a scientific treatise on the subject, the important element is that Planet Earth will not last forever. Further, a few million years down the road, the Sun will have an increasing role in the weather, radioactivity and axial tilt of the Earth. As spoken wisely by every generation, things never stay the same.

The numbers cited above are meaningless given the relatively short time it took for the first vertebrates to evolve into Homo sapiens. Still, it is obvious that nothing organic or living is forever and, in fact, is a bit unstable. To narrow the scope, consider the existence of vertebrates. Homo sapiens is wiping out dozens of species every day. This does not include disappearing insects and creatures that have no spine, for example, coral, bivalves and plant life.

Seven billion people cover Earth like a giant scrubbing pad, scraping the surface as if it were a dirty dish. The “soap” is carbon-based abuses of every kind mixed with chemical and radioactive byproducts of Homo sapiens, and the excessive space and food required to sustain each human. Note that every nonhuman vertebrate lives a balanced natural footprint, taking and returning to nature in a way that does not significantly disturb the status quo.

Why are humans selected to be a rapid reagent to life on Earth? Is this a good thing? Can human intelligence that will force change be attributed to evolution and processes of natural selection? Are humans the latest example in a series of evolutionary shifts? Must the world go through drastic transitions every million years or so? Is this a way of recycling Earth’s resources?

The questions beg a larger understanding of why we are a naturally occurring reagent that will change life on Earth.

Individuals often conjure a logical relationship between dinosaurs and people – both dominant in their time. The dinosaurs lost out to a meteorite that ended normal weather for a long time. Therefore, humans will be stopped only by extraterrestrial events. Nothing on Earth has enough effect to end the species. However, some claim radioactive poisoning from Sunbursts, excessive volcano and earthquake activity or a modern, unstoppable plague.

It is popular to say we are our own worst enemy and at some point Planet Earth will rebel and significantly reduce our number. Nevertheless, across Planet Earth’s lifespan, is destruction by humans a natural cycle? Is Homo sapiens the next “meteorite?” If Planet Earth were aware of human behavior, that behavior may be considered insignificant; we quite often assign ourselves too much importance with regard to geophysical reality.

Reality may be that Homo sapiens is indeed the peak of a long run of vertebrate existence. Scientists project that our population will top out at 12 billion – almost half again more than exist today. Numbers this large definitely will change the global ecosystem, including weather, species and topography.

Reality is that we are evolving faster and faster toward automatonic behavior. Key parts of our normal bodies will be electronic. Our manner of communication will be through electronic networks much more easily than if we had to speak or write. A tiny forerunner of this future world is the grocery card one uses at the grocery store. The store knows what you buy so it will be available to you; the store knows when you shop and how much you pay; the store knows you changed brand due to pricing changes; the store knows you have a new baby or a teenager. The store pharmacy has your health profile. With this information, the store sends you personal coupons, suggests magazine subscriptions, advises available neighborhood clinics and doctors, and may even make it not necessary to come to the store at all – your food is delivered to your door if not to your pantry and freezer. Neither you nor a grocery employee ever said a word to make all this happen.

Reality is that we are master of our own genome. We can alter Homo sapiens dramatically in one generation. It will be possible to change every feature of a fetus to have the perfect child. Medicine will modify genes to prevent genetic diseases and mental disorders. Homo sapiens will be freed from the slow, evolutionary process of achieving character traits through accidental changes generation to generation. Examples of all these evolutionary powers already exist. Only the process of making the changes available to the public need be added.

Reality is that the definition of “nation” will become less of an independent state and more like a consortium of producers.  Nations will retain traditional cultural values but will no longer require a complete Gross Domestic Product. The GDP will be comprised of economic output shared with other countries in an international marketplace (corporatism).

Given that Homo sapiens will not perish on a planet that is changing, our reality will never stand still and will be indefinable as we move into a new evolutionary phase – automatons. Our differences in appearance, freedom, and choice will be virtually controlled by electronic collaboration of banks, government, retail and presumed class. The mariner learned long ago that the opossum had a very stable genome because it was an ancient species that long ago stabilized any irregularities or inefficiencies. But, the mariner asks, “Can you tell one opossum from another?” As we evolve, we will be more like the opossum.

Ancient Mariner