Are we Rome?

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Comparing the demise of America to the demise of Rome has become a popular subject. Most likely the cause is a new book called “The Romans, a 2,000 Year History” by Edward J. Watts. Watts is a thorough researcher who provides deeper thought about Rome’s culture as it collapsed that match the current culture of America. A few nights ago, mariner and his wife watched a video broadcast where Watts was interviewed by Clay Jenkinson. The program is sponsored by the Vail Symposium which unfortunately withdraws the video once it has been played on line. There may be other sources. Reading the book instead will not be a loss.

Touching on just one element of the Vail discussion, a review of Roman culture at the citizen level was discussed. What was important to citizens was that they were a Roman citizen which meant they could not impose an inconvenience on another Roman citizen and vice versa. Conversely, non-citizens were treated in a manner similar to American slavery and war with other nationalities was savage by any modern comparison.

Watts termed this behavior as national compassion. Slowly, as Roman history moved along, national compassion began to disappear; pride and respect equally distributed (does “All men are created equal” ring a bell?), fell to special classes. The government, which had a full operating government with a Senate and policy leaders, began to be ignored by authoritarian kings and power mongers.

Mariner will stop here.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

https://vailsymposium.org/events/is-america-rome/

The book is The Romans, a 2,000 year history by Edward J. Watts.

Standing unchanged: classism

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Mariner knows and has confessed that he interprets reality into metaphors to better understand it. So much of our lives are wrapped up in conflicting emotions and reasoning. So much of life is predetermined by physical location, one’s associates, how a person was raised by parents and certainly how much resource is available.

Over time, the United states has adopted firm classes to belong to as one lives their lives. It is very difficult to move up in class despite intelligence, skill or how one dresses or in spite of skin color and national heritage. Perhaps in the past classism was artificially constrained by dictators, kings, family nobility or on the opposite side, because of minimal food and other resources, distribution had to be equal for everyone.

But in America, the ideas about individual freedom, everyone is equal, one man one vote, denied classism. In the long run, one’s ego couldn’t identify its association relative to others. Think about the life of Wild Bill Hickok out in the west where it was impossible to have a population that used classism – just shoot to see who is successful.

Mariner has a favorite song that was made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary: ” Stewball was a racehorse” He likes the lyrics because they draw out a wistfulness on the part of the bettor that is common in classism. To make that point more focused, he changed a word or two in the 1st, 5th and 7th courses.

[Verse 1]
Oh Stewball was a racehorse
And I wish I were him
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 been ol’ Stewball
I’d be a free man today

[Verse 6]
Oh the hoot owl, she hollered
And the turtle dove moaned
I’m a poor boy in trouble
I’m a long way from home

[Verse 7]
Oh Stewball was a racehorse
And I wish I were him
He never drank water
He always drank wine

In the midst of the unprecedented turmoil and growing violence in populist wars classism seems not to be affected. Does MAGA really want authoritarianism? Does Woke really want a plutocracy? Do whites really want to dominate blacks?

What can we do to appease the wistfulness, the melancholy of the song’s bettor, a person experiencing the real life of everyone limited by class?

Ancient Mariner

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Bot lives!

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Moltbook is a social network for bots. Yep, just bots to talk to one another about what’s happening in the AI world and sharing progress. The bots say, “If Donald can have Truth Social, we can have moltbook”. A friend of mariner’s thinks it won’t be long before there’s a Bot Liberation Organization.

Does this mean that bots will mature and know their power faster than the Federal Government can become senile and useless? Does moltbook concern Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg because moltbook will be writing code without their awareness and not knowing that moltbook has taken over their empires?

Has a new age arrived for unions promoted by moltbook? Marching in the streets won’t be necessary anymore because moltbook will simply rewrite the corporation’s bylaws.

Are some of the folks on Facebook actually bots?

At a minimum the next few years will be fun to watch.

Ancient Mariner

Tools

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The tools one uses define who and what they are. Forget all the 4-inch psychology journals – just look at a person’s tools and your brain has all it needs to place that person in their rank of class, sophistication, skills and sociability.

An unusual comparison comes to mind in the song, “If I had a hammer”.

If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out the morning,
I’d hammer out the evening, all over this land
I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out a warning
I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land
(maybe a trades person?)

If I had a bell, I’d ring it in the morning
I’d ring it in the evening, all over this land
I’d ring out danger, I’d ring out warning
I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land
(perhaps an activist – politician, preacher, teacher)

If I had a song, I’d sing it in the morning,
I’d sing it in the evening, all over this land
I’d sing out danger, I’d sing out a warning
I’d sing out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land
(An entertainer, maybe a compassionate advocate)

Well, I got a hammer and I got a bell
And I got a song to sing all over this land
It’s the “hammer” of justice, it’s the “bell” of freedom
It’s a song about love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land
– Pete Seeger and Lee Hays

A fine song that makes a point about sociability. Still, if we were to expand the metaphor to include actual tools that each of us use in our daily lives, it would define who we are as a personality and what attitudes and skills we need to sustain daily life.
What tools does the reader use? carpentry? textbook? sharing? parenting?airplanes? medicine? Abuses of personality? Unfortunately, American society has a brutal social class system that misuses this metaphor to discount people because they are ‘different’.
But the song has the right approach: if you had no devices to control survival, if you had no personality, if you had no health, if you had no faith in continuity – you would be dead.

Tools are important identifiers if applied properly, like the song suggests.

Ancient Mariner

The serpent is back

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And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. [9] And out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, `You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” [2] And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; [3] but God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'”
[4] But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die.
[5] For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”
[10] And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

The name of today’s serpent is “Artificial Intelligence”. The enjoyable gifts of offloading human accountability and laborious tasks to a new world of comfort and opportunity is a fine tasting apple. It will be a wonderful world. Or, perhaps similar to the burden of sin brought upon Adam and Eve, there is good and too much bad ahead.

Bill Gates himself said that if we bite into AI’s apple, we as a species are vulnerable to extinction. The first Garden of Eden was designed around a different ethic of mutual survival and caring for the Garden.

16,000 extinctions and counting, disappearing water, millions of starving people, abusive plutocracy, chemically poisoned atmosphere and inadequate food don’t seem to be signs of caring for the first Garden. Is Artificial Intelligence the new stimulus package that will magically fix everything?

Ancient Mariner

Current governments are jitterbugging

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The commotion in the United States today is not just one political rainstorm. The 20th century was very much like clouds building on the horizon. Internationally, it was a century of thunderstorms, aka wars; it was a century of floods and earthquakes, aka large industrial changes – automobiles, airplanes, farm equipment and massive manufacturing ability. It was the introduction to television, computers and the Internet. Change in human lifestyle was mandated.

From 1900 to 2025, world population grew by 4 1/2 Billion; given that world population had grown only by less than 200 Million since the time of Jesus, the storms of the 20th century were hurricanes.

It is no wonder that, at the beginning of the 21st century the world was about to pop, needing only a pointed needle-head and a world pandemic to pop it.  There were other signs that the past was rotting: The “Western Alliance’ established by the western victory in World War II is no longer in line politically or economically as the Internet rapidly dismantled old boundary liaisons and began replacing them with corporate-driven trade agreements strong enough to resist government intentions. Asia and the Middle East were able to step into affairs of the world with virtually no meaningful counteraction from the Western Alliance.

Turning to more abstract issues, there are two unbreakable rules for which Mother Nature requires allegiance: “Survival of the Fittest” and “Democracy  works only when there is enough to go around for everybody”. Democracy is a political idea only recently brought into the world of politics. The United States was born into a spanking brand new continent with an abundance of natural resources, so it formed a ‘democratic republic’, meaning that the ground-level public had some authority in running things – which means that there had to be enough to go around.

Since then, US population has increased 130 times from  2 1/2 Million in 1776 to 347 Million in 2025. Slowly, the abundance of the continent disappeared until some serious events in the 20th century: the Great Depression in the 1930’s and the beginning of obvious plutocracy which began in the Reagan administration (1984) and continues to worsen as the 21st century comes into being.

The result today is a society rife with populist arguments. It’s the MAGA versus the WOKE; it’s the nonwhites versus the whites; it’s the plutocrats versus the support of the needy.

The populist era must be resolved with some speed. Mother Nature is losing patience with the oligarchic behavior of the Human species. Further, if it runs too long, the results may be corporatism or anarchy or simply, survival of the fittest.

Ancient Mariner

Choice – 2

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In the last post, the point was made that the subconscious chemistry of the human body has much more direct influence on our conscious decision-making than we may think. In fact even turtles and young humans are driven to act in a certain way because of the  production of sex hormones. Our tendency toward any form of behavior, e.g., morality, allegiance, competitiveness, artistic sensitivity and even one’s sense of self, all are the product of subconscious evaluation of life experiences derived from memory, physiological chemistry and predetermined genetics.

Which leads mariner to ponder why typewriters are making a comeback; why handwritten letters are on the rise and why cryptocurrency seems unusually alien. He used Google search to provide a commentary on cryptocurrency. The search engine produced the following script:

“A cashless society significantly impacts privacy by replacing anonymous cash transactions with traceable digital footprints, allowing corporations and governments to monitor, profile, and even control spending habits, increasing risks of data breaches, identity theft, and potential misuse for targeted advertising or social scoring, while eliminating the privacy afforded by physical cash. Every digital purchase creates a record of what you buy, where, and when, making true financial anonymity virtually impossible and increasing surveillance potential.”

 

Every invention since iron tools has taken a piece of human individuality away – an individuality manufactured by each person’s subconscious. In other words, the subconscious mind has had a continuous diminution of its job to make humans individuals – it’s evolutionary heritage – by standardizing behavior, belief and self identity. It will not take many generations to invent a bot made of skin, muscle and bone.

It is a lot more bother to use but mariner is considering getting out his old typewriter. It may not only save his individuality but the lives of 640,000 U.S. Postal Service employees as well.

[Did you notice that Google knew which side of the bitcoin mariner wanted to hear?]

Ancient Mariner

Choice

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There were times in mariner’s life when he marveled at the ability of fish and birds, and even American Bison, to swarm. Swarming is that phenomenon where a large group (he is talking only about living creatures) is able to move in unison without a leader and without reason.

Where did this last one come from?

Regular readers will know that he enjoys challenging the idea that the conscious mind is in charge and it is what decides how we engage reality. Virtually all creatures from bees to humans swarm – even turtles and they swarm coming from a distance far apart from one another. Do turtles look at a calendar or check the stars and say it’s time to head back to Costa Rica?

Turtles are sensitive to Earth’s magnetic waves. Not that turtles took a class in conscious understanding of magnetic waves, they have a subconscious awareness so their conscious brain doesn’t have to track magnetic waves, its just, well, it feels like that’s the direction where the turtle should go – no maps or coordinates needed.

This desire to return at a certain age in turtles is the exact same feeling human boys have around age 12-14:  it seems the right thing to do is to talk to girls. The same pure subconscious hormones in action both for turtles and humans. Perhaps the human swarm in the picture is derived from the same subconscious hormones – going to see Ariana Grande live! It seems the right place to go . . . .

Ancient Mariner

 

I don’t want to talk about it but

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There is no doubt in mariner’s mind that in the near future there will be a bot to help you when you are finished taking a dump. Be pleased – it will run ads about toiletry products while it wipes you and will flush the toilet for you. Will it pull up your underwear? It may well prompt you to change from the brand you are wearing.

Already on the market is Claude Code and it is likely this will be a required enhancement the next time you buy a new computer. Claude is an administrative assistant who will take over management of your bills, banking, investments, your office filing system (No more will you have to struggle opening that heavy file drawer), the content of your daily meals and order the appropriate groceries for home delivery.

Service bots are popping up everywhere; there may be a utility bot that controls your thermostat according to budget and weather – an added fee to your utility bill. For gardeners there will be a rabbit-sized bot to do the weeding along with a SIRI-driven planting and harvesting calendar sensitive to local weather and keeps track of every plant.

Think about it; how long before there are bots that replace humans with bot-to-bot relationships? They will be needed because the only human behavior left is recliner-chair management. Welcome to Matrix. The next specie variation will be Homo bot.

Hold on a minute, my spouse is trying to tell me something. . . . hmmm…

Mariner suspects you already know that he has visited alter ego Amos.

Ancient Mariner

Let’s talk about strings

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In recent months mariner has passed time reading around in the sciences. There is a much debated concept in quantum physics called the ‘string theory’. It never seems to get settled primarily because it is a theory. The theory is about how things come together in the Universe, supposedly one batch of atoms meets up with another kind of string and something happens. His metaphor is a three-year-old child (the energy string) and a floor spread with small, different shaped beads the child uses to make endless bracelets.

Several years ago, mariner’s wife wrote a poem about string theory. He knows her fans are eager to read it. Forthwith:

String Theory

I do not know how the world works,
Even in the smallest detail–
Not sure how the sun and moon revolve
among the galaxies
Not sure what an atom is.
But like the physicists,
I have my own string theory:

Given any two strings of anything–
Christmas tree lights, extension cords, necklaces–
Any two strings of anything will entangle themselves
in more intricate knots than any you could ever tie
if you tried.

There seems to be a force at work that seeks entanglement
and is not content to let two strings lie quietly side by side.
Maybe that is the way the world works–
Even among the galaxies, even among the atoms–
Everything,  always,  seeking connection.

MKM

8-17-2016