Life as a Supernumerary

Is the reader familiar with the word ‘supernumerary’? Mariner first read the word in his college days reading about ancient Japanese culture instead of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In ancient Japanese culture, there was a ritual celebrating the wisdom and contribution an individual made throughout their lifetime. At a time when the person was retiring or, more accurately, when the person wasn’t part of the mainstream of things anymore, they were promoted to the status of a supernumerary. It was a positive, honorable acknowledgement. A supernumerary was one who was approached for advice in those few times when elderly wisdom was needed.

For the record the dictionary says: supernumerary – “exceeding what is necessary, required or desired.” Today’s use of the word doesn’t seem to capture the same elegance implied by the ancient Japanese.

Mariner has declared himself a supernumerary (along with everyone else over 75). A supernumerary does not understand contemporary social principles. Readers know that mariner laments the approaching reality suggested by the Matrix movies – a life totally controlled by artificial intelligence. To this end, mariner must share two cartoons from The New Yorker. The first speaks for itself and represents mariner’s greatest fear:

The combined effect of smart telephones, radio, television, computers, internet and social media is that the meaning of life does not come from individual experience. If one was born before this electronic invasion, one remembers discovering life from individual experience. True, life was quite parochial and limited to existential experience but the meaning of life began within an individual’s own brain without the puppet strings of Big Data. The second cartoon speaks to this disparity:

The cartoon speaks to mariner because he was one of the last to have creased jeans with a two-inch cuff. To supernumeraries this cartoon speaks to a time when reality was very much more intimate with human labors and experience. Even the labor of pulling a book from the shelf and turning pages to educate one’s self has been reduced to a thumb scrape or two.

A clear example of disparate social values is the current identity crisis that consumes our daily life, allows wealth to be increasingly unbalanced and causes political wars where there is no compromise. Many say that the only hope is to have unity in our nation. But what does unity mean? What does it feel like? How will citizens behave without populist values? Part of the problem of creating unity is that no one knows what it means to be unified.

Supernumerary folks know. If one experienced World War II that was a time when the nation was unified. America came first – even before citizens chose their groceries, automobiles, vacations, even when to turn all houselights off. Every neighborhood had social clubs for soldiers and sailors; mariner’s father held a weekly dance for the military from Fort Meade and the navy crews in Baltimore harbor. Good cuts of meat were not available in grocery stores because the meat went to the Armed Services. Gasoline was limited to three gallons per month. Women were the majority in factories. Enlisted men had free seats on trains.

Are the younger citizens ready for unity? Can they put aside their populism? It took a world war to unify the United States. There is another war today but it is not bullets. It is climate change, complete restructuring of society and jobs and creating the reality implied by phrases like “All men are created equal.”

If one is not a supernumerary, one has no frame of reference for the responsibilities of national unity.

Ancient Mariner

Meanwhile

Because of the anthropological tumult in today’s world, mariner hasn’t visited the world of the sciences for a while. Here are a few updates:

֎ Invest in European real estate now before the rush

In the next 200 million years, Eurasia and the Americas will collide to form the supercontinent Amasia, according to a model of tectonic plate motion.

From Columbia to Rodinia to Pangaea, Earth has seen a few supercontinents come and go in its ancient past. Now, researchers theorize that these giant landmasses form in regular cycles, about once every 600 million years. They even predict when and where the next supercontinent will form, driven by the creeping flow of rocks in our planet’s hot mantle. Nicolle R. Fuller/Science Source

֎ Ortho and Orkin are new kids on the block when it comes to insecticide

Ancestors living in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago not only slept on grass bedding but occasionally burned it, apparently to keep the bugs away.

Remnants of the oldest known grass bedding, discovered in South Africa’s Border Cave, lay on the ashes of previously burned bedding, say archaeologist Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and her colleagues. Ash spread beneath bound bunches of grass may have been used to repel crawling, biting insects, which cannot easily move through fine powder, the researchers report in the Aug. 14 Science. Wadley’s team also found bits of burned wood in the bedding containing fragments of camphor leaves, an aromatic plant that can be used as a bug repellent.

֎ Do teacher unions know about this?

Artificial intelligence designs lesson plans for itself

Unlike human students, computers don’t seem to get bored or frustrated when a lesson is too easy or too hard. But just like humans, they do better when a lesson plan is “just right” for their level of skill. Coming up with the right curricula isn’t easy, though, so computer scientists wondered: What if they could make machines design their own?

That’s what researchers have done in several new studies, creating artificial intelligence (AI) that can figure out how best to teach itself. The work could speed learning in self-driving cars and household robots, and it might even help crack previously unsolvable math problems.

֎ Check the weather – frequently

$16 billion. That’s how much damage was caused in the U.S. in 2020 by 16 climate-driven disasters, which cost $1 billion each, as of October.

The average yearly number of these disasters, ranging from hurricanes to wildfires to prolonged heat waves, has quadrupled in the last three decades. The planet is now about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 100 years ago, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Ancient Mariner

 

Do you remember that time when . . .

There is an advertisement on television at the moment that shows a group of young people doing the limbo at night under the colored lights of a hamburger shack. Seeing this caught mariner’s full attention. He had a flashback to the very same scene at a beach on the Magothy River in Maryland. He won the contest that night; perhaps that’s why he has bad knees today.

Continuously we are confronted by realists, psychologists and others who attack our good memories. “It wasn’t as good as you remember it.” Or, “You don’t remember how insecure you were then.” Or, “Isn’t that the time your father grounded you for two weeks for not coming home until the next afternoon?” Remember what Victor Hugo said, “Melancholy is the joy of depression.”

Who cares? What is important is that what builds the libido are those moments of joy, success and fulfillment as we grow up. Supposedly, the typical human stops ‘growing up’ in their mid-twenties but the memories of childhood, good or bad, will be who we think we are for the rest of our lives.

Today, those youthful experiences buried in our libido are constrained as we live trapped in our homes, hidden behind personality-erasing masks and unable to enjoy the collegiality of close conversation. Our common experience is missing a large chunk of normalcy; our ability to express who we are is shut down. Is it because we can’t emulate the expectations of our libido?

Mariner, for one, gleaned every drop of enjoyment and memory from that advertisement. For a thin moment, he had a good time.

Ancient Mariner

The long and short of it

This one is long: The first ‘human’ to evolve was Homo habilis who appeared 2.4 million years ago and survived for about 1 million years. A similar neighbor who came along about the same time was H. rudolfensis, who survived only for 100 thousand years. The first truly upright was H. Erectus who evolved 2 million years ago and survived until just 110 thousand years ago – about 2 million years. Today’s H sapiens came aboard 90,000 years ago and still is around. Just food for thought – will H. sapiens survive for one or two million years?

This one is uncomfortably short: If the United States were a sailing ship adrift at sea and President Biden took command, he has about six months to right the ship and reset the sails before international meetings and conferences will occur that will determine the ship’s course back to a role that leads in the race to the next decade. Righting the ship involves taming the pandemic and new rigging in Congress that can get things done.

This one is too long: Lingering with the ship metaphor, there are two storms at sea – the nation’s economy and the dangerous waves of Big Tech. It will take long enough to restart the economy that it will influence the 2024 election. Can the new sails and rigging hold? Big tech requires shifting ballast around below deck, which is restructuring taxes for the too rich investors and corporations, keeping the ship at good speed in choppy seas.

Really short: Donald Who? Don’t worry, he’ll be back as his business dealings and a number of investigations involving unconstitutional behavior reopen without the protection of executive privilege. However, we should not be zealous about whatsisname, we have a ship to sail.

Did you hear the Bosun’s whistle? Every citizen to their station!

Ancient Mariner

 

It IS our Nation

It was a long, relaxing day as the nation witnessed the transition from King Donald to President Biden. One sensed that a great sigh of relief blew across the United States; even the hardened press corps seemed to relish in covering the inauguration. To reach for a metaphor, we had turned off the burner that was causing our pot to boil over.

President Biden was eloquent in his attempt to return the nation to its citizens. Perhaps that is his most important agenda. He has deliberately selected career experts for every cabinet secretary, for the military, banking, corporate America and has begun restoring the State Department and the Department of Justice to be competent, experienced, professional functions capable of interpreting the world in the best possible light for the nation.

As has been reported widely in the press, President Biden inherits the most strained nation since FDR. Many aspects of the American spirit have been abused for decades; most of them appear in the headlines on a daily basis. We have become calloused as we watch day after day the terrible news of our disheveled society.

But we must help this administration. We must watch our daily news looking for progress not only in the nation’s wellbeing but in the lives of everyday citizens who are weary after decades of government indifference.

Joe’s first job is to put stitches on the wounds and at the same time begin therapy and reconstruction. It is a tall job.

It was clear today that the nation does belong to its citizens. Get your positive spirit out of the closet and put it on. That is your job.

Ancient Mariner

January 6

The attack on the US Capitol was violent; it consumed news organizations, social media, professional politics, corporate behavior and fringe organizations primarily associated with white supremacy. Five people died.

For all the cacophony, it is just a small incident in the midst of massive changes in government, society, economics, technology and global warming. Add to these unrooted times an epic invasion of the entire world by Covid-19.

In the United States 400,000 people will have died by the time this post is logged. Just measuring deaths, 5 people chose to be at the Capital where they may be killed while the virus has claimed one of every 121 people across the country. Each death not wanted and each death ripping into a family’s happiness.

It is true that four years of Donald-power has been extremely troublesome. There is no question that Donald is the match that lit many fires in society – including the attack on the Capitol – not just with his race baiting but with regulations affecting environmental issues, health issues, economic issues and he was disruptive to fragile behaviorisms that underlie democracy.

But Donald is just another incident brought on by the universal disruption we experience today, a disruption we will continue to experience for the rest of this century. Human society is very fragile. Society can be knocked off balance by imbalances in power, technology, weather and basic human need. Just a short list of moments that have contributed to our tidal wave of change:

֎ Since 1942 life expectancy has jumped from 53 to 80. This extra generation is very expensive to maintain and often interferes with incidental changes in society that then lead to larger consequences – think abortion, plutocracy, evangelical religion, any lgbqt issue, etc.

֎ For forty years American labor has been cut off from sharing in the nation’s profits; labor income has not grown commensurate with inflation – think loss of the American Dream.

֎ Despite the best efforts of white supremacists, caucasians will become a distinct minority in the United States by 2070 – think a revamping of civil rights legislation to eliminate the class discriminations that favor caucasians.

֎ Because of rising sea levels, by 2050 300 million people will be forced to relocate to other locations in the US – think housing, job loss, agricultural and local economies.

֎ Artificial Intelligence will force a major change in the relationship between employment and income. Most futurist economists believe a family stipend provided by increased corporate taxation is likely. Interestingly, a stipend was advocated by Andrew Yang in the 2016 presidential campaign and today, the impact of the pandemic has forced the government to issue stipends to keep the economy functional.

֎ The world is running out of resources, causing many nations to fail economically. Even wealthy nations are being pushed to reinterpret long held capitalistic tropes about supply and demand. The current rise in dictatorships is the result of public dissatisfaction with government but cannot be the final correction; internationalism will be redefined by 2050.

Everyone prays, in these turbulent times when society is in disarray, that the machinations of change will not become violent. Let’s hope the attack on the Capitol is the last of it.

Ancient Mariner

It isn’t what goes around, it’s what has always been

The disarray, some may say discontent, that the United States suffers today has been around for a while. Mariner has said that the damage to the American Dream began with the Reagan administration when regulations and legislation were loosened to allow corporations to invest in foreign markets and at the same time diminished obligations to employees.

Over forty years of discontent in the labor classes yields social discrimination and the splintering of national unity. Labor class unrest led to the militaristic behavior found in the role of police today. The police brutality evidenced in the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota became the new emoji for an old problem.

Flash back to 1991 – 30 years ago:

In 1991, after a drunk-driving automobile chase, four officers struck Rodney King with batons fifty-three times. The LAPD initially charged King with “felony evading,” but later dropped the charge. On his release, he spoke to reporters from his wheelchair, with his injuries evident: a broken right leg in a cast, his face badly cut and swollen, bruises on his body, and a burn area to his chest where he had been jolted with a 50,000-volt stun gun. Three of the four officers were acquitted.

The incident invoked the LA riots which eventually killed 63 people.

In 1992 Rodney became famous for saying, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Before the Nation’s cultural breakdown can begin healing, Congress must repair the Reagan policy that split the American Dream. Until then the xenophobic organizations will not subside; racial injustice will not be cured; economic fairness among the Nation’s citizens will not occur.

֎ Restore the unions.

֎ Raise minimum wage to be commensurate with inflation since 1980.

֎ Provide universal health care.

֎ Significantly raise taxes on the wealthy and large corporations to release privately stored, useless cash to the government so it can restore the middle and lower classes who live desperate lives today.

֎ Significantly increase the job market by utilizing opportunities offered by inadequate infrastructure, growing damage from climate change and by firm enforcement of antitrust laws.

֎ Repair a dysfunctional housing policy that locks out first time buyers and lower income families.

֎ Promote international economic participation with agreements similar to the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Some critics may claim these suggestions are a promotion of new-age socialism. In fact, it is a restoration to a time in history that ceased existing forty years ago.

Ancient Mariner

Homo sapiens has become obsolete

Regular readers are familiar with the skepticism of alter ego Amos. In this new century, one beginning with a multitude of new and unchartered worries for mankind, Amos feels increasing depression as his fellow humans (AKA electorate) fail to grasp the enormity and perhaps the fatalistic nature of the times. The recent attack on the United States Capital was a misguided and virtually irrelevant gesture when global civilization is on the brink of collapse as the environment falters, global resources rapidly disappear, birth rates around the world approach zero growth and mankind’s own manufactured reality is decaying.

Now, there is hard evidence that Homo sapiens is about to be irrelevant and will disappear in short order. The following photograph is taken from the back cover of the January issue of The Economist. The small type says:

“Malicious AI created her picture, yet she has never been seen by a camera. It made her an online profile, yet she has never logged in. Malicious AI built her to attack you.”

The public today is worried about face recognition software. Poo. Who needs your face anymore when AI has a detailed description of your profile, health, driver license, family connections, friends and financial particulars – and can make a face made to order? Even more, a detailed copy of your whole existence sits in data bases that can emulate your probable real life experiences.

Now, AI doesn’t need your face or your body. AI can create a fictitious reality without using real human beings and can interlace you with others on Facebook, Twitter and E-Harmony. If you’re still around in a few years, you may have remarried and not even know it.

Consider the new AI world of business: AI creates a statistical version of a restaurant then populates it with statistical versions of humans. The finances look good on a digitized screen and AI will have to move bitcoins around in the fake economy to balance the database.

The next phase of human evolution will be complete. Living only as digitized energy, our progeny easily will be able to spread throughout the universe.

Ancient Mariner

 

New horizons in change

The following two paragraphs are from World Review, an online magazine sponsored by New Statesman, a British publishing Company. It makes the case that conservative political forces around the world are drifting even further to the right and shredding centrist policies, allowing xenophobic and militaristic values to influence government policy. The American press is making the same case for US politics. Is this yet another tsunami of change confronting us in this troublesome century?

“. . . Just as central a place in histories of the Trump disaster must be reserved for those same, once-respectable conservative politicians who have enabled the president to whip up the chaos they now, finally, deign to criticise: the Lindsay Grahams, the Mitch McConnells, the Mike Pences, the Marco Rubios.

This pattern is not just confined to the US. Much has been written about the nationalist populist wave of recent years. Yet surely more powerful than any individual political victory by the populists themselves is the way they have co-opted and lastingly changed parts of the supposedly mainstream right (or threaten to do so). In Europe, conservatives in countries like Austria, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and France have adopted the language and tone of the hard-right. Old cordons sanitaires[1] have broken down, with extremists entering coalitions or otherwise cooperating with more established parties at local or national levels. Brazil’s hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro came to power with the help of the centre-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party. The turns towards authoritarianism in India, Turkey and Hungary have all been led from within established conservative parties.” [By Jeremy Cliffe, International Editor]

This is not the time in global history or that of the US specifically to introduce destructive social influences. At a time when technology, economics and global climate all face unknown frontiers of change that we can’t begin to define; at a time when collaboration, factual reality and common sense are the tools that are needed, will the future be achievable?

Ancient Mariner

[1] From French, a barrier designed to prevent a disease or other undesirable condition from spreading

It’s a New World

While the western world has survived the beginning of the twenty-first century more or less intact, getting organized for the rest of the century makes it seem as if the destruction of the Middle East is more descriptive.

Hopefully, Guru envisions a burst of energy, jobs and economy as the whole world responds to climate change, repairing infrastructure and shifting world economies in a way that will stave off international disruption through abuse of the Internet and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the global imbalance between the wealthy and the starving.

These tasks all are international and the wringing of hands and claims of the apocalypse will be part of the experience. It will be like training one’s wayward feet to fit into a new pair of shoes – if not painful at least uncomfortable.

Nations and their resources, unfortunately, do not drive the schedule of recovery. Every issue is at a critical stage such that avoiding catastrophe is the order of the day rather than casually planning new ideas with time to perfect them.

For the sake of brevity, mariner will describe only one issue – the one issue that ignores politics, economies and cultures; it is the most disruptive of the several critical issues: Climate Change.

We should be thankful that the pandemic has given the world practice at dealing with worldwide apolitical issues. Like the pandemic, climate change is no longer an issue of local environmental regulation and politics. It has become a global condition, an instability at the core of an environment that sustains all life. It is difficult to get excited about climate change because it is so slow in the manner by which it changes the environment. Mariner compares it to how sloping shoulders develop over decades of aging, one day at a time, one tiny increment of spine curvature each day. Then suddenly there is back pain and limitations of flexibility. The world already feels the pain of climate change.

Flooding of low lying land around the world already has become a crisis in many parts of the world: 11 million people in Bangladesh have lost two years of crops as the tides invade and stay longer each season; many populated islands around the world will disappear in this century; six large key cities in the United State will be overrun by rising seas – Miami already has in place city-wide pumping stations and drains to accommodate high tides.

Rising seas are caused by a warming atmosphere that melts the polar ice reserve. Being unusually warm, the atmosphere has extra energy for storms and, globally, the jet streams are shifting enough to begin changing agriculture on all the continents.

The following paragraph is a report from Forbes magazine:

“By 2050, sea-level rise will push average annual coastal floods higher than land now home to 300 million people, according to a study published in Nature Communications. High tides could permanently rise above land occupied by over 150 million people, including 30 million in China. Without advanced coastal defense and planning, populations in these areas may face permanent flooding within 30 years.”

The entire report is worth reading and has maps of where US cities will be flooded. See:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2019/10/30/shocking-new-maps-show-how-sea-level-rise-will-destroy-coastal-cities-by-2050/

 

Storms get stronger

Data: NOAA. Graphic: Reuters

With climate change, hurricanes overall are moving more slowly, meaning they can linger for longer over land, causing more damage. —Reuters

The temperature, as a daily personal experience, will be much warmer. In the United States the entire sweep of Gulf States will become very hot with frequent temperatures over 100°. Not only will agriculture be forced to relocate, so will the people. This means that hinterland cities will receive large migrations of people and jobs moving north. Retiring to the southern shores will no longer be a pleasant fantasy.

So Climate Change is a serious, immediate issue that will notably change weather, geography, agriculture, population centers and a reordering of governmental functions and responsibilities – and each citizen because the changes will be quite personal.

Mariner agrees that the confrontation is serious, perhaps greater than all the wars in US history. But. It is a new time to unify and tackle a big problem together. The world must succeed. Mariner is reminded of Rosie the riveter. Let’s wind up our sleeves, get beyond petty politics and personal agendas and get on with it.

Ancient Mariner