Monthly Archives: July 2021

Television versus Real Life

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Science Magazine – The scenes were apocalyptic. On 20 July, a flash flood in Zhengzhou, a city of 10 million on the Yellow River in China, caused a low-lying, kilometer-long section of the city’s Metro Line 5 tunnel to fill with water, trapping more than 500 riders in a subway train. In real time, passengers posted terrifying videos and photos on social media sites, showing people standing in chest-deep water that was still rising. Rescuers, hampered by extensive street-level flooding, arrived 4 hours later, but 14 people did not make it out alive.
So many things are happening in the last year or two: century floods and droughts, fires and dying coral, disappearing Pacific islands, melting glaciers and seafront catastrophes. Is something happening we don’t know about?
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Mariner is experiencing a personal renaissance, small r for sure but it ends a killing ennui, depression and isolation that started with the campaign of Donald and continues with the help of commercialized news broadcasts. What launched the renaissance was living without family for two weeks while cutting the cord on DISH and suffering empty space and time throughout the day.
Mariner has new found energy and interest in things to be accomplished. He calls it his ‘homesteader’ phase, last experienced on his farm where there was much to do in many areas of equipment maintenance and building construction, a lot to pursue agriculturally, home maintenance and still holding down a fulltime job.
The culprit: television. Having given up on the news, stopped watching lame late shows and meaningless comedy from sitcoms to SNL, the TV was forcing dissatisfaction on mariner. Not even movies were of interest. The short of it is that one’s life is all around them – not on television or smartphone or even on the Internet. Have we forgotten so quickly what we did with our hands, our family, our hobbies and sustaining our local social network and environment? Does the reader lament not being able to shop in a real store?
So when were you going to fix that screen door? When were you going to remodel that spare room? When were you going to make some cash with your hobby? When will you upgrade your rec room with ping pong, cornhole or billiards?
Remember – sociologists have identified ‘aspiration’ as the key word for the middle class. To what do you aspire by suppertime? (retired, especially)

ASPIRE [uh-spahyuhr ] to long, aim, or seek ambitiously; be eagerly desirous, especially for something great or of high value (usually followed by to, after, or an infinitive): to aspire after literary immortality; to aspire to be a doctor.

Archaic: to rise up; soar; mount; tower.


Ancient Mariner

Money and Mind

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Here’s a note from Protocol, a tech newsletter:

“Three hundred and thirty-one billion dollars. That’s how much revenue the five biggest companies in tech — Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook — brought in over the last three months. Here’s some Very Sophisticated Analysis: That’s a lot of money.”

The total GDP for the United States in 2020 was $19,278,194.2 million or simplified 19 trillion and change. Doing the math, the big tech companies made 6.8 percent of all the money made in the US economy in a year. We’re familiar with the impact of a pandemic. This is a techdemic.

In a capitalist system, profit must make more profit even if it has to consume other profit sources to sustain growth; the street term is ‘grow or die’. The tech companies have had enough influence to avoid their greatest enemy – antitrust. Each tech company, and we can include huge entertainment corporations like Disney, must continue to buy up control of larger and larger and more diverse businesses not only to avoid competition but to sustain larger profits.

Mariner doesn’t know anyone who can fix this. Just thought you should know.

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On the mind front, Netflix has a series called ‘The Mind Explained’. It is an informal approach to how memory, dreams and other mind phenomena work. If one follows the episode about memory, one comes away realizing that the mind is designed to help make our best decisions under the circumstances and does not retain unbiased or even truthful histories of our lives. The mind simply decides ‘this is who I am and given this existential situation, this is what I’ll do.’ Our mind certainly is no computer but certainly more complex.

Ancient Mariner

 

Wasteland

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As some readers may know, mariner is playing bachelor for a couple of weeks. The sudden absence of a life partner is surprisingly distracting for a few days. It took three days for mariner to set up routines, refocus thoughts and chores and establish a bit of energy about it all.

After a few days, desperation sets in with no one to interact with and a horrible, horrible void called television. Internet news was rehashing Covid yet again and provided little that was genuinely new.

Last evening, sitting silent in a silent living room and waiting for bedtime, mariner discovered a show on Smithsonian channel about six Obama speeches.

The atmosphere, the intelligence, the legitimacy of actions was so vividly different than it is today that it was akin to rapture. Not to give Obama what is not due but the reality of his Presidency, the reason, the humanness, the national unity was breathtaking. Mariner felt as if he had taken a soothing drug.

Check out the show: The Obama Years; the Power of words. It’s just like taking an aspirin for a headache or an antacid for the stomach. The rest of the evening was more pleasant – there is joy in the world, just not right now. But it did exist!

Drawn back to reality, these are dangerous times for democracy. Do not be slack in your support of democracy, you may lose it.

Ancient Mariner

Friendship

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AXIOS published an article this morning that talked about the fact that each of us has fewer friends today than we had in 1990. If one is a baby boomer it would seem so as friends and relatives slowly pass away; apparently there is more to it.

Friendship is a strong influence in our happiness. The term BFF is not a flamboyant term but speaks to residual accountability for support and growth. Among the AXIOS comments is one that says, “Context: This trend is nothing new, of course. Robert Putnam’s bestselling “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” was published in 2000 — 21 years ago.”

See: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

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All of a sudden mariner is again flooded with phony political polls that actually are fund raisers. Mariner doesn’t respond to these ‘national’ fund raising organizations because he believes they shouldn’t exist in the first place. Fund raising should be limited to the district covered by the election. A lot of graft and plutocracy would disappear. Sorry, shouldn’t lament over and over. Damned electorate.

Ancient Mariner

Intellectualism versus totalitarianism

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If the reader is thirsting for pure 100 percent intellectualism, read Harper’s Magazine. The journal always has looked to the abstract reasoning behind society, writing about the contribution of those who already concentrate on the ideas of reality rather than reality itself. Featured online and in the print copy this month is an article by Rebecca Panovka about author Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was an outspoken critic of the trappings of totalitarianism.

Hannah’s most noted work, a book about Nazi totalitarianism, ‘The Horrors of Totalitarianism’, has been brought back into the popular mainstream because of its close similarity to Trumpist authoritarianism. Instead of a crooked government as Trump accuses, in Germany it was the crooked Jews but the effect was the same – to dismember social unity and fragment political influence. This fragmentation allows a small minority to control the direction of society’s ethos.

Further, The Guardian is a British newspaper that also published an article about Hannah Arendt. Apparently Donald’s brand of authoritarianism is similar to Adolf Hitler’s style for dismembering the collective authority of society.

Both publications speak to the incompetence of government and the unsubstantiated reasoning of populist movements when confronted by an elaborate, organized and well-advertised myth that has no foundation in fact. The myth blames the wrong source for the hardships of the people, allowing rebellion against legitimate, if inept, political processes.

The articles imply that there are only two processes to deconstruct growing totalitarianism: war or counter movements aimed at unity – neither of which can guarantee wholesomeness.

Yes, yes. It is up to the electorate and we know how that will turn out in 2022.

Ancient Mariner

Progress for Civilization

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Here’s an interesting side note: Bill Gates is the largest farm owner in the United States. Ol’ farmer Bill.

Gates and his wife have acquired more than 269,000 acres of farm in the United States in the past 10 years. Those purchases, made with the help of the Washington-based firm Cascade Investment and a number of shell companies, include farmland in nearly 20 states that cultivate vegetables such as carrots, soybeans, and potatoes (some of which end up in McDonald’s French fries). These details come after the agriculture outlet The Land Report reported in January that the tech billionaire and his wife were the country’s top private farmland owners in the country. An NBC News analysis also identified Gates as the largest farmland owner in the US.

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The launch of Jeff Bezos is a new scale in bad taste – not to mention that Richard Branson looked any better. It is a sign that massive, really massive resources that are needed in the real world are not applied correctly. Mariner’s opinion is that capitalism must, must pursue greater profits or fail – but those profits are stolen from the lifeblood of a society whose resources have run out.

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It appears there will be no more reprieves for the nation’s roughly 8 million households behind on their rent and mortgage payments. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, more than 4 million of those households face the likelihood of eviction in the next two months. Add this fact to the fact that housing for anyone is hard to find; add the impact on the twenty-somethings looking for anything they can afford and add the fact that plain and simple, there aren’t enough physical, actual homes to go around.

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Oh well, there’s a scant chance that some bridges and highways may be repaired. Mariner thinks he will run over to Misty’s and get a milkshake.

Ancient Mariner

How to have a balanced economy

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֎ AXIOS distributed a concise and clear statement about why world population rates are dropping. It is a quality statement about a topic that doesn’t get much news coverage but can be a significant interpretation of social response to unsympathetic governments. It is typical that economic health is measured by GDP, inflation, and stock markets but the Axios article suggests that it is the condition of the population that determines the efficiency of a given economic philosophy. Some excerpts:

Why world population is slowing – Population growth is continuing to slow in the U.S. and China . . . Why it matters: Population growth spurs economic growth because it can increase innovation, workers and goods produced and consumed . . . What’s happening: U.S. immigration, life expectancy and fertility are all trending down.

We focus way too much on percent growth like quarterly GDP. We should think about what people want. What level of immigration people want. What age would people like to die.

Americans still want multiple children, but they’re worried about child care costs, their own student debt and a pause in their careers . . .

China has relaxed restrictions on the number of children families can now have. But the new policy seeks more to bolster the workforce than to promote population: The Chinese Communist Party is also raising the country’s retirement age, curtailing a key source of child care . . .

The bottom line: If countries want population growth to pick up, leaders must first fix underlying causes of the slowdown, including cost of child care and fear of immigration.

֎ From his lofty spot in the esoteric atmosphere, Guru suggests that the problems confronting nations in the 21st century will not subside until it is understood that political theories work best only in tailored economic situations. Guru said:

COMMUNISM works best in primitive conditions where authority is based on contributing to the wellbeing of other citizens and the economy is sustained solely by local labor and predictability. If one watches any of the homesteading shows on television they are watching classic communist behavior. Dictatorships that call themselves communist nations are misleading. Even the term ‘nation’ is stretching the concept. The reader may remember the commune movement in the US during the 60’s and 70’s but it failed because the surrounding economy was too sophisticated.

CAPITALISM works best when authority is based on assuring the freedom of all citizens to compete for available resources – but this works well only in economic conditions where there are plenty of resources to go around. The US was created at a time when an entire continent of unused resources was available and the expansion of worldwide economic resources was exploding as new places were discovered around the world. Capitalism was the perfect economy to scarf up resources at a geometric rate making the US the richest nation in the world. Alas, these resources have been depleted; in the 21st century there no longer are enough resources to go around for everyone. The population is too large to have everyone freely compete for resources.

SOCIALISM works best when authority assures equality among the citizens and the economy is stable and predictable. The Native Americans sustained a socialist economy for thousands of years because the resources, especially on the plains and seacoasts, were stable and predictable – until the capitalist authority killed all the buffalo, beavers, doves and destroyed important estuaries.

AUTHORITARIANISM works best when authority enforces social order in an economy that is inadequate or out of balance with the existing authoritative role. Once authoritarianism is in place it is difficult to remove; authoritarianism has no scruples other than power – just like Lord Acton said in 1887.

There are many other variations on the four basic economic philosophies. Corporatism is a style of capitalism; plutocracy is a form of capitalism; militarism is a variation of authoritarianism; Sheikdoms, China’s communist party and monarchies all are variations of authoritarianism. Tribalism, populism, classism, insurrection and other social movements can become significant and derail unbalanced economies – often allowing authoritarianism to emerge.

To use an allegory, consider the tight wire walker. The walker is authority, the wire is population and the long balance pole is economy. If the wire and the pole aren’t in sync, the situation becomes unstable.

Ancient Mariner