Author Archives: skipper

Did you catch this?

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The latest must-have accessory is a “stop-scrolling bag” — a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles.

Why it matters: We pick up our phones 100+ times a day and spend hours glued to our screens. “Analog bags,” as they’re also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time, Axios’ Sami Sparber reports.

🧶 How it works: “I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag,” including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the Northern California content creator behind the trend. The 31-year-old keeps one such bag at home, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car.

Some parents are jumping on board, and loading kid-friendly versions with toys, crayons and coloring books.

Zoom out: The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug.

Excellent good news! Homo must prove it has the stamina and ethics to just not roll over and let AI tell it everything. Every news item about AI brags about how it replaces the brain and every external body function employed by that brain. Incidentally there are a few AI corporations with just that in mind – replace the mind!

Spend some time every day self-contained – well, maybe a coffee is okay.

Ancient Mariner

At the bottom of it all

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In October 2024, mariner wrote a post in response to a challenge to describe ‘Armageddon’, a frequent term he uses to describe the future. Copied from that post, though not fully annotated, are the four elements :

֎ Most imminent would be nuclear war,
֎ Government would yield to oligarchical economies reminiscent of the early Persian Empire.
֎ Worldwide collapse of economics due to global warming – both the restorative cost and the great reduction of natural resources.
֎ Most distant would be the usurpation of the human species by electronic intelligence.

He was reminded of this post and its four elements yesterday when he watched a podcast about the state of available resources today. The guest made the following statement:

“If every person on the entire planet lived the lifestyle of American Citizens, it would require three planets.”

So many, many times mariner has lamented the extinction of tens of thousands of species due to human disruption and consumption of the biosphere. So often he has addressed the amount of land, energy, people and industrial cost that exists between a cow and a McDonald’s hamburger. So often he has lamented the excessive human population living twice as long as was intended by its genome.

Contemporary news around the world is driven by one or two of the items defining Armageddon but the truth is, the human presence is feeling the slow but growing constriction on survivability. Are we soon to join other extinct species?

A simple but telling example that has been around for a long time is successful capitalism. It works fine until there is not enough to go around. Classism emerges and social standards are denied for most of the population. This is the planet’s way of saying, “Okay, enough is enough.”

Where will we find another two planets to solve the human issue?

Ancient Mariner

A deeper interpretation

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Pondering here could balloon into an uncontrollable pile of useless words. Nevertheless, mariner will take a shot at a large question he has that has interpretive references going all the way back to the Assyrians 4,000 years before Jesus. The question:

Where did Donald Trump come from? How has Donald Trump dominated world politics? Why has the nation tolerated Donald Trump? Why is he here?

To save words and wandering, mariner takes broadly based interpretations of history, some concepts from sociology and economics and some perspectives on the human species.

The historically continuous cycle of change. If anything moves, the situation has changed. It could be a galaxy or a molecule; it could be the weather or a meteor; it could be the collapse of an economy or the lack of potable water; it could be anxiety about the security of humans or the desire for personal independence; it could be a rapid 100-year sprint from horse drawn vehicles to space ships and intelligent robots. Two points can be made: First, any change disturbs the balance of resources – there will be losers and winners. Second, any change redefines reality; the rules will change or possibly rules won’t exist at all. Some quick analogies:

  •  industrial Revolution created opportunity for massive population increase
  • discovery of the American continents created opportunity to experiment with worldwide economies and launched the Western Alliance that dominates world politics today
  • emergence of medicine doubled the lifespan of humans
  • discovery of electricity permitted family-based cultures to pursue independent subcultures
  • internal combustion provoked massive expansion of commerce
  • electronic communication introduced political power without a need to be directly associated with citizens
  • human-like computer functions that can replace humans
  • nuclear weapons established permanent and credible threat to the human race

Every change has its winners and losers. So there have been many wars and cultural disruptions in all these examples. In fact, the 19th century has a nickname : the century of war.

The biological circumstances required by all living species is ‘survival of the fittest’. It is nature’s way. Famously, and quite accurately, Lord Acton in 1887 said: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” ABBA has a song called ‘The Winner Takes it All’ The words are romantically motivated but romance can be easily removed to see selfishness as the driver. Let’s face it: the economic philosophy of change is to be lucky enough to have the winning lottery ticket. Think Julius Caesar, Bill Gates, John Deere, Google and the multi-million-dollar class. Only the lucky move on. Remember Euprimate? The little mouse-like fellow was the first primate. But at some point it didn’t have a winning ticket so one doesn’t see Euprimate around anymore. How long will sapiens/neanderthal have a winning ticket?

The Human Species. Anything or any event that can create human wealth seems to be a winning ticket as the world changes. The losers are the extra people the planet can’t support and the biosphere that is over-consumed to create wealth.

So there is danger afoot: any change that can be more efficient than humans has a good chance of holding the winning ticket for the species. As far as Donald and others like him, they lucked into wealth. Many of these ‘lucky’ folks don’t understand the economics of change and continue to consume the resources that are short in supply and that likely will expedite further change. The wealthy are trying to modify wealth to protect against future change. The change has nothing to do with money. They have bought suntan lotion to protect against hurricanes.

Ancient Mariner

 

What is faith, really?

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Faith is a brain function that helps humans survive. Faith is a decision maker that is necessary for human survival because humans can imagine anything – reasonable or not – and claim it as real. Without faith, there would be no way to measure quality, importance, danger or conversely happiness, satisfaction, reward or personal value. In short, faith is a judgment function that helps humans live the best life possible.

Quickly, one is aware that faith is vulnerable. It is vulnerable because each human must construct the morals of their faith in the midst of genetic dysfunction, life experience and daily assumptions based on one’s own unique confrontations with reality.

Religious faith is based on one’s perceptions of universal association, that is, there is a force beyond human physiology that implies moral behavior. A common gesture in this regard is the phrase “What would Jesus do?”

Social faith, that is, the belief that society requires a set of moral behaviors that provide a fair life for everyone does provide guidance but not as an absolute morality because the issues are deeply ingrained in individual need.

Most affective is personal faith that is tuned to each individual’s morality about what is the best decision that will bring “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to the matter at hand. Mariner described such an action in a recent post when an unknown individual driving down the street stopped to help him lift a heavy box.

One’s faith is not written in a hardbound book or even in the depths of Google. Faith acts a lot like muscles. Faith needs continuous faith-building exercises to keep it focused on contemporary situations. Remember that in human societies, the happiness of everyone affects one’s own satisfaction with themselves.

Ancient Mariner

 

Remember liberal arts?

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As regular readers know, mariner spends a lot of time in Nosey Mole’s tunnels, thereby avoiding broadcast TV news. He spends his time reading and watching more cogent and thoughtful reports in professional journals, non-profit news organizations and has burned a candle short looking for interesting entertainment shows.

One of his sources is YouTube which he calls Junk University. Name a topic, a person, an ideology, a trade skill, health, comedians or any flower no matter how scarce, and Junk University has a series on it. Mariner is a lingering fan of boogie woogie. There are endless hours of boogie woogie clips.

But whence what we used to call ‘liberal arts’?

Colleges are abandoning liberal arts because it isn’t focused specifically on career preparation. It has been decades since public schools made a serious attempt to introduce academic classes on history, politics, sociology, language, philosophy, psychology or religion. Trump et al are wiping out any evidence that there was something erroneously called ‘slavery’ in the American past. If a student isn’t pursuing STEM, they are out of luck.

Guess what? There is a top class liberal arts university on television! It is a TV series on PBS called NOVA – 50 years of liberal arts episodes covering all the implied information one would want to learn in a liberal arts program. There are insightful episodes about society, ancient history, the future of education, the future of industry, all the Earth Sciences, even mariner’s oft quoted ‘Hacking your mind’ 4-part series.

So if your soul is shriveling in this tumultuous, unfocused world, refresh yourself browsing 50 years of NOVA; orderliness will return to your psyche.

And don’t forget to chip in as a member to offset one of the wonders of political history who certainly will have a place on future NOVA episodes: The Trumpeter has killed Federal support to PBS.

Ancient Mariner

Homo sapiens is like a garden

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Mariner is a gardener. He has a Masters from Junk University (YouTube). So right off the top, he will acknowledge that most Homos are weeds. To give credit where credit is due, some weeds can be useful and attractive; In some cases, it is not the fault of some very attractive and useful plants that they become weeds.

For example, the mulberry tree is attractive and produces tasty, edible berries. The issue is that tens of thousands of birds eat the berries and discard hundreds of thousands of seeds across God’s Kingdom – which includes every existing gardener. As every Junk University graduate knows, there will be a fast growing, lanky and aggressive mulberry tree every six inches in the flower bed. Like dandelions, the entire root must be recovered or it grows back.

Social Media is a weed. Like the mulberry tree, it is a controllable tree that can be useful. But it’s those damned thousands of wrens and sparrows who use the tree to spread crap all over the world that make it a disruptive weed.

Some weeds are like some members of a family where most members of the family are normal and behave in acceptable ways. Then there are the weeds – obnoxious, aggressive, selfish, disruptive members of the family. Consider crabgrass.

Crabgrass is a member of the Digitaria genus, which is part of the Poaceae family, commonly known as the grass family. This family includes over 10,000 species of flowering plants, many of which are cultivated for lawns and agriculture.

Everyone knows how beautiful a well kept lawn can be. It is also true that in the Homo family, many families are bred (educated) to produce grasses that are helpful and make the world a better, more attractive place. But there are members of the family, like harebrained Presidents and weird growing Representatives from Georgia that can tear up a nice lawn in weeks. These family members grow fast by spreading seeds with the same sparrows and also are more discreet in that they send out unseen aggressive roots to push aside existing grass.

Well, it’s October. Time to use a carefully prepared weedkiller (violence, conflict) but more effective is for you political gardeners to get out the trowel and the secateurs, get involved and clean out the weeds. In Homo terms, be physically involved in local political activities, guarantee a fair election and pull the weeds out. Always reseed your lawn after this operation (vote in some good grass).

Ancient Mariner

 

Alone at last

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It’s one of those times again when mariner’s wife has gone visiting for a few days. There are several related responses to his sudden isolation. On the first day, there is a sense of free space where decorum is ignored. Eat when one wants to eat – and what one wants to eat; don’t make the bed; don’t shave; sleep often; tinker with small projects; if one is a reader, read; maybe go shopping for that odd item that normally isn’t worth the overhead. The street term for this response is called ‘Batching’, short for bacheloring – although the behavior is practiced by males and females.

After the first day, time is invested in bottom-of-the-jar tasks like fixing the storm door; making the laptop behave correctly; paint the basement; potting and propagating garden plants; clean the attic. Although unusually motivating, these tasks are huge and may end in an unfinished quagmire.

By the third day, one is aware that control of daily life has been lost. Maybe one should make a list of mandatory tasks to be done daily, like make the bed, do the dishes, feed the pets, etc. Slowly, however, loneliness begins to set in.

On the fourth day, loneliness sets in big time – especially in the evenings. One realizes how irrelevant televisions are; Alexi just doesn’t measure up as company; to many, the smartphone is a secret tunnel into Neverland (or netherworld) – just for awhile.

So the new life is quiet, unengaging and unrewarding. Slowly, the mind begins to adapt to a new life dedicated to survival. It is a quiet life with no big rewards and no acknowledgement for that life, either. This is the critical time when one must reach out to the community or severe depression creeps in. If nothing less, go to a public event of any kind or volunteer to help someone with a task or visit your nearest (within reason) relative (within reason).

Before the spouse departs, an agreed communication process should be arranged. One day can be spent traveling to a desired place like a forest, a beach, or even tour a museum – just a quiet, time consuming visit.

Hooray!! the spouse returns. Did you empty the trash in time? make the bed? sweep the floor? clean up the kitchen? shower, shave, shampoo, and trim your toenails?

Fortunately, love is blind (almost).

Ancient Mariner

Bits from home

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Mariner’s philologist friend and he have a special dictionary of stressed or highly truncated words that are intriguing. His friend’s latest contribution is ‘supwier’. Usually, mariner gives the reader time to deduce these aberrations for themselves but supwier may require immediate assistance:

SUPWIER (supp’ wi-err) — “What’s up with her?”

A view of mariner’s garden will observe that it has not rained in his town for more than two weeks so he has had to water his nine little gardens. The plants, however, have not been fooled by temperatures in the nineties and have begun to close shop for the season – only special autumn flowers and every known weed continue as usual. As all the garden catalogues suggest, now is a good time to plant the brassica family of green vegetables.

Since establishing four new toad ponds (trays), his garden looks more like a zoo. Coupled with the ripe pecan tree, squirrels abound. The countless crowds of sparrows and wrens have discovered every pond and have new neighborhood pubs to frequent. A new visitor is a feral Aegean house cat (grey with vague stripes).

Mariner calls on his religious friends to take up the slack and immoral behavior of our governments regarding the homeless and indigent; they who have been viciously and without cause cut off from food. One would think our destitute citizens understand that living in a Gaza world is normal. Remember that the word ‘convenient’ is not part of the process. Do something today!

Ancient Mariner

 

 

He is a sick man not fit to represent me

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Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid in the United States.

The cancellations began in mid-May, when over 100 orders of 2% milk bound for 31 states were halted.

The records show 4,304 canceled deliveries between May and September across the 50 states, Puerto Rico and D.C. Each truck here represents a delivery that would never arrive to feed communities.

All told, the deliveries accounted for nearly 94 million pounds of food. The true loss is likely greater, food banks said, because not all of the year’s deliveries had been scheduled.

The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.

Reported by ProPublica, a nonprofit, publically supported news agency.

This is the same person who sells Trump-branded Holy Bibles.

Ancient Mariner

 

Education in an AI world

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Walton Family Foundation and Gallup’s latest Teaching for Tomorrow report finds that while most teachers engage in professional development, the most beneficial opportunities — like peer collaboration — are often engaged in at a lower rate. At the same time, many teachers lack the classroom resources and staffing support needed to do their jobs effectively.

This report from Walton Family Foundation is a common perspective about the future of education. Education, like medicine, community support for the indigent, and even the nation’s governments – all are subject to the fate of history, changing society and real world confrontation. It is true that education as a concept is under great stress; it is true that the the recent plague interrupted an entire generation’s sense of decorum in the classroom; it is true that internet communications have reshaped the center of informative social dialogue; it is true that a slowly decaying form of government is incompetent in its service to the nation’s educational need and other government-supported cultural need as well.

Mariner suspects the largest impact, especially in colleges, is books. Who needs them? He has written in past posts to the blog about why we need education, methods of education and even the management of education. In this post he focuses on how  humans must be educated in the future and even now as great shifts of the planet, technology and behavioral environments are bouncing about in the winds of change.

Education, in particular, is easily affected by culture and innovation. Note the following examples and how quickly and fully these examples modified ‘normal’ education practices.

֎  In 1910 only 79% of children enrolled in schools. Only 11 percent of all children between ages fourteen and seventeen were enrolled in high school, and only 8.8% graduated. By 1950, the age of fossil fuel emerged, two world wars occurred, and an economic restructuring changed the social structure of society. Education statistics immediately changed. In 1950 84% of children enrolled in school and high school graduation leaped to 59%. The GI benefit of a paid college education thrust colleges into the general public sphere and bachelor degrees were economically available.

֎  Ezra Stiles, a former president of Yale University, died nearly 230 years ago. It is Mr. Stiles that we owe the grading system that has prevailed since. His clear intention was to publicly rank and sort students according to their achievement, not to give them feedback on their learning or to suggest how they might improve before the next exam. This kind of class ranking was a mechanism for conveying status and privilege (or withholding them), oftentimes mirroring the social structures of the world beyond the ivy-covered university walls. (Some suggest this intent created the ‘woke’ class).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Whether we accept it or not, Mother Nature outfits each and all her species with all the survival skills and behaviors needed to sustain a normal lifestyle for each specific species. In the case of mammals and many other branches of evolution as well, Mother outfitted them with ’emotion’. Emotion is the way humans integrate with one another, learn social values, develop compassion and reinforce safety. Emotion permits bonding not only to others but to the world around them.

Mariner looked back to our forefathers, the early Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. No books. There was lots of art in caves, on stones and wood, even on pottery; perhaps art is a primitive form of writing, of documenting emotion.

Our forefathers learned through social bonding the need to build homes for shelter without the benefit of watching This Old House on PBS or the dozen books mariner bought in order to build his house. These primitives learned by watching, sharing and caring. – Call it peer collaboration.

Instructors of any subject no longer need to read a lot of books and be the only source of truth and knowledge. That form of respect is gone because students don’t need books any more. However, indeed very important, is the fact that today a student’s emotions are needed in order to build knowledge for survival. Instructors must use tools out of the emotions kit to build a world value system that is not available in today’s society.

Ancient Mariner