Author Archives: skipper

Old folks are like annuals.

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The advantage of living in Nosey Mole’s tunnels is that it is quiet. The environment is stable and unchanging. Just as once in a while Nosey pokes his head above ground to check on things, so to has mariner. But they are brief moments to check that normalcy prevails around the tunnels.

What mariner sees is his small town. True, normalcy seems to prevail; citizens are living lives within the scope of normalcy, all the houses are still there and the pleasures of electricity, water and labor-saving inventions prevail. But what mariner perceives as normalcy across his lifetime no longer exists.

For folks born in the 1930s and 1940’s, the world of the 21st century is not ‘normal’. The big war ended while these folks were still young. What emerged was an era of bright sunshine, happiness and stable family life. Things like amusement parks, movie theaters and shopping districts were every day outings. Pleasantness often pushed the realities of existence aside. True, the realities of haves and have-nots existed but what was different was the sunshine. It seemed brighter. When the Sun rose in the morning, it was a new day to be experienced.

The first disruption to the sunshine was the Viet Nam war which, in hindsight, was the first sign of imbalance in the world’s political/economic situation. Now there are clouds in the sky – clouds that are omens of change and disruption. In mariner’s town, the sixties were the last years of a town-centric economy, a bustling social environment and a self-contained feeling of living in the sunshine.

Clouds gathered over the next twenty years then Reagan introduced cold weather. Those war-years folks weren’t at the center of society anymore. Unions were forced out of existence, corporations became gigantic but were no longer required to provide full retirement to their employees, democrats became white collar and forgot their roots. Farms became too large to be based on a single family economy. Computers began their march against social dependency.

The first hard frost was the disruption by the virus followed by a withering Congress, then came the age of Trump – the beginning of winter.

The sunshine is gone today. There is no warm, invigorating sunrise. Children of the war years are not indigenous. Culturally, they are withering – even as they continue to live their own reality.

Children of the big war are like annual plants – a life experience that does not extend into the present winter.

Ancient Mariner

As the world turns

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Remember that soap opera? Well, the world is turning for sure. There are only two issues  in this post: The liberties of a plutocracy and the cash model of a dictatorship. First, liberties of a plutocracy:

Ever heard of ‘The Villages in Florida – Active Living Retirement at its best’?

This is a cheaper home listed at $314,900. Occupants must be fifty-five or older and have a nest egg of about $1½ million and the elitist behavior to go along with it. Mariner knows, he has relatives in The Villages.

But the world has turned. The President has threatened the comfort of the white collar class to the point that the only safe place to retire is outside the United States. The list shows the most popular nations picked by the white collar folks:

Now on to the Dictator President and his influence on the financial well being of the American citizen.

 

The Week

12 US billionaires gained almost $1 trillion in wealth in 2024 as the stock market delivered another year of massive returns.

Millionaire investors have boosted cash to 19% of their total assets, up from 12% prior to pandemic.

Top 10 wealthiest American men collectively earned extra $1B a day, report says, as Trump pushes tax cuts.

Despite market turmoil caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs, the group saw an increase in their collective wealth of $365 billion over the last 12 months.

On March 18, 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By May 2022, his wealth had surged to $255 billion.  As of March 18, 2024, Musk is at $188.5 billion, more than a seven-fold increase in four years.

Over four years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth increase from $113 billion to 192.8 billion, even after paying out tens of billions in a divorce settlement and donating tens of billions to charity.

Throw in the effects of AI on the workplace and the future for the average American may not be a predictable one.

Ancient Mariner

Take a vacation

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Mariner and his wife have just returned from a ‘dash in, visit, dash out’ vacation plan. We don’t recommend it. The pleasures of visiting with family and friends is diminished while packing, unpacking, repacking and driving become the dominant experience.

We did indeed enjoy our time with friends and family (and the Maryland crab cakes, gardens and an excellent restaurant overlooking a classic inlet full of sailboats). It is a bit of tradition for mariner and his wife to stop at a Cracker Barrel when we travel. His order of fried shrimp was so large it served as lunch and dinner the next day! As to gardens, every visit had a garden! He confiscated some Sweet Woodruff plants when visiting one of his friends.

It is too bad that driving dominated our vacation experience  It is mariner’s opinion that driving, with all its consternation, still is better than airplanes or trains – haven’t tried rockets yet because they are too expensive. We have sailed on cruise ships but that is subject to “been there, done that”. Instead, charter a 40-foot sloop and sail to your destination.

Back to driving, it is so intense on the interstates one dare not reach for a drink or snack on the console. There are trucks that gather in groups to dance a strange square dance; there are left-lane abusers staying in the fast lane while driving five miles under the speed limit; there are drivers darting in and out of lanes at very high speed and within inches of other vehicles; change lanes at your own risk; on some interstate routes traffic has reached the saturation point. If one likes high speed, drive in Kentucky – the slow lane crawled along at eighty miles an hour!

But the real distraction is road construction. It was so bad along route 70 across every state between Iowa and Maryland that he and his wife chose to return home through West Virginia and Kentucky, crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis. It was even worse – between Lexington and St. Louis, one side of the highway was being rebuilt from scratch; backups were close to a dead stop for twenty miles!

Unlike other future prospects which mariner sees as uncertain, he relishes the day when all cars are driverless and must obey the instructions of the interstate computer. Will the speedsters even want to drive when forced to a predetermined speed limit?

All this considered, the time with friends and family was worth it. However, we won’t try another ‘dash in, visit, dash out’ vacation plan.

Ancient Mariner

Before Zoro there was Zoroaster

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Attracted to rediscovering ancient Kyrgyzstan religions by a friend mariner visited while vacationing, he discovered that Judaism and Christianity didn’t invent anything – they copied ritual and theology from Zoroastrianism. Even Jesus rising on the third day was a standard belief for everyone. When a person died, their soul hung around for three days before being evaluated by Ahura Mazda, the unchallenged creator of all things, and then were raised to their afterlife.

 

Ahura Mazda

 

Mariner urgently recommends that the reader watch on YouTube, Zoroastrianism Origin by Book of World History.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything is true

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Without television news to occupy his time, mariner uses that time to explore other subjects like paleontology and ancient cultural histories, Then there is quantum mechanics. He was drawn to this subject because a number of journals were covering a new breakthrough which solved open issues that have been unresolved since before Einstein.

Of anything one would want to study, quantum mechanics is the most confusing and obscure subject. Mathematics is beyond comprehension and is understood only by the most dedicated mathematician. Relativity is an understated word by which any situation can be redefined and still be true. The wrench for manipulating anything is called a quantum.

A simple metaphor: Looking at a Mercator map of the world (everything is flat making land nearer the poles to be larger than it is), if one were to fly an airplane from India to Denmark, the shortest distance would be a straight line on the map between the two locations. However, if we change the shape of the map to include actual planet-shaped accuracy, the line doesn’t appear straight anymore. In fact, it is a curved line that passes close to the North Pole. Yet, it is the same line, the same length and is curved to match the curvature of the Earth. In one case, straight line; in the other a very curved line yet both are the same line.

The ‘quantum’ in this metaphor is the change in map representation. Let’s make it more realistic: In your yard, you have a very long garden hose. You also have at the middle of the yard a tree that needs watering. Does it affect anything if the hose lies straight between the faucet and the tree or does it affect anything if too much hose is used and it coils all over the yard? No. It’s the same hose whatever shape it has.

What is vital is the location at each end of the lines and hose: India must be India and stay where it is, Denmark must stay where it is. The faucet must stay where it is and the tree must stay where it is. These are finite values – everything else is relative to the stationary locations. These examples are almost too simplistic but mariner can’t go any deeper without getting lost. He dare not get a fancy microscope and use these rules to measure behavior among the molecules, atoms and ions that make up the Universe.

He learned, without understanding, that if you add a lot of differently shaped lines between the finite values, system behavior evolves – like Suns and planets and Homos.

Welcome to quantum mechanics.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

It’s our turn

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One of the subjects mariner has focused on during the TV news blackout is anthropology, especially the evolution of various species of humanoids and when the major integrations occurred. A clear example is the disappearance of Neanderthal when the last ice age subsided, the large animals they specialized in hunting for food went extinct, the plant culture shifted, and the seas rose as the ice melted. At the end, cannibalism was practiced and a recent immigrant, Homo sapiens, emerged to dominate Europe.

Stepping back to a larger ancestry, the first humanoid to emigrate from Africa into Europe was Heidelbergensis (700,000 years ago) who eventually evolved into the Neanderthal with the help of Denisovans who occupied Siberia. In fact, several ‘cousin’ humanoids left Africa during this era as the African climate shifted to create the Sahara desert; generally they moved East to occupy Pacific coast regions and Australia..

Fortunately, Homo sapiens developed in southern Africa and developed there for a longer period and did not migrate to the northern hemisphere until 130,000 years ago. They had become something close to the modern Homo sapiens and quickly dominated the older humanoids who also had the disadvantage of losing an ice age, their intended breeding ground.

Stepping back to an even larger transition, These migrations were caused by an European ice age and an African climate change. It looms as a very large question: What will happen to today’s human population if the planet chooses to create a severe global warming? As usual, we sappiens can’t manage ourselves enough to prepare for such a change – a change irrelevant of plutocracy, racism and classism. Oh well, maybe Alexa can conjure something.

Ancient Mariner

AI’s vision of society is a panopticon

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Atlantic Magazine published an article about AI’s perspective on the shape and function of society: it will perform in the manner of a panopticon.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Mariner did not realize how frequently this term is being used today until after the Atlantic article. Despite being originated as a philosophical metaphor, it is as popular as Schrodinger’s cat and Pavlov’s dog. It also is more interpretive as a description of the future than mariner’s two movies of similar prediction, 1984 and Matrix.

The single corrections officer can be interpreted as a bucketful of AI corporations in operations today. Just to mention a few – Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Adobe . . .  Already in active use are most search engines, Alexa, Facebook, etc.

All the futurists like Jeremy Bentham, the movies, the active user applications and social media gossip predict a social panopticon where all there is left for a human to do is sit in a room and conjure reality through their smartphone.

Enjoy looking at wilderness sites on your smartphone? Did it occur to you it would be a genuine experience if you actually went to one instead?

Armageddon proceeds.

Ancient Mariner

Same-o, Same-o

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Hello Readers –

The reason all the honkies are getting behind Trump and his non-white deportation program (citizen or not)  and the idea of paying only honky women $5,000 to have a honky baby is because for several years now the population studies show that honkies will become a minority in 2045. Just wanted the readers to know that motive.

On to somewhat nicer stuff:

This definitely is the year of the dandelion. Mariner and his wife have spent several days removing dandelions from garden beds. Lawns can be treated chemically but garden beds are much more sensitive to chemicals and acidity. Dandelions are like mulberry tree seedlings = one must get the entire root, leaving not even a splinter. Otherwise, it will grow again. Maple trees are an insidious weed, too, but cutting it below the surface kills it.

It is hoped that there will be no more frosts. This past winter was unusually brutal. It was hard on roses and azaleas. Fortunately, the peonies and bulb flowers are bursting forth. Mariner has lots of irises and they all have big flower buds about to bloom. Spring has come. It seems in the Midwest that there have been regular occurrences of big stormy fronts with floods and tornado warnings. Fortunately, all his town gets is an occasional thunderstorm; he lives in a strip of Iowa that is declared a drought zone. Agriculture agencies have moved mariner’s side of Iowa from growing zone 4 to zone 6 suggesting warmer winters. He’ll believe it when it happens.

The title of this post is “Same-o, Same-o” because he has been watching a documentary series about early Rome during the age of unbridled, typically narcissistic emperors – like feeding typically lower class Christians to lions or murdering relatives to assure the proper succession. It is amazing how today’s President has mastered their style.

As to AI, everyone has been exposed to this new phenomenon enough that a rewatch of the film “The Social Dilemma” would be meaningful. It is available on Netflix.

Have a happy summer everyone!

Ancient Mariner

 

Mother Earth ups the ante

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Mariner has harangued his readers about the Armageddon consisting of excessive population, disappearing natural resources, global warming and uncontrolled AI. But Mother Earth has just started to get involved.

In a report from Nature Geoscience –

“North America’s geological core has persisted for billions of years—it’s what scientists call a craton, a massive block of continental rock that withstands the natural recycling system of plate tectonics. Typically, scientists think of cratons as unchanging, nigh on eternal. But new research published on March 28 in Nature Geoscience suggests that a long-lost geological plate may be siphoning rock from the bottom of the North American craton, eroding it from below, right under our feet.

Such a scenario would not be unprecedented—scientists have evidence that the North China craton thinned dramatically millions of years ago—but it would certainly be surprising and intriguing to study in real time. “Cratons are the oldest cores of continents, so they have been sitting near the Earth’s surface for billions of years,” says Claire Currie, a geophysicist at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the new research. “They’ve persisted through time, so this is quite unusual.”

Mariner could find no projected dates for these events but at some point in the future, the next tectonic shift may turn the Mississippi River into the Mississippi Sea or conversely, The Mississippi Mountains.

Mother Earth’s stash seems unending. Much of Florida and much of the Gulf-facing land in the US will disappear under rising seas; Global warming will disrupt political, economic and environmental conditions that may cause even more famine and unrest among human populations.

Mother Earth wants everyone to know that AI isn’t the only player in the future of us Homos.

Ancient Mariner

Phew! Lent is over

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It’s Easter! Now we can get back to our jelly beans, Hershey bars, donuts, ice cream and wine! Jesus thanks you for your effort and wonders why he ever decided to rise again.

Don’t blame yourself for failing to understand the core values of your faith. Every religion erodes over time, subject to cultural shifts, personal conflicts and the state of the planet. One can imagine how strong one’s faith had to be when, as a mother, you left your baby behind to save it from being, as you will be, eaten by a lion. Then Alexander saw a cross in the sky made with a cloud and considered it to be the reason he had won his wars so he declared Christianity as the state religion. Since then Christianity, in whatever form, is society’s Department of Religious Affairs and even spends enough money on buildings and cultural politics that DOGE would love to get it’s hands on that department.

But things change. Today in the United States, two billionaire Christian ministers (a bureaucratic title) are trying to reinstall Alexander’s form of theocracy – similar to the Islamic theocracies in Iran and Afghanistan. Further, one’s approach to personal ritual, budget and life management does not seem to fit the needs of the wealthier nations. Consequently, overall attendance in Christian churches is shrinking.

The oversight in history is that Jesus was encouraging selflessness as a means of personal survival. Sharing isn’t only a physical act, it is a way to cope in difficult times. The theology of Jesus was personal – not to be dependent on worldly conditions that brought death, starvation, insecurity, inequality and abuse. Not only does sharing minimize hardship in others, it makes a person feel functional and useful – a healing act that may feel liberating, perhaps like sitting at the right hand of God who is above the fray of human reality.

There was only one religious organization in Jesus’ faith. There were three roles: God, as an unending source of love; Jesus himself as a human example (not a prophet); every human being who, by their spiritual commitment to ‘sharing’ brought God’s creative, gratifying love to a human’s sense of self. This religious ‘organization’ is called the Trinity. When humans engage in sharing, there is only one experience: the blessing of God’s love – a love that displaces all despair, insecurity and hardship.

Theologically, Lent and Easter aren’t about giving up gumdrops or promising to improve one’s own inadequacies, it’s about sharing with others who may need your help. In short, as a Christian, what is given for Lent is you giving yourself to the Trinity experience so that your faith and your self will expand God’s love in an imperfect world. Spiritually, one’s sacrifice is the power that lets Christ rise on Easter.

He has risen. Are you in?

Ancient Mariner