Category Archives: Politics

A Nice followup

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This is a nice followup to mariner’s post, ‘Good News’. It is published by Axios:

It’s Giving Tuesday — the annual day when people across America and around the world donate to the causes and organizations they care about.

  • It also kicks off the holiday giving season, and charities see donations continue to roll in through December.

📈 The big picture: Americans are giving more. Last year, Giving Tuesday donations hit $3.6 billion, a 16% jump from 2023.

  • The generosity didn’t stop at cash: The number of Americans who donated goods jumped 32% and the number who volunteered ticked up 4%.

Zoom in: Writing a check isn’t the only way to participate in the season of giving:

  • Here are four other powerful ways to give back:
  1. 🩸 Donate blood. “Of the approximately 62% of Americans eligible to donate blood, only 3% do so each year. But someone needs blood every few seconds in America,” Vox reports.
  2. 🥫 Donate food. Many food banks and pantries across the country say they’re still seeing surging demand even after SNAP benefits have been restored. Check out Feeding America’s list of items to donate to food banks and which ones to skip.
  3. 📚 Donate your skills. If you can code, ask local charities if they need website help. If you love to read, pick up volunteer shifts at your library. If you’re on top of your own shoveling, offer to clear an elderly neighbor’s driveway.
  4. 💌 Donate your good cheer. Several organizations are seeking volunteers to spread joy — especially during the holidays. A Million Thanks mobilizes people to write letters of gratitude to service members and veterans. Love for our Elders collects letters for older adults. Cards for Hospitalized Kids distributes handmade cards to children in hospitals in all 50 states.

Try it! Many families weave giving back into their holiday traditions. Consider a group volunteer outing or spend a Sunday afternoon writing letters and cards together as you gather with your loved ones this season.

Bottom up is best!

Ancient Mariner

Good News

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Over the last month or so, mariner has seen a notable increase in efforts to save water. What is even better, water projects frequently are implemented at the ‘grass roots’  level. These efforts are documented in newspapers, gardening magazines, clips on YouTube and even on the search engine advertising strips. Even local public libraries have garden books that show how to build everything from a downspout system to self sustaining ponds. A local fire company has taken steps to catch roof water into a huge beer barrel like one would see at a brewery, which it uses as the primary water to put out fires.

The good news is this: If you want to change or improve a societal circumstance, the best and fastest way is from the bottom up. Saving water, it turns out, is easy and effective if only in your own back yard.

Another rapidly growing change at the neighborhood level is solar-based electricity.

The same is true in politics,  The situation is a broken government with little insight how to prepare it for the 21st century. Perhaps if you were to visit campaign activities and elect a sound, local mayor or state representative, this may be the fastest and best procedure to pull our government together again – start at the bottom.

Economics is a tough one to change from the bottom. When mariner had a contract in Taiwan, the culture there, while not running the national economy, was still run by family businesses. The local citizens ran a plethora of businesses at street locations and night market setups. Even light manufacturing was family run.  While there was no motive by the Taiwanese to change the Nation’s economic policies, it occurs to mariner that family run retail using local resources, would be a good method for  pushing back on the economy – a fact that may become real as AI changes the concept of workforce.

The current fear in the US that prices are rising generally for the common citizen has led to a resurgence of farmer’s markets in many suburban and rural areas – meaning that corporately processed vegetables are being augmented by home grown gardens.

Mariner’s grandmother was an excellent example of bottom up modification; this time because WWII demanded it. She was a full time seamstress for a large department store and further augmented her income by making clothes, draperies, rugs and any other sewing requests she could find. Plus she made most of the clothes for the family who at the time had very low income.

It will be difficult to tame electricity, computer, oil versus solar and manufacturing (although his neighbor rebuilt an early farm tractor to create a marketable item displayed in parades and his wife started a house cleaning service).

Bottom up is the best way to go to fix societal issues. Here’s the hard part: You must, with your own gumption, disrupt your staid lifestyle, get out of the house and use your smart brain and physical body to get things started.

Ancient Mariner

 

Measuring the fog

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Readers are aware of mariner’s concerns about the future. Specifically, there are four global phenomena that are trying to make serious changes to the status quo of human life and to the planet.

The first to be measured is population. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded eight billion in mid-November 2022. It took around 300,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 218 more years from there to reach 8 billion.

The global population is still increasing, but there is significant uncertainty about its long-term trajectory due to changing fertility and mortality rates.The United Nations projects between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050 and gives an 80% confidence interval of 10–12 billion by the end of the 21st century with a growth rate by then of zero.

This pattern of accelerated birth rates hits a point of psychosomatic collapse where the population begins to fall. This behavior also was proven in population studies with mice back in the 1960s. Those mouse studies also showed a societal collapse into two classes: a few very stable families where some family members served as border guards and, by mouse cage standards, were very wealthy. The other class being subject to mob violence, constant fighting, killing and an indifference toward newborns.

If population were an isolated phenomenon, it would be comparatively simple to manage. However, it becomes part of today’s fog because population is related to economics, habitat and behavior of the planet – as each of the four are integrated with the other three.

Hence the fog. Will the planet ignore human viability and destroy the balance of the surface with heat, storms and mass extinction or will the planet be influenced by dollars because there aren’t enough worldly resources to sustain modern economics as we have known it? The relationship between habitat and population is close.

Have humans made it too expensive to be the only creature who needs a fancy toilet, a water tower and septic system along side piped in fresh water just to pee? The industrial/technical age has created large economies at great expense to the habitat. It used to be instead of consuming millions of acres for grazing giant herds of beef, transportation and factory processing at local populations, that a person could buy fresh beef, lamb and chicken from a local butcher shop requiring only a dozen or so workers from farmer to customer.

Which causes are hurt the most of the four – economy, habitat or over population? Mariner hasn’t mentioned global warming.

Climate change is big in the news today because in just a few years, big cities, massive industrial centers and land itself will be destroyed.

So which should humans fix first? It looks like AI will tell the remaining pseudo humans the answers.

It’s all a big fog.

Ancient Mariner

He is back

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Mariner. Nobody special, just mariner. He has been visiting for a few days with long-time friends who live on a gorgeous property among the mountains of Arkansas. One could write tomes about the differences between Arkansas and Iowa. The most memorable difference is roads. In Iowa, one can be lost on long, unending gravel roads in the midst of endless fields without a home in sight. In Western Arkansas, the roads are first wrapped around a stick a lot like a spool of wire and then, in that curly state, they are laid down in a continuously elevated and sunken series of very tightly curved roads. Homes are scattered along the road but typically are hidden in the continuous forests.

While visiting, his friend Tom brought up a Biblical issue mariner had not come across in all his years of rummaging in religious tales: The holiday name ‘Easter’ is derived from an early Assyrian goddess Ishtar, a goddess of birth and fertility. Her symbols were an egg and a rabbit, hence Easter. The Roman Catholics firmly deny this, of course, but there is no smoking gun in the history books – just gossip. If the reader is interested, there are many web sources. Just type ‘Ishtar and Easter’ in your search engine.

Another piece of scholarly information mariner retrieved from his search engine was that dark chocolate and red wine trigger freshened brain attentiveness. Maybe over the ages that was a DNA patch so you could remember where the cork is. Similar to Ishtar, type ‘red wine and chocolate’ in your search engine.

On to a more important observation mariner noticed from a comfortable chair and a glass of red wine within the tunnels of alter ego Nosey Mole, is that Trumpians, other republicans and the democratic party and progressives, too, all are beginning to fragment. This situation could move three different ways: 1- The government will continue to crumble, most likely leaving political control with the Trumpians after the 2028 election 2- delete current election practices to the point that the outcome will be unstable and debatable 3- Corporate domination of society will be entrenched enough to virtually stop any democratic precepts from moving forward – AKA money wins.

Please, please be very careful who you vote for in 2028.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Sailing

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Sailing is an excellent metaphor for many of life’s experiences. There are the times when preparing to sail is overwhelming in its endless detail and distractions; there are times, while underway, when the weather changes a sailor’s plans; there are long periods of time when there is no one about except the sailor, the boat and the sea. If ever humans lived a sailing life, it is now.

A course on the ocean of reality has unpredictable weather, even hints of hurricanes and monsoons. Reality is driven by unknown weather confronted by a boat built in the past on dry land. Our boat’s energy and purpose comes from using the boat’s sails to interact with the waves and winds of reality – providing purpose, function and survivability.

How easy it is to use the sailing metaphor in the daily life of humans. We learn early in life that reality is not often kind and may even be determined to cause difficulty at the daily level. Yet humans must sail on, destined to fulfill purpose in life and even to physically survive.

Where is a sailor’s security while on the ocean? It is the boat, of course. It is also true that a human’s psychological self needs a ‘home base’ to feel secure. What is home base for a sailor? the boat. What is home base for a human? family and friends. It is family and friends across a lifetime that have helped build your boat. It is your family and friends that have shaped your sails and built a rudder to steer you through reality. But don’t feel life is their burden – you built the hull and mast. Yet, family and friends are a known and integrated base in the midst of the storms of reality.

If there were only one tool a sailor could take on a sail, it would be a compass. How would one know they were sailing in large circles? It is quite fortunate that sailors have a compass. It’s like using a GPS to get to the port of Maragogi, Alagoas in Africa. Fortunately for humans, the planet has an online network that can tell someone in what direction they are going just by using magnets.

If only such dependability were so with human culture. Just like a family provides direction and stability, one would think society would help, too, being a derivative of friends and family. Perhaps, every once in a while in some short sixty year period, society is stationary enough to live a pleasant life knowing where a person is and who they are supposed to be.

Such a time is not today. The disruptions, storms, abuses and ignorance that lie about today are like a miles-wide plastics and trash dump floating on the ocean of reality. No one knows where to go or when. No social identity is secure. Our rudders, whether boat or person, are clogged.

Now is one of those times when a sailor is alone with his boat for long stretches. The sailor must have a bonded relationship with his boat from which to draw confidence. Yes, the same is the situation for a human today. Only from our bonded relationship with family and friends can we draw confidence and security while sailing the oceans of today’s reality.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

Paint your lifetime in a picture

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Isn’t this an interesting thought? Imagine you are in a class of some kind and the assignment is to present your life experience in a painting. What would you paint? Perhaps some of your major events either of pain or joy? Perhaps a montage of the birthing day of all your children? Maybe a more bleak painting of conflicts in life. Your painting could have a theme, for example, Pablo Picasso always found a way to include breasts. Claude Monet’s expressionist paintings were never focused enough to see any detail – you wouldn’t have to name names.

Pretend we are Bob Ross. We could build a painting in layers. First, what color would you paint the blank canvas? Something bright but not too strong? Perhaps a pale, neutral color? It could be darker to reflect a canvas of disturbances, or a plain white which would permit multitudinous little images all over the canvas.

The next layer is the background. Inevitably Bob would paint mountains. Perhaps there was a suspended time when you lived in a different background like row houses or a college campus. Take note, though, that this background may limit what can be painted closer to the eye – Bob always painted trees and a road.

Now you have to pick the close up scene. Is it a bunch of small portraits? Is it a big event like joining the Army? What is the frequent style of events that shows your life? Your skills? Your family? Your job? Your romances? Your favorite pets? Don’t hold back – Pablo didn’t!

 

 

 

 

Ancient Mariner

How long since you foraged?

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If one isn’t sure that evolution is at play in the way Homo sapiens is evolving, consider foraging.

Many of us are familiar with the nomadic model of foraging. Most kinds of animals forage today. In parts of Africa, animals with hooves must migrate hundreds of miles to accommodate seasonal shifts in drought. “Cave man” lived on what it could catch and kill along with a surprising cuisine of indigenous plants. “Going to the store” meant scrounging in the woods or spending most of a day (sometimes more) hunting smaller animals or collaborating with other Cave Men to catch some protein.

Many thousands of years later Homo learned to grow his own food. Even in the nineteenth century, a significant percentage of Homos grew their own sustenance. However, rather quickly in the last two centuries, Homo has left foot-bound self-sufficiency behind. Homo learned to use a horse – not the first interdependent relationship between species.

Moving along quickly, the horse, then the train, then automobiles, then airplanes, then cruise ships – all had an impact on human foraging. It wasn’t long before foraging meant hunting for a grocery store and even special sharing (like leopards do) in restaurants.

Restaurants have been a mainstay for quite a while but evolution never stops. Homo foraging is pushing restaurants out of business by replacing an in-house meal with food orders delivered by organizations like Grubhub. A common effect on evolution is disease; COVID really pushed delivery services even to include foraging for grocery stores.

Already evolving in delivery services is a humanoid that looks like a minion. This likely will send restaurants the way of shopping malls and storefronts. Just let Alexa know and she’ll do the foraging for you.

It is a common speculation that future phases of evolution will allow the ancestors of Cave Man to sit or lie about while humanoids assume the responsibility for evolution in general, including work, leisure, foraging and social dependency. Perhaps a regenerative physicianoid will discover a drug that prevents bedsores.

Does anyone remember having to forage for a gopher for dinner? Among the greenery on the side of the road, which plants are okay to eat and which plants will poison you?

At least Homos know they will join the other 16,000 extinct creatures that have passed during the Anthropocene Epoch.

Ancient Mariner

 

A gift from Politico

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What an outstanding interview with Julia Angwin. Julia Angwin is a veteran investigative reporter and publisher known for groundbreaking, data-driven stories on the power of technology over our lives. She founded The Markup in 2018, and was recently appointed as the inaugural director of the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s initiative on independent media.

Mariner has edited the interview.
• • • •

What’s one underrated big idea?

The industry we call tech has transformed into media. Their political power comes largely from their role as information gatekeepers. They are the distributors of all content — entertainment, journalism, criticism — and we should start thinking of them in that light, rather than as some kind of technical wizards with magical powers.

This is probably everybody’s answer — but AI. Last year I wrote that the big question was whether AI was too stupid and unreliable to be useful. But I would add that the benefits of AI are even more questionable now that we know it’s stealing all our water and electricity.

What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t?

The top of my list would be for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation and amend the Federal Privacy Act to make it a meaningful bulwark against the DOGE data thefts that occurred with impunity this year.

What book most shaped your conception of the future?

David Brin’s “The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?” was so prescient. Published in 1999, Brin foretold the exact dilemma posed by the prevalence of powerful cameras available to everyone. If we restrict the cameras to government control, he argued, we will live in a police state. If we allow everyone to have cameras, we will at least be able to counter-surveil the government and maintain an equilibrium of power.

For everyone wringing their hands about banning kids from using smartphones, I suggest reading this book and imagining what our lives would be like right now if we didn’t have the ability to film federal agents as they unleash weapons on our unarmed neighbors who have committed no crimes.

What has surprised you the most this year?

I honestly didn’t think AI was going to cause people to commit suicide. I did not understand the level to which it was creating psychosis. Kashmir Hill’s reporting on this has been so horrifying. I’ve been writing articles about tech and covering this industry for many decades, and I often have had the problem of: I’m writing about something bad, but no one’s dying, and so it’s hard to get the public to care. In this case, people are dying directly. It’s the first time that I’ve really seen a technology cause such immediate harm and it’s really, really terrifying. It should be keeping everyone awake at night.

• • • •

Mariner is envious of Ms Angwin’s ability to criticize without attitude. It is a fault of alter ego Amos.

Ancient Mariner

There’s a weed in the garden

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If the reader has ever had a garden, they know the real trouble spot is weeds. Weeds sneak into the lawn or garden as tiny, well behaved plants; they may even have flowers. But gardeners know very quickly the nice little plant becomes boisterous, obnoxious and quickly trashes the garden, replacing it with something akin to messy unraveled hair and hides the garden plants beneath a flood of growth.

It’s too bad but AI is a new weed. Today AI has some appealing functions, especially as a source of entertainment and has new toys to play with on the computer – like writing all your letters to your mother. A cute little weed but beware: AI can take over the Amazon Forest while the reader is on a cruise!

Today, AI has been identified as a weed that will take over our understanding of how the world operates. It is just a conversational item now but in five years it will devastate the labor and white collar job market. An early indicator: Amazon is about to lay off 16,000 workers; the ‘weed’ is spreading.

The arts, that is, visual arts like painting and acting and writing, already show signs of abuse by the pushy weed. Even learning how to write with pen and paper may disappear from the school curriculum. To the other extreme, if the reader’s computer has kept up with system updates, they can read and write in any language. That is the weed offering some false greenery to hide the influence it is gaining in the garden.

Exactly like Creeping Charlie, AI literally overnight can take control of the garden. AI decides where it will grow, how rambunctious it will be and never consults the gardener.

At the moment, there is no nation in the world that has enough weed killer to control AI – especially the United States which has no operating federal government. AI will continue to grow, even competing with global warming as the largest disruption in the Anthropocene Epoch.

If the reader needs advice, consult Alexa.

Ancient Mariner

 

Whither we goest?

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This post shares some of mariner’s concerns for the future of Homo sapiens. In order to take a full measure, the first item is about Homos the way they were bred to be – properly balanced with requirements provided by creature evolution and constraints provided by planetary evolution.

֎ He cites an article recently published in the science journal IFLScience:

“According to a paper titled ‘Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: at the edge of survival’, there are 196 uncontacted indigenous groups around the world, and 95 per cent of them are located in the Amazon rainforest. Meanwhile, the rest are located throughout Asia and the Pacific.”

The full article is worth reading at https://www.unilad.com/news/world-news/experts-warning-survival-uncontacted-indigenous-peoples-threat-667525-20251028

These groups are now coming under attack from multiple angles, the report argues. They found that 96 percent of them today face threats from resource extraction, both legal and illegal. Around 65 percent of these isolated peoples are threatened by logging, the single most pervasive danger and often the first step toward deeper exploitation. Mining menaces over 40 percent, while nearly a third face violence or displacement from criminal gangs. 

More dangers are evolving in the 21st century. The report also highlights several “rising threats,” including social media “influencers” who seek to make contact with uncontacted peoples to create monetized content, as well as missionaries, funded by multi-million-dollar evangelical organizations, who attempt to convert these isolated communities to Christianity.

So these remaining 196 tribes are all that’s left of real, unsynthesized Homos. They are the real thing! Too bad. Today, dollars are the source of survival – the difference being that dollars are a form of borrowing from Mother Nature and not paying back.

֎  Home beds with ‘smart care’. These beds are equipped with a myriad of sensors and monitors that enable real-time monitoring of a patient’s vital signs, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, body temperature, etc. A person could be treated, maintained, fed and otherwise kept in a sustained state of health. The only piece missing is living a full life.

֎  Enter Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of Facebook and Meta. Using the internet to communicate, Facebook enables a person to remain a part of an active and ongoing replacement to society without have to do anything. Meta is Zuckerberg’s online reality that imitates and replaces any life experience a Homo might have.

Mariner doesn’t care that many readers poo-poo his belief that Homo will end up being a live example of Matrix. Hell, we’re three quarters of the way there!

Mariner has come close to marketing a recliner that can fold back to level. it is designed to have a tight fitting lid that can be connected to it so the deceased body can be taken directly to the graveyard. Now a bed has been invented that will allow TV watchers to watch for much longer. He is exploring a copyright for a lid to go with the smart-care bed.

Ancient Mariner