Category Archives: Politics

Data Breach

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Suddenly, mariner’s two favorite magazines, The Atlantic and Scientific American, are writing articles about mariner’s favorite topic, the demise of the human race to be replaced by electronic life – the Armageddon of us. It’s as though the magazines have accessed mariner’s unknown library of posts and have decided to frighten him to death by implementing his assumptions.in quick order long before he expected it. He was speculating the transition of power from human brains to total computer domination sometime 30-50 years into the future. No, no, the magazines say. They say “Surprise, mariner, it happens today!”

Readers know that recently tech scientists were able to create a self-producing biological app by connecting an electronic sequence with the chemical sequence of a chromosome. Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein both said that if electronically-driven devices can reproduce themselves, the humans would become extinct because of the overhead of mammalian survival.

The news this very day is that no less than the honorable and wise Elon Musk has been able to implant a socket into a human brain – a socket that allows a computer to plug into the brain. Those who have watched Matrix know this is exactly what the evil electronic empire did to the entire population including Neo. (Actually, Neo volunteered to have the plug inserted so he could access the fake world of the evil empire).

A much publicized Congressional hearing was held yesterday with the Big Six of the technical world trying, but not successfully, to introduce humanist values into their tech world. It already has been proven time over time that they control too much of the daily behavior of humans and ignore the laws against monopolization to assure there is no corner where the human subconscious can operate without tech influence.

Beyond mariner’s magazines are the special intellectual streaming channels that speak of the future impacts on the biosphere, not to mention society. Even in the curricula of the most successful trade school in America, YouTube (mariner calls it ‘Junk University’; he has a degree in gardening), the TED Talk series has had recognized professors suggesting that there will be three major controllers in the future: Eastern politics, western politics and, managing the economics of the entire planet, Artificial Intelligence.

Remember horse carriages, ponies and chopping wood for the fire to cook homegrown pork stew?

To add insult to injury, The Atlantic wrote an entire, lengthy article about the evils of being Chicken Little. Chicken Little has been a dependable alter ego for mariner since mariner began his post in 2013. Chicken Little’s behavior is different but logical. If one is burned by a fire, one learns not to get burned by fire. The article suggests that one should take the offensive and stick their hand back into the fire in an effort to take control of the situation. Any social psychology evaluation would acknowledge there are moments when retreat is the best option. Consider the innocent population of Gaza: Should they stay at home and be bombed to death or retreat (in unconscionable conditions)? Much of middle America has scant resources to spend in a battle where they will have little influence.

Neo, where are you?

Ancient Mariner

Death by Prejudice

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Please, please dear readers, forgive him but mariner needs to make a point.

Heretic, Redskin, Spic, Nigger, Wetback, Chink, Jap, Heb, Whop, Fag, Heine, A-rab, Polock, Trumper, Woke, Evangelical, Homo, poor . . . .

The United States, from the beginning, has had a serious social disease called prejudice. At many moments in its history prejudice meant death, often physical abuse, expulsion, and economic exclusion. As early as the 1600s Christian sects would perform many abusive, often deadly acts on other sects. Today, among many prejudicial groups, the Evangelicals are excluding homosexuals; two states have made it illegal to deal with homosexuals.

This is not a church sermon. It may be, as more and more nations assimilate in joint leadership (European Union), the United States may not transition very well to the global unification that will occur as soon as the Middle East (internationally bound by Islam) settles down to levels of civility.

Since the Second World War, most US international relations are militaristic, echoing international agreements from several wars during the late 2000s. What is beginning to emerge is a new era of colonialism that will have more sharing than the British and French had in their eras of colonialism during the 1800s and early 1900s.

China and India, America’s fellow sumo class nations, are active in colonizing the southern hemisphere. China is courting Peru, the world’s largest reserve of Lithium. Russia still pulls strings in Cuba. India is partnering with several African Nations. The US? We’re having trouble with fags, let alone a continent of Hispanics. In addition to southern hemisphere negotiations, China already is negotiating to install its Silk Road project which will encompass all of Asia, the Middle East, Russia and the Eastern EU nations.

Does it occur to anyone, especially the nation’s esteemed Congress, that the immigration issue would go away if the US were promoting its own Silk Road in Central America, the Caribbean and South America?

As everyone knows, the world is in turmoil because of climate, technology, population and natural resources. Might it be that those nations who are capable of redefining statehood may have a better chance at survival?

Ancient Mariner

 

Math Shmath

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Mariner read once that truth is not a constant. Truths don’t last forever even if it takes a million years to change them. Truths are not forever.

It is often perceived that mathematics, by its disciplined procedures, always provides a truth given truthful beginning values.  The conclusions of mathematics will conform to its own discipline for dependable evaluation but it is rare for humans to think in such disciplined ways. No matter the mathematical truth, the perception of that truth by humans is flawed.

For example, in his family whenever a birthday occurs, he drags out an algorithm about who is growing old the fastest. His family members suffer this ritual knowing it will pop up in conversation for each and every member of his family on their birthday.

He will say to his daughter “When you were born, I was forty times older than you. With this birthday, I am only three times older than you; you are growing older faster than I am.” This truth is derived from a mathematical equation ‘mariner’s age divided by daughter’s age’,   M/D = a diminishing percentage, e.g., 60/20 = 3.

This, of course, is the wrong formula; it should be M – D, which would provide a constant difference of 20 years, each growing older at the same rate.

Which brings us to the point of this post. Mariner cited recently that the Hispanics were growing faster than any other race in the U.S. He was challenged with a reference to Census findings which said the Asians were the fastest growing race. [80 percent for Asians, 70 percent for Hispanics]. In the Census, it is important to know specific information about each race individually. New growth of Asians is measured with a formula similar to mariner’s where a percentage is desired rather than an absolute count, which would mean little.

On the other hand, there are 20 times as many Hispanics as there are Asians. 70 percent of Hispanics would be double the total number of Asians.

One will find that paradoxes and conundrums are common when using mathematics.

Ancient Mariner

 

The Matrix approaches

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Did the reader see Walmart’s press release about how they plan to use AI? Their plan is to manage your purchases for you. They will track your purchase history a la Google and assume what your purchasing choices will be and when they will occur. Then your purchases will be delivered to you in an automated driving EV.

This will require Walmart to create a home network that includes your refrigerator (dare mariner say ‘icebox’?), tracking items with guarantee end dates, expiration dates and time-specific items like prescriptions and consumption history. What Walmart doesn’t mention is only they know the real price of things; shopping for best price is no longer an option for you.

Isn’t progress wonderful? First, having a telephone means you don’t have to leave your nest to talk to a neighbor; Second, having a television means you don’t have to leave you nest for entertainment; Third, having online purchasing means you don’t have to leave your nest to visit a store to buy things; Fourth, you don’t have to leave your nest to purchase groceries and other household items – including furniture, curtains, etc. Fifth and most important, if you are lonely you don’t have to leave your nest for company when you can hook up with facebook and other social media services – you can even look for a spouse or sell and buy your automobile without leaving your nest.

So the reader is at great liberty and freedom just to sit in their electric recliner (dare mariner say ‘rocking chair’?)

Has the reader seen the movie ‘The Matrix’? The screen is filled with human-like action seen in online gaming shows but what is important to note is that all of civilization lives in electrified coffins living what each person thinks is a real life but it is provided electronically by the evil boss of artificial intelligence; they are maintained in this dream state so the evil boss can use them as batteries.

Modern technology has improved things quite a bit. The residence is roomier and the human is allowed to remain physically supple; the coffin is replaced by the electric recliner. What is different today is that you are confined to your nest so the evil economy can take your money. Well, maybe your battery power, too, at some future date.

If you would like to electronically visit mariner, he has a showing in his rocking chair every Tuesday. Your credit card balance will be affected automatically.

Ancient Mariner

Snow

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Sitting out a very cold day with 7 inches of new snow, a seemingly useless and interfering stuff, mariner wondered if anyone was glad to see the snow. Serendipitously, the Atlantic published an article about how critical snowpack is to millions of people. Scientists recently discovered a constant temperature where snowpack will begin disappearing for good. An excerpt from the article is provided below:

“That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that. There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing. But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.

Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter. “A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,”

This situation reminds mariner that when Mother Earth acts, the entire planet and its biosphere are included. We frequently hear news about the mountain ranges melting and providing fresh water to lower habitats. It is another thing for snowpack residents to suddenly lose their water. Conversely, there are many regions in the American west that already suffer from disappearing water and some towns already are dry. One thinks of the warmer temperatures melting ice floes and leaving the polar bear in a difficult situation.

It is ironic that the oceans are rising because of melting polar ice while the amount of drinkable water is decreasing. We’ll have to wait to see how humans handle the situation.

Meanwhile, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Ancient Mariner

Let the primaries begin

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Mariner is aware that any given person may have personal reasons for casting votes for a given Congressional candidate. He does not expect that his observations will be universal. Still, he must acknowledge the will of Amos to express an opinion. Mariner and Amos have focused only on both houses of the U.S. Congress. Specific candidate names will not be offered.

The most important recommendation is to consider age as a number one issue. The U.S. Congress is the oldest in History. Technology and economic abuse are unfettered;  the Congress requires younger representatives that are experienced enough in contemporary life to at least identify the issues. While it is true that campaign circumstances may force a voter to look at other priorities, always keep age as an important consideration. He suggests a cap at age 55.

Virtually every large issue affects women more than it does men. There are fringe women just as there are fringe men but a women with a balanced view of life will pay more attention to the human side of legislation. If the reader’s choice is between a man and a woman, give a nod toward the woman – up to age 55.

Given the above priorities, there are some troublesome issues that require new leadership. For example, the U.S. has to curtail its financial support for every war on the planet. Global warming, balancing the health industry and a growing retirement class each will require large sums of Federal support.

The issue of immigration at the southern border requires candidates with new theories and ideas about new investment in Latin countries to stem what will otherwise be a growing concern because of global warming. The government must stop treating immigrants as if they are in line to see a movie. This is a specific political issue as well since Latinos are the fastest growing race in the nation. It wouldn’t hurt if a candidate were bilingual – in any language but especially in Spanish.

The nation’s economy is holding on and has survived the flush of money that helped citizens during the pandemic. Still, the wealthy, he means WEALTHY 10 percent of U.S. citizens sit on untold wealth that is neither taxed nor actively engaged in promoting the Gross Domestic Product. The resolution of this situation clearly is different between the national parties but whatever party with which the voter identifies, judge the candidate by their plans for the economy – especially discretionary spending; there are some candidates wanting to dismantle tax breaks for retirees, cut Social Security benefits, health services, and focused targets like SNAP, minimum wage and housing.

If, in the voter’s own precinct, there are local candidates running for Congress, think about electing someone you may identify with better than your feelings about a nationally-backed candidate already in office. There must be someway to vote for local representatives not pushed on local folks by the national Political Action Committees. When Senator Al Franken resigned from Congress, he confessed that his mornings were spent on the phone looking for financial contributors. Somehow, voters have to break up the growing plutocracy. Vote for local people who can represent the voter’s world in Congress.

Donald Trump is an airborne grenade. Run away!

Ancient Mariner

 

An etymology of religion

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Well, not really an etymology but it is about the words associated with religion. If one were to step back a good distance from the words used in religion, they would discover that there aren’t any major differences between religions. For example, the motivators are: what is the ultimate, singular force that governs reality? What is the best way to survive in the environment? What is the best way to manage humanity? What is the best way to survive when the relationship with reality seems uncertain?

As an illustration, the first god to be documented in the western world was Cybele, originally a Phrygian [ancient nation in today’s Turkey] goddess. She was the goddess of Mother Earth. In Greek mythology she was Rhea, the mother of the gods. Her Roman equivalent was Magna Mater. She was associated with fertility and also controlled nature, symbolized originally by the lions that accompanied her. In Christianity, she is Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Cybele’s role shifted through the ages except for one element: the master of creation. Because of transitions in human knowledge, Mary did not need two lions at her side to assure the birth of Jesus.

An interesting thing to consider is the definition of God. God was male and except for a few instances, was quite anthropomorphic, managing reality through a human’s eye. Would the reader consider the word ‘singularity’ as the latest definition of God? In quantum physics, this is the definition:

In scientific terms, a gravitational singularity (or space-time singularity) is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. In other words, it is a point in which all physical laws are indistinguishable from one another, where space and time are no longer interrelated realities, but merge indistinguishably and cease to have any independent meaning.

Another interesting example is comparing the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments [Exodus 20:2-17], Islam’s Sharia Law [see Post titled Sharia Law] and Christianity’s Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5]. Reading the words suggests vastly different objectives but the subject is the same: What is the best way to manage humanity?

This post is Mariner’s way of introducing the reader to a new way of looking at religion. The traditional way has caused wars, social upheaval and ridiculous fragmentation as politics, culture and technology grind the virtues of life into a useless pile of crumbs.

However, AI is eager to help 21st century humans throw everything into a dishwasher and produce an amalgamated religion appropriate for our modern culture(s).

We need Cybele and her lions . . . .

Ancient Mariner

A new thought

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Mariner trusts that everyone saw Judy Woodruff’s special on PBS about the state of democracy in the United States. If not, go to the PBS website at pbs.com and check it out. Most of the program exposed the deep emotionally-based opinions of both political extremes.

One thought that captured his ears was the suggestion that one of the ways to unite the citizens and break down splintered allegiances, was to expand civil services. The term ’civil service’ suggests that the nation’s governments pay for large numbers of citizens to perform any number of public activities that unify the effort to achieve a common identity among the nation’s citizens. Examples of civil service, utilized especially during the Great Depression and both World Wars are:

֎ The military, of course, where the government required virtually all men within certain conditions to serve time in the armed services.

֎ During World War II, the government directed vehicle manufacturers to stop building civil equipment and focus their entire effort on manufacturing military equipment. With all the men in military service, women filled job vacancies while their men were unavailable.

֎ The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was an ambitious employment and infrastructure program created in 1935, during the bleakest days of the Great Depression. The WPA put 8.5 million Americans to work building schools, hospitals, roads and other public works. The WPA also sponsored projects in the arts – the agency employed tens of thousands of actors, musicians, writers and other artists.

֎ Shortly after WW II, the government launched the Interstate highway system. The legislation expanded the Interstate System to 41,000 miles and authorized $25 billion to be made available in fiscal years 1957 through 1969 for its construction to accommodate traffic demand in 1975. The Federal share of costs would be 90 percent.

Civil service provided the money for each of these projects. As a result, workers could ask for additional benefits like paying for college, guaranteed retirement, and a fair wage. Today, 70 years later, all these benefits are nonexistent except in a few commercial situations where there are labor shortages. Inflation has risen but the general salary base has not.

Interestingly, it was the war years and global economic dominance that funded what is called the Woke class, 9.7 percent of today’s population that constitute a white-collar, college class that has the most influence in government and industry.

Could the government launch another civil service program to more evenly level its social and economic classes?

Ancient Mariner

Living life on carnival rides

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Spending some time in Chicken Little’s henhouse, where news broadcasts and publications are not allowed, mariner has become aware of how myopic news programming is. Many readers will agree that if one watches the news on Monday then watches the news a week later, it’s the same news. Perhaps Fox news, MSNBC, all the social media sources and ‘streaming’ news together have set the bar very low in terms of other topics that, while not blowing things up, starving people, giving coverage to useless and mostly conspiratorial congressmen, may have more impact on the near future of mankind. Below are a couple of topics that are very important and are changing reality on a daily basis.

Extinction

Back in 2014 Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a scholarly treatise about the rapid decline of the world’s creatures. A quote from the flyleaf of The Sixth Extinction – An unnatural history:

“Over the last half billion years, there have been five major extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.”

Elizabeth cites the disappearance of over 16,000 species of every nature and every family of creatures. There are too many humans (see Overpopulation below) taking up way too much space, consuming way too much of the planet’s reserve of chemicals, and by their nature, deliberately and wantonly destroying critical balances in the Earth’s environment.

Through technology and industrialization, humans have been able to flaunt the natural restraints of Mother Nature, enabling humans to live longer, live conveniently and ignore disturbances in the planet’s biosphere – at the cost of 16,000 innocent creatures and, since the 19th century, destabilizing the careful balance of global weather; an issue that is important enough to make the news. For the last 300,000 years, the weather has been unusually stable, allowing an excellent opportunity for all creatures to flourish. That stability is rapidly disappearing. The inability of humans to evaluate human economics versus planetary economics may be the doom to life on Earth as we have known it.

Humans, being the smarty pants that they are, abide by a major perspective: “If it can be done, do it”. In this vein, humans may be adding themselves to the list of species that are becoming extinct. Less than a year ago, scientists celebrated a special accomplishment: They were able to marry a computer sequence with a chromosome such that the computer sequence can reproduce itself. Now computer programmers themselves may be out of a job. Two scientists, no less than Albert Einstein and  Stephen Hawking, held that if artificial intelligence can propagate itself, humans are too inefficient to compete and will become extinct.

Overpopulation

Regular readers know that mariner has placed great stock in the similarity between mouse and rat overpopulation studies done in the 1960s and 70s and the state of human society today. Quoting managing scientist John Calhoun’s observation about the study:

“At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. They’d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they’d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it. The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, “the beautiful ones.” Generally guarded by one male, the females—and few males—inside the space didn’t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young. At least the rodents had unlimited food and water – not true with the human population.To human advantage, humans have guns and bombs, shoot children and anyone that seems different. Is this enough to reduce population?

A special carnival ride is the combination of not enough food with climate change. The combination is trashing whole nations’ economies.

And with war on every continent, rising authoritarian governments that will enforce inequality, and artificial intelligence cutting society from the past like a pair of scissors, this is a grand carnival ride!

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

Preparing for Donald

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Mariner and his wife have had more than one conversation about the possibility of moving to another nation should Donald win the 2024 election. They have done some research. The suggested website is a good source. How would the reader like to live in Finland, a perpetual first-place country?

See:

https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/the-10-happiest-countries-in-the-world

Ancient Mariner