Category Archives: Politics

We all need new top down awareness

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Especially the world’s governments but that’s another story.

Even more important is that you, me and every individual around the globe must stop living by the daily ethics of life that may have been true forty years ago. Computers are no longer smart typewriters and no longer fantastic libraries; computer technology has created a subhuman species capable of telling us what we should know and what to think. In a few years, computers, as our medical advisors and primary care physicians, will decide whether you continue to live or not. What is scary is that computers already think for themselves – technicians no longer solve ethical positions. Today a majority of stock market trades never see a human mind. Who tells you the truth – Mom or the smartphone?

We must cast aside the romantic image of farming as a rural life style with cute lambs and mooing cows and amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above a fruited plain. Worldwide we keep clearing to make room for more farms to make more food. The image of a romantic farm should be replaced by the relentless spread of crops and pastures that already cover two of every five acres of land on Earth, obliterating the wild landscapes that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Further, it is propelling the worst extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago..

We must look beyond a world made of nations. Any nation, including the US and China, is incapable on its own to stabilize industrial development, international supply chains, artificial intelligence, humanitarian obligations and, importantly – open warfare. At the least, smaller nations, especially in Africa and the Middle East, must adopt a model similar to the European Union. On a global scale, it is time to make war less important than management of the planet and all its human disasters. It is time for one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all – including Mother Earth. It is time for the United Nations to be authorized as the ethical authority – including the right to wage international war.

The ethics of human society must leave behind the age of nationally defined variations of humans; it is of no consequence whether Italian, Brazilian, South African, Indian, Polish, Chinese . . . The issue is eight billion humans and growing. There are only two choices: let the population grow until there is a tragic, horrible collapse of controlled civilization, or take control of birthrates. Sardonically, computers may help us with the population issue. The Dixie style of birth control is simplistic. The following is an extract from a post mariner wrote last April:

“A tremendous change occurred with the industrial revolution: whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).

  • During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
  • In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.”

Immediately, one grasps the idea that population and natural resources are the two issues that can’t remain under control given the ethical image we carry from the 1970’s. So, are we willing to go the way of the dinosaurs using our homemade asteroid or will humans have the wherewithal to live according to a new top down awareness?

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

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

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

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

Trekking amid Armageddon

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In these days, attempting to live a stable life is like being an empty trashcan in a tornado. All the headlines focus on what “Wanna be a dictator” is doing to the fabric of government; there are large situations like global warming, rational health care, personal civil rights, what schoolchildren will not be taught, the emerging isolationism of each state in the Union, and the precarious ripping apart of economic relationships between democratic nations.

That’s just one whirlwind in the storm. Another whirlwind swirls around the corporate freedom to dissemble independent human behavior and replace it with computerized corporate manipulations of behavior and intervene the interface between humans and genuine reality.

Having one’s own private perspective on how to engage in the community has been diminished and largely replaced by the new town square, Facebook – which is a behavior similar to smartphones, which requires no social intervention at all.

Corporations have automated out of existence places and activities where ‘community’ could be felt and engaged in – places like small storefront businesses, shopping malls, and computerized food services that have a negative effect on restaurants.

Slowly, humanity (in the wealthy nations only, there is no life to be had in poor ones) is being corralled into the world of one of mariner’s benchmark icons, the movie Matrix. The model is identical but Matrix says humans were put into wired coffins, their brains filled with artificial life experience and their bodies were used as batteries for the great “system”

In this reality it is the same model but for different reasons. Smartphones replace the coffins, social control replaces batteries. Remember Zuckerberg’s fantasy about everyone having their own online town? Sort of like the false life of humans in Matrix.

But the Armageddon swirl is closing in. Everyone must now store their personal computer backups on the ‘cloud’. Metaphorically, your smartphone provides verbs, your computer provides nouns. Your computer is no more than a data entry keyboard – sort of like a typewriter but wired to the corporate database.

Mother Nature will step in big time in a few years. Not that it will necessarily make things better; Mother owns the largest corporation – the planet.

Mariner is inclined to go looking for his two ponies and a cart. He has no smartphone, will not store his data in the ‘system’ database and continually searches for ways to shop face-to-face with other humans and to spend cash for purchases. He is a Homo sappien approaching extinction.

Ancient Mariner

Medical treatment

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Mariner is a decrepit old man. It seems the medical industry does not understand that a different set of ailments and treatments exist for the ancient class. He admits he has some ire about the situation so he let Amos write this post. Mariner has edited out foul language and libelous accusations:

֎ The suspicions began in 2006. Mariner’s brother went into the hospital to receive a pacemaker. While he was hospitalized, he contracted Clostridioides difficile or shortened, C-Diff. It is a bacterial infestation that attacks the large intestine, causing 10-15 bowel movements per day and loss of body water. For the worst cases, death is the only outcome. His brother went to a hospice for a few months then passed away. On his death certificate, it said cause of death was “kidney failure”. No, it wasn’t kidney failure, it was C-Diff!

Mariner suspects the medical industry uses this misstatement policy to avoid lawsuits. After all, it is general knowledge that C-Diff most often is contracted in hospitals.

֎ The job of primary care physicians (PCP) is to sell prescriptions and placate the patient’s anxiety. PCPs never fix anything. ‘Fix’ means heal it, symptoms gone, life returns to normal. Prescriptions often may influence physical disability but never fix it.

֎ Chiropractors are a lot like PCPs. They focus on joints and do a great job of making the patient feel better for awhile. But the patient will be back with the same ailment. It wasn’t fixed. In ancient patients, sometimes chiropractors branch out into special treatments almost like astrology. Still, nothing is fixed.

֎ PCPs often will send the patient to a ‘specialist’. Common examples are pulmonologist, cardiologist, ear-nose-and-throat, allergist, urologist . . . The specialist has a better set of prescriptions because they are limited to the special treatments the specialist will provide. Specialists may even offer minor surgery. Still, there may be a small improvement but it isn’t fixed. The patient is stuck with a lifelong dependency on the specialist – because the disability will never be fixed.

֎ Physical therapists are another specialty where being fixed is not an option. Mariner offers a personal experience: Told to visit a physical therapist by his PCP, he went to a hospital with all the equipment and routines necessary. First, he was guided to a swimming pool where he was to walk back and forth in waist-deep water. “Wouldn’t it be more effective if I swam?” he asked. “No, we don’t want you to hurt yourself.” was the response.

Then mariner was led to a gym with all the typical equipment. He was asked to step sideways along a bar and ‘to hold on’. After that, he was taken to a wall contraption with blue stretch straps he was to pull toward his chest. Finally, he asked when the therapy would begin, you know, sit-ups, weight lifts, deep squats. “Oh”, she said, You must be one of those ‘all in or go home’ types.” So he went home.

֎ Surgeons. Like just about every old folk, mariner has back problems. There are many ways to improve things with different types of surgery. Mariner did not hold back and went to an internationally known clinic. After dozens of tests and interviews, the final analysis was that four surgeons sat with him, each offering one of four options. One was needles, one was braces, one was intervertebral repair (disc), and one was welding vertebra together. Every one of the surgeons cited high risk of failure and restrained physical ability afterward. None would say it would be fixed. So he went home.

Being fixed by medical treatment is not an option.

Ancient Mariner

 

More info for peripheral view

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Everyone, around the world in fact, is inundated with the Trump phenomenon. Everyone around the world is troubled that their economics are so vulnerable to disruption. This vulnerability has a broader, peripheral circumstance that can explain this vulnerability: environmental resources are running out – whether they are elements, minerals, biomass, space or the effects of global warming.

As the population post cited, in all of human history, the population reached 1 billion. Then from 1800 to 1987, the population grew by 4 billion. What grew as well was the rate of consumption. Human laissez-faire about consumption is reflected in human treatment of the resources available: The world generates nearly two billion tons of municipal solid waste each year (MSW).  MSW includes trash from companies, buildings, houses, yards, and small businesses. The United States and China lead the way.

Mariner’s wife, a librarian, has a program where she reads stories to preschool children. She brought home a book which, with astounding clarity, demonstrated human disregard for environmental resources. The book is ‘One Little Bag – An Amazing Journey’ by Henry Cole.  All pages are drawings showing a small boy’s affection for his paper bag by always having it at hand for whatever purpose; it is the tale of a little boy who carried his one original lunch bag to school for over 700 lunches even using it to offer a wedding ring to his girlfriend. The pages also show all the industrial steps required to make a paper bag from chopping down the tree to paper manufacture, delivery, etc. One cannot read this simple story without realizing how trashy humans are. What is important is this trashy behavior does not show concern for the more important issue: disappearing resources.

Wastefulness is not limited to MSW. About four or five years ago, mariner watched a TV interview with a Federal Department head (mariner apologizes for forgetting the name). He was an advocate for expanding our ability to sustain natural resources in order to offset the impact of increasing consumption caused by rapid population growth. He addressed many industrial practices and the careless lack of concern by humans who consume large, irreplaceable areas of the environment just for profit or pleasure.

The Department Head went so far as to challenge lawns. “We need the space to grow food! Every bit of space around the home should be dedicated to self sufficiency, to help ease the pressure caused by disappearing food sources.”

It isn’t just food. Trickling through the news today is the concern for how much electricity and water the new computer age consumes. Computers alone have a special shortage in several minerals including Lithium, Cobalt and Zinc. Microsoft has just contracted the use of a nuclear power plant.

Mariner has a personal example: He and his wife maintain bird feeders. Many who offer this service find it invaded by squirrels. Mariner disregards this complaint knowing that he and his fellow Homos have leveled the natural environment of the squirrel to build huge, clunky houses, streets, tennis courts and businesses. The least we Homos can do is to be sympathetic to the shortage of food for the squirrel and any other wildlife that may still live here. It is interesting that only Homos need 1,200 square feet for a nest, plus lumber, steel, plastic, electricity, heating fuel, TV, a phone, a garage and two stories. Meanwhile, tigers and elephants are disappearing and wolves can’t live in the Midwest which is their natural environment because Homos will shoot them.

This peripheral information may shed light on why economies are not robust, why food and energy prices continue to rise and why every planet resource is at risk.

Ancient Mariner

 

Democracy

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Mariner called a meeting with the three alter-egos a few days ago. The topic was democracy, though not so much as it is weaponized today. The open question was what situation induces democracy, or inhibits democracy? How do the gears work in the democracy engine?

To be honest, the team had difficulty addressing the topic. In the United States (US) twelve generations have lived under and believed religiously in the political philosophy of democracy. Any substantial thinking is swamped by misperception, rumor, bias and periods when democracy was ignored.

The team used the standard definition of democracy as Wikipedia sees it (links are active should the reader want to delve into specifics):

“Democracy is a form of government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive or maximalist definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.

In a direct democracy, the people have the direct authority to deliberate and decide legislation. In a representative democracy, the people choose governing officials through elections to do so. The definition of “the people” and the ways authority is shared among them or delegated by them have changed over time and at varying rates in different countries. Features of democracy oftentimes include freedom of assembly, association, personal property, freedom of religion and speech, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights.”

֎ The above description pretty much is a definition of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Amos, the team member who is critical of most human behavior, said “Democracy only works in a perfect world where Earthly bounty is free and available to everyone – otherwise, democracy switches to capitalism. Frankly,” Amos continued, “humans don’t have the self-discipline to sustain a democratic reality.”

As a counterpoint, Nosey Mole, the more conservative member of the team,   immediately proposed the example of the Anabaptist structure as a truer form of democracy saying that it is a one-for-all and all for one democracy with a simple community board of directors and everyone benefits equally in the gross profits of the community.

Guru, the philosophical member of the team corrected Nosey saying the Anabaptist government was a theocracy based on the Christian Bible and did not necessarily follow democratic principles. He added “Democracy only works in small locations where the citizens vote directly on the passage of issues, while in larger expanses many citizens elect one representative to represent them when voting on the issues; that is called a republic.”

Nosey countered, “Well, they don’t need Social Security!”.

Mariner, the romantic naturalist, suggested that democracy is a manifestation of the times, that it is a reaction to a given state of affairs involving population, weather, economics and geographical conditions. “For example”, he said, “the leaders of the newly independent United States suddenly inherited massive amounts of territory, had no established rule over three quarters of the continent, still remembered the authoritarianism of the European Monarchs and suddenly inherited much more wealth than the population of 2.7 million needed. Some form of democracy was their only choice.”

“The Bill of Rights is the weak spot.” Amos said. “It’s a fantasy list of good times that doesn’t mix with natural herd behavior – it’s what benefits the herd that counts, not what benefits the individual.”

Mariner broke in and said, “It’s obvious the team will have to set another meeting to continue this discussion of democracy.”

Ancient Mariner