Feeling Blue

 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-quiet-revolution-of-the-sabbath

The article presents a very interesting mix of the value of keeping the sabbath both from  personal and legal viewpoints.  Strictly nostalgically, I cannot help but recall the joy of Sundays. We didn't go to church very often, which I preferred to avoid, but it was the day for the Sunday papers to arrive. It was a day for me to read through the comic pages with full page presentations instead of mere strips (and also in full color not black-and-white). Then I would go to the political pages which similarly went in depth and at length rather than the brief snippets that had been presented during the week.   Finally, I hit the arts pages, which always interested me.

It was a day when my mother used her cast-iron cookware to make Sunday breakfast. I recall it as an extensive and rather elaborate meal, although honestly I can only really remember her carefully spooning hot oil on top of the egg yolks so they could be flipped over without breaking and sitting in my favorite spot at the kitchen nook I could glance at the window at the playground surrounded by the apartments in which we lived in Germany.  

But even as a child what I really resented about Sunday was the blue laws. I did not appreciate the idea of not being able to go to the store.  

At the time it never occurred to me, but now I have to wonder, if Sunday is so utterly sacred and precious how is it that the priests, ministers, and pastors get away with working on that day? 😏

Pound Sand Or Breathe Sand?

 https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/alien-life-may-evolve-from-radically-different-elements-than-human-life-did

While the article is thought-provoking and might be useful to a science-fiction author, it's pretty thin on facts and very thick on speculation.

For example,  it's true that it is often pointed out that because it also allows for four covalent bonds, silicon might be an alternative to carbon based life.  However, the fact that silicon is extremely common here on earth and yet somehow we are carbon based, suggests it simply is not suitable.

Why not? First of all if you use oxidation in order to provide energy to your living organism, oxidized carbon yields carbon dioxide. A gas. Easy to respirate.

If you oxidize silicon, you get silicon dioxide. Sand. It's a little hard imagine a living being which will  breathe oxygen in and breathe out sand. 

(Yes, there were anoxic lifeforms before we evolved to depend on oxygen, but oxygen provides a highly efficient and effective basis for a metabolic system.)

Furthermore, the covalent bonds formed by silicon are more fragile than those of carbon. That is enough in itself to make life based upon silicon difficult to maintain, but it also means that lengthier and more complex molecules are formed with carbon which could not be formed ot maintained by the substitution of silicon. 

As for the other autocatalytic chemical systems that were studied, that's way beyond my level of knowledge, but I have some hesitations there too.

If life is so incredibly common in the universe, why is it that of the three planets which are terrestrial in nature and found in our solar system's Goldilocks zone, only earth is clearly teaming with life? One out of three makes it sound like life is actually rather rare and unlikely. 

Still, it does make for fun speculation. Hal Clement was noted for his interesting alien life forms in his science fiction novels. I think I need to go back and reread some of those; it's been a few decades.

Greedy Is As Greedy Does

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/tim-gurner-australian-ceo-unemployment-video-rcna104957

>Tim Gurner wants you to be miserable. Yes, you.

Speaking at the Australian Financial Review’s “property summit,” the property developer and CEO — net worth $584 million — complained that the country’s 3.7% unemployment rate was, in fact, a problem. “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50%,” said Gurner, because “arrogant” workers aren’t productive enough for his liking. “We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”<

He did apologize for these comments later. However, I am convinced he was only apologizing for having been foolish enough to say it publicly and being caught in  being truthful. I think he was being honest and completely sincere in his original statement rather than in his apology.

And his attitude is not a rare one among the privileged and entitled class. >According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of the wealthiest Americans believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”<

It is attitudes like this which are all too common among the wealthy, which drove Marx and Engels to create their poisonous manifesto. And therein lies the old teeter totter problem. An excess of wrong on one side of the teeter totter is not balanced by an excess of opposing  wrong on the other side.  Well regulated capitalism is highly beneficial to everyone in a society. Unrestricted capitalist warfare and greed are destructive.

When you think about it, it's really quite obvious. The poor are desperate and don't create a stable society in their desperation because desperate people do desperate things.  The wealthy care only about themselves and will gut and cannibalize the society they live in in order to make themselves wealthier than they already are.  The middle class is stable and mutually beneficial to society as a whole.

Aristotle was well aware of this over two millennia ago. His Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics explored this issue:

>Aristotle pointed out that if the middle class disappears, then the poor will become the majority. The poor tend to be less educated than the rich, and they tend to struggle just to make ends meet. If the poor are the majority, then in a democracy they will vote to take away the money from the rich!

So, what are the rich to do?

Well, do away with democracy of course! Democracy, at that point, becomes too much of a threat to the elite, and the elite start taking steps to limit the power of government. (Moves to limit voting by the poor, anyone?)

Therefore, as the middle class disappears, democracy disappears with it.

On the other hand, with a MAJORITY middle class, democracy works, and it works well. Why? Because the middle class tends to be educated and has just enough prosperity that members of that class can see themselves becoming rich some day, so they don’t punish the rich, and they have compassion for the poor, being that many of them came from poverty. The middle class stands between the two extremes, the poor and the rich, and you end up with a well functioning democracy.

Here Aristotle describes just that in his book Politics:

The best constitution is one controlled by a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor. For those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation find it “easiest to obey the rule of reason” (Politics IV.11.1295b4–6). They are accordingly less apt than the rich or poor to act unjustly toward their fellow citizens.< -- stanford.edu

This matters to us because our middle class has been steadily shrinking since the days of Ronald Reagan. That is because the middle class is being cannibalized by the ultra wealthy who want desperately poor people who will work for incredibly low wages so that the excessively wealthy can become even more excessively wealthy.

Remember what we're supposed to be doing in this country? 

-- We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.--

This is what a middle-class can do. This is what the poor would like to do, but in their desperation cannot do.  This is what the wealthy absolutely refuse to do because only their own interests matter to them.

God Save Our Wimpy God!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2iiZSgu5Uqw

Although there were only eight or nine people involved, I think it is reasonable to call them a mob. They came into an area that had been rented and in which they had no right to interfere. But they came to save the chapel for Jesus.

One of the leaders  (Napier) declared, "We didn't go  there out of hatred of these people. We went there because we wanted to make sure the House of the Lord wasn't being disrespected … there was about eight or nine of us… The people in the chapel said they were doing nothing wrong, and I asked if they were there to worship Jesus, and a few started raising the voices at me, so I told him just to get their stuff-that we weren't there to argue and I even help gather the things and pack them to their cars.

... if they want to do that stuff, they can do it in their own homes or buildings or wherever else, but it's not happening in Jesus house as long as I'm around to defend it…"

What was 'that stuff'? It was using the chapel as a retreat and safe space for members to meditate or pray according to their own individual desires and beliefs. Why were the crusading Christians in a panic and defending God from the horrible attack that God could not defend himself against? (It is funny how wimpy and weak their God is.  He can't do anything for himself and he requires mobs to do it for him yet somehow he's all powerful?) Someone had placed an ohm symbol in the chapel in case anyone wanted to meditate in the Buddhist fashion. Obviously Jesus would be totally destroyed by that. You know, kind of like a vampire and a cross.

I would certainly have felt threatened and would not have welcomed this interference in our rented property. It's a public venue but it was being rented by a private organization. This is the kind of fundamentalist activity you expect from the Taliban, but that's not surprising. These individuals are the Christian Taliban.

Also unsurprisingly,  the leader of the mob who is quoted above is an ex-con.

I remind everybody once again that I am not opposed to Christianity. I am a Christian.  But I'm tired of having to say to people that I'm not one of that kind of Christian. The world does not need a single one of that kind of Christian to be found anywhere on the face of the planet.

Uber Unter?

 

https://apple.news/AAkvWOSwAQhK81rgSKdOqdg

This article makes the point that I've been trying to make for quite a while. Neanderthals and humans are both very skilled and competent  species, but they are far from identical. The difficulty is due to the teeter totter problem. Neanderthals were originally regarded as genuinely subhuman and then, when we finally realized that this belief was unfair and  inaccurate, we tried to balance that error by piling assertions on the other side that are equally baseless; insisting Neanderthals were just like us.

All this does is result in huge piles of errors on both sides of the teeter totter. 

This Neanderthal expert raises some interesting points that I have not previously known. 

>“Look carefully at Neanderthal tools and weapons. They’re all unique. Study thousands and you’ll find each is completely different. My colleagues never realised that. But when I did, I saw there was a deep divergence in the way Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals each understand the world. 

...Of course, compared to a gorilla we have more creativity and skills. It gives us a certain image of ourselves– one of superiority. But what happens if we compare ourselves to something far closer – something far more like humanity, although different, that only disappeared 40,000 years ago?” Imagine, he suggests, how differently we’d see ourselves if confronted by hyper-intelligent aliens.

... “Their tools and weapons are more unique than ours. As creatures, they were far more creative than us. Sapiens are efficient. Collective. We think the same, and don’t like divergence. 

...“Neanderthals vanished, I think, because of high human efficiency. And this efficiency now threatens to destroy us, too. That’s what’s killing the planet’s biodiversity.”

...Over millennia, humankind has also developed an advanced, impressive technology and culture, of a type Neanderthals could never have imagined. “So while there is something dangerous in our nature, as a collective we can control and reshape it. Understanding this is the key to humanity’s future. Because if we don’t think carefully, next time it won’t be Neanderthals that our efficiency destroys, it’ll be humankind itself that’s the victim.”<

 I do disagree with the conclusion he made that suggests we might have been inferior to Neanderthals in creativity. We were superior to Neanderthals in networking and in working as a cohesive group.

For example, Neanderthals lived in small groups, did not have trade routes, and the small groups in which they lived were frequently heavily  inbred.  You could say that we were simply better at networking while they were better at surviving in individualistic small groups.

As far as creativity goes, compare what passes as  Neanderthal art with human art. One may or may not be art at all.  It is very hard to tell. The other clearly speaks for itself.

Neither species can really be considered as superior to the other in general, but only in certain particulars. We were better at adapting as we were generalists. The history of extinction shows that the more highly adapted and specialized a species becomes, the more successful it will be in that specific set of circumstances for which it has adapted. But it is equally true that the more adapted it is to a specific set of circumstances, the less it is likely to be able to survive change. Generalists adapt and survive. Specialists die out in the face of change.

Unfortunately, I must agree with him that our efficiency and  capacity to network and control our environment, forcing it to adapt to us rather than the other way around, has caused us endless grief and may yet cause us to inflict even greater harm upon ourselves.