Back to Basics or Die!

During the Vietnam War, after the complete destruction of a village called Ben Tre, an American major explained that it had become necessary to “destroy the village in order to save it.”  Angelina Jolie decided to “destroy the village in order to save it” by preemptively having her breasts lopped off to improve her odds of avoiding cancer.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/my-medical-choice.html?_r=0

She did it for the kids, and the military at Ben Tre did it to the kids, but the theory is the same: “Something bad is probably going to happen here, someday… so we’d better take care of the situation right now, before there’s a situation.”  The latest example of this theory in action is a plan that’s being floated by some people in Africa to save rhinos from poachers by cutting off their horns before the poachers arrive.  http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/15/184135826/can-economics-save-the-african-rhino

Many of our choices are fear-driven, and that’s not always bad.  If you don’t pass on a blind curve because you’re afraid to, that’s good.  If you don’t have unprotected sex with the tattooed stranger you just met at the club because you’re afraid you might “catch something,” that’s probably good too. But one of the problems with modern life is that we are conditioned to be afraid always and about everything.  This results in what we call “stress,” and is one of the reasons why life in Twenty-First Century America is so miserable for so many people so much of the time, despite that this is still one of the most affluent societies on the face of the Earth.

In the jungle, your reptilian brain knows good and well that when danger threatens, you have three options: fight, flight or freeze.  Each one of those responses takes a lot out of you, so you only flee, fight or freeze until the danger is past, and then go back to lazing in the sun, peacefully eating bananas, or picking bugs out of your mate’s hairy ears.  In the natural state, animals (including homo sapien sapiens (“wise wise man”—i.e., us…  and do you detect a little note of hubris in the name we’ve chosen for ourselves? ) don’t spend a lot of time worrying about dangers that might, but might not, ever materialize.  Nor do they lie around brooding about the bad times of yesteryear.  They live in the moment, often the formula cited by mental health professionals for achieving “happiness,” even… and perhaps especially… in the midst of all of our Twenty-First Century lunacy.

Of course, we’re a long way from the jungle now, and we’ve also come a long way from our animal roots, at least psychologically.  Physically, though, it’s another matter, and that’s where we really start to run into some trouble.  You see, our bodies are less malleable than our minds, and they (usually) take a lot longer to change.  When you sit around in traffic worrying about Al Qaeda or your retirement, you know somewhere in your thick head that those things aren’t an immediate threat to your safety, and neither is the traffic since it’s stopped.  But your body thinks it’s still back in the jungle where it should be, and it realizes that you’re trapped in traffic where Al Qaeda can get you, and that even if you escape today and make it to retirement age you’ll starve because you haven’t saved the four million you’ll need to survive until you’re super old and the long-term care insurance that you haven’t bought kicks in. (Don’t screw around with those retirement calculators, by the way; they’re very stressful.)  In other words, most of us are ready to fight, fly or freeze most of the time.  The adrenaline is pumping, the heart is pounding, sleep is hard to come by, for an awful lot of people who’ve never even seen a jungle.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response

Which, of course, is one of the primary reasons that we’re so unhealthy.  High blood pressure, heart disease, sleep disorders, problems with the digestive system, and yes, Angelina, even cancer, are associated with stress, which causes inflammation, which in the long-term is associated with just about every bad physical problem that you can imagine.  http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/stress-heart-attack-risk ; http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-stress-feed-cancer. But don’t let that stress you out.

If stress is everywhere, what can we do about it?  Well, going back to the jungle isn’t really much of an option, because most of it has been slashed and burned, and the remainder is full of poachers, anti-government rebels, real estate developers, and a few very angry animals.  But you might try living more like an animal.  In other words, try putting some of the garbage in perspective. 

 

There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight... and Every Night From Now On, Looks Like

   
Wonder what your retirement is going to be like?  Wonder what life is going to be like for your kids or grandkids?  Well, that’s natural.  Of course, you have to remember the lesson of the old tale of “The Monkey’s Paw,” namely that you should be careful of what you wish for, because you just might wind up actually getting your wish.

 A lot of our questions about what life on Earth is going to be like for the foreseeable future were answered on the front pages of major newspapers on Saturday, May 11, 2013.  The headline on the front page of the New York Times read “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 The LA Times reported the story on the first page of the “Late Extra” section under the banner “Crucial CO2 gauge hits key level.”  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-carbon-atmosphere-440-ppm-20130510,0,6498056.story To cut to the chase, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that last Thursday, for the very first (but certainly not the last) time, the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere as measured by the observatory on Mauna Loa has surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading, meaning that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any time in the last three million years.  Even if you’re not a Biblical scholar, you should know that three million years ago human beings weren’t even around yet.

Last Thursday was the first time that the average level remained above 400 parts per million for an entire day, but it’s predicted that within a very few years there will be no measurement of the gas, in any area of the globe, in any season, that will be below 400 parts per million. The reason that the 400 parts per million threshold is significant is that’s the level that the scientific “consensus” has decreed that CO2 levels must stay below to keep the average global temperature from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the average from pre-industrial times.    That may not sound like much, but apparently the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was about three million years ago, in the Pliocene Epoch.  It was a lot hotter then, the ice caps were a lot smaller, and scientists estimate that the sea level was perhaps 60 to 80 feet higher than it is now.  Not real good news if you live in Malibu, I’d say.  Or New York City, or Miami, or… well, you get the idea.

 Now of course, the ocean isn’t going to rise 60 or 80 feet overnight.  When you start talking about “epochs,” the time scale gets a lot bigger than what our “weatherpeople” are used to coping with in their forecasts.  But that doesn’t mean that you and yours aren’t going to be seeing some of the effects of the now seemingly inevitable debacle. Melanie Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist, is quoted in the LA Times article as saying, “If we don’t reduce carbon soon, we may no longer talk about searing summer temperatures, 100-year storms and intense droughts as something unusual, because they may be the norm.”

 What’s causing this upheaval?  Well, with apologies to BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, and their ilk, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the culprit is fossil fuels.  By studying the air bubbles found in Antarctic ice (which is melting pretty fast now) scientists have determined that for at least the last 800 million years the level of CO2 in the atmosphere cycled between 180 parts per million in cooler times to 280 parts per million in warmer times.  (CO2 levels and temperature are “tightly linked,” in other words.)  Throughout the roughly 8000 years of human civilization, the CO2 level fluttered around near the top end of that range—until the “Industrial Revolution” a couple of hundred years ago which kicked off the massive use of fossil fuels.  Since then, there has been a 41% increase in CO2 levels, with no end in sight.

 Why no end in sight?  Well, there are now over 7 billion people in the world, many of them already happily blasting away into the atmosphere with their air conditioners and motor vehicles, and the rest aspiring to join them.  The New York Times article, by Justin Gillis, put it very well:  “Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.”

 Not to mention the fact that we’re frenetically slashing and burning and chopping away at the earth’s forests, getting rid of the trees that, as they taught us even in California public schools, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.  Plus chopping down everything in sight so that we can grow corn and soybeans to feed to factory-farmed animals whose short, miserable lives are mostly spent farting methane.

 Why the hell not, you may ask.  If we know there’s a problem-- a crisis, even-- why aren’t we doing more to try to avert disaster? Well, why did it take so many years to start warning people about the dangers of cigarette smoking?  There are a lot of people, with a lot of money, who benefit from the status quo.  And they own politicians.  Lots of them.  As Mr. Gillis puts it, “[c]limate change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air…”  Well, it’s true that most of the air is nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%).  But that’s about the extent of the truth in this absurd argument.  Whether its cobra venom or arsenic, to use a couple of Mr. Gillis’s examples, or a few hundred wackadoos in Al Qaeda, a little badness can go a long way toward ruining your day… or your kids’ and grandkids’ future, for that matter.

 It may already be too late to avert disaster, and in fact probably is.  If this were a movie, and some scientist could somehow get representatives of every country on earth together to act in concert on an emergency basis to go all out to control population growth, implement green technologies, and rein in the great consumer lifestyle expectations of the American and Chinese peoples… well then we’d be living on another planet, anyway, and we probably wouldn’t have had to worry about CO2 in the first place.

Flim Flam

According to the New York Times (and who can argue with that venerable publication and its high journalistic standards?) the U.S. economy needs to add about 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the growth in the working-age population.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/business/economy/job-growth-falters-badly-clouding-hope-for-recovery.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=business.

According to the U.S. Board of Labor Statistics (and who can argue with them, either?), about 165,000 non-farm jobs were added in April, 2013.   http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.

So we're starting to climb out of the pit, right?  We added a net 15,000 new jobs last month!  Well...

Strangely enough, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 2 million fewer employed people now than there were in 2007.  Since we'd have to have added nearly 4 million more in order to keep up with population growth over the last 6 years (and obviously didn't), it looks like we're about 6 million jobs in the hole, plus however many jobs we were already short in 2007.  No wonder it still feels like hard times, even though those stock indexes are setting records.  But... the good news is that even though there are more unemployed people, the "unemployment rate" is falling!  Down to 7.5% now!  High Five!

The reason that the "unemployment rate" can fall even though the number of unemployed people is increasing is that not everybody who's not working is counted as "unemployed."  See, once somebody gets disgusted and gives up looking for work, they're no longer counted as part of the "labor force," so even though they're not working, they're no longer "unemployed."  And if they give up and retire early, they're not "unemployed," either.  And if you're a teenager or a recent graduate, you might be out there looking for work, but you're not entitled to unemployment benefits, so who's going to notice? 

Another thing... the Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are about 8 million of the "employed" who are actually "underemployed," meaning that they're working part time, without benefits for the most part, and would rather work full time.  Unless by some wild coincidence these 8 million are all people I personally know, this statistic must be understated. 

But there is some "good" news, which again comes to us through the venerable New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/business/college-graduates-fare-well-in-jobs-market-even-through-recession.html?_r=0 .  Seems that although more people overall are unemployed, more 4-year college graduates have been able to find at least some kind of work, albeit in many cases it is the work that used to be done by those with only some college... or no college at all.  A particularly depressing example was in the news lately: a McDonald's restaurant in Massachusetts boasts that every single one of its employees is a college graduate.  http://www.examiner.com/article/mcdonald-s-requiring-college-degree-plus-experience-for-cashier-positions .  Jumping back to the Times, seems that employers have figured out that in hard times they can be choosier concerning whom they employ, much to the detriment of the 68% of "civilian, non-institutional population over 25-- that is, the group of people who are not inmates of penal and mental facilities or residents of homes for the disabled or aged and who are not on active military duty" who do not have a college degree.

Oh, and I guess it's to the detriment of those college graduates with an average of $27,000 in student debt who are swabbing the decks at McDonald's, too.

After emerging from this swirling cloud of statistics, what is it that we still think we know?  Well, for one thing, I know why I hate statistics.  They sound scientific and important, but each number, taken alone, is practically meaningless.   Statistics can be easily manipulated-- e.g., by carefully choosing the numbers you reference, you can prove that the stock market-- or terrorism-- or skin cancer correlates with the phases of the moon.  And you can also convince people that the "economy" is improving even though, viewed from a slightly different angle,  the economic outlook for the vast majority of the "working age" population is pretty bleak, indeed.  Maybe it would be a good idea, the next time you read or listen to a story about the "economy," to ask yourself what the story was really saying... if it was really saying anything at all.