Prophecy

Over the last 25 years, there have been a few changes in the world—agree or disagree?  Homes and offices and libraries and cars became computerized, phones became mobile.  Americans became fat.  Words like “blog” and “tweet” and “e-zine” and “phablet” and “Belieber” came into general use.  Bookstores and one-hour photo labs and print shops vanished en masse, and commerce in general moved “online.”  Shopping malls, once the throbbing heart of American teen and suburban society, withered away to the point that the operators had trouble giving space away, and stores like Banana Republic and Radio Shack stepped up to serve as the “anchor stores” of what was left.  Entertainment became largely home-based, with big HD TV screens, satellite reception, wireless speakers, i-tunes and i-pods, game consoles, Blu-Ray discs and video-on-demand.  (Just as well, in a world where it now can cost hundreds of dollars to take the kids to a football game, or a thousand bucks to go to a Madonna concert.)  The youth of America donned urban gang attire and pop “music” became first shouting into microphones in badly-metered “rap,” then repeating the same lines over and over and over again in a singsong monotone  with the assistance of a “vocorder.”  Illegal aliens voted in elections, served on juries and joined in huge rallies to demand the rights and privileges of citizens, while the U.S. government commissioned a really tall wall (to keep them from leaving, I guess.)  Healthcare became outrageously high-tech and expensive, and the illusory “right to privacy” died once and for all with credit bureau rating checks, unsolicited offers of credit, robocalls, social media sharing, government communications monitoring, face and voice recognition technology, online “cookies,” computerized medical records, e-books, credit and debit cards, YouTube and interactive TV.  Censorship became en vogue, with campus “speech codes” and book-burnings sponsored by Tipper Gore, helped along by the public’s fear of religious fanatics who blew up abortion clinics, crashed loaded jetliners into tall buildings, surgically implanted suicide bombs and stabbed to death filmmakers whose work they didn’t like.  Full-body scans and cavity checks lengthened the wait time at airports, as did universal overbooking of flights and cancellation of service to small, unimportant cities.  Legroom was at a premium, once you made it onto the plane, increasing the risk of deep vein thrombosis.  And we were at war almost the whole time, without ever declaring war, utilizing everything from “surgical strikes” to “black ops” to “multi-national coalitions” to huge invasions to “regime change” to “nation building” to “drone” robots to further our incoherent foreign policy, with the U.S. military maintaining a presence in over 200 countries, just in case.  The Soviet Union collapsed, but the “peace dividend” was spent before we had time to realize it, and the U.S. is now the biggest debtor nation on Earth. 

Demographics in the country are shifting to the point that European Americans will no longer be a majority well before mid-Century, more and more people are claiming "mixed" racial and ethnic roots, and the foot traffic in cities like LA looks like you're in some exotic foreign clime.  Not only are the people getting to look the same everywhere, with a McDonald’s and a Starbucks and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on every corner pretty soon there won’t be any point to traveling around anymore because everyplace on the planet is going to look exactly the same.  But since a lot of Americans stay at the Marriott when they travel, anyhow, it may be a while before people even notice that there's nowhere to go.

It’s easy to sit back now and say that you could see it all coming, the seven billion people, the drowning polar bears, the rocket fuel in the aquifers, the Global War on Terror, the first (almost) black President, DNA crimesolving (at least on TV), Twitter, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report supplanting the network news, legal “gay marriage,” the burgeoning lists of “threatened” and “endangered” species, Mars rovers, Chinese spaceflights, Americans hitching rides in Russian space capsules because otherwise they’d have no way to get to the International Space Station because all the American shuttles are either blown up or in museums.  The rise and fall of Amy Winehouse, River Phoenix, Bernie Madoff, Anthony Weiner, Paula Deen, Barry Bonds, Paris Hilton, Marion Berry, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, Sarah Palin and, of course, Justin Bieber and his mom… not to mention the Kardashians.  You get the idea.

So, since everybody will claim to have seen all that coming, the only way I can make this interesting will be to try to predict the next 25 years, instead.  Here goes:

1.    We’ll discover proof of the existence of life on other planets (life now, not at some time in the distant past.)

2.    Somebody will clone a human being, whether it’s legal for them to do so or not.

3.    The world’s population will increase to at least nine billion, despite massive die-offs from increasingly aggressive “superbugs” (courtesy of our obsession with “factory farming” and persistent misuse of antibiotics.)

4.    At least a quarter of the species of plants and animals now in existence will become extinct in the wild, including some favorites such as pandas, tigers, gorillas and orangutans.  (Countless others will, of course, take their place   on the “endangered” and “threatened” lists.)

5.    There won’t any longer be any “Islamic” governments... anywhere.

6.    All official U.S. government documents will be “printed” or published online in three languages (English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.)

7.    The U.S. Constitution will be amended so that a foreign-born person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Justin Bieber can be elected President.

8.    All infants will be “chipped” at birth, signaling the end of Social Security cards, picture I.D.’s, credit and debit cards, etc… and even the pretense of privacy.

9.    Robots of all types will assume ever more prominent roles in our “service-oriented economy.”  It will become a novelty to interface with a human bank teller, grocery store cashier, doctor, lawyer or librarian.  Police and military functions will continue switching over to the tin men, too.

10.Fossil fuels will become first, very expensive, and then, passé, at least in the “developed” world, as alternative power comes online.  A regional nuclear conflict, fueled by Saudi and Irani fanaticism,  will end the sad saga of the Middle East.

11.Scientists will prove that the human personality a) is not rooted solely in the brain; and b) persists, at least for a while, after clinical death.  This will result in an uptick in executions, as people realize that death is really just Round Two, and there's no more room to keep people in prison, anyway.

12.There will be a Second (or Third, depending upon what part of the country you live in) American Revolution, this one predicated on class warfare, a la the French.  The 98^th percentile will assume control when the dust settles;  the  99th percentile (the fabled 1%) will no longer be with us, one way or the other.  But the economic stratification of our society will persist.

13.With the elimination of the need for human workers, unskilled and skilled alike, as the result of advances in robotics and computerization, there will no longer be a useful function for many people born into our Brave New World.  Only the elite will have what we now call “jobs” or “careers” or “an education.” Whereas philosophers used to dream about the benefits to philosophy and the Arts that might accrue if everybody had more leisure, the devaluation of the Humantities and the Arts as worthy subjects for study in favor of math and science (so that we can compete with the Chinese, as the politicians tell us) will have left us with a population of idle, ignorant, unimaginative people with those not athletically “talented” enough to play professional sports or good-looking enough to appear in pornos having nothing to do but hang out, get high, watch pornos and reproduce.

14.All restrictions on abortion and euthanasia will disappear.  You won’t even need a scrip from your doctor in most states (and your doctor will probably be a robot, anyway.)  Instead of saving for retirement, which would just be more of the same for most people, people will save up to take the Big Sleep early.  You’ll get coupons for it from the robot at the grocery store, too.

15.Written language will follow the path to extinction taken by the protractor and the slide rule and the pencil.  Everything will be video.  Just as kids today don’t learn how to write (or read) cursive writing, the kids of the near future won’t even bother to learn how to text (or to read anything at all).

16.We’ll have regular occurrences of mass food poisoning as the factory farm food distribution system collapses, and then we’ll switch to meat grown in the lab from stem cells… just one step away from Soylent Green.  Then cows and sheep and goats and pigs and horses can go extinct, too.  (They take up too much space, anyway, the argument will go, just like criminals and the genetic culls who opt for euthanasia, and unwanted foetuses, etc.)

17.People will fight primarily over food and water, not oil or religion.

18.The weather shift brought on by “global warming” will continue, rendering the Great Outdoors ever more hostile and making it very dangerous to live on the Great Plains… or on the coast… or near any seismic fault.  Radiation levels will become so intense, courtesy of the porous ozone layer,  that it won’t be safe to go outside without protective goggles and clothing, including a ridiculous-looking, tin-foil-insulated floppy fisherman's hat which, on the plus side, will also keep alien thought-readers out of your head.

19.Congress will pass legislation creating an official American history, a version of events that will be required to appear in all online encyclopedias and any educational videos for the few kids still going to school.  It will be updated hourly, with all amendments having to pass muster before a secret educational court.

20.Genetic engineering will progress to the point that prospective parents (with lots of money) will be able to specify the height, weight, hair and eye color, gender, gender preference, skin shade and I.Q. of their bundle of joy, not just name them.  It won’t take more than a couple of generations of this before we’ve laid the basic foundations of a divided society much like that of the Eloi (the selected) and Morlocks (the random) as depicted by H.G. Wells in his classic, "The Time Machine," and won’t that be fun!

Now, all this might sound a little bleak to you, but I think these are pretty conservative prophesies, just extrapolations of currently observable trends and technologies.  The real "future history" will undoubtedly contain many surprises (including, hopefully, some positive ones) that will act as game changers.  But still, probably wouldn't hurt to hoard some canned goods or move into a bunker or something, just in case.

What Dreams May Come

Ever had insomnia?  If you have, you'll know why getting enough sleep is so important to one's mental and physical health.  If you can't sleep, your body can't recover from the stresses of the previous cycle.  But more importantly (I think) your cerebral cortex just keeps going and going, just like the late, great Energizer Bunny.

Some people count sheep when they are trying to fall asleep.  Not me.  Last night I occupied myself for quite a stretch by mentally apologizing to an endless list of people, living and dead, whom I've trampled upon, or disappointed, or betrayed, or slighted, or misunderstood, or wronged, or cheated on, or resented, or bad-mouthed, or yelled at, or ignored, or annoyed, or forgotten, or let down, or abandoned, or harrassed, or persecuted, or mocked, or fought, or stood up, or resisted, or lied to, or abused or failed to help over the years.  And if I thought about it long enough, I'll bet everybody I ever met would wind up on that list.  Brother, was I glad when the sun came up.

And what really gets me is that the bad stuff I was remembering was just the stuff that really happened and that I know about.  There are probably rows and rows of people out there who have imaginary grievances against me, too.  And people with legitimate grievances that I never knew about, or have forgotten about.  And what about all those impure thoughts?

If it's really true that your life flashes before you in reverse when you're about to die, I hope you get to remember some of the good stuff, too.

Memory is a funny thing, really.  Over many years, the justice system has demonstrated that eyewitness testimony isn't quite as surefire as always used to be assumed, because no two witnesses ever perceive the same event in exactly the same way.  Further, research has established that people see what they expect to see, are very susceptible to suggestion, and have a tendency to fill in and edit details over time.  A witness who's been carefully "prepared" to give testimony will sound convincing to most, even if the foundation for his or her story lies in somebody else's wishful thinking or artful suggestions.  Remember the McMartin Pre-school case?  Sock puppets wielded by state-retained psychologists were able to coax the most incredible stories from a bunch of allegedly-abused pre-schoolers, stories so incredible that even a jury of ordinary Americans wouldn't buy them.

You can coach yourself, too-- edit your own history. Say something often enough, and you'll come to believe it's true, whether you're recounting your high school athletic achievements or your noble ancestry.  And once you can believe, you can beat a lie detector any day.  My Mom's done her whole life over several times this way.

That's what we need dreams for, actually.  As a sort of reality check.  Other than frissons when you're walking through a deserted alley or a haunted house, or creepy feelings when the wild-eyed loser pulls up alongside of you in his windowless van, dreams are one of the few times that your subconscious mind will interface with your conscious self in a way that you can make sense out of without the discipline of meditation or prayer or at least a whopping dose of hallucinogens to help you out.  And unlike these other methods, the subconscious usually gets to select the program when we're talking dreams.  (Although I'm told that those who work at it have (sometimes) the ability to "incubate" a dream about a topic of interest, even then the subconscious has to agree on the topic before the show will start.)

"Vivid" dreams may be something special.  Sometimes they involve prophecies.  But regular old dreams are cool, too.  In my case, I think one of the best things about them is that they are not (consciously) expected.  But maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic, because to tell you the truth I don't often remember my dreams these days.  Sleep apnea, maybe?  Subconscious bored or dead?  Who knows?  At current rates, I can't afford a visit to the sleep clinic or the shrink to find out.

Death

There was an article in the New York Times the other day about the "death cafes" that are springing up everywhere.  No, this isn't a retake on the Jim Jones Koolaid thing.  What these gatherings are, people get together at Starbucks (or at a real coffee shop or tea room) to simply talk about Death, not actually do it.  http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/death-be-not-decaffeinated-over-cup-groups-face-taboo/ 

According to the article, these groups trace their origins to a web designer in London named Jon Underwood who organized the first "Death Cafe" in 2011.  Mr. Underwood, in turn, was inspired by the work of a Swiss psychologist, Bernard Crettaz,  who organized what he called called "cafes mortels," designed to encourage people to engage in "more open discussions about death." 

That's great.  I'm concerned with death as a philosophical problem, too-- in addition to its presenting a pretty heady math problem related to investment horizons and estate planning.  But I would suspect that there's a lot of wheel-spinning going on at those get-togethers, because you can't get away from the fact that the reason we're interested in Death in the first place is that it's the end of Life.  I have to think that in order to understand what Death is, you'd have to start out with a consensus on what Life is, and there's remarkably little agreement on that.

After all, just one last rattling breath, a gunshot, a heart spasm, or a splat on the pavement is all that stands between the Here and Now, whatever that is, and the Hereafter, if in fact there is such a thing.  So, in my humble opinion, it stands to reason that you'd get a good leg up on the problem of Death by taking stock of all that you know or can learn about "pre-Death," i.e., "Life."

Well, I think that we've all heard about Darwin by now, and the Law of the Jungle, a.k.a. the "Survival of the Fittest."  So, at one level, at least, Life is all about trying to stay alive.  Which, of course, begs the question, "Why?"  Why struggle to stay alive?

You'll find no shortage of people who will say that they "love" Life.  Most of those people don't live in war zones, though, nor do they suffer from lingering, painful diseases, nor have their kids recently been kidnapped, raped and murdered.  Then again, just living a life of privilege isn't enough to make one "love" Life; otherwise, movie stars and millionaires wouldn't become drug addicts or alcoholics or attempt suicide at a rate greater than troops returning from a year in Afghanistan.  Frankly, there's a lot of Life that is pretty crappy, all told, and even if things are going well for you it's possible to become upset about the destruction of the environment or children on chemotherapy or terrorism or illiteracy or cruelty to animals or the sudden death of James Gandolfini or intolerance or hunger or hate.

Of course, there are positive aspects to Life, too, like Springtime and flowers and Mozart and fireworks and Yosemite and horses and Rodin sculptures and cherry pie.  But like all of Life, all of these things are ephemeral (yes, even including Mozart and Rodin, although each of them will probably last longer than Yosemite, at the rate that the environment is deteriorating.)  And some of the "good" things, like fireworks and cherry pie, can also kill you.  And although in the Bible it says something like "the poor will always be with us," (or am I thinking of Dickens?) unfortunately nobody can say that about honeybees or blue whales or even elephants anymore, so how long do you think horses have got?

So, maybe there are reasons to "hate" Life, too, if you can't bring yourself to "love" it.  But either way, it's legitimate to ask if there's a point to it, and I think you have to have at least a working hypothesis on that point in order to formulate a theory concerning  the nature and meaning of Death.  (We can save the empirical experiments for later, if that's O.K. with you.)

If you approach the problem from the other direction, it's just as tough.  Is Death a "transition" or a "graduation" or a "fulfillment" of some kind, as people quoted in the NYT article conceptualized it, or is it just "the end?"  If it's just "the end," is it possible for Life to have meaning?  If it's a "transition," what's it a "transition" to?  And if it's a "graduation," what are the criteria for promotion to the next grade level?

As pointed out in the aforementioned NYT article, a lot of people (in Western nations, at least) shy away from talking about Death, and many people acknowledge that they fear it.  Why fear death?  It appears to be as natural as birth, after all, and as far as we know it is inevitable and, except in Oregon, is pretty unpredictable.  Maybe our fear of Death is nothing more than our instinctive fear of the unknown.  Maybe.

If you turn off like a light bulb when you die-- i.e., simply cease to exist-- all your troubles are over.  But, as Hamlet realized, you never can tell.  "To sleep... perchance to dream.  Aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come..."  What if everything doesn't zero out?  What if your life really does flash before your eyes and then you have to remember all the smallest details forever?  After all, the human mind doesn't seem to be programmed to imagine its own mortality.  And since we don't really know what consciousness is, why assume that it resides exclusively in the brain, and that it is dependent for its existence on the continued viability of that organ?  What about those stories of organ transplant recipients who begin to experience memories associated with the deceased individual who donated the organs?  What about dreams, what about ghosts?  And, dare I say it, what about the possibility of retribution for all the crappy decisions and bad acts and evil thoughts?  Have we done enough good deeds to balance things out?  Are we accountable to Anyone but ourselves for all of that?

Some people (well, maybe a lot of them) think that all these questions are answered by their particular brand of religion.  Ricky Gervais, whom I admit is an acquired taste, explored the formulation of religious dogma in a film called "The Invention of Lying," in which the protagonist, living in a fictional world in which everyone always tells the truth, attempts to comfort his dying mother by making up a story about a "Man in the Sky" who controls everything and has a beautiful afterlife waiting for Mom.  Mom is comforted, but this story is overheard, and the thing quickly spirals out of control.  Next thing you know, the son is a world-famous prophet.  What is impressive to me is how hungry all those naive, honest people were for some answers, and how uncritical they were in examining the "prophet" once he started giving out the answers they sought.  "How do you know?" is a question that never came up... pretty much like real life. (And in real life, of course, if the question did come up, the response would be gibberish:  "Because the Bible says so," or "According to the magic golden plates that I lost," or "The Angel Gabriel buttonholed  me in a cave.")

If there is no purpose to Life, then it seems to follow naturally that there is no purpose to Death, either.  If there is a purpose to Life, then is there necessarily a purpose to Death?  (Other than just making room for more Life, that is.) Or is it something that just happens?  In the case of infants and kittens who die young, does either their life or their death have a purpose?  What is the purpose of the life of an evil, destructive person?  Or the death of a gentle nobody?  If Life is all there is, what's wrong with being a hedonist?  Or a sadist, for that matter, or a child molester?  What's worthy about being a saint?

If there is an Afterlife, a strange concept for which the empirical evidence is at best inconclusive, is it something that is the same for everybody, or is it tailored to the individual?  Are we constructing our own Heavens and Hells right now?  Or is there a big, shining City out there somewhere, with incessant harp music and hymns, one size white robe fits all?  Why would switching from Led Zeppelin or Steely Dan to that stuff necessarily be a reward as opposed to a punishment?  Remember that "Twilight Zone" where the crook winds up dead, and thinks he's in Heaven because he gets whatever he wants and things always go his way... until he realizes that the complete lack of adversity (can't even lose at pool) is driving him nuts, and it is revealed (by a leering, whited-suited Sebastian Cabot) that he's actually in the Other Place?

In the end, it all comes down to a belief system, whether you start from some holy book or a science text.  Either you believe that Life and Death matter, and have rules of some kind, or you don't.  And either way, I'll bet you stop and wonder sometimes.

Good God!

Hey, let’s talk about God.  I don’t mean using His Name in vain, or anything like that.  And I don’t mean let’s shout at each other like we were in church.  I’m talking about having a serious discussion, with God being the topic.

In the middle of the last century, the hot topic was Is God Dead?  But to me, that was jumping the gun, because I’m not sure anybody ever really got around to establishing that He existed in the first place.  Stephen Hawking, who is a self-professed atheist, states that the laws of physics can explain the existence of the Universe without the need for postulating the existence of a Creator.  I guess we’re going to have to take Hawking’s word for that, because physics at his level is Greek to me, and if it’s Greek to me, it’s Greek to you, believe me, unless of course you happen to be Greek.  But even assuming that Hawking is correct (as we must, for our purposes, anyway) all he’s saying is that there doesn’t have to be a God, and he doesn’t think there is one.  But not even Stephen Hawking can definitively say that there isn’t a God.

These days, we hear a lot about something called “Intelligent Design,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “if this is here, Somebody must have made it.”  Well, I’ll take Stephen Hawking’s word for the fact that "it ain’t necessarily so,” at least with respect to the individual marvels that the “creation scientists” typically point to as “proof” of the existence of God.  But again, I suppose that Somebody might have “made” the world.  But even if that were so, we’d have no better chance of being able to prove it than the ants digging in that ant farm in your kid’s room would have of proving that you exist.

So, maybe there’s a God.  Maybe there’s a being or a spirit or an entity that created all that we’re aware of as the Universe.  That’s where you’ve got to start.  So how do you prove whether or not there is such a One?  Lots of philosophers and theologians have tried, and for various reasons, none has succeeded.

Plato and Aristotle, among others, advanced what is called a “Cosmological Argument” for the existence of God.   Many others, including most notably St. Thomas Aquinas, have elaborated upon it.  The Cosmological Argument goes like this:  Everything has a beginning, and occurs as the result of some cause.  If you go back far enough, there has to be a beginning of everything, and the Cause of that beginning is what you’d have to call the First Cause… or the Uncaused Cause… or God.  This is why you’ve got to think of God as eternal—if nothing caused Him, then by definition he was always (and will always be) present.  For those of you who attend Christian churches, that might ring a bell:  “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, etc.”  Of course, Stephen Hawking seems to be challenging that, but if you think about it a little, you come to realize that there’s a major flaw in his reasoning, in that it requires an assumption that the laws of physics always existed as we now know them, and if that’s so, where’s the First Cause for them?

Stephen Hawking and most other physicists, by the way, trace the beginning of our Universe to something called the Big Bang, and conveniently deal with the problem of what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang by concluding that a) there’s no way of knowing; and b) it doesn’t matter to our understanding of the existing Universe in any event.  Of course, the Universe is and always has been defined by physicists by reference to what we know about it, and our conception of the Universe has changed quite a lot since it was conceived, a few thousand years ago,  as something flat carried upon the back of a giant turtle and surrounded by a series of crystal spheres, so I’ll bet that if you got a couple of drinks into Stephen Hawking he might admit the possibility that there are a few more questions to be answered around the fringes of his current theories.

Of course, both Plato and Aristotle believed in an eternal cosmos, that existed without beginning and without end, and that sounds a little more like the prayer mentioned above.  “Pantheists” believe that the Universe itself is God—i.e., that God is everywhere.  That works out pretty nicely, because if the Universe itself is everywhere and is eternal it would pretty much be occupying the same space as the omnipresent and eternal God that we’re looking for here.  Plotinus, back in the Third Century, felt that the Supreme Being would necessarily cause the Universe to exist, merely by the fact of His own existence, “creatio ex deo,” as expressed in Latin.

There’s something called the Ontological Argument, among the proponents of which was one Rene Descartes (the “I think, therefore I am” man.)  Those who favor the ontological approach to the problem of the existence of God usually define God as an entity “than which there can be no greater.”  Well, that’s clearly inviting discord, because who’s the greatest is pretty much a question of opinion, at least at the elite level.  Remember, even though Muhammad Ali just flat out told everybody the he was The Greatest, people fought him anyway, and eventually even whipped his ass… sort of.  And why would we assume that our Creator would necessarily be The Greatest?  In Robert Heinlein’s novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” for example, the Creator of our Universe is revealed to be a fledgling artist whose work (i.e., our Universe, including us) is judged—presumably by entities greater than the Creator—to be so seriously flawed that it has to be painted over. Maybe we—and our entire Universe—are just a mistake. How would we know? Of course, there are some people (like the Biblical Moses, for example) who report that God talks to them personally.  Oral Roberts once told his flock that a 900-foot Jesus tapped on the window of his upper-story office and told him to build a cancer treatment center.  Another time, Roberts announced that God would be “calling [him] home” unless he raised eight million bucks by the middle of March.  There are visitations from angels reported, too, and what about the Bible itself, touted as the Word of God? Like the old song says, “How do I know?  The Bible tells me so.”  Sounds a little circular, if you ask me.

And even if there is a Creator, who says that He would necessarily be all-knowing, all-powerful or all-good?  And how could He possibly be all three of those things, given the travesty of human history?  If, for example, God was all-knowing, He would have known about the Holocaust before, during and after the event.  If He was all-powerful, He could have prevented it.  And if He was all-good, He would have prevented it.  Does the occurrence of the Holocaust therefore prove that there is no God?  Or only that there is no God that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good?  (This, by the way, is called “The Problem of Evil,” and was first stated, so far as we know, by Epicurus.)

What if God were only two out of three?  If He were only all-powerful and all-good, for example, but not all-knowing, he might have just missed the Holocaust.  The Universe is vast.  Or maybe the “Deists” are right, and God just lost interest after creating the Universe, and pretty much lets it run itself—sort of like if you had an uncle who won the lottery, but figured that you were pretty much on your own if you fell behind on your mortgage.  A far scarier prospect, to me anyway, is the possibility that God might exist, and be all-powerful and all-knowing, but just not all-good.  After all, we’re supposedly made in His image, and it really doesn’t look like there was a serious attempt to make us all-good.  Or maybe the Holocaust was a special case, sort of like the invasion of Iraq, in which the shot-caller’s judgment was warped by pique at the victims’ previous bad acts against a relative… or something like that.

When we pray, to Whom, exactly, are we talking?  Is it to the Person in Charge, or simply to a lackey sitting in a celestial call-center?  Or an intern?  Or an apprentice?

Now, when I lie awake in the middle of the night and fret about all this stuff, I really tick off the lady of the house, who proudly boasts of her freedom from religious indoctrination and wants to know why in God’s name (well, she doesn’t say it like that, of course) I want to waste my time pondering the imponderable.  Heck, that’s like asking why I want to waste my time on James Bond or Star Trek… in other words, a good question.  But I guess there’s a part of me that wants to know, in the event I’m ever tempted to pray for anything, whether it would be more like I’m petitioning the White House or Santa Claus. Well, God and Santa are both magic, and either way, you might get an answer, but it might not be the one you’d like.  Still, from being a kid I remember that even if Santa didn’t bring me exactly what I wanted every time, he never gave me a real kick in the teeth like a World War, an auto accident, or a cancer diagnosis, either.  God, on the other hand, is always “waxing wroth” and smiting people… or so it says in His Own Book, anyway, and apparently, unlike Santa, or even the dentist, He never gives out toys.

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.