Tough Guys

If you rabbit-hole into health news and advice on the internet, you would think that humans are snowballs in hell. So many terrible things can happen. A new problem discovered daily. Any of which are certain to cripple or kill you slowly or suddenly, at any time .

I remember that I am on the far end of millions of years of evolution. Admittedly, some luck was involved, but humans did not take over the world because they were soft and weak .

Lately we tend not to give ourselves enough credit. People can eat anything, and throughout history, they have done so. A lot or a little, in conditions from charred to raw to spoiled. We automatically vomit up most poisons, we purge bad bacteria. Anything that makes it through the first line of defenses faces almost certain oblivion from a fearsome immune system. As for injury or damage – most organs usually repair themselves .

Admittedly, we do die eventually (although that might be another aspect of evolutionary toughness). And also over half of us now survive childhood when we would have once been dead before adolescence. No matter. With or without technology we’re the baddest life form that ever existed .

Okay. We need to avoid getting hit by a truck. Eat sensibly. Follow a relatively careful lifestyle. But the parameters in that lifestyle are immense, regardless of what some nerd with a microscope “discovered” yesterday .

So swagger a bit. It’s useful to play the bully once in a while. And all advice isn’t good.

Global Crossing Redux

Around 2000, I was working in a relatively high-tech company. All my colleagues were poised to get rich. They’d invested in all the upcoming technology stocks. The future would be golden .

Most were internet related. For the cautious, Microsoft was solid but turning into a has-been. Apple was there for the daring. But most dreams centered on the magic rockets like AOL or Yahoo. Speculative dreams pursued the “name territory” like Pets.com (nobody was using search engines so easily remembered names were the wave of the future). Beanie Babies were the bitcoin of those times. So many folks told me they knew their retirement and children’s college were set .

Of course they were partisans of their picks. They did not understand the venture capitalist truth that one must invest in a lot of losers to hope for one massive hit. They knew that they knew .

A lot of IPO issuances were springing up all the time. Ultimately buzz centered on ” Global Crossing” – a fiber optic company. Whispers in the hallway. Clandestine peeks at moments on the company terminals. Advice. Certainty of payoff. How could they miss?

Of course – well – the “dot.com crash”. Most startups vanished as most startups do, carrying their stocks to the bottom like the Titanic. Twenty years later GlobalCcrossing was an okay investment. But most speculators had gone down with the ships .

Oh, I forgot, the past does not predict the future ,,,

Goonies

Police in the United States have generally been respected, at least in the last 50 years or so, even if regarded a little cynically. For the most part they are neighbors with a tough and stressful job, long stretches of boredom marked by moments of unpredictable terror. Most of us can sympathize with their occasional overreactions, rudeness, and even civil transgressions. Understandable .

ICE broke all the rules .

Nazi Stormtroopers are imagined as lean, mean, hard, cold, nasty, and effective. The image of ICE is more that of a gang of mumbling rumbling Michelin men, always moving in fat, deeply swaddled herds. Angry for the sake of being angry .

At some point in the past ICE agents were due appropriate sympathy as trained professionals, going into difficult areas to find “the worst of the worst” violent criminal alien gangs. A necessary job to mop up what local government could not handle .

But now? Local law seems adequate to handle and turn over the worst of the worst. The goon gang seems to be ignorant, obese, overenthusiastic thugs egging each other on to violently seize inoffensive women and children. Only to fill quotas. And an awful lot of the new masked faces in a bloated force simply resemble poorly trained, bitter unemployables, grateful to act badly while unidentifiable .

Goonies. And not in a funny movie .

Tick Terror

Lately a litany of ills has people around here huddling inside in fear. Deadly fevers from mosquitoes, flesh eating bacteria in the water, invisible plagues in the air. Ticks with strange and horrible diseases .

The common denominator is that the culprits are tiny or invisible. Also ubiquitous if you are in the wrong area. It’s quite difficult to avoid water at the beach, air on the patio, or grass in the park.

Ticks are my favorite public overreaction. Mosquitoes invisibly come from anywhere and bite you right away, germs are generally thinly dispersed, flesh eating is quite rare. Ticks cannot run, jump, nor fly. They’re quite slow and deliberate, and take a pretty long time to climb to wherever they want, dig in, and begin to feed. Lots of opportunity to find and get rid of them if you look.

But folks imagine them as some miniscule land variant of the great white shark. Stalking the grasslands ready to pounce. Dropping from the sky on the unwary. Cleverly racing up legs to hide under socks or shorts. Evolving to be impervious to insect repellent .

The good news for me is that most park visitors remain on paved road. To them, grass is toxic, woodland trails forbidden. I ignore the signs and check now and then, always when I have finished my hike. No problem. But – well – the trails are lovely and empty for us adventurous types, apparently courting death or worse . I often receive incredulous stares from the crowds on the macadam.

As I often tell my 10-year-old grandson, the great thing to be really truly afraid of here on Long Island is not ticks, mosquitoes, bacteria, or sharks, but cars and the impatient maniacs who drive them.

Mentally Obese

I’ll use the ancient politically incorrect connotation of obese to mean someone who is excessively fat from enjoying eating way too much with no regard to health consequences. That may damage an individual, but what I will call a “mentally obese” person may endanger a society .

In a consumer driven culture, most of us are “mentally fat”. We acquire too much and may desire even more. But we have limits to our greed, some self-imposed, some forced on us. Many folks honestly believe that what they do not own cannot be enjoyed. They must possess a thing before they dare appreciate it.

The worst mentally obese people are not simple consumers, but titans of industry. They must have more and more and more regardless of consequence. They think they are “lean and mean” but they are a social tub of lard, wallowing about in plans, risks, and ambitions .

They remind me of Marx’s observation that the end of classic capitalism would result in a few gargantuan monopolies owned and controlled by one survivor each. These days, it is not hard to imagine such a scenario where the CEO has no employees at all – only AI agents. And, for that matter, no CEO .

Perhaps, Marxist dystopia is only a temporary stage. With current IPOs, our mentally obese masters of the universe are well on their way to the ultimate end.

Spectacle

Now seems an age of spectacles. Huge crowds attend sports events, electronic extravagances in stadiums, concerts, and crazy oddities like “Burning Man”. A thirst for the exotic, satisfied continuously by spectacular technology .

Yet many spectators are really not on site. They view the show on tiny screens, or even large screens, with none of the crowding and hormones that make a live event so noteworthy. Yet they count it as a spectacle nonetheless .

I’ve grown more sedate, although I still do enjoy the ideas of some spectacles. But older and more fragile, I’m quite content to be an armchair adventurer most of the time. The revelation for me has been how much spectacle I can create in my immediate surroundings, by careful and total immersion in the moment. Truly listening to bird calls, rapidly staring at patterns of leaf shadows in a breeze, even staring for minutes at an ant or spider.

The whole world, properly seen, is a constant surprising miraculous spectacle. That’s really why I continue to draw. A sketch forces a trance-like state that squeezes my concentration to the point where whatever I am looking at is spectacular. With luck, that intensity carries over when I am done .

Giant spectacles are grand real marvels _ I’m not knocking them. But I find that without all the muss and fuss I am usually surrounded by equivalent possibility. True wonder .

Certainly Flexible

In our teenage years, we become convinced we know everything and are consequently certain we are always right. We may learn more as time goes on, we may change our minds, but we remain just as certain all the time.

Science constantly tries to break this tendency. The worst scientist is one who knows what, how, and why. In many other careers, it is equally important to acquire knowledge, apply it, think out of the box, and flexibly move on to better understanding .

On the other hand, in society and politics, changing one’s mind is a “flip-flop” and a sign of horrible dishonesty. “How can you have deceived me so?” Friends, families, elected representatives are supposed to remain frozen in attitude and belief, as we once thought we knew them .

It’s understandable. After all, the core of a society must be relatively conservative to function at all. We need to believe that lives have fundamental organization. Total chaos is unsustainable .

The only thing worse than an ongoing movement in what we are certain of, is to be frozen at one point until a sudden internal revelation forces us to reject all that we know, start over, and be absolutely certain, once again, that we are right in whatever new belief.

Like most of our leaders .

Entitled

Political speech is usually more concerned with connotation than definition. Consider the current polemics about “rights: which are viewed as free, and “entitlements” which cost money. What these words actually mean is best described in the lovely legalistic phrase “normal and customary” .

There are no absolutes. The rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are contradicted by graveyards, prisons, and slums. Entitlements such as pensions are viewed as earned rewards, but tend to include expected safety nets for food clothing shelter and medicine.

The rich, of course, always think that whatever they have is a form of right – granted by God, superiority, hard work. The poor assume society owes them other rights such as education. Everyone considers security and property protection on the fuzzy borderline .

This is where the war of connotation spills into redistribution of wealth. If everyone is entitled to health care, are we infringing on the rights of the well-off by taking away some of their assets? There is no easy answer, although the way politicians twist meanings may make it seem so .

Utopians have always claimed that the problem is simply scarcity. In a world of abundance the difference between what costs money and what does not will vanish .

Perhaps .

I’m not holding my breath .

Babies and Puppies

Advertisers know that big eyes sell. Slap a picture of a baby or a puppy on a product and more people will buy it. Most of us can scarcely resist those cute expressions, and we get a rush of endorphins just looking at them .

Nature probably evolved this in certain mammalian species (especially primates) which have young who require extended care. Humans then tended to breed dogs whose puppies were more appealing. In both cases, the cutest survived.

Social causes have now become deeply entangled with standard advertising. In particular, anti-abortion groups always picture helpless human infants as those being “murdered”. In truth of course most modern abortion involves discarding a lump of mostly formless tissue .

Ah, but the potential… Unsurprisingly anti-abortion never mentions surly teenagers nor terrifying criminals who may result from the rescue.

After babies grow up to be surly teenagers, hardened criminals, nasty insane terrorists, or just people we dislike, we have little trouble handling them roughly. “Pro-life” can be code for a social movement to preserve the “right people”.

Of course the crusaders are sincere. After all, they’ve seen the cuddly pictures on the propaganda media.

Looney Geniuses

Overwired brains often descend into what seems madness to others. Brilliance can be associated with insanity. Isaac Newton pored over mysticism, medieval alchemists tried to turn lead to gold, Chinese emperors ate crazy stuff to become immortal, many religious fanatics pondered the ineffable reasons for the universe even as they admitted humans cannot know .

Most of our current batch of lunatic geniuses concentrate on science fiction. They want to move humans to other worlds, live forever young, turn the next stage of evolution over to silicon machines, vanish into a “singularity” which, if it existed, would exactly resemble the current universe .

But in one or two areas (when financed with other gullible people’s money) they are indeed brilliant. Some actually build things, many simply manipulate gambling spreadsheets. Their narrow focus on whatever they succeed at makes them less than stable and realistic in other areas of their lives .

I truly enjoy reading of their adventures in immortality. Instead of ingesting gold or jade, hiring magicians to enchant them, or bathing in virgins’ blood, they simply do weird self-denying rituals. Living in oxygen tents, starving, precise foods. All to extend lives which _ examined from a wider human experience _ hardly seem worth living .

I wander outside to smell the roses and laugh in the moonlight . In my own world, forever, eternally young