The Future of Our World--Should We Be Optimistic?

Global warming and climate change; species extinction and loss of biodiversity; world population growth. These are all inter-related, and the experts keep warning us that unless we do the right things--and stop doing the wrong things--the world is headed for disaster.

Some people who have weighed in with their view of humanity's future have been optimistic, confident that the right things will be done, and done widely and in a timely manner.

I feel unable to share this optimism. We have seen how wealth and power--for example the fossil fuel industry--has used its power and money to try to undermine science and spread disinformation about climate change--not to mention politicians who in one way or another have an interest in the status quo, and religious institutions opposed to any efforts to control human fertility.

Copyright © 2021

Immortality and Musings Thereupon

It's pretty widely known that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with immortality. They developed mummification, an elaborate series of procedures for preserving the human body after death. And with mummification, prayers, and suitable entombment they hoped to ensure that a person who had died--particularly, but not only their kings--would continue on in the afterlife with a happy existence.

The Vikings believed that a brave warrior would enter Valhalla and "live" there with much feasting and drinking of mead.

The seventeenth-century English writer Sir Thomas Browne saw fit to reflect on immortality when a Roman burial site was discovered in his county of England. He reflects that, for example, having your epitaph in half a dozen languages is no guarantee of immortality; only the Christian promise of resurrection, he concludes, is a sure way of achieving immortality.

It occurs to me that today we can have immortality. My musings--different from Browne's--began with my seeing a TV program with Jack Hanna, a famous zoo keeper and conservationist. The program might have been pretty old. Hanna, as seen on TV, doesn't get any older--so having a film or video of oneself keeps you at a certain age; you don't get any older.

And Alex Trebek died two months ago but episodes of the TV show Jeopardy!, which he hosted, are still being broadcast.

So, among all the incarnations of immortality that humans have dreamed of over the centuries and millennia, today we might actually have a means--a technological means--of preserving a person, in a manner of speaking, such that they won't age or we can see (and hear) them after they have died.

Copyright © 2021

2021 a New, but Maybe not Better Year

Supposedly, there is an ancient Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times." Well, certainly 2020 was an "interesting" year, what with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused wrenching disruptions to individuals, families, schools, companies, institutions--to nearly all people and in nearly all places on Earth.

Plus, in 2020 the United States had a presidential election, defeating a man adored by some and reviled by (perhaps) many more.

And for me personally, 2020 was eventful just because early in the year I had surgery to remove a cancer.

So, probably literally billions breathed a sigh of relief when 2020 ended, believing, or at least hoping, that the new year, 2021, just had to be better than the one ending.

After just six days of this new year I don't know that we can be very sure of that. Bad news is that the virus in the United States is not abating--far from it--and now we need to be worried about variants in the virus caused by mutations.

And today, which was to have seen a rather routine and boring vote by Congress to accept the vote (for president) of the Electoral College, the U.S. Capitol, the seat of the Legislative branch of the US government, was attacked, besieged, breached, etc., by supporters of Donald Trump.

I am not a historian but I'm pretty sure this was unprecedented. The transition of power from the administration of one US president to the next, incoming one usually proceeds completely peacefully. That is how it is supposed to work. But nothing that Trump has had a hand in--and this riot--or "insurrection," as President-Elect Biden called it--was indeed inspired, preached, urged by Trump--has followed the pattern or expectations for a normal presidency.

 Copyright © 2021

Donald Trump, Liar-in-Chief

 

Note/disclaimer: I write this as the outcome of the Nov. 3,2020 election is still uncertain.

Donald Trump is a colossal liar. He unceasingly spreads misinformation and disinformation, half-truths and lies. The New York Times counted some 1300 lies from Trump in his public speeches, etc., in his first year in office--that's about three a day.

And, with incredible irony, he attacks anything that is unfavorable to him or critical of him or shows him to be wrong as "fake news"--when he is the fake news.

It seriously threatens our democracy when a president seeks to undermine our news media and the very profession of journalism. Unfortunate--and very concerning to me--is that people--at least his supporters--believe him.

People do not know, have never learned, to be critical or to tell truth from lies.

Many, many years ago, when I was teaching, I used to upbraid my own students for being uncritical. I would say to them, "I could stand up here and say 'Black is white' and it would go in your ears, through  you heads and then down through your arms and onto the paper of your notebooks."

There are courses I have seen to make people better able to tell what is true.

Evidently a big factor is social media. People see deliberate misinformation on social media sites and believe it. Worse, they pass it on to others.

As I hear, some social media sites have begun to put labels--labels carrying a warning--that some posts are known to be false or misleading.

Right now, as votes from the election of two days ago are being counted, he is trying to call these votes--which are simply mail-in ballots that in many states, according to their state laws, could not be counted until the in-person voting was over, fraudulent, trying to make a case that the election is being stolen from him. This is merely our democracy working--working as it should--and he is doing all he can to discredit it.

 Another remarkable event of the still-young new year is the result of the run-off US Senate election in the state of Georgia. Georgia is a Southern state and surely has shown some of the prejudices associated with the South (maybe, to be charitable, I'll add "at times"), yet it has just elected a Jew and an African-American to the Senate (two different gentlemen). I suspect some Southerners of the old sort are shrieking in horror.

 

© 2020.

Reasons Why People Like Trump

 Mr. Donald J. Trump has done everything wrong. Just as a couple of examples: He has not moved the US in the right direction--or has moved it even in the wrong direction--on global warming/climate change. He has weakened protections of the populace against air and water pollution, to favor big business, the polluters. And, maybe worst, through his poor handling of COVID-19 virus, he has allowed nearly 200,000 people to die (yes, he deserves major responsibility for that).

 And yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people love him.

 Hard for me to understand.

 And yet: One man interviewed for TV said that he wants to see America go back to the America of his youth.

 I can sort of understand that. In my younger days, we did not even have the words carjacking, school shooting, lockdown, smash-and-grab.

 On the other hand, in those days maybe the Black man was expected to "know his place," and of course stay in it!

 Of course we cannot go back, and we should not want to. Drop that nostalgia, such as it may be, and realize that there are so many ways in which we must progress and are overdue to progress. As far as race is concerned, we are staring in the face the very problems that were recognized 50 years ago.

Copyright © 2020.

Some (I Hope) Funny Stuff--pretty miscellaneous

 What is a hill billy? A male mountain goat (think about it).

I can't run a marathon, I can't run a mile, but I can run a bath. And I can run a stop sign (but I really don't ever).

A friend of mine is someone who always has to be up on the newest and latest. Instead of catching COVID-19 he caught COVID-20.

I would not want to send Donald Trump to a lighthouse, let alone the White House.

To eat low-calorie food I recommend Swiss cheese holes. I promise you, they are very low-calorie. In fact they are the keystone of my new diet, which I call hole-istic.

One hears about so many dishes or recipes "made from scratch." I have tried multiple times to find "scratch" in the store, but they never have it.

 

 

Reagan, Trump (and Other Republicans and Conservatives), and COVID-19

Ronald Reagan, as a candidate for president in 1980, kept telling us that government--at least big government--is a bad thing. Government is sprawling, bureaucratic, inefficient, corrupt. And anything that government does can be done better and cheaper by private industry.

And, as president, Reagan put this policy into practice, and cut, defunded, or eliminated many government agencies and programs. (For example, the day of his inauguration he stopped all Department of Energy funding for alternative-energy research, thereby setting back our work on sustainable energy sources by 30 years or more.  This ultimately cost me my job so--disclosure!--okay, maybe here I have an axe to grind.)

Reagan's continued railing against government convinced a lot of people--someone said, "Reagan won that battle"--and has perhaps become the prevailing philosophy in America. Certainly we see it in Trump, who also has been cutting and defunding a lot of government offices and programs. Just as an example, he cut funding to the Centers for Disease Control.

I want to quote a little publication called Catalyst, published by the Union of Concerned Scientists:

In 2014, the Obama administration established an office within the National Security Council to coordinate the federal government's future response to pandemics and provide accountable and organized leadership.

In 2017, the Trump administration abolished this office--and perhaps as a direct result, its response to the coronavirus pandemic was initially haphazard, inept, and lacking in overall accountability. We didn't have a clear sense of who is coordinating federal agencies to address public health and safety. We do have bungled efforts, like the failure to arrange for an adequate supply of testing kits. . . .

Conventional wisdom holds that private markets are the best way to satisfy society's needs, and the role of government should be primarily focused on ensuring that markets work properly. COVID-19 puts the lie to this proposition. When a crisis hits, there is no substitute for effective action directed and mandated by government.  Market signals alone will not ensure that the right people get tested, that emergency hospitals are set up, that ventilator manufacturing is ramped up, and so on.

 Catalyst, Volume 20, Spring 2020, pp. 2, 20

As of a few days ago, the death toll from this virus had surpassed 100,000. I believe that Trump and the philosophy I have cited here are at least partly to blame for these deaths. However much Reagan and other conservatives influenced public thinking and subsequent politics, I strongly believe that, as this article suggests, it's time to say that here we have a real-life situation that shows that this philosophy is flawed.