The latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report lays out a stark timeline for how long we have to reduce our carbon emissions to avoid crossing the threshold of a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperature leading to catastrophic effects for life on Earth. Paraphrasing the report, at present levels of emissions we have until 2030, or 2050 at the very latest. To avoid the worst case scenario, we will need to cut emissions in half by 2030, and cut them entirely by 2050. Given the conservative political and capitalist landscape prevalent today, meeting those targets does not seem likely.
A wedding party crosses a street in 2006 in Oulan-Oudé, Republic of Bouriatia, Siberia, Russia. Photo by Cyrille (Suleiman) Romier.
Since national governmental and business leaders will not take the initiative on this issue because it conflicts with the greed of the status quo, it will be up to local leaders and citizens to address the problem. There will be calls to use technology, such as geoengineering, and wholesale adoption of driverless cars and electric vehicles. Those are attempts at a fix that are best implemented by national organizations on a large scale, and cannot be relied on considering the need for national consensus and funding. Geoengineering may work to a limited degree, though it would certainly be subject to the law of unintended consequences. Tweaking the worldwide car culture would have more limited effects since improving the efficiency of how cars are driven and shifting their emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack would ultimately amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
A scene in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, depicts New York City’s thriving pedestrian culture. Warning: foul language.
What’s needed is a wholesale change in the approach to daily living, particularly among the citizens of the world’s wealthier countries. Start with walking. Every day, everywhere. Build sidewalks. Get cars, driverless, electric, or otherwise, off the roads entirely. Bring back public transportation for trips that are impractical for walking. People will have to demand improvements in public transportation and pedestrian infrastructure through their votes and their dollars, rather than waiting on public officials and corporate executives to make the necessary changes. As a quote popularly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi has it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” And as he did, walk if you can, for yourself and for change in the world.
— Techly
“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.” — M.F.K. Fischer (1908-1992)
Supermarkets are often not the most appealing places, despite the efforts of the owners to entice buying by using attractive layouts and presentations, but the one biggest sales pitch they can offer is a byproduct of their work, and it is the alluring smells emanating from the bakery section, early in the morning especially. It is an amazing occurrence that in an otherwise stale, uninteresting place, the aroma of bread baking should catch our noses and take us to a comforting place of memory or imagination and draw us toward it, if not to buy, to at least inquire of the baker what is in the oven at the moment that is wafting toward us such heavenly smells.
Bread-Baking, an 1895 painting by Charlotte Mannheimer (1866-1934).
The sense of smell is more closely and directly tied to the sense of taste and of memory than are the senses of vision, hearing, or touch, and that is understandable when we consider that it is a chemical sense which cuts to the essence of things quickly. No one, after all, has suffered intestinal distress from eating something merely because it looked unappetizing. Should I eat this? It looks okay and doesn’t feel strange other than being a bit soft, and of course it doesn’t sound like anything, but it smells a little off. No, I will not eat it. Useful information to have before putting the substance in one’s mouth and possibly ingesting something sickening. It’s why smell is tied so closely to taste that people who have lost the sense of smell, as can happen in old age, also lose the sense of taste, and therefore appetite.
Why smell and memory should be linked tightly together is more of a mystery. An American who has visited France and smelled the aroma of freshly baked baguettes might have memories of that visit elicited unbidden simply by walking past an excellent bakery in this country early in the morning as various breads are baking in the shop. The nose will pick out the one particular smell and, with its direct link to memory, evoke that long ago trip anew. What evolutionary purpose could that serve? It perhaps rings back to a time when we weren’t the highly visual creatures we are now, and instead relied on smell to tell us whether something we were encountering currently had positive or negative connotations in our memory.
Freshly baked bread for sale at Granville Island Markets in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Photo by Schellack.
It’s helpful to realize that the connection of the sense of smell with the brain takes place at the core level, whereas the sense of sight was layered onto the brain later in our development. That should also help explain why the inextricable connection between smell and memory often eludes our ability to describe it in language, a much later cognitive development even than sight. Smell, it seems, bypasses our more sophisticated powers and goes directly to our emotions, the core of our animal being that we share with millions of other creatures on Earth. When we smell good bread baking, we don’t need to intellectually analyze our reactions our wax poetic about it, describing the situation in a million flowery words, because our brains, nervous systems, and our entire bodies take care of telling us what we need to know. For many of us, our involuntary reactions of mouth watering and imagining of savory yellow butter melting into warm slices of bread will lead us into the shop to make a purchase, staving off for the day the hunger of the beast within us, and rewarding us with pleasant memories for days in the future when that heaven-sent smell wafts our way again.
— Izzy
You can fool most of the people most of the time, and whoever is left will fool themselves the rest of the time. A great many foolish beliefs are relatively harmless, such as the idea that handling toads will give you warts, though the toads may hold different opinions. Other opinions are foolish and yet not harmless, among them the idea that climate change is not a real threat, and anyway it’s not caused by human activity. Again, the toads may have opinions at variance with that.
An 1863 engraving by Gustave Doré (1832-1883) used to illustrate an edition of Don Qixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The caption for this plate is taken from the text, and reads “A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination.”
Scientists and journalists have been tap dancing around the reasons why some folks seem more susceptible than others to fake news stories, especially ones that confirm their beliefs about a subject. They refer to the lack of “cognitive ability” in people who have “confirmation bias”. In plain English, stupid people will believe what they want to believe, and they don’t want to be confused with the facts. Is the Earth flat, despite readily available evidence that it is a sphere? You betcha it is! Is the Earth a mere 6,000 years old, according to some Christians? You know it is, and pay no attention to all those much older fossils – they’re fake news! Is Spanky the Pussy Grabber, aka the Philanderer-in-Chief, getting a free ride from the same white, evangelical Christians who roasted Bill Clinton at the stake for similar behavior 20 years ago? Yer darn tootin’ he is, and he will continue getting a pass as long as he stocks the federal judiciary with anti-abortionists and signs off on tax breaks for rich, white, evangelical Christians.
There’s little anyone can doto convince some folks, roughly a third of the population, that truth, justice, and the American Way exist outside their bubble, and that they’ve been falling for one April Fool’s joke after another much of their lives. Such folks will stubbornly burrow even deeper into their bunkers, popping out occasionally to take pot shots on Twitter at the latest targets of their fevered conspiracy dreams, up to and including schoolchildren who survived a mass killing taking a stand against America’s fetishistic gun culture.
The Smothers Brothers deliver a sideways take on “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha. As with everything in life, there’s a sliding scale to the relative harmlessness or harmfulness of foolish ideas and impossible dreams. Shades of gray can be difficult for some people to adjust their eyes to, and they would no doubt prefer the ease of differentiating black from white and leave it at that. Believe in the Easter Bunny? Fine; it’s hard to see how anyone’s hurt by a bunny heralding spring. Believe that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president in 2016, was so evil that, based on rumors on internet forums, she was in charge of an indecent criminal enterprise based in a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant, and in consequence grab a gun and barge into the restaurant to break it all up? That’s delusional thinking, and combined with some other poisonous ideas, it’s dangerous. Next time, take a little longer to stop and think whether something is impossible, or even likely.
— Techly
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.”
— William Blake (1757-1827), Auguries of Innocence
Biophilia – love of life – is a term popularized by the American biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson in his research and books of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Mr. Wilson was interested in how humans appear to require some connection with nature no matter how much the modern world tends to divorce them from that connection. City dwellers in particular may be live amidst steel and concrete structures to such an extent that they never step on grass in the course of an average day, but they still will find comfort at home in tending a few houseplants and a pet or two. Mr. Wilson proposed that the need to maintain a connection with nature was so pervasive in humans that it went beyond culture to genetics, and was therefore innate and undeniable. Humans may pretend to be above nature and separate from it, but their genetics and behavior said otherwise.
Looking north at Central Park from the top of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan. 2009 photo by Piotr Kruczek.
Scientific research since then has confirmed Mr. Wilson’s hypothesis, some of it confirming common sense notions such as how hospital patients with window views of trees and greenery appeared to recover faster than ones with a view of the building next door. The idea of biophilia itself appeals to common sense, but science needs to quantify things, and that’s for the best because there have after all been other notions in the past which seemed common sense, such as the Sun revolving around the Earth. Lately there has been a resurgence in belief that the Earth is flat, though it’s hard to tell just how seriously Flat Earthers expect to be taken by everyone else, or even by themselves.
Everyday proof of biophilia, however, seems so commonplace that it is hard to refute. Still, there are people who live for making their environment as sterile and devoid of nature as possible, and it seems there are more of them now than ever. Children especially seem to have withdrawn from nature both on their own and because of their parents’ protective instincts. Children now spend an inordinate amount of their time in front of screens, and much of the remainder of their time is structured education or play. They are seldom left on their own to scratch around in the dirt in their backyards and observe the ants at work, as Edward O. Wilson himself did for countless hours as a youngster and, indeed, as an adult, since his specialty as a biologist has been myrmecology, the study of ants.
A western part of the 843 acres of Central Park in New York City. Recent appraisals of the value of Central Park’s 1 and 1/4 square miles of prime real estate in the middle of Manhattan are well over $500 billion. May biophilia influence New Yorkers for generations to come so that they continue to prize Central Park for its connection to nature rather than its speculative value in dollars. Photo by Ad Meskens.
The steep drop in hands-on discovery of nature among the latest generation does not bode well for future conservation measures when those children grow up and start making their own decisions. Reading about a tree in a book can take a person only so far without the furtherance of education granted by resting under the shade of a tree on a hot day. Even the tactile act of reading a paper book, its pages made from trees, gives the senses a greater depth and breadth of perception than reading from an electronic screen. We are animals, with the senses of animals, and we engage the world through those senses every bit as much as we engage it with our brains, even when we are cut off from nature. But with a lack of input from our senses our decisions about the natural world are likely ill-informed, and much as we might try to help conserve animals, plants, and resources, we are not doing as much as we could because they are not part of our everyday world. How can you love the natural world which supports you if you cut yourself off from it and avoid embracing it with not only your intelligence, but with all your senses so that you can feel it as well as know it, and understand thereby you are a part of it and not separate from it?
— Izzy
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” ― Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The title of this post is a paraphrase of the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth, which states that desire and ignorance are the causes of suffering. The paraphrase states something similar in a different way because of the two meanings of “want” in English. “Want” can mean desire or greed, because it goes beyond “need” into territory destructive both to the wanter and to the ones from whom the wanter takes. “Want” can also mean a lack of things mental or physical to meet one’s needs. The haves and have nots, with the greed of the haves causing suffering for the have nots.
As the population of the worldcontinues to grow past 7 billion toward an estimated 10 billion by mid-century, agronomists are hard at work figuring out how to feed all those people. One school of thought has it that the current agricultural system is no system, and therefore is inherently inefficient, requiring more central planning to efficiently allocate resources and achieve economies of scale for each crop throughout the world. Another school of thought has it that large scale agriculture is destructive of the environment and ultimately leads to worse yields as soil health declines, and forces farmers to become dependent on a capricious international financial cartel rather than building local networks they can rely on in bad times.
Both schools of thought seem to believe their system is the best way forward in order to feed a growing world population. Both are right and wrong, for different reasons. Without going into a specific comparison of the two agronomy models, the main point is that hunger has always been part of the human experience, and it will continue as long as there are greedy people who take more than they need, and in so doing deny to others what they need. The problem is not an agronomy problem, though since people are bound to increase their numbers for the foreseeable future it is good and necessary that well-meaning farmers and scientists continue working to increase agricultural yields, but the problem is one of human nature and an economic system that rewards the worst part of that nature.
A sculpture of Lord Buddha. Photo by Priyanka250696.
There is food enough already in the worldto feed everyone adequately, yet more than a billion people go hungry every day. It is not a distribution problem, either, as some have suggested in the past, as though the food would be evenly distributed if only the logistical problems could be licked. No, it is a problem of poverty and income inequality, and therefore of the will of the haves to share with the have nots. The haves rationalize that if the have nots would only show the gumption to pull themselves out of poverty, they could partake in the bounty of the haves, never mind that the haves often stole the bounty from the have nots in the first place. The haves apply rationality to the problem when rationality is besides the point because they are standing with their boots on the necks of the poor, yelling at them to get up. That is the economic system and the crass part of human nature it enables and rewards.
A segment of the 1992 film Baraka, directed by Ron Fricke. Music for the film was composed by Michael Stearns, while this portion, a song called “The Host of Seraphim”, was written and performed by Dead Can Dance, an Australian duo comprising Brendan Perry and vocalist Lisa Gerrard. The spiritual and ethical systems in place around the world help redress some evils, but they have not been enough. The more populous the world becomes, the greater the economic inequities, like a pyramid growing ever larger but retaining the geometric relationship of its parts. Any person who gets in at the top of a Ponzi scheme knows that the wider the base of the pyramid, the greater the wealth accruing to those at the top. Two thirds of the world’s adult population lives on less than $10,000 per year, which is poverty level in the United States, where the threshold for one adult is about $12,000. Economic standards differ throughout the world, of course, but it’s a good guess that getting by on less than $10,000 per year anywhere in the world does not leave room for addressing anything much beyond basic needs.
There’s food enough for everyone, though the poor can’t afford to buy their share. There’s food enough for everyone, though the wealthy have no interest in sharing what they don’t need. Growing more food won’t solve the problem, only maintain the status quo as population increases. In the current economic system, the haves will always have and will have even more as more people come into the world, while the have nots will have to make do with less no matter how much food is out there, always out of their reach. The problem is one of spiritual and ethical guidelines existing separately from and in parallel to a corrupt economic system that benefits only a privileged few, rather than informing and guiding that system for the benefit of all.
― Izzy
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 254-5.
For those who are paying attention, it’s hard these days to keep up with the news coming from the seat of the federal government in Washington, D.C.. It can seem the news really is erupting from the seat with flatulent, obscene noises. The news can also be disheartening, even maddening. Have we slipped into another reality, or just a darker version with comic undertones? The nuclear nightmare has re-emerged after having slipped away into the dreamworld for more than thirty years.
The fealty of the dead is not respected, while the call goes out to stand in blind loyalty to a starred and striped cloth, ignoring the crimes of the police. It makes no sense, is even insane by any clinical standard, but still the lies and hypocrisy mount one on another, like flies dying on a windowsill. No, those aren’t flies beating themselves silly against the windows, liberal media. Is the media liberal? It must be; we have repeated the lie often enough. There’s a trick some have mastered of refocusing their eyes through the smudged window to what lies outside, where the world is sunny and new. They don’t see the flies.
Where does the new viewpoint lead but to some very old ideas? Beatings, torture, and more war. It’s okay because it all happens in a place away from here, and because the people on the receiving end deserve it, otherwise why would we be doing it to them? Those people would do the same to us and worse, given half a chance. We must not give them that chance, not even a smidgen of it. We must interdict. We must do to others before they do to us. That is Law. To do otherwise is to appear weak, and to appear weak is to be nothing. Let the meek inherit the Earth in the next life, this one belongs to the vicious.
Dante (He Hath Seen Hell), an 1864 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904).
There are people in the world who need destroying, no matter who they are. We know. God knows. God told us. Who are we? The ones who know what God knows, that’s who. One day we might look into our hearts as through a window, and see there only flies battering themselves to death against the glass rather than seeing through them to the green grass and blue skies outside, but that day will never come, God willing, because it’s been an awfully long time coming already and still the world goes on like it has for years, for ages, the rich getting richer, the lunatics insisting they should run things. Still, for all that, some wistful souls continue wanting to make things better by acknowledging there are flies buzzing the windowpanes, and they try opening the windows and shooing the flies back outside.
― Ed.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
― 1 Corinthians 13:11; King James Version of The New Testament.
It’s fine to believe in fairy tales as a child, at least when the belief is harmless. Children learn about human behavior, often through the actions of animal characters, and they pick up some moral lessons. Fairy tales have their place in educating children, but that place is not in science textbooks. Recently the New Mexico Public Education Department injected a dose of the fanciful in editing science standards for the state’s schoolteachers to follow in their classrooms.
Mother Goose reading fairy tales in an illustration by Gustave Doré (1832-1883) for the frontispiece of an 1866 edition of Charles Perrault’s Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times with Morals, or Mother Goose Tales.
The questionable edits dealt with the age of the Earth, evolution, and human-caused global warming. All the usually controversial subjects in the battle over teaching the nation’s youth. The standards that New Mexico’s top public school bureaucrats were altering came from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which were formulated by national science and teaching associations. Editing science teaching standards appears to be another case of cherry picking facts and replacing them either with fancy or with the assertion of widespread doubt where there really is very little, along the lines of what has been happening with textbooks for years now.
Texas has long been in the news for leading the way for creationists and climate change deniers in pressuring textbook publishers to muddy the scientific waters on those two subjects, and perhaps has served as an unfortunate model in that respect for other states like New Mexico and California. The playbook borrows from the scientific method in that it adopts skepticism as a tool for doubt, ignoring the part about overwhelming evidence eventually tipping the scales to the point where continued skepticism is no longer productive without the presentation of convincing countervailing evidence. Persisting in error to that degree becomes obstructionism, and while some of it is ideologically driven, it can often serve the ends of greedy corporations, such as in the fossil fuel industry.
From the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a scene where logic serves absurdity.
Teaching children falsely, either by substituting fanciful notions for facts or by omitting facts altogether, results in ignorant adults who are poorly prepared to manage real problems. Insisting children believe in fairy tales to the exclusion of understanding how the world really works will only reinforce the continued destruction of the environment and the misunderstanding of our place in it. Instructing children in dominion instead of husbandry replaces a clear-eyed view of what is and has been with what never was nor will ever be.
― Izzy
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
― words of Jesus Christ from Matthew 7:3-5, King James Version of the New Testament.
The second half of the schoolyard taunt in the title is “But what am I?” What, indeed, are you, Mr. President? On Tuesday, the current president of the United States addressed the United Nations General Assembly for forty-five minutes, and the results were an embarrassment to the country he purports to represent before the world.
After some preliminary stroking of his own ego, the current president launched into the main part of his speech, and for much of it, when he was excoriating other nations he may as well have been referring to the current iteration of the United States as people in other nations might very well see it.
The April 15, 2017, Tax March on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., included this inflated rooster in the likeness of the current president, borrowed from a sculpture by an American for a Chinese shopping mall to mark the Year of the Rooster. Photo by Mike Licht.
“Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists, but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.”
“Authority and authoritarian powers seek to collapse the values, the systems and alliances that prevented conflict and tilted the world toward freedom since World War II.”
“International criminal networks traffic drugs, weapons, people; force dislocation and mass migration; threaten our borders. And new forms of aggression exploit technology to menace our citizens.”
“We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow.”
“It is an outrage that some nations would not only trade with such a regime [North Korea], but would arm, supply and financially support a country that imperils the world with nuclear conflict.”
“The Iranian government masks a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy. It has turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos.”
“This wealth, which rightly belongs to Iran’s people, also goes to shore up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, fuel Yemen’s civil war and undermine peace throughout the entire Middle East.”
“And above all, Iran’s government must stop supporting terrorists, begin serving its own people and respect the sovereign rights of its neighbors.”
“It is time to expose and hold responsible those countries who support and finance terror groups like al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban and others that slaughter innocent people.”
“For example, it is a massive source of embarrassment to the United Nations that some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the UN Human Rights Council.”
By his own words you shall know him. He speaks of others but he may as well be talking about what his own country has become and how it behaves in the world. There is one more notable part of the speech, in the middle where he talks about North Korea and ad-libs the “Rocket Man” insult line.
“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.
Rocket Man [Kim Jong-un] is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.
The United States is ready, willing and able. But hopefully, this will not be necessary.
That’s what the United Nations is all about. That’s what the United Nations is for. Let’s see how they do.”
The current president appears to have the emotional maturity – or immaturity – of a teenager. He fails to understand, however, that unlike the outcome in this scene from the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, there will be no safety valve for either of the belligerents in his game of nuclear chicken with North Korea. James Dean stars as Jim Stark (in the red jacket), Natalie Wood is Judy, and Corey Allen plays the ill-fated Buzz Gunderson.
Oh, really, that is what the United Nations is for, to rubber stamp the will of the President of the United States, however unhinged he may be? We know what the 45th president of the United States is, and we also know what his counterpart, Kim Jong-un of North Korea is, and in terms of schoolyard threats and insults they have achieved parity. What’s difficult to comprehend is that these two malevolent idiots hold the fate of so very much of humanity and the Earth in their child-like hands and don’t appear to grasp the gravity of the situation beyond their own little sandboxes.
― Ed.
“Precisely because of human fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
― Carl Sagan, speaking about alien abductions.
At a hearing last week of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) asked NASA scientists if it was possible there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago. Kenneth Farley, a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, answered there was no evidence of a civilization. Representative Rohrabacher could have been referring to the story on the Alex Jones InfoWars website last month about a slave colony on Mars, or he could have been referring to stories dating back to the 1970s about the “Face on Mars”, one of the supposedly artificial constructs among others in the Cydonia region of Mars. In any event, no one but Mr. Rohrabacher knows for sure.
Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking lander in Death Valley, California. Sagan (1934-1996) devoted the fifth episode, called “Blues for a Red Planet”, of his thirteen part 1980 PBS documentaryCosmos to Mars and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.
Both of the above mentioned stories are what people generally call conspiracy theories. Mr. Jones in particular is almost always referred to by mainstream media as a conspiracy theorist. They use the term pejoratively, as a smear, and in Mr. Jones’s case they are probably within bounds for doing so, though the haughty contempt attached to their use of the phrase also serves to dismiss people whose objections to the standard media or government line on any story are offered with more substantial evidence and sounder reasoning. To call someone a conspiracy theorist is to lump that person in with Mr. Jones and his far out contemporaries.
The public must use critical thinking in evaluating conspiracy theories, the conspiracy theorists who propound those theories, and their critics who attack them. Unfortunately, critical thinking appears to be in short supply lately. Many fake news stories gain traction among the gullible in the online echo chambers where people go to read opinions and conspiracy theories they want to believe. It’s all fun and games until a half wit with an assault rifle decides to take matters into his own hands, as happened with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory circulating online last year.
It’s unrealistic, silly, and unconstitutional to try to shut down the websites peddling the most egregious conspiracy theories. Education in critical thinking is the only way to combat the spread of lies, but there will always be people immune to learning. All that can be done in their cases is to limit the damage they can cause. Conspiracy theorists do serve a positive purpose, however, in poking holes in an official story. Rulers and their mouthpieces in the corporate media have an interest in constructing stories for the public to cover up their crimes or unethical behavior. Critical thinking by the conspiracy theorists and those willing to hear them out serves an important watchdog role in such instances. Just because the government of a supposedly democratic republic such as the United States tells a story about something does not mean that story is entirely, or even partially, true, and to dismiss critics of the government’s story as conspiracy theorists becomes a cynical method for shutting down debate.
A wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire in 1888. The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious firmament beyond. The caption underneath the engraving (not shown here) translates to “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet…”
A scene near the end of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, with Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison being filled in on a theory of the assassination by government insider, Mr. X (modeled on Fletcher Prouty), played by Donald Sutherland. The film was successful and was praised by critics, but major media and government figures labeled Stone a conspiracy theorist and took him to task for telling a story antithetical to the “Lone Gunman” findings of the Warren Commission.
There very well could have been a civilization on Mars long ago, though scientists contend it is unlikely. After all, we are still discovering – or rediscovering – ancient civilizations here in our own backyard on Earth. A present day day slave colony on Mars is even more unlikely, to the point of being improbable. Scientists do hypothesize that life, in the form of microbes at least, may once have been present on Mars billions of years ago, before it lost most of its atmosphere and it’s liquid water either evaporated off into space or turned into ice locked within rocks. Some of that microbial life, according to the theory of panspermia, may have seeded itself on Earth long ago when meteorite impacts were more common in the solar system, and rocks flung into space from impacts on Mars found their way to Earth. In that sense, it’s possible we are all descended from Martian life. The scientific consensus, however, is that life originated on Earth, and if there is any cosmic seeding going on, then our planet is the one doing it. In the universe as we understand it, anything is possible, but in critically thinking about agreed upon facts known as evidence, we come to realize that some things are more likely than others, and are even probable. In the most critical view, nothing is certain.
― Techly
“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” ― the Rev. William L. Watkinson*(1838-1925)
The nonprofit organization Fight for the Future has set up a website called Comcastroturf which allows people to check if their name has been used surreptitiously to file anti net neutrality comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC had recently opened up a public comment period in anticipation of rolling back net neutrality regulations, and within a short time they were inundated with anti net neutrality comments which appeared to be generated by Internet Service Provider (ISP) astroturfers from hijacked subscriber lists. Comcast threatened Fight for the Future with a lawsuit, from which they have since backed down after it appeared obvious even to them that it was a tone deaf public relations debacle. They blamed the company they outsource their brand defenses to for excessive vigilance.
Let there be light; photo by Flickr user Arup Malakar, taken in the Kamakhya Temple, a shakti temple on the Nilachal Hill in the western part of Guwahati city in Assam, India.
It’s clear from new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s remarks on net neutrality that he does not support the FCC net neutrality regulations adopted in 2015. Since the rest of the now Republican controlled board of commissioners will most likely go along with him when they vote on the regulations in September, the public comment period appears to be a mere formality. That apparently hasn’t deterred the ISP industry from feeling the need to generate a phony campaign to support the anti net neutrality commissioners. Perhaps they were concerned about the pro net neutrality campaign of John Oliver. Now Comcast and other industry giants have egg on their faces, and Chairman Pai has not escaped squeaky clean either, as he has declined to question the validity of the astroturfed comments, while distracting the attention of the public by complaining about mean tweets.
There are customers of Comcast who complain endlessly about the company’s high prices and lackluster, even adversarial, customer service, yet those customers do little or nothing to explore alternatives to Comcast. They sit grumbling in the dark and won’t lift a finger to light a candle. Such people do a disservice to themselves, but since they seem to be satisfied with that in a masochistic way, the rest of us are left having to listen to their grousing while they do nothing to improve their situation. That shouldn’t be a problem for those of us who can get out of earshot, though in the broader perspective it is those dissatisfied but immovable customers of Comcast who grant the company its monopolistic power in the marketplace, and that’s a problem for everyone because it limits affordable options as smaller companies struggle to establish themselves when confronting the obstacles thrown at them by industry giants and the legislators and regulators they have in their pockets.
Comcast and companies like it might behave better if they started experiencing mass defections. Comcast has been losing subscription television customers, while increasing broadband customers. Cord cutting does not affect Comcast’s bottom line if the customers doing so are merely moving their dollars from one part of the service to another. City dwellers and suburbanites have more options for internet service than people in the countryside, and so they have fewer excuses for continuing with Comcast even while they dislike the company intensely. Ultimately the choice comes down to a decision about what to give up, at least in the short term. Even without streaming video, life goes on. For the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants, the whining of some Americans about how to get along without access to each and every National Football League (NFL) game over either the internet or subscription TV, or the latest “must see” TV series, must appear ingloriously obtuse and selfish. These companies have too much power because we have given it to them. It’s like being abused in a relationship and not working to free yourself because you can’t imagine life any other way. Who knows, life untethered from the Comcast umbilical cord could be better than you think.
― Techly
Pigeon Point Lighthouse, south of San Francisco, California; photo by Diedresm.
