WHY YOUR JAW IS NARROWER, HOMO SAPIENS

I know. It's been awhile since last I entered here. And I was doing so good, but sitting in front of a computer is not my most pressing interest these days. Though I don't know what else is. You can find the whole article here.

[SNIP]
(AP) Science fiction writers have suggested a future Earth populated by a blend of all races into a common human form. In real life, the reverse seems to be happening.

People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.

"I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed," explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "The opposite seems to be true."

"Our species is not static," Harpending added in a telephone interview.

That doesn't mean we should expect major changes in a few generations, though, evolution occurs over thousands of years.

Harpending and colleagues looked at the DNA of humans and that of chimpanzees, our closest relatives, they report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If evolution had been proceeding steadily at the current rate since humans and chimps separated 6 million years ago there should be 160 times more differences than the researchers found.
[PASTE]

THE RICH GET RICHER AND…

The following, below, is from the London Telegraph. All I can see is that this proposed exclusive golf camp for millionaires just goes to demonstrate how, as they used to say, “filthy rich” the filthy rich are getting. This would be a place only the very very very, yes, very, rich could afford to go as they trot about the world, living high off the labor of the laboring folk. The laboring people of the world create all this wealth for these people whose only contribution is the capital. All the real creative work is done by the hourly wage earners. These displays of wealth are disgusting in a time when much of the world’s population lives in poverty, without potable water, in conditions unfitting for a pig. Read it and gnash your teeth!

[SNIP]
Donald Trump's Controversial $2.1B Scottish Golf Resort Proposal Is Rejected

London Telegraph | Auslan Cramb | November 29, 2007 11:17 PM

Donald Trump's controversial plans to build a £1billion golf resort along a stretch of unspoilt coastline have been dealt a fatal blow.

Councillors have rejected the proposals for two links courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses in one of the biggest single property developments seen in Scotland.
[PASTIE]

CURRENT READING

Nine Stories by Salinger, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, and some Marvin Bell poetry. It occurred to me recently that all I want to do in the near future is read popular science and the world's best literature while working algebra problems to exercise my logical brain. Keep my nose out of politics and pop culture. I'll bet my resolve lasts until, maybe, a minute from now.

SMIRKY AND SON


Doesn't that smirk just say it all. It says, I'm a rich, connected SOB, and you fools that support me as I grow rich at your expense are truly fools and idiots, and don't I know it. All the way to the bank, I laugh.
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ART AS RELIGION

Hello readers! After a long silence, here I am again.

The following is what I thought art and literature were during most of my adult life, even though I was not always clear about their power in my life. Unfortunately, artists and creative persons who are ahead of their culture find that they are not drawn into the circle of society nor are others drawn into the creator’s circle. So what does Ms. Dissanayake make of the avant garde? I think she has confused popular dance, which is more universal in its appeal, with art and literature that challenges conventions.

“Art, she [Ms. Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade—a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what calls ‘artifying,’ people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

“As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.”

FALLING DOWN FALL


It’s Fall definitely now in November, and, finally, the cottonwoods are changing (see photo), but my buddy in Erie PA tells me it’s in the 60s there while in Vancouver it is in the 50s today. What’s up wid dat? So, today, I was much depressed thinking of how many ways health insurers from private to Medicare try to shift as much expense onto the client as they can and do so in very sneaky ways so that you don’t see it coming until it’s halfway up your butt. It’s stealth insurance for sure. Then, also, today, I hear that my PSA jumped a little bit more than one point and that scares me since it’s that old black prostate cancer that killed my dad, a very aggressive form of it. And he died at age 77, and, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I turned 70 in October. So I’m more scared than I let myself in on until one minute I’m talking to a buddy about our lives and, suddenly, it hits me that any plans we make for too far in the future to see each other again, might be too late. Then I got a tingling sense of fear all the way from my funny bones in my elbows, all around the chest cavity into my heart.


One good thing about my walk today is that the old blue heron is back. I thought that when the city poisoned the blackberry bushes on the little isthmus where he spends a lot of time and cut down all the vegetation there that, perhaps, they scared the old bird away or, maybe, killed him with poison. But there he was today sitting atop one of his favorite pilings. Picture included.
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PALIMPSEST/GORE VIDAL

Just finished reading Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir of his life in the late 40s, the 50s and into the 1960s. Gay and atheist, he’s an inspiration to me, a decidedly heterosexual American male and atheist, myself. I don’t know if he knows it, but all his own frailties show through in Palimpsest. I can see him being from time to time as petty and as vain as those he castigates and reveals in his memoir, but, then, so often, reading him, I also see myself, being the same thing. In fact all humanity is present in his memoir. None of us is free of the vanities Gore writes about. It’s been a long time since I laughed aloud reading a book, but Gore made me laugh, aloud and freely. Interesting—when laughing aloud in an espresso joint, where many tender sensibilities abound, one catches nearby talkers wince as they wonder if one is laughing at them. I noticed that more than once.

“When Orwell writes, ‘Spain,’ or Hazlitt, ‘Napoleon,’ one's eyelids droop, Surely this does not happen when I write ‘Ron and Nancy’.... At least my characters are inherently comic, or so I find them. Today, I wonder why I am so content, inhabiting as I do a body so keen to disassemble. Then I realize why, perfect day to one side: I do not want anything, I am past all serious desire for anything—at the moment, anyway. The Buddha was right: To want is to suffer.” —Vidal, p.174

Today has also been a perfect day for me after a troubled Sunday when everything in my life seemed empty and purposeless. How odd that those days still come at my age of 70, and they always come when I am still taking myself to task for not having succeeded at that or this, when I still think I want something more than a sunny, coolish walk beside the Columbia River in the glittering light. This morning, I was also a Buddhist. Like my wife.

“I recall now, something that Jack [Kennedy] had observed about the great of this world. ‘In this… uh… job you get to meet just about everybody. You get to know all the big movers and shakers, and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.’ He said this with some wonder, even wistfulness—as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn’t.” —Vidal, p. 378

“During my ten years in the wilderness, a good deal had happened in literature. The Beats had for a time flourished, and many of us were alarmed. Was this what writing was destined to be—an endless report on what one had done the night before while listing the names of the all-alike towns that one sped through on the ever-same road? Although, as writers, Kerouac and Burroughs were not much different from such conventional writers as Philip Roth and John Updike, I feared that their imitators would, like the executors of some inexorable Gresham's law, drive literature itself out the window. All this proved to be a false alarm. Their imitators were few, while the originals either died or did not continue, and literature went out the window anyway.” —Vidal, p. 410

The ten years Gore speaks of as “wilderness” are the years during which he vowed to make himself financially independent so that he could write whatever he chose to write and live as he wanted to live. He set himself five years but it took ten, still he accomplished it. And the novel continues to die a slow death. Though opera and classical music are further along in their decline, so the novel, a Johnny-come-lately compared to those two, is following slowly behind, leaving the stage. I would mourn their passing, but, if the hope of life is that someday true peace and prosperity could reign here on Earth, I can see no evidence that the arts have contributed to that peace or prosperity. No more than has religion. Could Plato have been right when he wished to ban poets from his Republic?

LOVELOCK LOCKS AND LOADS

In the November 1st, 2007 Rolling Stone Magazine, Jeff Goodell interviews and features the ideas of James Lovecock, the scientist who came up with the idea that our Planet Earth is a living being. Still controversial among some, many other scientists are now accepting of Lovecock’s ideas about the planet. Frankly, I like the idea that, in my interaction with the atmosphere, I’m just like a fish swimming in its environment. It just opens my imagination to so many creative ways to think about life’s existence on the planet.

The interesting thing about Goodell’s writing is that it’s so logical that I’ve excerpted pieces of it, and they make sense even though they are small fragments of a much longer piece. Best, though, is buy a Rolling Stone and read the whole article.

[SNIPPET]
[A]s a scientist, he [James Lovelock] introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia—the idea that our entire planet is a kind of superorganism that is, in a sense, "alive."

Our air "is not merely a biological product," Lovelock wrote, "but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat's fur, a bird's feathers or the paper of a wasp's nest, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment."

"You could quite seriously look at climate change as a response of the system intended to get rid of an irritating species: us humans," Lovelock tells me in the small office he has created in his cottage. "Or at least cut them back to size."

Lovelock put out a book called Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. "The Gaia hypothesis," he wrote, "is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here." Gaia, he added, offers an alternative to the "depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship, forever traveling driverless and purposeless around an inner circle of the sun."

Of course, scientists like Broecker rarely used the word "Gaia." They prefer the phrase "Earth system science," which views the world, according to one treatise, as "a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components." In other words, Gaia in a lab coat.

"The whole system," he decided, "is in failure mode."

One of the questions that fascinates Lovelock: Life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3 billion years—and to what purpose? "Like it or not, we are the brains and nervous system of Gaia," he says. "We have now assumed responsibility for the welfare of the planet. How will we manage it?"
[PASTE]

FALLING OUT OF BLOGLOVE

Again, time has passed. George Bush seems well defeated, I’m adjusting to Vancouver and making friends and acquaintances at last. I’m not so urgently driven to communicate in this blog. My marriage continues to be wonderful. I’m drawing again, writing some poetry, working algebra problems, reading and drinking lattes at some interesting coffee shops around Vancouver. I drive over to Portland almost every Sunday morning to join my fellow humanists for interesting lectures, then go to lunch with another small bunch of humanists. I feel pretty good, and I’m much pepped up by the knowledge that my potential heart disease turned into a clean bill of health by angiogram. I’m meeting some people in the apartment complex too. Currently I’m reading poetry by Marvin Bell, Loewen’s book and also Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest. I really like Gore Vidal, I do. Sense a kindred spirit there, even though I’m heterosexual as all get out, but sometimes Gore’s writing makes me love him. Life is pretty damn great.

EVEN JEFFERSON CORRUPTED BY SLAVERY

In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen studies 12 textbooks of American history to demonstrate just how distorted American textbooks are in order that they might portray America in a much too favorable a light. Even in my minor in history, I don’t recall the following information being presented to me.

[SLICE AND DICE]
… slavery and it concomitant ideas, which legitimated hierarchy and dominance sapped our Revolution idealism. Most textbooks never hint at this clash of ideas, let alone at its impact on our foreign policy.

After the Revolution, many Americans expected our example would inspire other peoples. It did. Our young nation got its first chance to help in the 1790s, when Haiti revolted against France. Whether a president owned slaves seems to have determined his policy toward the second independent nation in the hemisphere. George Washington did, so his administration loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the French planters in Haiti to help them suppress their slaves. John Adams did not, and his administration gave considerable support to the Haitians. Jefferson's presidency marked a general retreat from the idealism of the Revolution. Like other slave owners, Jefferson preferred a Napoleonic colony to a black republic in the Caribbean. In 1801 he reversed U.S. policy toward Haiti and secretly gave France the go-ahead to reconquer the island. In so doing, the United States not only betrayed its heritage, but also acted against its own self-interest. For if France had indeed been able to retake Haiti, Napoleon would have maintained his dream of an American empire. The United States would have been hemmed in by France to its west, Britain to its north, and Spain to its south. But planters in the United States were scared by the Haitian Revolution. They thought it might inspire slave revolts here (which it did). When Haiti won despite our flip-flop, the United States would not even extend it diplomatic recognition, lest its ambassador inflame our slaves "by exhibiting in his own person an example of successful revolt," in the words of a Georgia senator. Five of the twelve textbooks mention how Haitian resistance led France to sell us its claim to Louisiana, but none tells of our flip-flop. Indeed, no textbook ever makes any connection between slavery and U.S. foreign policy.

Racial slavery also affected our policy toward the next countries in the Americas to revolt, Spain's colonies. Haiti's example inspired them to seek independence, and the Haitian government gave Simon Bolivar direct aid. Our statesmen were ambivalent, eager to help boot a European power out of the hemisphere but worried by the racially mixed rebels doing the booting. Some planters wanted our government to replace Spain as the colonial power, especially in Cuba. Jefferson suggested annexing Cuba. Fifty years later, diplomats in the Franklin Pierce administration signed the Ostend Manifesto, which proposed that the United States buy or take the island from Spain. Slave owners, still obsessed with Haiti as a role model, thus hoped to prevent Cuba's becoming a second Haiti, with "flames [that might] extend to our own neighboring shores," in the words of the Manifesto. In short, slavery prompted the United States to have imperialist designs on Latin America rather than visions of democratic liberation for the region. (pp.142-143)
[RECONSTITUTE AND PASTE]

Photo a nice one along the Columbia River as one drives westbound on I-84.

GOD DID IT FOR US

The cold-blooded reality of fundamentalism in America is demonstrated time and again in American history. Cold-bloodedness began very early. It was Catholic as well as Protestant in the New World. Now it’s also and insanely Moslem. But here’s an early take on how the hyper-religious imagine that their imaginary god works in the interests of Christianity. It’s from the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen (p. 72).

[CLIP]
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. European Americans also contracted smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but they usually recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." 
Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side. 
John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague 
"miraculous." In 1634 he wrote to a friend in England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection ...." God 
the Original Real Estate Agent!

Many Indians likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them. Robert Cushman reported that "those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." After a smallpox epidemic the Cherokee "despaired so much that they lost confidence in their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe." After all, neither Indians nor Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease.
Indian healers could supply no cure; their medicines and herbs offered no relief. Their religion provided no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol, converted to Christianity, or simply killed themselves!
[PASTE]

Less malevolently, but in exactly the same manner, golfer Gus Johnson’s claims his imagined god aids his golfing exploits.

WHIDBEY ISLAND SUNRISE

The photo is from a recent trip I took to Whidbey Island to visit old pal from Spokane, Doug. Looking from near Clinton toward Everett.

THE PRES. WHO WOULD BE KING AND ONE OF HIS BEMEDALED HENCHMEN


This is an entry which has lying around the computer for quite some time, but when I looked into this more recent medal business, I thought some more kingly stuff ought to be mentioned. PS: Guess which man on the right is not the bemedaled Bushite fool? What is the thing with these modern military men and their medals? With our chief political figures having such problems with arrogance, could we expect less from our modern generals?

The following passages show how we're messing it up around the world because we got a bullheaded Texan in the White House. From Newsweek, Dec. 19, 2005 p. 40:

[OPEN QUOTE] Most leaders who are consulted are simply informed of U.S. policy. Senior American officials live in their own bubbles, rarely having any genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, let alone other foreigners. "When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can't take it in," explained one senior foreign official who requested anonymity for fear of angering his U.S. counterparts. . . .

"Attending any conference abroad," Patten continues, "American cabinet officers arrive with the sort of entourage that would have done Darius proud. Hotels are commandeered; cities brought to a halt; innocent bystanders are barged into corners by thick-necked men with bits of plastic hanging out of their ears. It is not a spectacle that wins hearts and minds."

. . . . To foreigners, American officials increasingly seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running. "There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without," says Kishore Mahbubani, formerly a senior diplomat for Singapore and now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Because Americans live in a "cocoon," Mahbubani fears that they don't see the "sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world." [CLOSE QUOTE]

THE VALLEY OF ELAH

I recommend this film for it’s emotional power and for the performances by all concerned, but if you don’t like films with unhappy endings, you don’t want to see it, but if you are addicted to the truth, then you must see it. The screenplay is a knockout. Films which get under the skin of a situation are rare, and this one gets far under the skin of the Iraq situation. It works at so many levels, it’s a Twin Tower of Power all in itself. There’s one line at the end of the film about the American flag that works at so many levels, your head will spin—“It’s been used a lot.” You’ll see what I mean when you actually see the film.

OKAY! IT’S FALL IN OLD FORT VANCOUVER!

BOY! I’M SURE NOT MOTIVATED THESE DAYS

to make any blog entries. Could it be because Bush is on his last White House wafers and the Republican Party is showing us its true colors in every public bathroom around the country, and, thus, I do not feel that my nor America’s freedoms are as threatened as they were back when I started this blog?





Here’s a photo of my own artsy-fartsy rebellion (that's my foot on the grass) and a little interesting website for you to munch on while I try and work up better fare in future days.

AIN'T IT OBVIOUS?

[SNIP]
In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon's mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders. Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus's recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.
[PASTIE]

A DYLAN MOVIE BY DIRECTOR OF "FAR FROM HEAVEN" AND "SAFE"

The movie "Safe" has long been one of my favorite movies. Now Todd Haynes is making a movie about Bob Dylan. When Haynes makes a film, it's always interesting and challenging. His films aren't gimmicky or surreal but the feel of them is always a little off center. Go watch one if you don't believe me.

[NIPPLE]
TORONTO (AP) - Bob Dylan is not at the Toronto International Film Festival. But six shades of Dylan are present with "I'm Not There," a swirling, shifting ramble through the many lives of one of the most enigmatic figures in music history.

Different actors—including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett—play incarnations of Dylan at various phases of his public and private life.
[PASTIE]

Preceeding is by DAVID GERMAIN

That's right—that's Kate as Dylan in his early days.



(AP Photo/The Weinstein Co., Jonathan Wenk)

RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM IS AN “EVOLUTIONARY STABLE STRATEGY”

In the past I’ve copied information into my blog from Pinker’s writings about reciprocal altruism. Now here’s a long passage by Dawkins from his The Selfish Gene (pp. 183-186) about the evolutionary mechanisms by which altruism worms its way into the human psyche by means of Dawkins’s selfish gene theory, contrary as that process may seem to the concept of a “selfish” gene. In short, The Golden Rule is based in human evolution and may prove to be the way by which the human species survives and thrives. I know I’ve said the same thing in other places in this blog. I hope the idea isn’t getting to be boring.

[OPEN QUOTE]
Suppose a species of bird is parasitized by a particularly nasty kind of tick which carries a dangerous disease. It is very important that these ticks should be removed as soon as possible. Normally an individual bird can pull off its owns ticks when preening itself. There is one place, however—the top of the head—which it cannot reach with its own bill. The solution to the problem quickly occurs to any human. An individual may not be able to reach his own head, but nothing is easier than for a friend to do it for him. Later, when the friend is parasitized himself, the good deed can be paid back. Mutual grooming is in fact very common in both birds and mammals.

This makes immediate intuitive sense. Anybody with conscious foresight can see that it is sensible to enter into mutual backscratching arrangements. But we have learnt to beware of what seems intuitively sensible. The gene has no foresight. Can the theory of selfish genes account for mutual back-scratching, or 'reciprocal altruism', where there is a delay between good deed and repayment? Williams briefly discussed the problem in his 1966 book, to which I have already referred. He concluded, as had Darwin, that delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals. Trivers, in 1971, took the matter further. When he wrote, he did not have available to him Maynard Smith's concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy. If he had, my guess is that he would have made use of it, for it provides a natural way to express his ideas. His reference to the 'Prisoner's Dilemma'—a favourite puzzle in game theory shows that he was already thinking along the same lines.

Suppose B has a parasite on the top of his head. A pulls it off him. Later, the time comes when A has a parasite on his head. He naturally seeks out B in order that B may pay back his good deed. B simply turns up his nose and walks off. B is a cheat, an individual who accepts the benefit of other individuals' altruism, but who does not pay it back, or who pays it back insufficiently, Cheats do better than indiscriminate altruists because they gain the benefits without paying the costs. To be sure, the cost of grooming another individual's head seems small compared with the benefit of having a dangerous parasite removed, but it is not negligible. Some valuable energy and time has to be spent.

Let the population consist of individuals who adopt one of two strategies. As in Maynard Smith's analyses, we are not talking about conscious strategies, but about unconscious behaviour programs laid down by genes. Call the two strategies Sucker and Cheat. Suckers groom anybody who needs it, indiscriminately. Cheats accept altruism from suckers, but they never groom anybody else, not even somebody who has previously groomed them, As in the case of the hawks and doves, we arbitrarily assign pay-off points. It does not matter what the exact values are, so long as the benefit of being groomed exceeds the cost of grooming. If the incidence of parasites is high, any individual sucker in a population of suckers can reckon on being groomed about as often as he grooms. The average pay-off for a sucker among suckers is therefore positive. They all do quite nicely in fact, and the word sucker seems inappropriate, But now suppose a cheat arises in the population. Being the only cheat, he can count on being groomed by everybody else, but he pays nothing in return. His average pay-off is better than the average for a sucker. Cheat genes will therefore start to spread through the population. Sucker genes will soon be driven to extinction. This is because, no matter what the ratio in the population, cheats will always do better than suckers. For instance, consider the case when the population consists of 50 per cent suckers and 50 per cent cheats. The average pay-off for both suckers and cheats will be less than that for any individual in a population of 100 per cent suckers. But still, cheats will be doing better than suckers because they are getting all the benefits-such as they are-and paying nothing back. When the proportion of cheats reaches 90 per cent, the average pay-off for all individuals will be very low: many of both types may by now be dying of the infection carried by the ticks. But still the cheats will be doing better than the suckers. Even if the whole population declines toward extinction, there will never be any time when suckers do better than cheats. Therefore, as long as we consider only these two strategies, nothing can stop the extinction of the suckers and, very probably, the extinction of the whole population too.

But now, suppose there is a third strategy called Grudger. Grudgers groom strangers and individuals who have previously groomed them. However, if any individual cheats them, they remember the incident and bear a grudge: they refuse to groom that individual in the future. In a population of grudgers and suckers it is impossible to tell which is which. Both types behave altruistically towards everybody else, and both earn an equal and high average pay-off. In a population consisting largely of cheats, a single grudger would not be very successful. He would expend a great deal of energy grooming most of the individuals he met-for it would take time for him to build up grudges against all of them. On the other hand, nobody would groom him in return. If grudgers are rare in comparison with cheats, the grudger gene will go extinct. Once the grudgers manage to build up in numbers so that they reach a critical proportion, however, their chance of meeting each other becomes sufficiently great to off-set their wasted effort in grooming cheats. When this critical proportion is reached they will start to average a higher pay-off than cheats, and the cheats will be driven at an accelerating rate towards extinction. When the cheats are nearly extinct their rate of decline will become slower, and they may survive as a minority for quite a long time. This is because for anyone rare cheat there is only a small chance of his encountering the same grudger twice: therefore the proportion of individuals in the population who bear a grudge against any given cheat will be small.

I have told the story of these strategies as though it were intuitively obvious what would happen. In fact it is not all that obvious, and I did take the precaution of simulating it on a computer to check that intuition was right. Grudger does indeed turn out to be an evolution¬arily stable strategy against sucker and cheat, in the sense that, in a population consisting largely of grudgers, neither cheat nor sucker will invade. Cheat is also an ESS [Evolutionary Stabile Strategy], however, because a population consisting largely of cheats will not be invaded by either grudger or sucker, A population could sit at either of these two ESSs. In the long term it might flip from one to the other. Depending on the exact values of the pay-offs—the assumptions in the simulation were of course completely arbitrary-one or other of the two stable states will have a larger 'zone of attraction' and will be more likely to be attained. Note incidentally that, although a population of cheats may be more likely to go extinct than a population of grudgers, this in no way affects its status as an ESS. If a population arrives at an ESS that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad.*

It is quite entertaining to watch a computer simulation that starts with a strong majority of suckers, a minority of grudgers that is just above the critical frequency, and about the same-sized minority of cheats. The first thing that happens is a dramatic crash in the population of suckers as the cheats ruthlessly exploit them. The cheats enjoy a soaring population explosion, reaching their peak just as the last sucker perishes. But the cheats still have the grudgers to reckon with. During the precipitous decline of the suckers, the grudgers have been slowly decreasing in numbers, taking a battering from the prospering cheats, but just managing to hold their own. After the last sucker has gone and the cheats can no longer get away with selfish exploitation so easily, the grudgers slowly begin to increase at the cheats' expense. Steadily their population rise gathers momentum. It accelerates steeply, the cheat population crashes to near extinction, then levels out as they enjoy the privileges of rarity and the comparative freedom from grudges which this brings. However, slowly and inexorably the cheats are driven out of existence, and the grudgers are left in sole possession. Paradoxically, the presence of the suckers actually endangered the grudgers early on in the story because they were responsible for the temporary prosperity of the cheats.
[CLOSE QUOTE]

By the way, extinction is a possiblity in certain species, when grooming doesn’t take place. Mice who are kept in seclusion from their mates, can sometimes die from head infections. And think about the example of small fish that clean the teeth and gills of other larger fishes.

Photo: The once upon a time steps up which early Vancouverites climbed from the Columbia River upon arriving in the thriving outpost of Vancouver, Washington.

BOTH MONKEYS AND SENATOR LARRY CRAIG KNOW
WHAT “PALMS UP” MEANS

The palm up gesture is getting a lot of play these days in the news. The first snippet is from a science article in the New York Times about non-verbal signaling. The second snippet is taken from the interrogation of REPUBLICAN Senator Larry Craig and is also about non-verbal signaling.

[SNIPPLE]
ATLANTA—The chimpanzees, after spotting the humans at the corner of their compound, came over to us with their arms outstretched and their palms turned upward. This was the chimps’ way of asking for a banana—and a lot more, as researchers here at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have discovered.

That simple gesture, the upturned palm, is one of the oldest and most widely understood signals in the world. It’s activated by neural circuits inherited from ancient reptiles that abased themselves before larger animals. Chimps and other apes, notably humans, adapted it to ask not just for food, but also for more abstract forms of help, creating a new kind of signal that some researchers believe was the origin of human language.

If that’s true, if human eloquence can be traced from a primal message signifying “Gimme,” I’m not sure what conclusion to draw about our species. Maybe that we are inherently social creatures who survived and prevailed against mightier animals by learning to enlist the cooperation of others. Or maybe just that, in our heart of hearts, we are all slackers. . . .

Most of these gestures are performed unconsciously, but the palm-up was adapted long ago for conscious gestures by humans and other apes. . . . A chimp would use the palm-up gesture to ask other chimps to share food, for help in a fight, for sex or, most frequently, to request a grooming session. Bonobos used it most often as an invitation to play.
[PASTIE]

Now that we’ve got a fairly good picture of what the palm up gesture in monkeys and other Christian family value Republican animals means, let’s look at the following snippet from the interrogation of Senator Craig by Officer Karsnia.

[SNIPPLE]
KARSNIA: OK. And then with the hand. Um, how many times did you put your hand under the stall?

CRAIG: I don't recall. I remember reaching down once. There was a piece of toilet paper back behind me and picking it up.

KARSNIA: OK. Was your, was your palm down or up when you were doing that?

CRAIG: I don't recall.

KARSNIA: OK. I recall your palm being up. OK.

CRAIG: All right.

KARSNIA: When you pick up a piece of paper off the ground, your palm would be down, when you pick something up.

CRAIG: Yeah, probably would be. I recall picking the paper up.

KARSNIA: And I know it's hard to describe here on tape but actually what I saw was your fingers come underneath the stalls, you're actually ta ... touching the bottom of the stall divider. . . .
[PASTIE]

Perhaps Christian family values Red State Idaho Senator Craig was only asking officer Karsnia for a grooming session.

By the way, the monkey photo which I think must be of Senator Larry Craig is by Victor Koen

“GRAFT AND LOOTING” (i.e. Bushillvania Land)

For an excellent exposé of Bush’s wonderful capacity to reward business in his maniacal drive to privatize everything, read the article, “The Great Iraq Swindle” in the September 6, 2007 Rolling Stone. Below is a small piece of the whole article to wet your whistle with.

[SNIPPER]
The Bush administration's lack of interest in recovering stolen funds is one of the great scandals of the war. The White House has failed to litigate a single case against a contractor under the False Claims Act and has not sued anybody for breach of contract. It even declined to join in a lawsuit filed by whistle-blowers who are accusing KBR of improper invoicing in Fallujah. "For all the Bush administration claims to do in the war against terrorism," Grayson said in congressional testimony, "it is a no-show in the war against war profiteers." In nearly five years of some of the worst graft and looting in American history, the administration has recovered less than $6 million.

What's more, when anyone in the government tried to question what contractors were up to with taxpayer money, they were immediately blackballed and treated like an enemy. Take the case of Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, an outspoken and energetic woman of sixty-three who served as the chief procurement executive for the Army Corps of Engineers. In her position, Greenhouse was responsible for signing off on sole-source contracts—those awarded without competitive bids and thus most prone to corruption. Long before Iraq, she had begun to notice favoritism in the awarding of contracts to KBR, which was careful to recruit executives who had served in the military. "That was why I joined the corps: to stop this kind of clubby contracting," she says.

A few weeks before the Iraq War—started, Greenhouse was asked to sign off on the contract to restore Iraqi oil. The deal, she noticed, was suspicious on a number of fronts. For one thing, the company that had designed the project, KBR, was the same company that was being awarded the contract—a highly unusual and improper situation. For another, the corps wanted to award a massive "emergency" contract to KBR with no competition for up to five years, which Greenhouse thought was crazy. Who ever heard of a five-year emergency? After auditing the deal, the Pentagon found that KBR had overcharged the government $61 million for fuel. "The abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR," Greenhouse testified before the Senate, "represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."

And how did her superiors in the Pentagon respond to the wrongdoing highlighted by their own chief procurement officer? First they gave KBR a waiver for the overbilling, blaming the problem on an Iraqi subcontractor. Then they dealt with Greenhouse by demoting her and cutting her salary, citing a negative performance review. The retaliation sent a clear message to any would-be whistle-blowers. "It puts a chill on you," Greenhouse says. "People are scared stiff."

They were scared stiff in Iraq, too, and for good reason. When civilian employees complained about looting or other improprieties, contractors sometimes threatened to throw them outside the gates of their bases—a life-threatening situation for any American. Robert Isakson, a former FBI agent who worked for Custer Battles, says that when he refused to go along with one scam involving a dummy company in Lebanon, he was detained by company security guards, who seized his ID badge and barred him from the base in Baghdad. He eventually had to make a hazardous, Papillon-esque journey across hostile Iraq to Jordan just to survive. (Custer Battles denies the charge.)
[PASTIE]

R.E. THE PHOTO ABOVE

Caption should read "The Wife Is Always The Last To Know"

FALWELL COMPLIMENTS THE DEVIL

He’s dead now, so this entrée, which has been lying around for some time, is quite old:

Anyhow… scrolling across the bottom of my news screen this morning (Date ?) came the news that Rev. Falwell is apologizing for comparing Clinton (Hillary?) to the devil. Said it was “tongue in cheek”. These public clergymen! They’re almost always doing some nonsense or other in their mouths with their tongues. Now that would be a real insult if the imaginary creature in Falwell’s brain actually existed, and comparing the devil to Hillary is a real compliment to the phantasm of the devil that religious people carry around in their heads. However, Falwell needs to be careful. He’s a con man, has been making his living conning people out of their money all his life (makes his living that way), so I believe he actually knows that what he says is nonsense much of the time, but he needs to remember that those who take him seriously are very gullible people. I mean—look at all the Biblical nonsense they take literally! An interesting sidelight is when I consider that perhaps Falwell has been peddling his nonsense so long that even he believes it. Of course, I’m told that the best con men of all are those who have convinced themselves of their own lies.

By the way, do you think their god was trying to give them a message about badmouthing the Clintons, when He took Falwell's life?


OF WILLIAM INGE AND OTHERS

Mertie and I had a brush with fame last Saturday night (Sept. 30, 2006) when we attended an Interplayers performance of William Inge’s play “Bus Stop”. I saw the 50’s movie with Marilyn Monroe and recall that I liked it. The Spokane performance featured Ellen Travolta and her husband John Bannon. It was just okay and not helped by the fact, for Mertie and me, that this man sitting directly in front of us kept coming in and leaving while the theater was still dark. I wondered aloud at intermission to Mertie about why the bastard was interrupting our enjoyment. This morning, a week later, the Spokesman reports that John Travolta was at the show to watch his sister perform. He reportedly had been ushered in and out at begining, end and intermission while the house lights were off in order not to distract from his sister and brother-in-law’s performance. I could have leaned forward and whispered in his ear. Ah, these brushes with the famous, really excites an old codger like mese’f, but what does it actually signify?

Also while on the topic of Inge—as a youth, I was truly moved by such movies as “Picnic”, “Dark At The Top Of The Stairs”, “Come Back Little Sheba”, and “Splendor In The Grass”. Specially “Picnic”. I identified with the drifter, played by William Holden, in “Picnic”, thinking myself doomed to be one myself, the perpetual outsider and “Dark… Top… Stairs” I recognized as an existential drama about a god which did not exist. I didn’t like Splendor all that much. I didn’t realize how much Inge had been a part of my thinking back in those days until I looked him up after Mertie and I returned from the play. Then all the dots connected, and I was not surprised to read that he offed himself June 10, 1973 in a deep depression. At about the same time as Inge kissed off his Earthly coil, my first marriage ended, and I set off for the deep South to work on a shrimper, a job which never came my way, so I ended up machining cylinder heads for Cessna aircraft engines down there, fishing off the shore end of the Dauphin Island bridge, south of Mobile, Alabama, learning to crab with my new friend George Wills, born and bred in New Orleans but working in Mobile, drinking Budweiser to excess, eating lots of clams, generally whoring around like the Holden drifter until I met my second wife, born and bred in Mobile. Then commenced a brief and dramatic period in my life in which I, born and bred a northern city rat, fancied myself quite the redneck. For all of six months, then my wife hit me with her hard hat, tried to strangle me and threw me out.

DANN’S ART





This picture by Mr. Irish shows you exactly the sort of wry humor that he is capable of. To see some more of his work, go to Honeychunks. I've got hanging in my own art hallway, one of Dann's works myself.










DEAR EDITOR

The following is a letter I sent off to Newsweek magazine which was generated by an extended piece they did on Facebook:

“One of the saddest most incomprehensible claims to arise out of your Facebook article was the statement by one of your respondents that he has 1,042 “closest friends.” How does anyone make time to personally get to know a thousand people on the one on one basis required for real friendship? I’m a 69 year old blogger myself, and I’ve poked around in some of these social networking sites. I’m astounded by the long lists of friends that participants claim to have. Many bloggers are obviously performing to attract attention rather than to develop close personal ties. A lot of what appears on Facebook and elsewhere seems to be the, "hey look at me I need attention" sort of relationship that one finds hollow and unrewarding in real life.

“I think one’s close friends are people who are physically close, people who one actually talks to face to face or has known personally for extended times in the past. I admit to emailing and phoning old friends who are now physically distant, who I haven’t seen in many years, but our friendships are still based on close past personal experiences, and we try from time to time to actually get together. Somewhere in the past, I came across the statement by a social commentator that one is lucky if he can claim one or two really true friendships in his whole life. I think I can count, perhaps, five close friends myself, maybe a few more. People I really trust with the facts rather than my performance piece, and the older I get, the less range my performances have.

“I’m honestly puzzled by this internet friendship phenomena. I wish someone would explain to me the huge psychological shift by which someone can imagine he or she has thousands of personal friends. Making friends face to face, as I know it, is such a daunting risky enterprise. Is the fact that website friendships don’t have to risk personal encounters that allows people to imagine they have more friends than they do? Is it social naiveté on their part or have I missed something along the way? Has the definition of “close friend” radically changed?”

PROPHETIC CASSADY

Because I happen to be reading, as I told you, On The Road for the many such time, I came across this passage. Cassady has showed up from California at Kerouac’s brother’s house in Virginia at Christmas 1948. They are involved in moving furniture and Jack’s mom from Virginia to New York. Kerouac says as they bop into New York, “He [Cassady] said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

JEFFERSON—LIBERAL, (DARWINIAN?) AND INHERITANCE TAX SUPPORTER

"That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate: Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants: not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought.” —Thomas Jefferson in a Summary View of the Rights of British America

First, note Jefferson says that our human rights come from “the laws of nature”. I don’t see any appeal to a higher power here. And you know why he doesn’t appeal to god, don’t you—because to appeal to a god would put his claim to our freedoms on an equal footing with the king’s claim by divine right to his authority. To believe in god is to more or less admit that one is a monarchist. How many American Christians are truly monarchists at heart?

I don’t know how many times I come across a positive attitude toward liberalism in Jefferson’s writings. Why, do you think, conservatives so hate liberals when such fine men as Jefferson and others say they are also liberals? If these founders of our liberties were liberals, what scheme do conservatives have against our liberties, do you think?

Also, for those who hope to end forever inheritance taxes, we can peek into how Thomas Jefferson might want that tax to continue. In his autobiography he reports that while in the legislature of Virginia, he hoped that the “repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain.” He saw that wealth might create an aristocracy in America just as birth had created an aristocracy in Europe. Thus, I suspicion he might be all for a steep inheritance tax if he saw how wealth has completely corrupted the political system which he and others like him created.

Photo is of condos along my walk on Officer's Row in Vancouver.

ON THE ROAD ROAD

Yep—I’m not making regular entries and, if you’ve been reading this, you know why.

As most of you know, literate enough to be reading a blog and not listening to some music on it or just wanting to see movin’ pitchurs [sic], this month we been celebrating the 50th year since Jack K’s great book, On The Road, was published in 1957. So I’ve commenced givin’ it my fifth or sixth read in my life, counting in that first read I give it back in my 20s, in the sixties sometime ago. This passage is near the beginning of Jack’s first trip West and it rings two bells with me. The photo below is out of Newsweek.

First, he’s stopped in Des Moines, Iowa to spend a night in a cheap hotel down by the rail yards. Well—I was a child in Des Moines when the Second World War ended. My stepmom, dad and I was living in a motel by a highway and I was out on the grass in front, playing, when all the car horns on the highway started to honking, and I ran in to ask my stepmom what was going on, and she was the one to tell me that the war was over. I must’ve been about eight years old I guess.

But more interesting to me is Jack’s state of mind in the following passage. I’ve experienced the same feeling more than once, and I know I’ve got friends that have also. And some who still do too. Most recently for me was just in the past few months. In Jack’s case, it’s cause he’s halfway between psychic places in himself. For me, the same. I’m still adjusting to this move from Spokane to Vancouver after 31 years in Spokane. And just two weeks ago, I had this feeling that I no longer knew who I was. Who am I here in Vancouver, all my friends back in Spokane, what’s left of family in Dayton, Ohio or down in Florida? Me being the oldest still alive in my family, the oldest of all the cousins, me next to step off the diving board into permanent unconsciousness. Also I’ve given up AA and Codependents Anonymous because my spiritual program just isn’t spiritual enough to fit anymore. So for the briefest of moments, I shared Jack’s feeling in the following paragraph. When I was adrift, I often didn’t know what I was feeling when I felt this stuff. This time, I wasn’t so shook up, and I realized that I had to get busy getting myself involved back into my life. So I’ve started writing a novel. That’s familiar. And working on poetry, also familiar. Then I’ve gone and joined the Portland area Humanists so I got a place to go have lunch with people I feel comfortable around on Sundays, and, soon, I think I’ll become a volunteer with the Vancouver library system, also familiar, as I was a friend of the library back in Spokane.

Anyhow, here’s Jack’s take on that certain feeling.


“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted, and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was half¬way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why¬ it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” —Jack K.

PS: When you realize how often Jack went back and forth, he was always between one future and another, East or West, during his lifetime. He died in the same city my birth mother died in, St. Petersburg, Florida, of alcoholism. Like so many of my favorite authors.

OKAY. I GOT LITTLE TO SAY.


This is like, well, feeling orphaned. In this same issue of Newsweek is the celebration of the 50th anniversary since Jack Kerouac's On The Road was published. Can you believe it? Funny thing is that I know most modern young people could only sigh that this old man was once inspired, depressed, challenged . . . by these beings from a diminishing pantheon of artist/gods.

Moreso than by any church affiliation or incarnation of gods in Jesus form, these men asked me to think, to ponder my situation in this life, my home in the universe. My relationship with them was fraught with pain and change. They kicked me down the steps, and I had to, later, pick myself up and dust myself off. They gave me no hypothetical superbeing to do the job for me. They left me on my own, thank goodness.

WHY BUSH SHOULD BE IMPEACHED or
AT LEAST BE CHARGED AS A WAR CRIMINAL


Read the accumulating evidence documented in the “Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff”.

The evidence of the wrong-doing, cruelty and un-Constitutional behavior of the Bush cadre is slowly accumulating. Never before have I witnessed (since Nixon?) an administration so full of liars and slanderers. Again, I want to point out that fundamentalist, Christian churches behave exactly like what is disclosed in the following report toward people who don’t agree with them or who commit “sins”. Unforgiving, closed-minded, savage and revengeful—that’s typical fundamentalist behavior, and, now, it’s infected the White House through Bush and company.

Read about it here.

MOUNT HOOD BUDDHA

The picture is of my third walk along the Vancouver waterfront. I come around a bend onto the Columbia River after emerging from a more wooded walk, and there he is in the distance—BuddhaHood. A friend, Geoff H. of Spokane, told me that Kerouac liked to say the mountains rising up in this regions were all Buddhas. This very much impressed me the next time I came upon this scene. Frequently, on morning walks, the Buddha is not visible, hidden in the river fogs, mysteriously awaiting more fortuitous signs.

[28] Struggle

What is this fog that licks against old gray walls and hides
The sun? My wildflowers shrivel in a killing frost,
Cold drizzle falls on October streets, walking makes me shiver.
Some New Age thinkers believe weather can affect our moods,
Some say we are the pawns of planetary alignments. Ha!
If only my fate were that easy to unravel, gladly
I'd reach up and shift the orbits of the earth and sun,
But this drizzly mist just swallows up my flailing fists.

That's in case you think only the BuddhaHood struggles with fog!!

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MINDFULNESS

Neuroscience is still trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and the origin of mind in the human animal. Here are some more theories.

[OPEN QUOTE]
This also led to speculation as to which species did or did not have theory of mind and at what point in evolution it appeared in humans (Povinelli & Preuss, 1995).

There are two distinct origin scenarios for our capacity to understand intentional agency, to create representations of other agents' behavior, beliefs, and intentions. A widely accepted social intelligence scenario is that higher primates evolved more and more complex intentional-psychology systems to deal with social interaction. Having larger groups, more stable interaction, and more efficient coordination with other agents all bring out, given the right circumstances, significant adaptive benefits for the individual. But they all require finer and finer grained descriptions of other agents' behaviors. Social intelligence triggers an arms race resulting from higher capacity to manipulate others and a higher capacity to resist such manipulation (Whiten, 1991). It also allows the development of coalitional alliance, based on a computation of other agents' commitments to a particular purpose (hunting, warfare; Kurzban & Leary, 2001), as well as the development of friendship as an insurance policy against variance in resources (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).


Another possible account is that (at least some aspects of) theory of mind evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction (Barrett, 1999, this volume). A heightened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a better sense of how these "other" animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive significance for survival problems such as eating and avoiding being eaten. Indeed, some primatologists have speculated that detection of predators may have been the primary context for the evolution of agency concepts (van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983). In the archaeological record, changes toward more flexible hunting patterns in modern humans suggest a richer, more intentional representation of the hunted animal (Mithen, 1996). Hunting and predator avoidance become much better when they are more flexible, that is, informed by contingent details about the situation at hand, so that the human does not react to all predators or prey in the same way. [CLOSE QUOTE]

—H. Clark Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey” in Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 105-106

Re. the photo: Some species still don’t have a conscious mind. Think of the most illustrious of Crawford, Texas’s citizens.

TODAY, MY SUBJECT IS HELL

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

—Robert Frost

SUBJECT: HELL: EXOTHERMIC OR ENDOTHERMIC

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues via the Internet.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs, using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed).

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This yields two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you" and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is, therefore, extinct, leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being, which explains why, last night, Theresa kept shouting, "Oh my God!"

Photo in Gehenna (Hell of Bible) courtesy Mark Hodge.

COULD WE REALLY GET TO BE THIS GROWN UP? HA!

“Logocentric thinking is also associated with efforts to subsume diversity under identity, to reduce the other to the same. Jim Cheney, in his postmodern critique of radical environmentalism, argues that there are strong authoritarian tendencies in environmentalist thought due to this refusal to acknowledge difference. He argues against the claim that all knowers are essentially alike, and hence are able to resolve differences by appeal to objective standards of reason. Each person's history and place in the world is distinct, and their perspectives incommensurable with all others. The thesis of the sameness of all knowers can only be an ideological tool designed to coerce agreement, to socialize people to a particular conception of reality. There are potentially an infinite number of truths corresponding to the equally infinite number of different places that people inhabit in the world, and to claim that any position has priority over other positions is to be engaged in a rhetorical exercise in order to justify and enforce domination. Cheney calls for respect for otherness, letting differences exist without any pressure to compromise so that each entity is given full latitude to develop the way that best expresses its own individual existence.” —Arran E. Gare in Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, pp. 92-93, Routledge, New York (1996)

PS: I don’t think that the unfortunately named J. Cheney’s position is the position that Gare would accept. I’ve included it in my blog as an interesting take on objectivity. Frankly, I think if we all were more objective, we would have fewer conflicts, even though we disagree, because scientific objectivity usually comes to pretty factual conclusions. Right? Objectivity is a method for arriving at factual data and has nothing to do with leaving one’s opinions out of it until, that is, the facts are established. Now—as to opinions about non-factual, therefore unreal and nonsensical, matters, like how close one’s nose must come to the ground while bowing to Mecca or what a god’s asshole looks like, there are no facts involved. It’s pure opinion and therefore entirely relatively, and we should never dispute these matters one with another. Eh?


NEW DENSE ELEMENT DISCOVERED

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named "Bushcronium." The symbol for Bushcronium is "W".

Bushcronium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Bushcronium's mass increases preternaturally over time when morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons in a Bushcronium molecule to form isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed whenever morons reach a critical density. This hypothetical concentration is referred to as "Critical Morass."

When catalyzed with money, Bushcronium activates Foxnewsium, an element that radiates orders of magnitude more energy than Bushcronium itself, albeit in the form of incoherent noise since Foxnewsium has 1/2 the peons but twice more morons.

Folks, I’m sorry, but I don’t know who to credit this piece of writing too. I believe it’s one of those free-floating internet pieces that I scoop up in my daily ramblings. Now it’s been months since I stored it in my desktop file, Blog/ Future Stuff, and, well, who knows? It’s damn good though.

THE EVER-CHANGING SELF

Most of us who know the least little bit at all about biology (fundie Xtians excused) know that our cells replace themselves. Roughly every seven years, we are “evolved again” (my word). Of course, I didn’t know until Antonio Damasio taught me that the “precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart and the cells of the lens” do not replace themselves. (The Feeling of What Happens, p. 144) In his marvelous study of how consciousness evolved, I find a great deal of interesting reading and one fascinating passage is the following one so marvelously poetic about the constant replacement of the body as it ceaselessly reinvents the structure that evolution has given it.

[SNIPPLE]
We are not merely perishable at the end of our lives. Most parts of us perish during our lifetime only to be substituted by other perishable parts. The cycles of death and birth repeat themselves many times in a life span—some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year; the exceptions are the precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart, and the cells of the lens. Most of the components that do not get substituted—such as the neurons—get changed by learning. (In fact, nothing being sacred, even some neurons may get substituted.) Life makes neurons behave differently by altering, for instance, the way they connect with others. No component remains the same for very long, and most of the cells and tissues that constitute our bodies today are not the same we owned when we entered college. What remains the same, in good part, is the construction plan for our organism structure and the set points for the operation of its parts. Call it the spirit of the form and the spirit of the function.

When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. Like the sand on the beaches of our childhood, it can be washed away. It is astonishing that we have a sense of self at all, that we have—that most of us have, some of us have—some continuity of structure and function that constitutes identity, some stable traits of behavior we call a personality. Fabulous indeed, amazing for certain, that you are you and I am me.

But the problem goes beyond perishability and renewal. Just as death and life cycles reconstruct the organism and its parts according to a plan, the brain reconstructs the sense of self moment by moment. We do not have a self sculpted in stone and, like stone, resistant to the ravages of time. Our sense of self is a state of the organism, the result of certain components operating in a certain manner and interacting in a certain way, within certain parameters. It is another construction, a vulnerable pattern of integrated operations whose consequence is to generate the mental representation of a living individual being. The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues, and organs to systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse should the process of rebuilding and renewal break down. The 
construction plans are all woven around the need to stay away from the brink.
[PASTIE]

I am doing this at two to three in the morning as the object, George Bush, arising from my memory banks, has chosen to impinge its ghastly presence upon my hapless organism, rendering it alert and sensing danger when it should be replenishing itself with sleep.

PS: Call the tree, raising its arms into the sky, a "forest monster". Does it give you that eerie feeling like forests do in some of these recent children's movies like Harry Potter, those boring, endless Ring tales and that old Wizard of "if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times" Oz?