Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow

"Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow" is, in my opinion, one of the least popular renditions by Michael Bublé, not that I am an authority on his songs. The title seems straight forward enough. Or, is it?  Someone analyzed it this way. Technically, "today is the day that was yesterday's tomorrow".  So, shouldn't it be, "Today was yesterday's tomorrow"? I am not a grammarian either, so we leave it at that.  Meanwhile, someone made a riddle out of it:

A teacher enters class and says, “If only yesterday was tomorrow then today would be Saturday." What day of the week did the teacher speak of?

A logician/grammarian had one idea.  First, he thought there were two answers - Either today is Thursday or Monday - depending on what "proper" grammar were used.  Here is the quote:

 "Both answers are correct, because the grammatically incorrect use of the word “was” introduces ambiguity. The two versions of the question that lead respectively and unambiguously to the two different answers are “yesterday had been tomorrow” and “yesterday were to be tomorrow.”

"Edit: Today is Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. If yesterday had been tomorrow (Friday) then today would be Saturday

Today is Monday. Yesterday was Sunday. If yesterday (Sunday) were to be tomorrow then today would be Saturday".

Did you get all that?

Well, wait until you hear what others had to say.

"In our system, tonight's midnight is the first moment of tomorrow. But as for the rest of us – there's no official answer and the military use a system in which midnight is 0 hours. In that system, tonight’s midnight is the first moment of tomorrow. But as for the rest of us – there’s no official answer.. Blah, blah, blah ..

And a few other off-the-grid ideas.  Then, we have this to ponder ..

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow went into a bar.

Yesterday: Be thankful my friends for if it were not for me how else would you have gotten here?

Today : Listen.  If not for me, how are y'all going to enjoy this?

Tomorrow: Now, now, without me what do you two have to look forward to?

That in a nutshell tells us what life is really all about.  When we think about it our lives can be summed up in three elements.  Whatever it is we do at the present moment is archived instantly as memories of the past. Every dream, each aspiration, every plan all reside in every tomorrow that is yet to happen.  Today is all we have to do anything because yesterday is gone forever and tomorrow is yet our best hope that our dreams may still come true.

However, let's be aware of the quote below:

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.         --- Fulton Oursler

What Kind of a Story is That?

"Peanuts", the widely syndicated cartoon strip written and illustrated by Charles Schulz, ran for 50 years (1950-2000). It was "among the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all,[1] making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being".[2][3] At the time of Schulz's death in 2000, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of around 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages".

There was one strip that I can't forget the gist but not the dialogue exactly. Charlie was telling Lucy a story and since I can't really recall how it went I will make one up.

Charlie: "The Halloween monster was running after me. I knew it was because I too was running.  I ran as fast as I could. And it ran just as fast".

Lucy: "What kind of a story is that?"

Okay, but I do recall Lucy's question exactly.  "Peanuts focuses entirely on a social circle of young children, where adults exist but are never seen and rarely heard". 

Charlie Brown's little story above is not as uncommon as in our real world. I recall someone telling me this little snippet:

"I don't know about the breadfruit.  It's not bread and I wouldn't call it a fruit either. I mean a fruit is something you can pick from a tree branch that you can eat outright, right?  I wouldn't say that about the breadfruit. So, who named it that way?"

When someone says something like that, we can't add anything much to it or care to, assuming we know much about breadfruit, except perhaps, as a rejoinder, we can  ask, "Well, how about the grapefruit.  Clearly, it is not a grape .."  Then you realize you find yourself in the same position because you don't really know where to go with it. 

Now, how often do we find that the stories and behavior of the Peanuts characters do mimic adulthood, sometimes in funny ways and in some cases, we find awkwardly more embarrassing or lacking as much sense that the "Lucys" of our world find pleasure in putting down with the suddenness and acerbic wit that the Peanut character manages with so much sarcasm and pain.

Yes, that's right. We know a Charlie Brown, a Linus, even a Snoopy. Sadly, we know a Lucy too. At work, among family and friends, and in society , in general. She or He is that innocent looking face, naturally quick witted but there is not one ounce of gentleness when they so choose.  They are notoriously of little use as a co-equal at work, and terribly more so as a boss.

But, Lucy!

Well, by the time we were born there was not much choice but to go by what stories there were already before we arrived. In fact, your story, mine and everyone else's begin with prologues of what were before ours could begin. Then we live it and soon there is the epilogue.

Lucy actually had a probing question to ask all of us. What kind of a story have we written for ourselves.  Or, what kind of story do we want to tell. Life is after all a story. Come to think of it, life is every moment a story.

Anyone who has ever applied for a job - who hasn't? - has to tell a story about who he or she is, what they've accomplished and what they have to offer.  The interviewer or hiring manager tells a story about the company, about the business and the applicant must have a convincing story worthy of a job offer.  Lucy had a point.  The interviewer, the decision maker, and ultimately the company has the right to know what kind of a story do you have.

Readers of Peanuts know to ignore the advice Lucy dispenses because they are invariably useless. However, the reader is not able to dismiss Lucy's put downs or her outbursts.

Courtship, like friendship, also begins with a story. Marriages begin with a story.  How it survives and flourishes depends on how consistently each in the partnership had kept to the story they told in the beginning.  

The strip-episode above, while it is more about the coming season, we learn from it that every relationship, friendships and marriage in particular, must be more about giving.       Wow, indeed!

Inevitably, each of our life's epilogue will then be about, "What kind of story do we want to be remembered by?"

Life's Traffic Camera

A man, a "conscientious driver", just went through a traffic signal when he noticed that the traffic camera just flashed.  He knew that he drove at the posted speed limit so he was furious at being photographed for a possible violation.  He turned around to make a U-turn to go through the light again.  He made doubly sure he was running at the exact speed limit, even slowing a bit right at where he thought the camera was. The camera flashed again.

He said to himself, "I hope they send me a citation or ticket in the mail. They don't know what's coming from one irate citizen and taxpayer.  Oh, yes, they will hear from me all right." 

Two weeks later his wife called him at work.  "Hey, John, guess what was in the mail today? You got two traffic citations and  fines to boot".

John was gleeful, "Oh, yeah, that's great because I have the letter prepared already.  You want me to read it to you over the phone?"

His wife replied, "Why don't I first read to you what the citations say. The Department of Public Safety cited you for not wearing your seatbelt.  You  were photographed twice at seven minutes, thirty seconds between each offense."

That, in a nutshell, bitter humor aside, describes one of humanity's many pitfalls.  It is our ability to look at everything around us through the "clouded" lenses of our eyes, and through our eyes only.  It is a disability actually that can lead us to make assumptions, suppositions, and misjudgments that can lead to stereotyping what we see around us that can lead to one of the most common side effects of a clouded lens in our mind's eye.

In a divided society, a disunified country, a population segregated by politics, religion, custom and culture, a flash from an imaginary traffic camera is enough to trigger emotions, from an imaginary source followed by reactions and profound hatred  towards situations and conditions that ultimately lead directly against our fellow human beings because we assume too much, we jump to conclusions too soon and before long the chasm is way too wide beyond mending.

On a personal basis, life's traffic cameras are everywhere too.  Unfortunately, often it is not what we thought it was flashing for, because we saw what went through our clouded lenses.  Arguments start that way because we thought we heard something but the other person meant something else. Like the "conscientious driver" who thought about speeding while the camera flashed for an unworn seatbelt, we heard one thing while we form a rebuttal for another.  Soon, we are talking past each other.  Then we wonder how we drifted away from one another over something that we don't even remember what it was to begin with. 

In the U.S. today, Thanksgiving Day is a special celebration for the right reasons. The week is the most traveled time of the year, perhaps equally if not more so than Christmas week but it can also be one occasion for life's traffic camera to flash, often merely perceived when it wasn't.  

If there is a time to put our blinders on, this is the day to do it; so, we do not see the imaginary flashes from our defective peripheral visions. This is the time too for life's traffic camera to be turned off. By everyone.

Enjoy the food, the conversation, football for those inclined to sit on the couch for the rest of the day, or compare notes for those whose eyes are focused on the best deals tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!!!

We Are All Eternals

This is a fantastic universe we live in. We can say it is magical, even. How can it be otherwise? We inhabit it. Is it an inconceivable supposition that some of its magic, its attributes of wonder, may have rubbed off on us? Fair question? Are we not endowed with the Creator's purpose? Too fantastic? Too unrealistic? Too improbable in a universe of several trillion galaxies, each galaxy with 100 to 200 billion stars - one of them we call our sun, a mere particle of sand in a swirling dune where the number of stars exceeds all the sand in  all the earthly beaches our imagination will allow us to comprehend?  

Even though we merely occupy an incomprehensibly miniscule corner, a relatively mere dimensionless point of dust revolving around one starlit flotsam - one of 200 to 300 billion flotsams - swirling around an average galaxy that one early human observer fondly described as a freshly stirred milky concoction.  Yes, relative to the entire Milky Way galaxy our home is less than an invisible point filled with over seven billion other even more miniscule points and you are one of those reading this - pondering as I do with many others thinking the same way.  However, thinkers and wonderers that we are, why is one lifetime allotted to each one merely an average of less than seventy years, some longer or shorter, and it ends. Then, that is all there is?

Well, it is a fantastical world when we get right down to it. So, let's get deeper into the meaning of our existence. For this to work we need to unshackle the limits of our imagination, go past the stop sign of what we are used to believe and go beyond the boundaries of human philosophy, sociology, even its physiology.  

It is highly unlikely I will go to the theater to watch the movie - Eternals - based on another set of Marvel comics characters of that title. "In the film, the Eternals, an immortal alien race, emerge from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their ancient counterparts, the Deviants".

Obviously this musing will not be about that. I will venture that based on the above one sentence plot description, it seems to be just another frequently used storyline of the universal tug of war between good and evil.  This will not be about that either.

Then why phrase the title of my musing, "We Are All Eternals"?  It is a hopeful provocation. But let's not get ahead of the punch line.

Physiologically, every part of your body has been around for far longer than since your first birthday. These elements had been recycled for millions of years, most of it for billions and billions of years.  You are practically made of stardusts, figuratively and literally, you are.  Your physical body, that is.  We'll get to what is beyond your physical structure later.

Every iron element in your body, in your red blood cells and cells in your muscles, was at one time in the belly of a huge star that exploded into a supernova.  Every star ultimately will run out of its fuel - hydrogen - and when that happens the extreme gravity will implode the entire star the moment iron is formed at its core from the intense pressure. Almost instantaneously the implosion will be followed by a huge explosion, hurling all the material outward into empty space, causing shock waves along the way that created all the other heavy elements like gold, potassium, etc. The exploded remnants after many millions of years will recombine with other debris in the vastness of space to be reborn into another star.  One of those stars became our sun.  

Actual image after a supernova explosion millions of years ago

With that sun were several swirling spheres of hot gasses, half of them cooled to form rocky structures on their surfaces - Mercury, Mars, Pluto (if you still consider it a planet), asteroids, moons, and of course, our dear earth.

You are therefore a physically recycled material. The oxygen you inhaled just now, may have been through the nostrils of one extinct dinosaur a long time ago, which may have been part of an exchange made possible by an ancient Jurassic fern when it took one molecule of carbon dioxide exhaled by some other air breathing creature, now extinct, when it stripped the carbon and expelled the oxygen.  The process repeated many trillions of times before your lungs processed it.

The long and short of it is that we are part of a series of universal recycling processes long before recycling aluminum cans and plastics became part of our social conscience. This majestic universe of ours is one great recycler extraordinaire.

So, we know our bodies came from recycled material. Soon, as we pass on, our bodies, together with cut grass, banana peels, gray whales, racoons, wildebeests, wet cardboards, eels, algae, innumerable luminaries, unknown homeless people, warriors and civilians, saints and politicians will be recycled too.  

Death in the end equalizes everything that perished.  Is that it then?

To quote Werner Herzog, a filmmaker whose "films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams,[2] people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature.[3]", one might be led to believe not only in our insignificance but that ..

"The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man". 

On the other hand, a noted physicist, Michio Kaku, had this to say,

"The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe".

Suppose you were the Creator, would you let that creature live only for so long and then cast it into oblivion?  You are not expected to answer that because, one, you are not the Creator, and two, you, I and everyone else, are not equipped with all the fantastical and magical powers of the entire universe. However, those 100 billion neurons and the trillions of connections they are capable of making are enough to make us ponder, contemplate and wonder.  The universe, therefore, may have rubbed off some of its magical powers on us, after all.

That magical power,  that we are allowed to have, however weak, gave us consciousness. The latter is no trivial matter.  It is what makes us human. It is what differentiates us from one another. Why then do we have it? What purpose is consciousness if it must exist only within the confines of one lifetime? A mere nanosecond out of an eternal universe?

We think not.  Well, going back to unshackling the limits of our imagination, is it not possible consciousness will live on forever?  If every physical element that gave it a home - the 3.5 pounds of tissue with 100 billion neurons that Michio Kaku referred to, sitting atop our shoulders, are recyclable, why not for the stream of consciousness to flow forever?

Let's try another analogy. Recorded music in a reel of master tape, grooves on a vinyl record, pits on a CD, once heard, appreciated, memorized by those who liked it, will live on long after the reels of tape, vinyl and plastic discs have been destroyed.  There is a universe of people on whom the music of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Elvis, Michael Jackson live on; likewise, why can't this universe accommodate every consciousness that had ever existed?

Is it possible, our consciousness has existed all along, for billions of years, and will continue on for the next billions of years?  Just asking. 

Like I said when I started this musing, "For this to work we need to unshackle the limits of our imagination, go past the stop sign of what we are used to believe and go beyond the boundaries of human philosophy, sociology, even its physiology".  

I close with why I write these musings, as premised at the top:  

When you find yourself having to take a break from those that keep you on edge and stressed out, you can take the time to ponder with me some of the un-ponderable and the whimsical and lightly thought provoking issues you did not have the time to consider but now you may want to look into because you have a moment or two to spare or you just want some of your brain cells to be tickled out of slumber.

The Wabanaki Loop: It is Going to be A Very Cold Winter

A new chief was chosen to lead a confederation of Native Americans, collectively called the Wabanakis.  One day he was asked by the tribal leaders if it is going to be a cold winter.  Being a modern college educated man, the new chief had no idea about the traditional native weather forecasting that his elders were accustomed to. Wanting to appear strong and resolute, he stood quick on his feet and told the tribal leaders that it was going to be a cold one. He then declared, as a show of statesmanship,  that the people should gather firewood to prepare for the coming winter. The people (the Wabanakis) gathered as told.

As a hedge, he called the weather service a week later, without revealing his true identity, as a way to double check his decision and see if he needed to recalibrate.  The weather man told him that it was going to be a cold winter - a re-affirmation of what initially was a wild and slightly flippant guess on his part.  The chief summoned his tribal leaders again and told them that the winter weather will really be severe so the people should gather more firewood.  Again, the Wabanakis did as told, doubling their efforts even more.

Another week went by and the chief, still unsure and not too confident about his leadership role, he again anonymously called the weather service for the latest update.  The weather man said, "It is going to be a really, really severe winter".  

The chief then asked, "How can you be so sure?"

The weatherman replied, "I am 100% confident  it is going to be a really severe winter because we've observed that the Wabanakis  had been gathering firewood at a blistering pace these last two weeks".

That, of course, in this day and age, describes how information coming from a single source can spread and oftentimes doubles up on itself.  It is sort of a perversion of a feedback loop. It gets worse when viewed from the proliferation of information - true or false, real or fake - along the loopy corridors of social media, political punditry and society's short attention span. Both sides of the political aisles suffer from a phenomenon which I define now as the "Wabanaki Loop".  You read it here first - a new phrase soon to be in the annual "new lexicon for 2021" (just kidding).

Before I move on I intend to redeem myself later, at the bottom of this blog, if some of the readers find the story to be one of irreverence and disrespect for The Wabanaki Confederation, which is a real organization of Native Americans.

Many of the readers would be familiar with the telephone game, known by one other name, as quoted below:

"Chinese whispers (Commonwealth English) or telephone (American English)[1] is an internationally popular children's game.[2]

Players form a line or circle, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they heard to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect."

Another idea comes along:

"Our social media newsfeeds are often so full that many of us can view only the top few items, from which we choose to re-share or retweet."

"Information that passes from person to person along a chain becomes negative and more resistant to correction."

                                                --- Scientific American (December2020)

 {Note: This is the last time I will pick a quote from Scientific American; in fact, this is the last time I will read this magazine (ever). I only found out recently, the above quotes notwithstanding, that the magazine, for the first time in its 175 year history endorsed one presidential candidate over the other in the last 2020 election. It was stunning to find out from reading the back issue of Oct. 2020 that the editors of this highly esteemed scientific journal would stoop to blatant partisanship.}

That is the irony of it all because the quotes above were from their Dec. 2020 issue, after the endorsement in October.  Soon enough upon more careful re-reading, I noticed that their views on racism, climate change and Covid 19, were all slanted only one way.

That, among so many things going on, is one reason this country may remain divided for a very long time, if not irreversibly so, forever.  With the division comes the danger of one side feeding only on the information from within the one side and only that one side. It becomes the Wabanaki Loop. The country must get out of that loop or it will ultimately get caught by a self-feeding vortex it may never be able to climb out from.

The atonement part:

"The Wabanaki Confederacy (Wabenaki, Wobanaki, translated to "People of the Dawn" or "Easterner") is a North American First Nations and Native American confederation of four principal Eastern Algonquian nations: the Miꞌkmaq, Maliseet (Wolastoqey), Passamaquoddy (Peskotomahkati) and Penobscot. The Western Abenaki are also considered members, being a loose identity for a number of allied tribal peoples such as the Sokoki, Cowasuck, Missiquoi, and Arsigantegok, among others".

The original farce that I heard - a very short one at that - used politically incorrect generalization using a term to describe Native Americans in its non-PC form.  I remain sensitive to the idea that for a good part of over two centuries a significant slice of the U.S. population  had been maligned via an antiquated grouping of  people.  I do apologize. However, the humor will not have worked had a different story line was used, except that I then expanded the humorous little story with more descriptive words and an elaborately spun plot line.  I therefore apologize to the Wabanakis.  I encourage the readers to read up a bit more about them because their domain used to be that of Northeastern U.S. and the eastern coastal areas of Canada. They, like most indigenous people in the past, had suffered through a lot.

I must also mention that years ago in my career working for an oil company I worked with a true gentleman  named George G. He was Navajo, college educated with an engineering degree, who worked at our strategic planning group.  He and I had played doubles tennis a few times but diabetes later put an end to his mobility when one leg was amputated. Less than five years later he passed away.  George was a brilliant example of the strides taken by indigenous minorities who excelled to rise above the stereotyping generalization used to put certain groups in a segregated box of society. George had a very gentle demeanor who spoke softly and coherently when he was making a point.  He was  one of those "unforgettable characters" I met and knew well.  

There, I hope I have more than made up  for what some readers might consider irreverent humor about the winter and firewood story. 

 

Why Politicians, Lawyers and Engineers Take Different Post-Earthly Paths

One day, Satan's assistant went up to see St. Peter at the Pearly Gates  partly to check on how things were going and to brag a bit about what's going on down below.

"Say, St. Pete, how are things here?" bantered the devil's assistant. St. Peter replied that everything was just fine and inquired likewise how things were in hell.

"Well, three months ago an engineer left his earthly existence and, to my surprise, we got him. He is terrific.  Didn't take him long to suggest improving the living conditions at the office.  I was even more surprised when my boss agreed and gave him a no-limit budget. Before long we had central AC, refrigeration and ice cubes for the staff.  My boss even has an ice cream machine now".    

St. Peter was aghast, "Wait a minute, there must have been a mistake.  No engineers go to hell ever.  There was a clerical error, for sure.  Send him up here right away".

"Or, what?" replied the devil's assistant.

"Or, I will sue you and your boss".

Satan's assistant was quick to respond, "And where will you get a lawyer?"

Some of the readers may have  heard that already but I must say no one had ever heard the sequel to it.

Many frustrating months passed and St. Peter was not able to sue. Then one day a politician died and was at the Pearly Gates  to hear his fate. St. Peter reviewed the man's life. The man, though a  politician was quite a pious human being and he was also an astute lawyer. St. Peter told the man, "You are a first boarder-line case, a politician  for consideration is rare indeed, but you can have permanent residency behind these Pearly Gates if you will do this one task for me".  To which the man readily replied that he will do whatever is required.

"I will send you to a place", St. Peter pointing downwards, "temporarily to launch a legal brief and argue the case there if necessary to get this engineer relocated to his rightful place here".  The lawyer/politician nodded enthusiastically. St. Peter added, "You bring him up here and you will both be granted heavenly citizenships forever".

Weeks passed with no news to St. Peter but by the seventh month the politician/lawyer and the engineer were at the Pearly Gates.  St. Peter, pleasantly surprised, can't wait to hear what happened.

The politician/lawyer was the first to speak, "It was overwhelming at first. As you already know, I was up against a horde of lawyers and an equal number of politicians there, arguing the case to retain the engineer.  However, dealing with all the cacodemonic red tapes and reams of paper work aside, I will be remiss to claim all the credit and not acknowledge what this engineer did to help our case".

The engineer spoke, "I was challenged when Satan the 'boss' himself paid us a visit while we were preparing our case.  He declared that, 'There is no way in hell for both of you to leave this place, specially you the engineer.  The day you  leave this place is when hell freezes over'.  Well, he obviously did not remember that I still had the authority for unlimited budget that he apparently  forgot to withdraw. With that I was able to soup up the entire refrigeration system on a hellish overdrive. History was made. Hell did freeze over".

St. Peter asked, "And just like that Satan let you go?"

"Well", the engineer answered, "I told Satan that if he let us go I will leave him the 'kill switch" with a timer for the over drive and in seven days he can turn it off. So he allowed our departure".

"Okay, but I am a bit concerned that in a week's time Satan will get to enjoy the comforts of air conditioning again", said St. Peter.

"Don't worry.  When he pushes the kill switch it will immediately trigger another switch which I had hidden nearby for a souped-up heating system I built alongside that will instantly turn into overdrive. In a few days the entire refrigeration system will self destruct, all the energy will be refocused into the heating system. Hell will be scalding hot once more".

Now, y'all know why engineers don't go to hell. 

It's just a story concocted by The Idle Mind. Not just because I am an engineer by education but because much of the progress in comfort and safety we enjoy today are mostly the work of engineers.  On the other hand, most regulations, though clearly not all, have a way to dampen certain paths to progress into slippery slopes - mostly espoused by and written for politicians by lawyers.   

There is hope.  We can start electing into office pious, kind hearted, sensible politicians with common sense who will self-limit their stay in office.  They may be rare but they're out there and each find is worth the effort to get them elected. Over staying politicians, as we speak, have all gone past their overdue shelf lives.  It's time to enforce the stamped "expiration" or "sell by" dates on them.

Do You Know the Way to San-ity?

We may not want to say it but we all know the way to insanity.  (Or, alternatively, you can hum the Burt Bacharach tune popularized by Dione Warwick). The question is: Do we know the way back?

1. Headline,

Aug 11, 2021 ... SALEM, Ore. (WTVO) —

"Oregon governor signs bill ending reading and math proficiency requirements for graduation"

"U.S. now ranks near the bottom among 35 industrialized nations in math"

Math performance of American 15-year-olds declined significantly on international PISA test.

Which countries were in the top 10?  In numerical order from 1st to 10th: 1. Singapore, 2.  Hong Kong, 3. Macao (China), 4. Taiwan (Chinese Taipei), 5. Japan, 6. BSJG (China), 7. Korea, 8. Switzerland, 9. Estonia, 10. Canada.   (Note: BSJG stands for Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu Guangdong provinces in China).

U.S. students stand at 43rd place; although the government spent almost $15,000 for elementary and secondary (FTE - full time equivalent) students, exceeded only by Luxemburg, Austria and Norway.  Only S. Korea that is in the top ten list in math proficiency belong to the top ten list in expenditures.  On the other hand, No. 9 Estonia (math proficiency) spent just half of what the U.S. did for its students. The educational system in the U.S. had apparently lost its compass. Can we be hopeful it can find its way back to San-ity?

2. Headline: Clearly not a shining example of an $80,000 a year college education.

"Peter Fray-Witzer, a student enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, wrote an op-ed in a campus newspaper complaining that 'cisgender men' were going to install radiators in his 'safe space' dormitory".

Miriam Webster defines Cisgender : "of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth".    In other words, it is a person born as a male behaving as a male; likewise, a female at birth behaving as a female.   Read quote below about what happened:

"A student at an $80,000-a-year ultra-liberal Oberlin College in Ohio claimed in an op-ed that he was left ‘angry, scared, and confused’ because ‘cisgender men’ installed a radiator in his ‘safe space’ dormitory".

The English language just topped a little over 1 million words, as of last count. "Currently, there is a new word created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day".

William Shakespeare created in his entire lifetime a total of 1700 words; many of them do not make it in normal conversation today. A "safe space" used to mean that one has enough clearance to park a vehicle in one's garage.  Or, assurance a ship captain has while maneuvering his vessel through the Panama Canal. Today, some students are so emotionally fragile, they need to be reassured of a place of refuge for comfort and safety  but please don't let a regular maintenance guy come to fix the heater.  Pick one from the other extra five gender identities but please no run-of-the-mill serviceman or servicewoman. That is scary and confusing.

What is going on?   We had better find a way back to sanity? Is this the epigraph to describe the country today, 

"One flew east, one flew west, / One flew over the cuckoo’s nest."

"Although this may have nothing to do with the meaning of the nursery rhyme, most European cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests and build no nests of their own. The baby cuckoo is raised by parents of a different species along with their own babies but usually grows more quickly than its non-cuckoo nest-mates and pushes them out to die".

The cuckoo - far from having the oft quoted bird brain -  exhibits one of nature's cleverest adaptation for survival. By letting other host birds raise its chicks, the female cuckoo can lay as many as a dozen eggs by cleverly laying one (and only one) egg at a time in a dozen different bird's nests. The female cuckoo is thus freed from the responsibility of caring for its own young, and in so doing it can lay more eggs than any mother bird could. The most sinister part of it is that the one cuckoo egg, once hatched, will first immediately push every other chick out of the nest until it is the only one left and the host mother bird will unwittingly raise it as its own. (There are several YouTube videos online that show how the cuckoo chick manages to get rid of its nest mates until it is the only one left; those with a faint heart may not want to watch it).  

If we as a society are not careful, we will end up with one cuckoo bird to take over the national nest. Those who advocate to change this, cancel that, remove this, excise that from the vocabulary, transform this and that, do not come from the majority but from the tiniest corners of social media, hidden from the everyday citizen.  However, their views, once hatched in Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, etc. can cause the demise of one established norm.

Society must continue to respect the voices of the minority but the latter should not be allowed to arbitrarily rule. In a democracy, that is. This is what is happening today.  One cuckoo egg can and will push away the rest out of the national nest.  Five or so junior members of congress can drown out the majority.  But much of society does not seem to see it. 

"Seconds pass with every door. Minutes pass with every street. Elijah never realizes that he's lost, so he has no trouble finding his way back". -                                                              Author: David Levithan                                                                                                  

 All society can hope for is that it realizes that it is lost.  

The Cuckoo Cuculus Canorus

 

The tiny host mother bird feeding a cuckoo chick.  The host mother bird will remain clueless the entire time. Imagine, the tiny mother bird gathering such an enormous amount of nutrients to feed the oversize chick, more than it normally would have had to if it were raising its own real tiny chicks. 

Over 28 trillion dollars of national debt continues to go up - feeding the proverbial cuckoo.

I encourage the reader to read the previous musing, "2050: The Ebb of the Tragic Trajectory .."  

2050: The Ebb of the Tragic Trajectory of a Once Powerful Nation

2050

There will be a lot of pushback on this one, I'm sure.  But if by pushing back means that people are drawn to a sudden and earth shaking wake up call, then the title-statement is worth far more than the need to merely learn the lessons of history but how such a "tragic trajectory" can be reversed.  

It is a truism, almost a theorem (not just theory), in both natural and political sciences that once momentum, speed and trajectory of an object or political idea is known, one may predict where the object or idea will ultimately end. In addition to that but even more  importantly is that history  also preeminently, almost in every case, mimic both the path and trajectory of all past societies, regardless of the make up and origin of its inhabitants that applies to where we are today.  

I'll try to get to the point right away to make my case.  This great nation we call America begun in 1776.  2050  is 274 years hence from its official birthday after its independence from  the last great empire.  If it makes it to 2050 it will indeed have had the longest shelf life of any world power, but not by much.

Sir John Glubb wrote a paper on the "Fate of Empires" in 1976. The chart below was in that thesis.

The nation             Dates of rise and fall                   Duration in years

Assyria                  859-612 B.C.                                      247
Persia                    538-330 B.C.                                      208
(Cyrus and his descendants)
Greece                   331-100 B.C.                                     231
(Alexander and his successors)
Roman Republic    260-27 B.C.                                       233
Roman Empire       27 B.C.-A.D. 180                              207
Arab Empire          A.D. 634-880                                     246
Mameluke Empire 1250-1517                                         267
Ottoman Empire    1320-1570                                         250
Spain                      1500-1750                                        250
Romanov Russia    1682-1916                                        234
Britain                    1700-1950                                         250

"The dates given
are largely arbitrary. Empires do not usually
begin or end on a certain date. There is
normally a gradual period of expansion and
then a period of decline. "

Why did Sir John Glubb define the end of the British Empire in 1950? Britain barely survived WWII from the onslaught of Nazi Germany.  Without the help of its allies, primarily from a country that was once its colony, 1942 would have been its official denouement. Still suffering from an earlier blow to the gut from 1914 to 1919 (WWI) followed by near mortal wounds that begun in 1940, ending in 1945, it was not for another eight years before the "fall", as defined by history.

So, let's examine why almost all empires expired after approximately two and a half centuries. And why is it that only one of them at a time would reign with such dominance at any given moment in history? It seems that the rise and fall of kingdoms and great nations follow this one omnipotent rule of gravity - everything that goes up must come down.

The gravitational force that act on the trajectory of any social and political structure is directly proportional to how well developed a nation or kingdom had become.  Wealth, military power, influence, sophisticated way of life of its people, envy and competition from other nations and kingdoms, the ultimate erosion of the social fiber and resolve of its people will all conspire to pull down the trajectory of its continued existence. 

It is argued by sociologists that human nature is the root cause because when things get too comfortably easy the next generations to follow the preceding one loses a lot of what it took to achieve the things that are now and often taken for granted. Economists tell us that once the apex has been achieved by the prior generations, the tendency of the next is towards complacency.  Taking it easy is a human trait that has its own inertia when things have indeed become easy. It might seem like a circular argument but human nature is such that once so much is given out as entitlement to the needy, the need to work harder is diminished among those for whom the need to work harder is a prerequisite to achieve a higher level of economic status.  Physicists as always will tell us that what goes up must come down.

People will argue over those till sunset and on to many more sunsets.  Speaking of sunsets, it was at one time either a self description or a matter of pride that once "The sun never sets on the British Empire".  

"The phrase was first made by Fray Francisco de Ugalde, Spanish, to King Charles 1".  And indeed it was true when its colonies circumnavigated the entire globe with an estimated land area of 13.7 million square miles.  

I apologize for picking on the British Empire but it is the most recent one and closest to the aforementioned 2050. But if the reader were to go back to the chart above, one cannot escape the tragic ladders of history.

Let's look at the following statement below, that described the trajectories of empires throughout history:

"There is normally a gradual period of expansion and
then a period of decline".

Indeed, empires grew slowly when a population, singly or the banding together of several smaller organizations of people, strove to achieve dominance over others as a survival strategy for protection and self preservation.  In the process they led innovations in food production, political organization, weapons development, wealth management, and so on and on.  However, the defining feature had always stemmed first from the development of the human character and adherence to the rules of law and common sense. Without question, civilized behavior was both the cause and effect of the growth of empires.  That is the reason for the creation of the Magna Carta and the Geneva convention, even the foundation of the United Nations (at least based on original intent), as examples, became possible.  It is the reason why certain beginnings of empires failed quickly  - the best example being the rapid rise and precipitous fall of the Third Reich - when the path they took were off the rail of civilized behavior. For brevity this was condensed to one compact paragraph but the reader may want to examine history for more insights into this idea.

The  fall of an empire always originated first from within and only later from external pressure. Empires always weakened first from the general decline of the population's will and erosion of the fundamental moral character of its society.  Of course, that is putting it quite simply, perhaps even naively, but the strength of any social structure is its moral backbone.  We can talk about political will but its breakdown always begin with the people.

What are we to see or observe today that makes 2050 a reasonable prediction?  These same signs were true in every decline of all empires past.

1. Deep Internal Division - The country today, is deeply divided. Not just from the traditional political party split where not all of the population are always actively engaged but it is a far more serious split between conservatism and liberalism.  And there are integral parts to each side. One is about conserving the ideals and belief systems of what brought this country its decisive success for over two centuries.  The other half is about liberally forging and fundamentally changing the country into something else.  Worse is the slow but almost penetrating allure of socialism.  Nevertheless, when the country is divided, it is almost as if it loses half its strength and resolve. While the flu pandemic of 1919 united the nation, today's Covid 19 has become the source for a severe division. 

2.  National Debt  -  Every empire in history always suffered from the same debilitating, resource sapping burden of debt.  To view the U.S. debt in real time, copy the link below to your search bar for a second by second increase in the national debt.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

At this very instant while typing these few words, the national debt is almost 29 trillion dollars, $87,000 per citizen and $230,000 per tax payer. By the time the reader gets around to viewing the debt clock, you will be shocked at how far the numbers had gone up.  The amount to service the debt (interest rates alone) is staggering.

Every past empire was so saddled with debt that its ability to hold on to the vastness of its glory and influence and managing its own national affairs felt no differently from a family selling its assets, little by little, until all it had left was a fraction of what it used to have.  Debt erosion was the slow gradual loss of any empire, as in losing a foot of its river bank  one day at a time from the rampaging rapids, or the shrinking of its shoreline from the constant battering of the gathering storm from far and wide, from the pretenders to the throne of another emerging empire. Incredulous, you say, examples please? Napoleon sold Louisiana to the then emerging USA so the French emperor can continue to fund its slowly declining empire; Spain gave up Puerto Rico and The Philippines to the U.S. after the quick but decisive Spanish American War.  Two generations earlier Spain was still untouchable as a super power.  How did the U.S. purchase Alaska so cheaply from Russia? Britain had to retrench from its global colonies when costs to maintain them became a huge financial burden to the empire.

3.  Foreign Adventurism - For lack of a better phrase, this refers to maintaining forces in foreign soil long after the need for it in the mistaken notion that it will prevent future conflicts. The U.S. after realizing early on that it was becoming a superpower, did something right.  It did not go the way previous empires did by amassing vast colonies across the globe, except perhaps but briefly in claiming the Philippine Islands as its one and only colony.  Perhaps that was because of a 300 year period that the archipelago was under Spanish rule.  Since granting independence to the islands after just two generations, the U.S. had never once claimed another colony.  However, maintaining forces across the globe - from S. Korea to Japan to Germany and a host of many other locations around the globe - the cost is still very high without benefiting from the rewards of a colonizer.  Yet, it had been engaged in regionally limited but never trivial military engagements from Korea to Vietnam to the Middle East.  Costs to all of these contributed to the gradual accumulation of debt that to this day is growing and seemingly unrepayable; not counting the cost of many young American lives. The Greek and Roman empires suffered the same fate.  Alexander's generals divvied up his empire into little ones while the Roman Caesars brought foreign adventurism severe aftertastes at home.  The empires soon lost the political will and it  was no less than politicians who ultimately ended Julius Caesar's hold on the empire with violent strikes of many daggers right on the senate floor.

4.  Growing De-assimilation - The country at near the apex of its development benefited from being the melting pot of many cultures, accumulating the strength of multinational skills and talents for innovation and entrepreneurship. The assimilation of people who have come from near and far were the obvious recipes for success.  Today, there is a great tear in the fabric.  Multiculturalism has become the reverse of assimilation to the detriment of creating a unifying ideal that made "The United States". It has devolved into the weaponization of race as a political cudgel by those interested only in holding on to power over a divided country, buoyed unwittingly by supporters who are made to feel nobility in subscribing to the delineation of the races. There are those who suddenly feel the invigoration of waking up condemning the norms of what are otherwise benign ideas and traditional systems. The waking up to adding multiple gender identities to the traditionally accepted norm, while demanding that society abandons the notion of the traditional family units, the elimination of certain elements of language perceived to be oppressive to others became the destructive cancel culture.  Revising history by eliminating or destroying certain elements and signposts of it are the quickest way to erasing lessons that can be learned.  There is so much, too many to list them here, that fall under the umbrella of cancel culture and woke-ism that is more damaging to established social norms.  De-assimilation is widening the division. Division only weakens the national identity.

Now, I can go on and expand the list several folds longer, i.e., "The Dumbing Down of the Educational System", "Breakdown of Law and Order", "The Deleterious Effects of Social Media", etc. But the reader gets the idea. But there is hope.  Perhaps this country will heed the warning signs, reverse the course of the trajectory, even if only to flatten the curve from the ever trending downward direction.

If we do not reverse the trajectory, 2050 will be real.  The ebb of a once great nation may come sooner than later. 

The widely accepted laboratory of the "Great Experiment" built up by courageous men and women in 1776 is in danger of being dismantled before our very eyes.  It is as if the results are being challenged by those proposing fundamental changes that, by the way, are not exactly new. Socialism has been tried many times before and failed in other laboratory nations. From the Soviet style communism - the only relic of which manages to survive, but barely, is  Cuba - to many versions of it that were tried in Venezuela, Argentina and Eastern Europe decades earlier where  their lessons are largely ignored.  Instead, the lesson plans that made America are being shredded to pieces. The irony is that the "new textbooks" being proposed are recycled pieces of failed manuscripts from which we see nothing but failed states wherever they were tried.

If this country does not wake up to the high winds and the rumbling thunder of a gathering storm that is about to hit in the next decade or two, it will wake up in the aftermath in the first morning of 2050.

The Case of the Body Snatchers

Did the title catch your attention?  Of course, it did. The genre of "body snatcher" movies was fodder to a number of Hollywood movie productions from low budget adaptations of one or two popular science fiction novels that go back to the '50s to one or two that actually had named stars with starring roles in them, including Nicole Kidman in one and David Sutherland, etc. in others.

However, the fascination with body snatchers were not just limited to the genre of science fiction but from fantasy platforms including those that were a mix of horror and ultra religious themes that would include "The Exorcist" from a best seller written by William Peter Blatty.

Sorry to disappoint some of you but this will not be about that kind of body snatchers.  It is about the "real thing".  Body snatchers are not only all around us, they are in us.  Hyperbole aside, they made us. 

Whatever  the reader's belief system dictates, whether it is from pure naturalism or faith in the  power of a Creator, this musing is about the wonders of the unseen that makes life possible and the survival of  all living organisms in this planet. It could also be our ultimate protection. H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" drove home that point (spoiler alert for those who are not familiar with the book or movie) towards the end.  The exoplanetary invaders were in the process of extinguishing all of humanity with their superior technological weapons and invincible spacecraft only to succumb to the tiniest, invisible inhabitants of the earth - microbes. The invaders were felled by germs!! The space aliens did not have immunity to bacteria and viruses. One by one, each of them perished from infection.

Fictional accounts and runaway imaginations of many sci-fi authors aside, the idea of body snatchers in our midst - in our innards and all over our entire bodies - that protect and insure our survival is very real. Read below a direct quote from a scientific paper:

"Microbes occupy all of our body surfaces, including the skin, gut, and mucous membranes. In fact, our bodies contain at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human ones, blurring the line between where microbes end and humans begin. Microbes in the human gastrointestinal tract alone comprise at least 10 trillion organisms, representing more than 1,000 species, which are thought to prevent the gut from being colonized by disease-causing organisms. Among their other beneficial roles, microbes synthesize vitamins, break down food into absorbable nutrients, and stimulate our immune systems".

"There is a close connection between microbes and humans. Experts believe about half of all human DNA originated from viruses that infected and embedded their nucleic acid in our ancestors’ egg and sperm cells".

The above two paragraphs explain completely but concisely the compelling dependence of macro organisms to the smallest microbes that are in us and all around the environment in which we live.  The truth of the matter is that microbes preceded us by many millions of years.  Other estimates claim that single celled organisms may date back to as early as 2 billion years ago before we became us.  Those dates don't matter very much because even plant life was here long before the first vertebrate animals and early mammals and hominids that came much later.

Time in this case was on the side of allowing myriad opportunities for organisms, especially those that developed into the more complex ones which would include us, so that today we benefit from how our bodies were able to adapt and actually utilize many microbial agents into helping our physiology to defend against the more harmful of these invading organisms. Today we use vaccines that work because the introduction of weakened microorganisms help train our antibodies into recognizing and eliminating the bad infectious actors. The accidental, albeit serendipitous discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1928 of penicillin - the golden wonder of antibiotics - came about when mold that is ordinarily harmful to us, became a bacterial nemesis that we rely on to this day.  It saved millions of lives and averted all kinds of infections when it was needed the most - during and immediately after WWII.

However, these wonders give problems to those rare individuals who are either allergic to certain microbial medications, such as penicillin or toxins produced by other microbes. I am one of those. Many, many years ago while a freshman in college I had tonsillitis  that warranted antibiotics.  As an out patient, I stopped by the university hospital on my way to ROTC that afternoon.  It was awkward having to get the shot on my behind and taking down the bottom of my uniform.  Immediately, although unbeknownst to me, embarrassment that a female nurse had to give me the shot, witnessed by a  female student nurse, was the least of my problems that early afternoon.  I made it to the lobby on my way to ROTC class and that was the last I remembered until three days later.  I was in a coma from severe reaction to penicillin.  It was anaphylactic shock, a sudden drop in blood pressure made me collapse on the lobby floor. 

That was very rare but indeed microbes can cause us harm.  But for every microbe that can hurt us there are many in our system, inside our bodies, permanent residents in our gut, that are beneficial.  And often we and the micro-colonists benefit mutually from living together.

From the moment of our conception, all throughout the nine months or so of our existence in the womb, microbes of innumerable varieties were already in us.  Our early immune systems were provided for us by our mothers.

"From the moment we are born, microbes begin to colonize our bodies. Each of us has a unique set of microbial communities, which are believed to play an important role in digestion and in protection from disease".

"And though some microbes make us sick and even kill us, in the long run they have a shared interest in our survival. For these tiny invaders, a dead host is a dead end".

In other words our bodies are composed of teeming colonies.  The colonizers are microbes that not only preceded our coming into being but have in fact played a role in our ultimate survival and development. Perhaps these microbes, as we speak, are shaping the future of humanity and other species.  There is no doubt they were there to influence our historical past.

It seems then that the microbe's preeminent status in the bio-world is due to the fact that they were here first and their superior ability to adapt gives them the most advantage.  While humans produce a new generation every twenty to twenty five years, bacteria create a generation every twenty or thirty minutes. That is a critical trait that bacteria sooner or later develop immunity when antibiotics are misused by us.  Packets or colonies of bacteria that survived when the prescribed dosage of antibiotics are not completely taken by the patient will develop immunity to that particular medication. 

Viruses are, of course, impervious to antibiotics because technically they are not "live" organisms. "Viruses are simply packets of nucleic acid, either DNA or RNA, surrounded by a protein shell.." They merely hijack our own cells to make exact copies of themselves. Our cells die in the process while the virus clone will go on to do the same thing over and over again with other cells.  Why then do viruses kill the very host that propagated them? Viruses outside can lay dormant and may survive for periods of time, long enough for a nearby host to come in contact with them.  What a clever if not  a sinister method of adaptation.  That is what makes COVID 19 a really bad snatcher of life for the most vulnerable among us.

A vaccine, however, is like a platoon of special forces, the Green Berets in our bodies that go out to train the native cells to recognize potential invaders and annihilate them with anti-body assassins and booby traps.  The much lauded and oftentimes more effective natural immunity stems from having survived an assault by the virus that left a great number of our antibodies prepared and able to recognize the invaders and preemptively "killing" them before taking a foothold in and among our cells. It's a violent world in there. 

The long and short stories of it all is that tiny microbes outnumber all the living cells in our body by a  huge margin. Of course, that is in number only because where size is concerned, our cells are way far larger and heavier.  There may  be an equal number of bacteria as there are cells in our body but the microbes only weigh less than half a pound in a typical 150 pound man.

In the total analysis, microbes of bacteria and viruses may outnumber the cells in our body but they can never outnumber the trillions and trillions of neurons and the number of synapses the neurons are capable of connecting in the human brain. It is the intelligence of the host organism that makes it possible for humans to not only understand the complexity of the invisible colonists but the ability to find ways to keep the balance undisturbed and find means to alleviate the situation when one side is about to upset the entire apple cart.

We must accept that we are forever hitched to the symbiosis between our body and the body snatchers. Our existence and survival depend on the balance that demands total equilibrium between us and them - the real body snatchers.  The real heroes are our system of antibodies that obviously have retentive, cellular photographic memories of the invaders that once encountered are never forgotten throughout our lifetime.

Y'all Be safe, be well, stay healthy and be always grateful.