Why Growing Old Beats the Alternative?

 

It is an important question. The one significant answer, if one were to distill it to just one, is that the alternative to growing old is to die young.

If life is indeed a journey, then it follows that growing old allows for a much longer trip.  It also means getting to more places than had it been otherwise.

If the price of the ticket to growing old are chronic pains, a bigger medicine cabinet, a thicker medical file, fading vision and straining to listen to normal conversation, or having hip or knee replacements, always keep in mind that that ticket is not due to be collected till towards the end.  So, enjoy the journey to its fullest.

I notice too that getting old also allows for stories to get better with each recollection.  The privilege of editing is not what preoccupies the youth.  They are too busy to introspect or think deeper than and beyond the spur of the moment. By the time we get to a certain age we get to enjoy the accumulated paint brushes and a more colorful pallet and a bigger canvass on which to express and tell our stories.  Our keystrokes may be slower but our vocabulary is larger, our knowledge substantially wider.  The alternative to growing old is the limited experience of youth.

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience".

-------- President Ronald Reagan

Only when we get to a certain age when we acquire the audacity to say, "Youth is over rated". It is also the time, the only time actually, when we can say with deep conviction that youthfulness is not the strongest quality of the young, or that we sometimes say, "If only we were able to keep our youth and didn't squander it when we were young", whatever that means, since I don't really know where I was going with that one.

Here is the reason why, as we get older, time seems to go faster:

On the other hand, this is what bothers some people.  Why does time have to flow only in one direction?  You see, we are all gifted to understand life better looking back but we can only live it going forward.  The only entity I know that was able to do it differently was Merlin in King Arthur's court. At least, in one version of the king's lore.  In that story Merlin lived going backwards in time - he experienced the future while living "forward" in the direction where he is yet to confront the past.  How he and King Arthur were able to interact was never explained in that story.  Although I should remind you.  That was a Broadway musical, "Camelot". On stage or cinema, producers and directors can do whatever they want.  After all, Lerner and Lowe were able to turn a cockney flower girl into a princess in "My Fair Lady".  But, I digressed.

So, we shouldn't  be worrying about growing old.  Once we get to that point, the dreadfulness of when we used to worry about the uncertainty of the future is all gone because we are already in it now.  We made it.  And we could care less about what happened in the past. We shouldn't want that to be a burden. Besides,  the future that we used to worry about is not so bad. Given that perhaps life in a few instances was not fair, to be alive today is still a good thing.  Really. It's a gift.

The folks of a certain age reading this - you know who you are - have that privilege to have gone aboard the rail car of life far longer than others who didn't get to board because they didn't have the express ticket to a longer life.   The long trip, as often the case, may be fraught with a lot of challenges but it beats the local bus. The scenery is better. Even if not, remember, the power to edit is the reward of living longer, specially if you outlast all the potential critics to your story.

Getting the full value of life's ticket is to finish the journey.  Losing the ticket early is a tragedy we do not wish on anyone.  Handing it over at the station after a life's long journey should never be feared.  Instead we should cherish the experience while it lasts. Old age is that time just before we reach the final stop and it is the only stage in life where we can claim, "We know better".

Above all, the one reason we want to try to live life at its fullest, and achieve one that was well lived, is because there are no round trips for the rail way of life.

Hold on to that ticket.  Live well. Live life like it is the only one you have.

 

In Awe of the Climate Fever

How good is the science of climate change?  It is awfully bad! First sign towards incredulity is the attempt to wiggle with semantics. It was global warming in the beginning.  But to hedge the bet that it is possible a global cooling could occur, climate change was a bigger umbrella.  Pun intended.  Now, it is climate emergency, since existential threat has become a bit over used already.

1.) We will not talk about existential threat.  Instead let's talk about existential events that had  already happened.  There were five mass extinctions of species throughout the fossil records. They happened. Species became extinct, new species emerged. In fact, over 95 % of all species that ever existed are no longer with us - today. All of those mass extinctions occurred long before there were internal gas combustion engines, coal fired power plants and industrial furnaces, and if green house gases from Co2 blanketing the upper atmosphere were the reason, they were all from natural causes and way beyond the artificial manipulation by any of the living organisms then. 

2.)  Let's try this.  Ultimately, the sun's energy - the heat we get from it - rules the entire solar system, and it is what determines how hot or cold the planet had been.  1.3 million earths will fit inside our sun.  So, it is huge.  More importantly, it is one unimaginably large thermonuclear device. At its core are the equivalent of about a trillion megaton hydrogen bombs exploding every second.  But we're fortunate, we are 93 million miles away.  Let's put that in perspective.  If the sun is a light bulb at the ceiling in the middle of an average room, earth is the size of a particle of dust on one corner of the breakfast table. We're far away so we get only 2 billionth of the total energy the sun puts out but the sunlight heats the atmosphere and combined with the heat the earth's surface gets (land and oceans), we get our daily weather and the long term  definition of climate.

The sun had been  a stable provider but the nature of how it produces energy is subject to the uncertainty principle, provided for by the laws of physics.  So, any slight deviation from its routine had large consequences on planet earth and the rest of the solar system that depend on it. Disturbances in planetary orbits, solar flares, sun spots, etc. can cause a number of variances on climate.  Add to that volcanic activities, magnetic pole reversals, jet streams, earthquakes and we find that our human efforts would be like a canoe pushing against an ocean liner trying to change its course.  In other words, the mighty sun, the light bulb at the center of the room, will fry an egg on the pavement in Phoenix, Arizona, on a hot summer day, but a slight weakening of its output, or some anomaly in its nuclear fusion reactor, even briefly could have an impact on climate.  And then there is this, from geological records:

"At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth’s history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago".  In other words that was the time all the Great Lakes in North America were frozen solid with ice and glaciers.

3.) American taxpayers, or 330 million inhabitants are admonished to adhere to the climate agenda.  But two countries with a combined number of about 2.5 billion people, will not play along.  One will continue to burn coal and even export it.  The other just recently, in an effort to be responsive to the cutting of trees for firewood, announced that its households will now switch to propane/butane gas stoves for cooking. But we're told that the U.S.  must aim for zero emissions by such and such a date while kitchens, continents away, will be cooking with hydrocarbon gases.

Meanwhile, today as it happens, the U.S. has by far the cleanest air and cleaner rivers than 3/4 of the world.  If you don't think so, compare U.S. big cities with those of the cities at those two countries alone.  Add another billion who cannot afford to finance a green new deal  on their own to the 2.5 billion people mentioned above and we have  at least half of the world's places that will not comply with the restrictions the U.S. is urged to self-impose.

Climate fever is a strange malady.  Not only is it really not understood, the diagnosis is suspect.  The motivations, however, are much too clear.  It is politics and political power and a means of imposing control and a gateway to central planning from the seat of a central government instead of the federated states.  

Two years ago I wrote in, "In Awe of Climate":

Yesterday, Sept. 4, 2019, 425 days from next year's U.S. 2020 election, ten presidential aspirants gathered for a Climate Town Hall for hours. It and almost all the next get together and discussions to follow will be pivotal in one particular way. One of these candidates could conceivably shape the critical agenda for running the next government in case the present administration is voted out of office. It shall be a huge switch in policy because as one of the candidates said last night, "Every Policy Should Be Informed by Climate Change."  What that means could be subject to interpretation, but for what it is worth, it can mean that climate change will dictate, influence and likely be the last word in how the new government will conduct its business. 

To our dismay, it is exactly what is happening - a feverish scramble to position climate in front of the American public - in less than three months of the new administration.

To remind the reader and every American taxpayer, below is one of the key sections in the bill driving the Green New Deal agenda which will be the overarching influence in much of the proposed spending by this administration in the next decade.  Let us be very clear about this. While politicians and others worry about existential threat that climate has become, this one is horribly consequential to taxpayers and America's well being. 

(E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘‘frontline and vulnerable communities’’);  the goals described in subparagraphs A through (E) of paragraph (1) (referred to in this resolution as the ‘‘Green New Deal goals’’) should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the ‘‘Green New Deal mobilization’’).

Financially,  $billions "ain't cutting it anymore because now we're talking in trillions of $".

If we are going to distill what is going on, it boils down to two main points: climate change and racism drive the policies.  And somehow, from one rhetoric to the next, the government manages to not only connect them, they are able to make them intersect, intertwine with each other.  No less than the Vice President  took the lead from the New York Times editorial which said: 

"The most immediate cause of the immigration surge may be the series of deadly hurricanes that swept through Central America last year, part of a greater trend fueled by climate change".

Just as an aside, but it is not any less crucial, through the magic of wordsmithing, what used to be a violation of the country's sovereignty of its borders, illegal immigration became undocumented entry and now with nary a pretention, proponents just lump it all into pure and simple immigration. To say that the line is blurred between those arriving at the proper port of entries with proper and legitimate documents and those just merely walking across an open border is a massive understatement.

Some may consider this a radical idea and likely a subject of censorship by social media and I know some of what I had already written had been restricted in subtle ways.  

Let us not forget that for something so nebulous as this climate change initiative has been, thousands of people already lost their jobs across the nation and other places. Add to that all the lost peripheral businesses related to the fossil fuel industry and the potential rise in gas prices and we will have an economic hardship about which we will find a lot more unintended consequences to follow.

The more we are told to follow the science the more we will see that climate change could be a fraud, an impostor of the truth.  

Are we really in for a world like this?

Or, is the blue planet much too resilient than we give it credit?

We are not and should not be saying that we abandon all efforts towards a cleaner, safer environment but we must do it with an abundance of common sense and a paucity of politics and pseudo-science.

As reference to "In Awe of Climate", copy link below to your search bar and click on it:

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2019/09/in-awe-of-climate.html

USA, Don't Try to be Argentina

The title is not meant to be facetious, and I must hope that no Argentinian is offended.  The world knows the depth and distress that befell the once wealthy nation that is Argentina. The steady stream of its citizens leaving the country in the last  three decades or so add to the travails of a country that was once  the destination for over six million immigrants in the late 19th century, second only to those who came to the U.S.  Today, those who were able to leave  know the value of their fortune for just that reason alone.  

Must the world at large learn the lesson of Argentina? I wrote in an earlier musing that either history is an incompetent teacher or people are inept students and, arguably but sadly, we  can now conclude that human nature and politics are poor substitute teachers. For the first time in human history, the lesson plan is laid bare, live and out in the open for the world to see in Argentina. And Venezuela, or other failed states in that region, for that matter. Will any nation learn from it?  Will the big, mighty USA grasp  just even a hint?

First, we must search the archives of the past for context, but we will not travel too far back in history to make sense of it today.

Argentina's history  almost mirrored that of the U.S. Its story began in 1776 (date sounds familiar?).  "The declaration and fight for independence (1810–1818) was followed by an extended civil war that lasted until 1861, culminating in the country's reorganization as a federation of provinces with Buenos Aires as its capital city. The country thereafter enjoyed relative peace and stability, with several waves of European immigration, mainly Italians and Spaniards, radically reshaping its cultural and demographic outlook; 62.5% of the population has full or partial Italian ancestry".

"The almost-unparalleled increase in prosperity led to Argentina becoming the seventh wealthiest nation in the world by the early 20th century".  The economy relied on exports of beef and agricultural products. 

Although the United States is castigated even now for its history of slavery, all the colonized territories from Barbados to Argentina and Brazil had their share of the slave trading era to satisfy the needs of the labor intensive business of agriculture and animal husbandry.  Some of the territories - they are independent nations now - have a share of the black population far higher, as a percentage, than it is in the U.S. The Caribbean islands, including Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti and the Dominican republic  and Brazil  have higher black  demographics in their population. Though not so much in Argentina, it is a  little known fact  that, recently, of all times, it has its own Black Lives Matter movement.

In the long fight for ideological influence between democracy and communism, underscored during the cold war, Cuba became the western hemisphere's showcase for the Soviet style communism when Fidel Castro's movement ousted President Batista. In the guise of socialism, political radicalism first infiltrated Cuba's elective government in the mid 50's.  It took a while after the revolution in 1959, before Castro finally acknowledged and declared Cuba a communist nation in 1965.  From there he exported the ideology to much of South America.  Che Guevara, an Argentine-born physician met the Castro brothers in Mexico City, became a naturalized Cuban a short time later, then he set out to export the ideology to South America, including a foray into Africa's Congo.  It was in Bolivia where he was arrested and executed.

During that period of political upheavals 17 of 20 countries in the Latin American region were dictatorships.  Mexico  had an elective government but it was a one-party system for decades. There is already so much that had been written about Argentina and Venezuela. A video has been going around for some time now. I had gotten it twice already, so far.  The reader may want to watch it.  The background music was sang by Madonna, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina", which is, of course, the theme of the Broadway musical, "Evita".  A copy of the link for anyone interested, is at the bottom of this blog.

I will not rehash all that had already been said and written about Argentina's economic, social and political misfortunes, except perhaps to cite one quick commentary from The Economist magazine seven years ago, "The Parable of Argentina": 

"There are lessons for many governments from one country’s 100 years of decline."

"A CENTURY ago, when Harrods { Upscale London Dept. Store} decided to set up its first overseas emporium, it chose Buenos Aires. In 1914 Argentina stood out as the country of the future. Its economy had grown faster than America’s over the previous four decades. Its GDP per head was higher than Germany’s, France’s or Italy’s. It boasted wonderfully fertile agricultural land, a sunny climate, a new democracy (universal male suffrage was introduced in 1912), an educated population and the world’s most erotic dance. Immigrants tangoed in from everywhere. For the young and ambitious, the choice between Argentina and California was a hard one".

What went wrong?  As mentioned, so much had already been said. However, there is something to be learned, and the U.S. may want to pay attention.

Three years ago I wrote in "Ancestry, Fredericksburg, Texas", the following:

"Mid 19th century Europe was a period of discontent with the political climate and economic conditions that were pretty much held over by monarchy and nobility. Many Europeans, Germans included, heard of a new system that was growing out of a former British colony, where the hopes of ordinary people were lit by a new political experiment - democracy. One German nobleman denounced his nobility to lead a group of German immigrants to resettle their lives at a place called America".

That new political experiment and an economic system based on capitalism that was the United States thrived like no other nation had been before.  

Today, there are signs of fraying at the edges of what once was a glistening tapestry of one government system and a burgeoning economy that worked perfectly hand in hand for over two centuries now. 

What was once a colony became a nation that had a pivotal, if not decisively crucial, role in ending two world wars in Europe and the Pacific.  By the 50's and 60's, the U.S. was a full- fledge superpower.

One generation later, beginning in the 80's, which followed the so-called free-wheeling social revolution, exemplified by Woodstock of the 60's, the movement to transform the government began. Another generation came and in 2008 the pledge to transform the nation along progressive liberal lines was out in the open. Today, the trend is continuing but more so like a coiled spring snapping back into action after a four year compression that repressed the movement of liberalism.  

The 2020 election happened.  The new administration resumes the transformation so that  the era of high taxes, almost unfettered social programs and entitlements, federally focalized control over state rights, fueled by a woke generation and cancel culture, and a compliant media are well on their way to upset the once well balanced two-party democratic system  towards a monolithic power structure.

The Huffington Post, not exactly a conservative medium, published in 2011 a list of 53 types of taxes imposed on the American people  that did not exist a hundred years ago in the country's history. That list is even longer today.   On top of the Federal Income Tax, we have the inheritance tax, school tax, all kinds of sales taxes and today, the gasoline tax is over $.47 per gallon, and there are 48 more on the tax codes that are a heavy yoke for the American public and small businesses to carry on its back. It is true indeed that death is the only way to avoid taxes.

The taxpaying public has a right to be appalled by the fact that as more taxes were imposed and collected, the more the government is unable to balance its budget.  There is something so fundamentally wrong with that.  For that incoherent phenomenon alone, we can only point to government as the source of the problem, as it was with Argentina.  It is as if democracy that was the foundation of this country since 1776, has already weakened so badly  to be comparable to what ails this country's real physical infrastructures.

If central planning is the Achilles heel of socialism or communism, American democracy is suffering from  severe skeletal fractures at several places. It is swollen with 3 million federal employees, 600,000 of them work for the U.S. postal service alone. The woke generation and cancel culture have singlehandedly created a society cowering in fear of being labeled racist this, xenophobic that,  while businesses are caving in to the slightest tremor created by social media.  Monolithic censorship will result in a single political system.  It shall be a victory for the dominant party but a disaster for democracy.

The 2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill is just the opening bid for what will be a massive spending agenda, but the congresswoman from Queens New York said this, “I know that may be an eye-popping figure for some people, but we need to understand that we are in a devastating economic moment,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Millions of people in the United States are unemployed. We have a truly crippled healthcare system and a planetary crisis on our hands. We’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. So we can do $10 trillion.”

That reference to "planetary crisis" is all about the green new deal.  It is so easy for a lot of these politicians to propose all these spending because it is not their money.  Look up or Google the "Solyndra scandal" and shovel ready jobs between 2008 and 2009, that did not even touch dirt.  Look to the Spanish version of the green new deal earlier that was a total failure.

If this continues, the country will go on to print more money to fund the social programs it cannot afford while mismanaging the economy and its educational system where the teacher's union is now a significant voting block and political contributor. Government bureaucracy that permeates the  Postal Service, Social Security Administration, The VA and many other agencies, is the single most pervasive cause of waste, inefficiencies and enabler of incompetence. Amtrak and the USPS are two examples that, if they were corporations, should have gone under a long time ago.  If they were traded in the stock exchange, their price (what taxpayers pay) to earning ratios (P/E) alone would have been enough indicator to halt operations.  But, they are still around because government has taken the phenomenon of "throwing good money after bad" and tossing it into the proverbial bottomless pit.

From Forbes: "Argentina's highest annual rate of inflation was a staggering 20,262% in the 12 month period ending April 1990. That definitely constitutes hyperinflation! To translate using U.S. dollars, an item which cost $1 in May 1989 would have cost $203.62 one year later. Argentina was in a depression from late 1998 to 2002."

What are the odds that politicians will have learned something from the Argentina story?  

American readers should care about what can be learned from Argentina. All that we need to do is look back at history.  Relics of history are not difficult to find if one must look at what happened then.  Ever wonder what happened to great civilizations that built the Acropolis of Athens and the Temple of Delphi, the Colosseum of Rome, just to name a few.  Or, the pyramids of Egypt.

Will tourists a thousand years from now be clamoring to see the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, or the surviving pillars of the Golden Gate Bridge?  Farfetched?  If history continues to teach but we refuse to learn, tourists of the future will see for themselves but politicians will never foresee nor look at the consequences of what they do today. And they will no longer be around to witness the future they created.

          

 USA, Don't try to be Argentina

Copy the link below to your search bar to listen to the song, that accompanies the video about Argentina that I mentioned several paragraphs earlier.  It is an https: file and safe.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=295c8f1d05&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-f:1696037345660737989&th=178988fad9e799c5&view=att&disp=safe

The blog that precedes this is about a longer historical scale that tells how we got to this point in our history.

  

All The World's A Stage ..

Partially borrowing from Shakespeare's verses in, "As You Like It", the original metaphor was, of course, referring to the fate and fortune of men and women on their birth and death - entering and exiting the stages of life. 

And we can also say, "All the world’s a stage, And all the" empires of men  "merely players; They have their exits and their entrances" .. referring to the emergence and collapse of empires at various places around the globe in just the last four thousand or so years.

This is a lightning fast look at history.  Our world, a tiny dot afloat and confined in a tiny space of an endless universe,  contains only a finite area of land and sea that historians euphemistically call the theaters of war. Indeed, "the world's a stage" for human conquest after conquest, followed by collapse after collapse - disintegrating into ashes in one place, followed by birth and emergence in another.

As much as we try to make sense of a world that seems to be always on the brink of plunging into conflict, always on the verge of a chaotic future, its past history - replete with pages that are easily the lesson plan for us to learn from - is merely a reminder that it will only repeat, as it had time and time again, into an endless loop.

We hear about existential threats from a lot of sources or for any number of reasons but "wars and rumors of war", quoted from from the New Testament's Matthew 24:6, had been and will always be the most alarming of all fears.

Why we are not learning from history is one mystery we may never be able to answer. And here we are; but how did we get here? What is the reason for this quick historical summary? If we are not able to learn from history, nations today, including the USA, must prepare for the inevitable.  Readers, you be the judge.

About 2,300 years before Christ's birth was when the first "formally" recognized empire begun. The Akkadian Empire arose from the region we know today as Iraq. As trajectories of empires go, that empire collapsed to be followed by others but always from another region.  The Hittite empire came into being in what is now Turkey, in 1600 B.C. The Assyrians from northern Iraq took it all back about three centuries later. Around that time, or maybe two generations later Rome was founded in 750 B.C.

Persia, what is now Iran, had its turn but not for very long, as historical timeline goes, when the Greeks defeated its army in the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. So much fighting went on in that region until Alexander The Great put an end to the fighting when, true or not, he cried when there was no more kingdom to conquer - at age 30 or so.  But the lull lasted only for so long.

But "the glory that was Greece" was put aside by "the grandeur that was Rome".  There was war after war, bloodshed and carnage, when just before half a century before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar put the exclamation point to what was to be the Roman Empire.

Many more empires came and went by way of more bloodshed, wars and conquest, that produced a list of many more empires.  Some were regional in scope as to not have expanded beyond neighboring border kingdoms. 

Past civilizations, if we must call them that, were molded out of empires expanding and contracting - an empire rising as another is collapsing.  It was a zero sum game.  It had been the rule.  Whenever one empire rose, it was always at the expense of another.

After Alexander's death, the Greek empire shattered into pieces, divvied up among several of his generals.

From among those pieces, from India to Africa and Europe rose several pretenders to absolute rulership. From what is now Tunisia, a Carthaginian general named Hannibal ventured out of Africa into Europe via Spain, over the Alps with his famous elephants, but he failed to take Rome. Out of that came more battles but it was from that when another empire begun. Europe and  across the English Channel and through the Middle East and Africa, about three centuries B.C., saw the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire.

In 395 A.D. the Roman Empire split into two.  The western empire collapsed entirely while the eastern part became the Byzantine empire.  It ended in 1071 A.D.

Filling the void were the Gupta empire in India and several others came out of the Middle East. The Moors invaded Spain in 711 A.D. but were stopped in their tracks by the Franks in 732 A.D.  A good part of Western Europe consolidated under Charlemagne. Almost three hundred years after his death the crusaders ventured into the middle east and captured Jerusalem. Four generations later the Moors under Saladin recaptured it.

While the so-called religious war was going on, the Far East consolidated their various factions and from that arose Genghis Khan who united the Mongols to form a huge empire. Their mastery of the horse and archery while on horseback exemplified rapid and sweeping deployment of the so called Mongol horde that swept across Northern China, then India.  History repeated again but before such an empire collapsed, the Mongols managed to invade Russia, all the way to Hungary and Poland, where it retreated upon the death of Ogedei, one of Genghis Khan's sons. An attempt to re-consolidate was made by invading Southern China but the failure to conquer Japan sealed the Mongol empire's fate into oblivion.

In 1325 A.D. in what later became the Americas, the Aztec empire rose to dominate that continent, albeit in complete isolation from the rest of the world.  Meanwhile, the Ottoman empire from the region of what is now Turkey put an end to the Byzantine empire.  

Out of Europe, separate kingdoms took to the sea with sailing ships.  Ships replaced marching armies over land and in the name of exploration, Spain, England, France, Portugal and the Dutch set sail to the seven seas.  Explorations turned to colonization of the "new world" and places never before visited by land-bound armies of old.  The British empire colonized North America, some Caribbean islands, all the way to Australia and New Zealand and some Pacific islands.  The Dutch were traders but they did have Indonesia and Aruba.  Portugal took a chunk of South America in Brazil.  But the most prolific colonizer of them all was Spain.

Cortes conquered the Aztecs in Mexico, Pizzaro bested the Incas.  Magellan went to Asia and claimed the Philippines, so named in honor of King Felipe (Philip) of Spain.  Portugal may only have one colony in South America but Brazil is about half the continent.

Eleven of the twelve sovereign countries, all to the west, from Venezuela to Chile and Argentina, and all in between speak Spanish and an amalgam of native languages, a little of English, French and Dutch.  Portuguese is, of course, spoken in Brazil.

Extending that region to include Mexico and the Caribbean, lumping them altogether into what is generally known as Latin America, the original Spanish colonies included Cuba and Puerto Rico.  That is 20 million square kilometers (almost 8 million square miles) of land area.

History deals harshly with Spain's track record when it came to managing its colonies. Fairly or not, by comparing colonies that later became independent nations, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and of course, The United States, did very well over those colonies under Spain.  Furthermore, the French colonies didn't too well either.  As a reader, you be the judge on what was then the Belgian Congo, South Africa and Indonesia (Dutch) and all  Asian countries that were colonized by the French and the British, and include the Philippines from Spain. And keep in mind that it took three to four centuries before colonies were let go to become independent.

Here we are today.  Old empires from the East, one in particular is re-emerging, will likely collide with the west.  From the latter is a new empire, if you will call it that, that rose from the "new world" - once a colony of an earlier empire.  

So, in a nutshell, that is the story.  "All the world's a stage" .. And all the" empires of men  "merely players; They have their exits and their entrances". 

Coming next:  "USA, Don't Try to be Argentina"

 

The World Within Us

There was a world already here long before we were born which will still be here long after we are gone.  That is one world.  The other world is the one known only to us as individuals.  It is a world no one else can see. That world is what resides in our individual minds. Or, in our individual consciousness, if you will. That is what I recall Sir Ken Robinson said in one of his talks.  If you have not heard of Ken Robinson, it is worth a peek at You Tube or at Ted Talk.  

It  looks much too intuitive, doesn't it? Too natural, to even be considered worth an "u-hum" as defined in Urban dictionary, much less an "uh-huh".  Thinking a bit more deeply we must realize that such a world begins and ends with us.  That is the one thing we do take with us to our grave.    Ken Robinson, who by the way died last year, did mention it only briefly as a segue between two topics during that one presentation I listened to but that was what stayed with me.  I wished he had spent more time on it.  But then, perhaps, it was better that way, because now we are provoked to think from within that world - that individual private world that is impervious to even a peek from others. Unless we let them.

Why is this significant?

Profoundly, and if I may preface it this way, that world that was here before we were and eternally hereafter "exists" because we are here to ponder it, to appreciate it, to be awed or threatened by it, to wonder or question it, and so on and on.  Yes, the moon will still be there even if we are not looking, or that the tide will rise and ebb because of it, whether we like it or not, but without a conscious, sentient being, none of that will mean anything.  For that matter, the entire world has no meaning, if there is no one to perceive it. Of course, that is because we look at it from our perspective. For a thousand million years when life first emerge and develop, it can be said that only the Creator saw what and how those creatures were doing.  Wait!  What?

Some of us will wonder that way.  Why did God wait that long for some of the creatures to develop a consciousness sophisticated enough to have the ability to ponder such a world? Is it God's infinite patience? Or, is a thousand million years merely a single second in God's eternal clock? Not for us to question why because we will likely not understand the answer anyway, so we are left with that world within our mind - our consciousness - to see all that we are allowed to see.

Think about this.  It is from that world within us, within our minds, that we actually first begin to make life our own and how to go about living it.  It is from that world that we will learn what it is we will be good at in order to pursue not only a good means to earn a living but attain a life well-lived. Unfortunately, we now live in a culture where the measure for success, therefore the attainment of happiness, is based on the acquisition of material things.  It follows therefore that the world outside, not the one within us, is all that matters and so we lose sight of what lies beyond economic measures.  We obscure the view of what should be a well-lived life with one that is what those in the outside world believe it should be.

Let's digress for a bit.

Lawyers and investigators  make it their business to take a peek at what we are thinking.  Or, they want to see what it is in our world that makes us look at the outside world the way we do. That is because much too frequently eye witnesses see the same event a little or much too differently.

Politicians and pundits want to influence our internal world so that we may see the outside world the way they want us to see it.  The media want us to see the outside world to influence what goes on inside our head.

Social media strive to change the outside world so that we may  see  from within our world the view they want to promote.  Case in point - just to name one - is this thing about white privilege.  I am not white, but if I were and I am told that my life had taken on a different but special trajectory because  of my skin color, then the burden of guilt weighs much too heavily to carry from an early age to adulthood.  But that is exactly what white children are bombarded with in many public schools today, that continue on for those who enter our universities.  Cancel culture is such a heavy but one crude blunt instrument to use on the population but it is wielded with abandon today.

From much of the media coverage that is propagated abroad, America is a racist country. Consequently, as recently as a couple of days ago, the Chinese delegation, not surprisingly, used that to lecture our Secretary of State when representatives from both sides met in Alaska.  When one political party and the woke generation use race, or labels of systemic racism, as a cudgel for their cause and agenda, it is to be expected that it will be used by those who oppose America's influence in the world.  We cannot help but note that those who paint the racist label on this country are the very same ones who encourage illegal immigration through our borders that they would rather not protect. Why would anyone let children go to a place where racism is rampant?  

Let's look at numbers.  According to FBI data, 1,000 unarmed men were killed by police between 2013 and 2019.  Or, an average of 142 people per year.  Of that total, 47 were black men.  By the way, it does not say if all of those killed by police were innocent people; or, were they committing crimes when the shooting occurred? But the media seems to propagate broadly, which includes to the rest of the world, that there is and had been an epidemic of black killings by police.  From the context of the total U.S. population of 330 million people, that number loses its intended political effect but nevertheless, it is today still being promoted.  Yes, blacks only make about 13% of the total population, so a third of those killed by police is a serious anomaly but it is a far cry from "blacks are hunted down by police like dogs", as one voice yelled loudly.

From what you just read, it is often a relief or solace  to be able to get back to the world within us to make sense of all the information we are constantly being fed by media, social media, and by politicians and pundits.

Lest we forget, it is from within that world that is the only place we can claim to be of our own making, and it is one where we can take comfort because that is where everything that is about us must first begin. It is from there that we give beginning to our dreams, our ambitions, a source of relief when we need one but it is also the only place from which our love for another human being must first begin.  It is the place from where we acknowledge the love of those dear to us. Is it a complicated place?  Yes.  But it is a lot simpler when compared to the world outside where we have relatively little control.

It is from within that world that we can reminisce good and wonderful memories. It is from there that perhaps, if we want to, and there is nothing wrong with it, we carve out a place where we can be contrite, console ourselves, be grateful for what we have and relinquish unfulfilled dreams that weigh us down but instead focus on what remains of those we still want to accomplish. Soon we find that that world from within is one powerful and impregnable place for anyone to dare enter.

One caveat, and it could be a significant one, is when we give up the key to that world within for one or another to enter, and for lack of any other way to say it, "to mess things up inside". Unfortunately, consent is all it takes.  And often, that consent may come one trickle of allowance each time until that door is wide open. 

So, be a superhuman, and make that place your own "Fortress of Solitude".

   

Are You Curious to Know?

 Are You Curious to Know ..?

1.) .. If you have Neanderthal DNA in you?  If so, do you understand that you may harbor Neanderthal thinking?

The Neanderthal lineage, depending on whom you ask, may have begun 315 to 800 thousand years ago. Their uninterrupted pre-historic existence ended just 40,000 years ago.  Undisputed is that the oldest fossil on record is from about 430,000 years ago.  What this means is that Neanderthals had actually lived/existed for far longer interval than modern humans, so far.  While a 167,000 year old fossil is considered the oldest human outside of Africa, where first homo sapiens species may have all begun, 100,000 years ago is considered the pivotal split from which we - modern humans - first emerged.  We cannot, even if we collectively gather all our hubris, claim superiority over Neanderthals.  They've lived for three times longer than we have, so far, and we're about to extinguish ourselves with the mere threat of climate change and racism and racial inequity.  Neanderthals are thought to have perished from the sudden cooling of the earth that brought about a prolonged ice age.  On the other hand, modern humans were brought up by warmer climate.  That is the reason, through the wonders of adaptation, that we now have far less body hair in us, while our distant ancestors were practically covered with fur.

"Neanderthals arose in Europe after pre-humans left the African continent and apparently never made their way back south".

It is suspected that Neanderthals and homo sapiens lines may have intersected briefly, long enough for some kind of ancient inter-marriages to have occurred that remnant Neanderthal DNA had survived in us.  In fact, it is surmised that we inherited some of their genes that help us fight invasive micro-organisms or provide us with immunity from certain diseases.

But, be careful, our President suspects we may still be clinging to Neanderthal thinking for protecting our borders. Neanderthals used the crudest of tools to survive for as long as they did but they were protective of their territory.  I guess that is what the President meant about Neanderthal thinking.

2.) .. What "cancel culture" is doing?

Well, for one thing, feminism is under threat.  Or, for that matter, gender is losing distinctiveness fast.  And it is under furious assault.  Being first woman vice president or president, as a distinct future possibility, is losing a special place in the annals of accomplishments because the blurring of gender delineation is clouding the social and political landscape. Out of that rubble will emerge pure neutral genders.  Girl and women athletes and all past record holders can only look on while transgendered super athletes will break every world speed and strength barrier in women sports. The most noble roles, at least by old fashion standards in the nuclear family, "Mom" and "Dad", are the the latest to be cancelled, after six Dr. Seuss books are taken out of circulation. By the time this is over, statues, books and social order destructions will seem like the passing of a fashion trend.  The English language will be made more doubly difficult because  we may never be able to distinguish who is talking because "he", "she", "aunts" and "uncles" and all gender-specific pronouns are excised from the vocabulary.  Lest we forget communist China begun with a nation wide "Cultural Revolution".  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rogue went by the same playbook, except they failed to hold on to power.

3.) .. We just elected our first super president?

Judging by last night's first presidential speech, our President and his administration, by pure super powers, are solely responsible for why we have millions and millions of doses of Covid 19 vaccines, less than three months from his inauguration.  It takes super amnesia to not recall that at the first issuance of a travel ban to help stop the spread of the virus, he vehemently opposed it as a then Presidential candidate, accusing the then sitting President of Xenophobic behavior.  It actually takes super arrogance or selective forgetfulness to realize that vaccines take time to develop and produce because then, if he recalls the timeline involved, it would have meant giving credit to the previous administration.  To not even mention the previous efforts of the last administration also takes super malice.

It also takes super nonchalance to not even hold a solo press conference to answer questions from the media.  Well, that's what happens when one has super handlers to dictate and shape a super agenda.  It also takes super guts to not admonish the teachers unions to go back to school to do in-person teaching, for which they are getting paid, science and the CDC findings notwithstanding.  It takes super use of science to be able to determine to the exact date the time for people to begin doing small group celebrations - July 4th.  Why not June 15, May 11, or perhaps tomorrow?  To recall the King of Siam from the Broadway musical, "The King and I", it is "scientific" to make such pronouncements.

4.) .. That the Green New Deal could end intercontinental travel, except by ships?

Think about this.  Electric airplanes?  If it's all the same to all the scientific super thinkers, let's remind them that the physics of the jet engine requires fuel/air mixture at the combustion chamber to produce super-hot gasses to thrust the 404,000 pound Boeing 747 off the ground and travel thousands of miles to cross the Atlantic or Pacific.  Electric powered planes will only do propeller propulsion to fly.  And would you trust an electric-powered aircraft packed with rechargeable batteries to cross oceans?  While jet fuel diminishes its weight over the course of the flight, batteries - fully charged or dead - will weigh the same at takeoff and landing.  Jet engines allow for jet aircraft to fly and land with only one of two engines running. Electrically run propeller planes will be dead in the air.  But we'll do away with air polluting jet aircraft, anyway. But wait!  People like John Kerry, as he fondly described his answer to a reporter, when asked about why he uses private jets to travel. "People like me" needs to cross oceans by private jet to receive an environmental award.  At least, Greta Thunberg sailed to New York on a sail boat when she made her now famous U.N. speech.  But, I must end with this ..

Are Child Miners Exploited to Manufacture Electric Car Batteries?

The use of child labor to extract cobalt from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo is certainly a major problem.

The Laundromat

The Texas winter freeze saga continues.  For lack of a better way to dull the searing pain it caused countless folks, calamities like it are equal opportunity disruptors of life.  But then, such an unforgettable experience also brings to light the many instances where and when one may find opportunities to be grateful, even thankful that life continues even in times of adversity.  "The Laundromat", a rather intriguing title if it were a TV sitcom,  is an unlikely scene for gratitude but it was and still is for me.

Like millions of other Texans who were affected by broken pipes - hence, interrupted water service - lingering effects have remained and will likely be for awhile. The good news is that there are more people now with water.  The not-so-good news is that a good majority of those only have partial access to water inside their homes.  Most of what the overworked plumbers have done, working 12-15 hours a day, was to plug broken pipes in homes that allow for water availability in sections of plumbing that were not damaged; the broken portions were merely isolated before complete repair and restoration can be undertaken at some future time after all the workload had gotten back to normal.

So, we're grateful we have water in two of the four bathrooms and most importantly in the kitchen.  However, we cannot do the weekly laundry because there is no water by the utility area where the washing machine is located.  The clothes dryer - which uses natural gas - works but what is there to dry? My wife was distraught.  She felt helpless as the pile of clothes and towels was rising to the height of a termite mound on a Kalahari desert.

The winning idea of the day came from me.  I'll do the wash at the local laundromat. We'll do the drying at home.  I had to do it in consideration of my wife's health, I knew it precluded even for her to come along.  The nearest laundromat is 25 minutes away by car, aptly named "Stop N Wash". Bringing the three baskets of laundry from the car to the laundromat's machines and back was a man's job.  That's what my gallant thought was until I realized soon enough that I was often the only guy at the laundromat doing the  chore.

Such a winning idea should have been one to count as part of the many hardships one had to endure in times like these but I did not want it to be. It was an opportunity for social exploration and an informal study of one human experience hardly discussed or often ignored.

First this.  The dry cleaning and laundry service industry in the U.S. had revenues topping 10 billion dollars in 2016.  The laundromat - a self service washing and drying business - was at about 5 billion dollars annually.  For perspective, there are 44 countries in the world with GDP (gross domestic product) under 5 billion dollars a year.  And there are a dozen countries at the lowest rung where their GDP is under a billion dollars!

It is conceivable that in the developed world many may never in their lives experience using the services of a laundromat.  Clearly, very few will recall that the laundry machines of old were coin operated. I knew that well when on the first year as new immigrants we live in an apartment complex that had for its selling point a laundry service onsite in one of its premises. I remember it like it was yesterday when during wash day my wife and I would go during weekends or evenings down the stairs through a winding path to get to the laundry "center". With a coffee can full of quarters and our own detergents.  I don't recall that there were fabric softeners then.

Photos below are just miniscule examples of how people, perhaps in half  of the world, do their laundry routinely, today.  I do not have a single reason, not even one odd miserable excuse, to feel disadvantaged or be tormented by the thought that now I had to drive 25 minutes to get to a laundromat.

When I saw the photos above, to grumble is a verb that should never be part of the lexicon in the developed and western world.  To complain about washing clothes when technically all of that is done by machines that are now equipped with so much computing power that  was not even possible for the average person during the years when the world first witnessed Neil Armstrong and others went to and landed on the moon.  Truthfully, the moon lander was designed by engineers wielding slide rules and using paper spreadsheets.

The 25 cent coin-operated machines are gone.  You can still bring quarters (25 cent coins) but the attendant will have to exchange them with paper bills for insertion to a receptacle and issues you a "Cyber Laundry Card".  You can use a debit card directly on the machines.  If you put in a ten dollar bill, you get an eleven dollar credit, or twenty-two dollars on a twenty dollar bill.  Do you know what it gives you? A whopping 10 % return on your money. What bank gives you that?  From the address, one sees that the laundromat is on another city from where we live.  But I am still not complaining about having to drive over there.

I was slow on my first attempt to operate the machines.  Although, often there were first timers too who would seek assistance on the intricacies of the system.  But it didn't take long to acquire because the machines proved to be idiot proof.

One lady came in with laundry that needed seven machines.  She was on the phone, even while interacting with the laundromat assistant. During all that time that she was loading the machines, putting on the required detergents and fabric softener and bleach, she never put the phone down.  She raised multi-tasking to another level.  How she kept the conversation going without missing the flow of the exchange was worthy of a study on how to effectively curb "attention deficit disorder".  Forgive me for eavesdropping on her but what was there to do besides watching the machine spin, rinse and spin even more furiously to a crescendo until, "Cycle is Done, Thank you" prompts you to go ahead and open the latch.

One other time, it was last Saturday, there was only one car in the parking spaces in front of the laundromat before I eased mine in.  As I entered I heard two people in a very animated conversation at one corner lined with tables for folding laundry.  I did my routine - looking like I really knew what I was doing, clearly far from the novice that I was on my first day.  Although I wish there was someone with me to hold a conversation with while doing the mundane task. Two people talking continued with nary an interruption.  I needed to go to the restroom, so I had to go through the area where the two were talking.  To my surprise, there was only one lady there busily but neatly organizing her laundry in well-ordered stacks. Her phone was on speaker and her conversant companion was obviously, wirelessly somewhere else.  Technology put to such work as to make work go by quickly.  For her, anyway.

Now the modern laundromats look like these.  I took these photos of "Stop N Wash".  But there is more to be said.

 

It is clean, well lit, and even the rest room is clean.

Contrast the last three photos to the above.  How on earth can anyone drive himself or herself to whine or groan over going to the laundromat?  I know I will be going again next week until we get our plumbing fixed completely.  

A dose of perspective is always the best motivator.  I always say, that no matter how bad your situation might be, somehow there is always one other worse than what you have.  If you don't see one, imagine there is one  because somewhere in one spot of the world, someone there wishes he or she has your problems.