Eulogy for Common Sense

Common sense had already sustained a thousand blows and lacerations.  It is time for its last rites and its eventual funeral. The long battle it endured lasted for at least a generation  now.  Its many attempts to fight back was akin to stopping the ebbing of a one-way tide that  had been receding for decades now and leaving behind a drying sand - now almost devoid of a living thought. Its last line of defense - critical thinking - is crumbling and quickly giving way to a horde that can only be described as capably doing nothing but engage in group think. If common sense is on life support it is now a matter for society in particular and for all of civilization in general to pull the plug. Yes, we can pray for a miracle but prayer is now too another collateral casualty.

Common sense is dying from small blows and often lacerated with very little blood. It is now punch drunk from a jab here, a jab there, and body punches that merely stagger the senses without really causing a knockout, not even  a knockdown. Common sense has not gone down for the count. At least, not yet. But it has already had recurring standing counts. And that is worst than being counted out entirely. It is a pitiful sight.

Here is one little jab. The New York public school system allowed  its students - the only one to announce it publicly -  to skip classes to attend a climate change rally. We should not have a problem with that ordinarily, except that the school system, based on 2017 data, lags behind many states in student proficiency in reading and math, described along with several other states as having, "Performed significantly lower than national public" average.  Common sense could only gasp.  Why let these students spend one day away from the classroom at all. Classrooms where prayer is no longer allowed  and chocolate milk is now also removed from the school cafeteria (yes, New York City did it) have become a battleground where children are the innocent bystanders.  

These young kids, not trusted to make decisions on what they eat or drink (sodas removed from school vending machines) by its own government (not their parents), are deemed smart enough to play a role in climate change debates. These are the same youth that its government will not allow to drive, vote or buy alcohol and other restricted items. It was common sense that determined these guidelines a long time ago.  Now it looks on helplessly when these kids who ought to be allowed to enjoy a good part of their youth playing dodge ball (now prohibited during school recess) or develop critical thinking for themselves are practically driven to believe their world will end soon.  They've been protected by safe spaces, made to fear "toxic masculinity", confused by the expanded definition of gender and bathroom assignments, etc. School system, prohibited from allowing prayer to insure that freedom of religion is adhered to, also abandoned civic classes from its curriculum, yet it may endorse one set of political views that are passed on by its teachers to students with unrelenting barrage and impunity . 

Common sense is looking for refuge in adult minds because they should know better. But even that is now a notion that is in doubt. Higher education that used to provide a mental vaccine against the decline of common sense is no longer home to reason. The same adult  minds now use their local legislature to re-label a felon, an ex-convict, as "justice involved" person or, get this - a "returning resident".  How nutty is that? This whole idea of sanitizing these labels is exemplified by the San Francisco legislature to, among other things, identify a juvenile delinquent as "young person impacted by the justice system".

Below is an actual quote from the San Francisco Chronicle:  

"The language resolution makes no mention of terms for victims of crime, but using the new terminology someone whose car has been broken into could well be: “A person who has come in contact with a returning resident who was involved with the justice system and who is currently under supervision with a history of substance use.”


In other words, someone whose car was broken into by a recently released offender, on parole with a drug problem".

Got that? This is what it has come down to. The rabid social liberalization of labels really does nothing to improve people's lives, whether you are a victim of crime or a criminal. Another laceration to common sense.

I do not wish for this to happen but imagine when we get to the point to call a murder victim as a "life-deprived person" while the murderer is a "life-terminating agent". Let's not be too sure to get this past the liberal wagon ride. Does it make the homeless feel better about their situation if they are  labeled instead as "persons in-between-residency", such as someone who is in between jobs is for the moment - jobless?

We mourn the deathly malady that now plagues common sense.  If it must indeed succumb to the inevitable extinction then the least we can do is to eulogize it.

Common sense.  You had a good run.  For centuries you kept civilization upwardly mobile; you gave birth to the Magna Carta; you provided us the platform from which democracy was launched; you made sure decency triumphed over barbarism, hard work is rewarded for those who toiled, sympathy over greed and compassion was more sensible than hate. In short, you made civilization a workable environment within the bounds of reason, free of the touchy feely that we are now enjoined to adopt, lest we offend someone or something. 

We bid our goodbye. We celebrate the memories for keeping us within the guidelines of true sensibilities and a balanced view of a logical world by improving the human experience for centuries but, alas, we are offered in your stead the fantasy of safe spaces, the crying rooms, university curriculum and programs that defy critical thinking by launching a multi-million dollar program to study mindfulness, creating the equivalent of a "Kindness Institute". 

We can only ask or wish that when perhaps we finally get tired of all of these, that you will come back. If and when that happens humanity will be well served once again. If not, then indeed this is goodbye.

Nature's Socialist Nature?

I woke up one morning thinking about those three words, linked exactly that way and in that order. How this popped into my head was kind of a mystery. What I remember was that the night before I may have either heard someone in a political talk show, or was it someone in my dream, who asked the question, "Is God a socialist?"

Far be it for me to feel guilty of heresy to repeat the question here, it is what it is.  A question that I can't let go even if I wanted to because it was like an itch that needed to be  scratched.  That even led me to jumble the three words in another way, such as the combination that says, "Socialist's Natural Nature"? Or, should it be "Natural Socialist's Nature"? The last one has a nuanced meaning or interpretation of the same combination as the first one but there is something about it I can't truly figure out. The reader may have better luck with it. I'd like to move on.

I begin by asking, "Is the ant or bee colony a natural socialist structure in the animal kingdom?" Of course, the two examples have other derivatives in the animal kingdom as well, such as the organization exhibited by the wolf pack, a pride of lions, or a pack of Africa's wild dogs, or the uniquely different animal organization that mimics human monarchy - a cackle of hyenas.  I begin there because there is no better phenomenon to connect them all to "Nature's Socialist Nature".

Both the bee and ant colonies are run as a dictatorship, perhaps  a benevolent one. The queen dictates everything and though mostly immobile on its own once it starts the colony, its size massively bigger than any individual bee, it needs to be carried by several if the need arises.  But it knows everything that is going on. It knows to lay eggs that will develop into worker bees, or more soldier bees, or drone-caretaker bees that take care of the larvae and the young and general house keeping, depending on what needs to be replenished. It gets the largest share of food being brought in every day. Everyone else gets the minimum needed, just enough to sustain them for a day. In other words, there is no equal sharing of resources being gathered. The queen is the CEO, the fat cat of the colony.  Why does it need all the care and nourishment?

And so it comes to this. A well run colony is like a well run corporation. The CEO, the fat cat, who could be the founder of the company, or the hired gun to run it, has the responsibility no different from the queen which, in fact, is the one to start a colony. Absurd, you say? Well, the worker bee brings in nectar one sip at a time. It does not do or is it required to do much more than that. The wealth of the colony - the entire beehive of honey - is cared for by individuals with different jobs.  The colony is defended by soldier bees, no different from how a nation is made secure. We've talked about what the worker bees do, but more importantly the workers are the foundation of the beehive's economic system. The drone caretakers do pretty much everything, no different from the government services (from education, general services and maintenance of the infrastructures, etc.,) paid for by taxpayers. 

Simplistic analysis, perhaps, but we know there is no equality of benefits (no income equality to speak of)  because why? Each of the individuals contribute at different levels and the worker bee does not begrudge the queen's benefits because, again, why? The queen dies, the colony dies. But  it is a very simplistic view indeed because the colony is actually a single organism. Yes, a single organism in reality. It is the very same analogy in why the brain, a mere three pounds of tissue, only 2-3% of the average human body's entire mass gets 25% of the energy extracted from its daily nutrition. The human body, made up of various and many parts, is not a socialist organism. The finger nails, perhaps more relevantly functional than our hair, both get the same kind of nutrition but they do not get the same amount or quality that the pancreas or liver gets.


Does that answer the question, "Is nature, by nature, socialist?" Does it answer, "Is God a socialist?" If God is, why did God make mountains and molehills, why not give every nation the same climate, equal geographic domains, equal access to the oceans, farmlands and mineral resources, etc. An all powerful God could have made us all equal in stature and have exactly the same skills and talents. We have those questions and a host of other queries. Many of them will remain unanswered.  

But does nature abhor socialism like it does a vacuum?

Socialism is a choice, yes, and we know a sector of humanity at one time or another had tried it and others still trying to become one. Presently, several nations run their governments with different shades of socialism, some a bit more than others. Communism - what we'd call the more severe form of socialism - had been tried but it had suffered a fatal retrenchment of some sort. For all intents and purposes, Cuba seems to be the only true communist country, and  a very poor one, while Venezuela is today's greatest and most glaring example of socialism horribly gone wrong. Venezuela is the blinking red light that says, "Whoa, don't you dare go this way!" China is Communism In Name Only (CINO, for short).  It still selects its leadership through the Communist Party system - a monolithic one and unchanged since the days of the Mao era. The country at large - particularly in the rural areas, farm lands and factories, small and large communes - is very much run and controlled based from the original model of communism. 

One huge difference that made China an economic power that it is today, despite the fact that it still self-identifies to be a communist country, is that it runs its economy by modeling it after a capitalist system, with all the trimmings of blatant government support and intervention and a compliant citizenry, always worried and weary of an unforgiving system.  That is its biggest advantage over a purely free market system practiced in the west, which is a free market system by and for a free people. Will China and its brand of hybrid communism be able to sustain itself in the long run? Time will tell. Will capitalism, a mere century old, survive? Only time will tell.

Nature is not a socialist. God is not a socialist. I think we can put that to rest. Or, can we?

We are in the midst of a gathering storm. It might seem just like a swirling wind, apparently incoherent for now, but it is gathering momentum. It is getting more and more difficult to dismiss  like it used to be at the mere mention of the idea just two decades ago. The danger is that people will begin to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch. More than that, the enticements are getting more and more believable, or at least the growing number of people are allowing themselves to be deluded by the delusions proposed by a handful  (for now) of potential aspirants who want to run this country waywardly to the extreme left of liberalism.  

If we are not careful, the idea of the free stuff - free college, universally free health care, freeing up debt, guaranteed income, income equality (a nonsensical idea) - is the very anti-thesis to real freedom. Lest we forget, when a government can so easily give away free stuff, the same government can so easily take it away.  The worst part is when government uses that power to give and take as a tool to subjugate the people - the very same people that sustains it.  As a matter of fact, let us not forget that the very idea of giving away free stuff is a zero sum proposal. Where ever and whenever the government gives away stuff for free to a group of people, it is actually taking away from others. That government, believe it or not, when it gets to a critical point, is a government that will cannibalize itself.

This reminds me of a short essay I wrote in 2016, "99 Cannibals and 1". That is where I end this note but, so you know, I begun thinking about this in December, 2016 with:

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2016/12/99-cannibals-and-1.html

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 paraphrase Shakespeare's Mark Anthony from "Julius Caesar", the candidates all came to bury the climate change deniers and praise every conceivable initiative towards zero emissions and to warn us - this country in particular although notably absent were criticism against the rest of the world - on the now common refrain about existential threats the whole world is about to face in just a matter of less than two decades, twelve years being the favorite time frame.

And once again, climate deniers - anyone and all who do not support the policies of these candidates and their supporters - are doomed ignorant, backward looking, uneducated, unsophisticated citizens.  Their votes or their opinions are those only belonging to this country's ill-advised taxpayers. Taxpayers nevertheless, so their share of payments towards running the government is welcome but they do not have a voice because what good is it to listen to the ignorant and the unenlightened.

Let's see how the ignorant and the unenlightened can stand up to the nobility of the candidates that included one who espoused a holier-than-thou kind of theology when he said,

“If you believe that God is watching” as humanity spews pollutants, “what do you think God thinks of that?” he asked. “This is less and less about the planet as an abstract thing and more about specific people suffering specific harm because of what we’re doing right now. At least one way of talking about this is that it’s a kind of sin.”

That is supposed to be from the enlightened and sophisticated, highly educated by one of the nation's foremost houses of learning - the elite university.

Let's see how well enlightened they really are. Or, how the ignorant, the uneducated and the simple minded can be more pragmatic than they are given credit for.  Let's see how the enlightened knows their geology, paleontology or if they even have a working knowledge about the adaptation of species.

Let's talk about "existential threat". As a species, the modern human emerged about between 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. If earth's history is written in a book over a million pages thick, the entire history of our  species, modern human in its present form, would belong in the last single page.  The rest of all the species that ever lived (from early micro-organisms to dinosaurs and the woolly mammoth) would be in about 750,000 pages.  T-Rex and all the dinosaurs that ruled the earth for 160 million years will actually have just several pages dedicated to their story. It is boundless human pride to think of how truly important we are, or how truly powerful we are to be able to manipulate, or impose a particular opinion or agenda towards controlling climate.

Read a quote from a PBS (not exactly a bastion of conservatism) TV program:

"Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct. Many of them perished in five cataclysmic events. According to a recent poll, seven out of ten biologists think we are currently in the throes of a sixth mass extinction". 

Let's be clear about one thing.  Those five cataclysmic events occurred eons before there were gasoline combustion engines or coal fired electric generating plants.

Another thing to be clear about is that species survived each time, albeit only a tiny, tiny slice of living organisms did and we're one of the beneficiaries of their latest survival.  Why we survived is called adaptation - by our early ancestors.   

Let's digress for just a bit. There is quite a bit of emphasis on diversity and racial identification in this day and age. Let's talk about that. The enlightened may not know this but the primary reason we have a diversity in skin pigmentation, hair color, the color and shape of our eyes, our general skeletal differences among different people were all due to climate change. We must never forget this.  Why do you think we have the scale of skin pigments track the different zones where people live? It is no coincidence that pigments vary from dark to light based on the zone's distances from the equator. Darker skin protected our ancestors from too much sun while those from temperate or colder climes needed fairer skin to absorb Vitamin D and other benefits of sunlight where it is less. Had there been people living then in what is now Minnesota or Montana and similar latitude anywhere around the world,  when these places had a tropical climate millions of years ago we would have had a different configuration of races.  Climate changes at the time that they occurred  and the localization of their effects around various parts of the globe over thousands of years created the kind of diversity we see today.

Existential threat.  Let's talk about that. Talk to the spirits of species that went extinct because of one climatic change after another. And what about natural disasters brought by severe and wide spread volcanic eruptions (spewing carbon and sulfur a billion times more than produced during rush hour in Mexico City and Beijing and Mumbai and LA combined, lasting for centuries).  Species survived. There were no cars or hydrocarbon-fed industries to blame then.

67 million years ago an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest hit what is now The Yucatan Peninsula. Talk about climate change that followed. It wiped out the dinosaurs.  Mammals which before then barely eked out a minimalist form of existence emerged to become the dominant species. From their development came to be our ancestors. We were brought up by climate change.

I actually have a hundred pages worth of musings on the subject but I will spare the reader. Let's get to the bottom line. Many, or rather  politicians and their elite luminary sympathizers and supporters,  will want to insure the extinction of thousands upon thousands of jobs held by people who only want to feed their families or to pursue a livelihood. The same politicians will want to forever alter how businesses and the economy function, because climate change ought to be halted, arrested or re-directed according to ideology based on their own sense (likely to be wrong) of world history.

The so called existential threat is that which will put an end to common sense. Or, an end to the existence of particular industries that employ millions of people world wide without regard to how we the people will pay for the programs against perceived threats according to a class of people pretending to be the enlightened ones. Let us not forget that predictions of the very same nature we hear today are mere reiterations from as early as three decades ago.

I only have this one scenario to leave with the reader. What if, God forbid, the San Andrea's Fault does create a major tantrum around the area that straddles both mega cities of LA and San Francisco. Major rescue supplies among other things will be water. Will rescuers be allowed to come in with truckloads upon truckloads of water in pallets of plastic bottles, as were the means to help every disaster anywhere in the world? Think about just that one little thing. I hope that will trigger a few other thoughts about common sense. Today, only hydro carbon vehicles, both by land and air can get over quickly to rescue the affected.  One prominent candidate wants to put an end to gasoline combustion engines. But they have no clue that electric vehicles will get their nightly charge from the electric grid connected with an umbilical  cord to generating plants run mostly on hydrocarbon, over a third on coal, a small percentage on nuclear. 

Here is the biggest kicker of all. If solar and wind power were to replace all the generating plants cited above, an area the size of the entire state of California will be needed, cleared of all trees and vegetation, where solar panels can be laid out flat, end-to-end, side-to-side, and for wind turbines to stand tall. That's about right, plus every citizen's fervent hope and prayer that the wind blows and the sky is clear. Every day, 365 days a year. That is for the USA alone. How many of these solar panels and wind turbines will have to be manufactured for the entire planet?  But wait! Are we forgetting how and where to get the amount of energy to mine for steel and aluminum and copper, transport the ore, smelt all the metals needed to build the structures, manufacture all the solar panels, batteries (lithium has to be mined too). Think, which comes first - the chicken or the egg.  

The death of common sense is the biggest existential threat. An army of thought police, political correctness and a wayward sense of balance will be the end to open discussion and cooperation from all minds, if only one voice is allowed to speak.

If it's too good to be true ...

Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower twice, had to have been, during his time and for much of the 20th century, one of the greatest practitioner of the criminal art defined by the expression, "If it's too good to be true, it probably is".  He also had to have been the most innovative and daring of all con-men who ever lived. He did successfully "sell" the Eiffel Tower once, and tried to do it again when the first victim was too embarrassed to go to the police. The second "sale" almost succeeded and when he was found out he fled Europe and came to the U.S. where he continued to make money the only way he knew how. His daring was so boundless that he conned the most ruthless criminal mind of that era - Al Capone. Ironically, his many scams finally caught up with him and was sentenced to a 15 year imprisonment in Alcatraz - the very same institution that hosted Al Capone later, for a tax evasion conviction. But Lustig died of pneumonia in a Springfield, MO federal prison before he could begin his sentence  in Alcatraz.  Lustig's life story was legendary and worth reading about, notably in, "Handsome Devil" by Jeff Maysh.

Of course, the con game is one of the oldest criminal tricks man invented and perpetuated against his fellow man.  Although, the very first account of "too good to be true" had to have been the one found in Genesis 3 verse 4 of the Old Testament on the temptation of Eve on eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge:

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.  For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  (KJV)

By the way, the fruit was not an apple, and the devil did not manifest as a snake. Just to be clear, because we ought to realize that a snake, without any prehensile hands, would have been totally helpless in handling an almost round-shape fruit, let alone plucking one from the tree or even vocalize anything above a hiss. {The serpent, word used in the Bible, was likely to describe a deceptive creature or trickster}.  The devil would have been better off impersonating a Capuchin monkey.

The expression, "If it's too good to be true, it probably is" originated from early 16th century. Perhaps now considered almost a cliche by some or still an intuitive adage by others, it  gets handed down from one generation to the next, often interpreted with subtle variations. It had a lot of truth back then and, common expression or not, it continues to be true today.  

The expression has had several iterations in over centuries of usage from different English speaking regions. One example is Mark Twain's, "It's too good for true, honey, it's too good for true" (Huckleberry Finn, 1884)..." 

But what exactly is the correct way of phrasing it?

One argument says that it should be, "If it is too good to be true, it probably is not". Grammarians come in and the debate raged on for awhile. I think either one can be correct. The adjective phrase at the end of the sentence either describes only the "too good" part and rightfully claims that it  "probably is not", or on the other hand, if it describes the phrase "too good to be true" then it is also correct to say that "it probably is" too good, for it to be true.  Got that? Anyway, I digressed.

We regularly get warnings from various consumer protection agencies about fraud, scams, get rich quick schemes, etc. We are made aware constantly because these universal scourge is always evolving. It is able to adapt with changing technology. And there is always a new generation of people to take advantage of and an ever growing batch of the aging population to victimize. The latter is the saddest part because the older the folks get, the more vulnerable they become. And less likely they are able to cope with or adapt to technology's fast moving pace.  

Too good to be true scams remain singularly-themed but come in so many flavors that authorities are overwhelmed to keep up. Here is a classic example - one variation of many - that had been going around for years. We either received one of these directly or indirectly know about it from friends and co-workers who got it from an email inbox:

"I'm an Nigerian Prince and I am facing exile, but I have a fortune of $50,000,000.00 that I need to get out of the country. Please give me your bank account number and I will transfer the money to you. Thank you kind person! "

It can be as simple and blunt as the one above while others were woven with such care and intricacy of a John le Carre novel. But many more were so grammatically challenged that people would forward them for their entertainment value. 

Then there are the telemarketers and the pressure selling that are forced upon those who attend innocuous-sounding presentations that promise free stuff or show tickets or sweet selling by con-artists, etc. It may not seem that way but TV commercials, internet ads and pop-ups can be subtle messages of stuff "too good to be true" as well. So much money is spent on all of these enticements but they may pale in comparison with how much is spent within a short period of time on political campaigns in this country.

It is estimated that 6.4 billion dollars were spent in the 2016 election (presidential and congressional contests combined). Of the 187 countries in the world ranked by annual GDP (gross domestic products) the bottom 31 countries produced goods at below 7 billion dollars in 2018. The U.S. spent that amount in just a few months of a presidential election year.

In other words, U.S. elections are, if it were a cottage industry - which could be exactly that -  is enough to sustain one of 31 countries for a year, or fund several nobler programs for those in dire need in this country.

Elections, everywhere we look or seriously listen to, is almost always a cacophony of promises that can be  regarded mostly as belonging to  the category of "too good to be true".  And both sides are guilty.

We'll refrain from expounding on the subject more than had already been said here. Suffice it to say, too good to be true in politics is a repeating theme, not worthy of more than one refrain in the chorus line we've already seen and heard multiple times.

So, the larger question is why we, who populate the top rung of the evolutionary ladder, with intelligence so far and above the ceiling which our nearest animal relative can never break, is prone to the siren song of the flimflam man or woman. It is obvious men do it more than women, so the conman is the appropriate job description. (Let's not even talk political correctness here, usually from the same group that protests to remove man from every word in the English language).  But that is enough we can manage to say about that as well. 

Gullibility and skepticism, trustful and incredulously leery are two traits we naturally have but why do so many succumb to the lure.  And often, the victim can be almost complicit in the completion of the crime. I'm sure the most rewarding part for the conman, pardon the pun, is that the victim has a lot to do with closing the criminal deal as the perpetrator. Remember, in the con game that is of the category we are discussing, the victims are never coerced with the barrel of a gun or any weapon for that matter. The victims and their money were parted with such accord that that businessman in France, a wise and seasoned entrepreneur, was too embarrassed to report his gullibility to the police.  

Why, indeed, do so many fall for the world's oldest criminal manipulation? Is it that often we try to reflect  our goodness in the personality of the person doing the con? Or, is the lure often the shortest distance to the reward with very little effort or investment from the victim?  In other words, the victim is deluded into believing something to the exclusion of even a modicum of disbelief or incredulity? Or, simply put, is greed so empowering as to be unencumbered by a simple thought process or suspicion? It could be one or all of the above.

Take the example of the mouse and the cheese on the mouse trap.  The poor creature is not equipped to question that there must be a catch to the free cheese. And caught it is. However, the next mouse that comes upon the trap with its fellow creature caught in it, studies have shown, will not be lured by the same trap later, unless the trap is thoroughly washed clean of the scent of a dead mouse, or a new one is employed.

Humans, on the other hand, based on our history, never seem to learn the lesson of the free cheese. In fact, the more free something is, regardless of how incredulous the lure is, the more the message is received. We hope not, but the siren song of free stuff is used by both politicians and con men because it does continue to work. Why do you think this country has so much free entitlement in its socioeconomic system now, that were absent just decades ago?  The pioneering spirit that used to be propelled purely by hard work and optimism that built this country is now overwhelmed by so much free cheese that politicians are so willing to promise free stuff over and over. That is because it works. Soon when it is too late, when the population is gripped by the realization that all those free cheeses were not free after all, is a lesson learned in futility.

So, remember that when it is too good to be true, it probably is. 

Happily Ever After?

To live happily ever after is what life is all about, isn't it? But I have to wonder.  Is that true of all life?  Or, is it only true for us homo sapiens? Or, is it even a reasonable expectation? And then there is the question of who and more importantly what defines happily ever after. Of course, it is just us who can think in this manner. 

What is happily ever after for an impala, for example, when it worries all the time about the leopard, or a pride of hungry lions, lurking among the tall grasses. It is likewise not even always a happy moment for a cheetah after a heart pounding, lung-exploding chase to catch a gazelle because a band of marauding laughing hyenas or a platoon of wild dogs are within a scent away of the fresh kill. A lion king is never assured of holding on to the pride that he fought so hard to get and keep.  There is always one young strong unattached male waiting to barge in, or worse, two young brothers in search of a pride of lionesses to wrestle away from an aging male.  Life, for these and many other animals, does not have any, not even a tiny bit, of potential for "happily-ever-aftering", to quote King Arthur in the Broadway musical, "Camelot".  Animals don't retire to pursue a hobby or do volunteer work. They merely expire, often abruptly, without ceremony, speeches or the obligatory retirement cake.

The zoo is the only place where a wild animal is guaranteed safe space. But clearly, it may be a sanctuary, but we know, the animals know, that that is not living happily ever after, either.

But then, in our world, the one we've taken millennia to develop into a civilized society, does happily ever after really exist? We need to be honest about answering this question. Please read the quote below.

"I've often wondered what it would be like to win the lottery and suddenly have more money than I could ever reasonably spend. I won't win because I don't play, but of course most people who play don't win, either."

----------------------- William von Hippel  (Discover Magazine, March 2019)

Mr. von Hippel wondered further, talking about those who actually won the lottery, "They may be driving a nicer car, but their mind is focused on the fact that they're still sitting in traffic."

Now, now Mr. von Hippel. Would you rather be  sitting in traffic in an eleven year old Chevy, in dire need of a tune up with an air conditioner that barely works or  in a Bentley, on an ergonomically calibrated supple leather seat, breathing HEPA filtered air-conditioned air, listening to jazz over 16 Dolby-tuned surround speakers driven by a 200 watt amplifier? Which would you rather be in?

Let's back up for a minute. Is "happily ever after" really real?  More properly, is it defined as a destination, a final place, the ultimate physical state, or is it a state of mind? Or, none of these.

Factual or not, Alexander the Great, at age 33, supposedly wept after realizing he ran out of places to conquer.  There is no record of it  anywhere, attribution from Plutarch the Historian notwithstanding, nor was it credibly fact-checked by film script writers when Hans Gruber  said it in the 1988 movie, "Die Hard". Alexander died at 34. We don't know how old exactly but he died young.  That much is true.

This question, many would consider as mere musing, is actually far from trivial. Seriously, what is everyone's ultimate motivation in life?  Job interviewers almost always ask the question, "Where do you see yourself five years from now, ten years from now?" Hardly, not even once, I think, that an applicant is asked, "How do you see yourself at retirement?" Or, "What do you like to do when you retire?"  I think that is more insightful than a 5 or 10 year plan. Maybe. But that's not a bad thing to ask a future employee. It could be put into the mix for a different window into the applicant's outlook. 

Back to the original query. Sociologists, psychologists, HR experts, your priest, minister, or rabbi, more importantly your significant other, will likely disburse differing opinions. We'll stay clear of those. But where else can we turn?

Von Hippel did look into that. He writes for Discover magazine, so he viewed it from the context of the natural sciences, more specifically, how this aspiration for a happy ending is driven by evolutionary impulses, or by natural selection. 

In the article was a German adage, "Anticipated joy is the greatest joy". Let that sink in for a minute.  

Every parent in the Western and every Christian world knows just how much energy their kids put out in anticipation of Christmas morning. Hanukkah, while not at all similar to the Christian tradition, is accompanied by anticipation as well, perhaps not to the same degree but it too had changed over time as to have digressed from its original meaning. Anticipated joy is further enhanced by the Christmas countdown, including knocking off time from celebrating Thanksgiving to give way to Black Friday that now even begins on Thursday night. But what happens when all the gift wrappers are all strewn over the floor, and all the anticipation quelled? I'll let the reader be the judge.

Sandra Hayes won the Missouri lottery that was 224 million dollars in 2006. This is what she said about the very people she loved whom she described as , "turning into vampires, trying to suck the life out of me". Winning obviously did not buy her happiness. And, I'm sure the reader has heard or read about other similar unfortunate anti-happily-after-ever outcome.

The clamor for happiness is universal. The emotion is real. Von Hippel wrote that the evolution of species is all about being re-productively successful. Propagation of the species takes precedence over everything else, to the exclusion of the individual's real or perceived happiness. Take this with a grain of salt, if you like, but it is just another rationale for why the aspiration for happiness is a universal instinct, or that it has a natural driver rooted in our genes. "Happiness is a tool that evolution uses to incentivize us to do what is in our genes' best interest".  In fact, he said that lasting happiness would actually get "evolution to lose one of its ways to motivate us". A rather cold assessment but let's move on.


Amazon knows about "anticipated joy". Next time try to remember and note the stages of your state of mind from the moment of  "researching", and narrowing down your choices until you get to click that "Place your order button".  You not only get the confirmation almost immediately but Amazon knows to get you on that high level by enabling you to "track your order".  This lengthens and sustains that part of your brain where "anticipated joy" resides. It continues until that package arrives. Then what? You're ready for the next moment of "anticipated joy" that Amazon is counting on.  Now, this is not true of everyone, for sure. But do remember this. There is something about "Anticipated joy is the greatest joy".  

Did the founding fathers knew it then when  the Declaration of Independence was conceived? Take the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". It is still being debated today as to the meaning of "pursuit of happiness". Many claim that it means to chase after, others say it has more to do with the attainment of it as a goal at the end, while others take the idea of practicing happiness as part of everyday life as opposed to going after it like some kind of distinct material entity, such as a prized trophy rather than a state of mind.  Whatever the case, or wherever the reader stands, happiness was conceived by the founding fathers as one of equal value with life itself and liberty.

We know, of course, that happiness is not something that can be bottled or packaged. It is as different as the beholder may decide what it actually is. Sandra Hayes, the lottery winner, clearly realized it cannot be purchased. In fact, money or the acquisition of a sudden windfall made happiness an impossibility. In her case, she knew she was a lot happier before than after winning the lottery. 

Here is something to consider. A two dollar lottery ticket is the cheapest form of entertainment money can buy. You see, until the numbers are drawn and just before you throw away the now useless non-winning number you were filled with anticipated joy.  Make note though that the minute you spend a lot of money on lottery tickets, such as those who spend a great portion of their weekly check for the Power Ball at its peak, no longer get the anticipated joy. It is trepidation instead - the anticipated sorrow that a bunch of tickets worth a bunch of money will plummet in value, negatively worse than Venezuela's Bolivar (at an inflation rate of 1,698,488% 2018 est.). So now we know entertainment can be bought cheaply with two dollars. Ironically, unlike a front row seat at a concert, a bunch of money on lottery tickets buy nothing but a nerve wracking, woeful episode. Buy it cheap, if you must, because two dollars might be worth the anticipated joy.  However, one should realize that it is money thrown to the wind, 99.999% of the time.

In my woodworking I notice that I am happiest in the midst of doing the project.  Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the finished product but it is always while working on it that gives me most joy. And time seems to flow more quickly in the midst of working on a project. The quality of joy in the process seems to evoke more tingling sensations than during the moments spent viewing the finished work. We all know that sitting idly makes time move like molasses; working on something makes the minutes and hours go in haste. 

Therefore, happiness must be a derivative of the process, not some kind of destination to go after. It is not a physical entity but perhaps one that is dimensionless, without form but one that only an individual may recognize. It cannot be dictated or forced onto anyone by anybody. It could actually be a regimen that can be practiced. It could be a means and an end in and of itself, outwardly visible only through the individual. It is practiced and can be measured in doses of optimism or one defined by a generally positive outlook. Optimism is one of anticipated joy, pessimism is one of dreadful expectation. If one must engage in the pursuit of happiness, take optimism along. Unharness any pessimism and leave it behind before it drags everything the other way.  The wrong way.

With that, science or not, I think happiness can indeed be practiced. And so we can conceivably make it a form of exercise, and with practice we could get better at it.  As with any kind of exercise, it must be done with regularity.  I'm just talking here because obviously happiness is immeasurable but are we not able to see it brightly when we see someone so ebulliently exuding with it?  Yes, an individual will feel it, we see it, but happiness' greatest feat is to be different and varied in form and intensity, and it always depends upon the individual. Most of all, happiness is one we will have to choose to have on our own but it cannot be forced on us by anybody or by you on others. However, mark this. The other feat happiness is capable of doing is that it could be infectious and this is the only instance where one may choose to be a carrier and the infection you carry is sought rather than avoided.

So, be a carrier, or if you see someone who is, get close and decide to be infected.

We Just Don't Know ... We Just Can't Know

Consider this. You were at the cashier's check out register. You noted immediately from the moment you laid the items down on the conveyor that it was not going to be a friendly encounter. The cashier didn't make eye contact, and she was almost manhandling the merchandise. You try to make small talk. It's an effort that usually works because that's the least anyone can do to lighten someone's day who obviously had been on her feet all day. No response of any kind. If anything her face looked even more dour. When she handed your receipt she didn't even look at you. No "have a nice day"; instead, you were dismissed as if you were an inconvenience. You walked back to your car wondering, "Was it me or that was the worst service experience ever?"  You wanted to forget the whole thing but then ...

You wonder. You just had to. She was having a bad day, obviously. Did she just break up with her boyfriend? Was the store manager particularly harsh on her today? Or, was she a single mother worrying about her three year old at the day care because the kid had a bit of sniffles and clearly did not want to be left there.  You just knew there had to be many reasons why the cashier behaved the way she did. But you don't know. You just can't know, could you?
  

Forget the mysteries of the universe. You might have a crack at understanding the "inverted yield curve" in the world of finance or you had recently acquired a working knowledge of general astronomy but finding out the answer to what was bothering that cashier is something you can't know. Well, you could have tried if you went back there and talked to her. But you will not. You should not. And even if you did, you can never be too certain she will tell you the truth.  So, you just have to accept that it is another unknowable mystery.

Now, on your drive home you were stopped at an intersection. Waiting for the red light to turn, you looked to your right. Under the awning of a bus stop stood another youngish woman with a little girl next to her. The girl was looking up at the one whom you assumed was her mother. The woman was crying uncontrollably, shoulders shuddering. There was a couple next to them who were quite oblivious to the woman and the little girl. The couple were giggling over whatever it was on the guy's smart phone.  The light turned, instinctively you took your foot off the brake and onto the accelerator and off you went. Like most every driver, you drove with very little thought to what used to be a very complicated, synchronized manipulation of muscle and machine when you were first learning to drive. Now it was like riding a bike. Your mind is able to preoccupy with other things while simultaneously maneuvering a 2500-pound vehicle on a busy street. But again, the mind just had to engage on that now pressing other "something else". 

The cashier's problem was now replaced by the plight of the woman and the little girl. You can't shake off the image of the girl looking up at the woman whose tears you imagined had to be flowing still. And you remember she didn't even have a tissue in her hands. The image of the giggling couple kept intruding but surely the crying woman and the girl proved indelible. This time the mystery is definitely unknowable. You're now 6 blocks away from the intersection, the bus must have already come to pick them up. Another mystery unsolved.

In that short span of time the human experience once again reigned supreme over everything else that is going on in the universe.  7 billion people means an almost infinitely complex exchanges that no  algorithm can ever predict or evaluate.  For example, why people do what they do, or behave the way they do, or say what they say.  Otherwise, timing the stock market, predicting election results, or understanding the mind of a teenager, would by now be an exact science. 

Well, it comes down to this.  Yes, the whole world would now seem like a smaller place than it used to be. Though the globe's circumference has remained the same, there are now close to 7 billion people alive. The number was 1.6 billion in 1900. A century and a half before that, in 1750,  it was only 700 million. Modern technology in communication and social media had created this illusion of a much smaller world, yet we seem far apart from each other. But we should realize that the entire human experience is still mostly local even when the entire world is within a screen shot of a video-conference, a 24-hour news cycle, or a culture now constantly being altered by You tube, Facebook, selfies, and the pervasive ubiquity of the phone camera in ultra-high 1080 pixels of resolution.

How are we to alleviate the descending disorder of our societies when the internet is now not so much a net as it is a barrier to what used to be a lot more genuine human experience? Are we going to get to the point when  indeed we just don't know, we just can't know much about those within our neighborhood or those within touching distance of our everyday life.

The two extreme examples above are clearly beyond what is allowed in our human experience to assuage.  Even if we tried. But there are within those stories the hope that compassion can be revived or re-strengthened, and sympathy for the cashier's travails can still be had or if the couple at the bus stop could have paid just a tiny tad more attention to the mother and daughter instead of quenching their insatiable taste for social media and cheap humor. 

The tools for communication may be instant and all encompassing but are we really communicating?


Well there is something we can do. The following is a real story. It is real because I was in it.

A little over eight weeks ago I switched gym location. Same chain but is four miles farther and decades newer. It has a salt water pool instead of the standard chlorinated one, 25 yards long instead of 25 meters. This meant swimming an extra two laps (20 to 22) for a 1000 meter swim. But the more significant difference was that none of those I had become friends with at the old gym will be there, let alone familiar faces I had gotten used to and mine to them.

Another huge change and the one that really mattered is the zero wait time to get a lane. The pool is hardly a busy section of the gym. After just a few days of going, there are just a handful of regulars that come at about the same mid-afternoon hours. And the pool, with or without swimmers is as quiet as "an undiscovered tomb" (to quote Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady). Folks were not talking to each other, to my dismay, but it was to be that for the first days I've been coming.  So, there was one big (and I mean big) tall Caucasian (Swimmer A, or Sa, for short), another who swims with a snorkel, web-gloves and fins, and special-looking goggles (Swimmer B, Sb), a petite middle age lady who was clearly a high school librarian (Swimmer C, Sc). Everyone did his or her swim quietly, no one talking to anyone.

Like most of you, the reader, I had opinions about each one of them, and I'm sure they too had some about me. So, each of us just don't know and can't know of each other. The idle mind got busy. Sa does not look old enough to be retired, so he must work nights. Sb must be a "new" swimmer or the snorkel makes breathing a lot easier and webbed gloves and fins are simply reasonable swimming aids. Sc must be a housewife, to make the particular swim hours. 

I was wrong in all three of my opinions. It just shows again that "we just don't know, we just can't know".

One afternoon, I was walking along the length of the pool to set my gym bag on a bench at the other end. I was jolted to hear someone who was already in the water greet me good afternoon in Filipino! It was Sa (the Caucasian). Smiling he said, when I turned, "I'm no Sherlock Holmes but your shirt says about a Philippine Island resort on it and, forgive me, but you do look Filipino". He, as a young man years ago, did missionary work in the Philippines and had become quite good with the language though not too well now from disuse. That broke the ice and the stillness that permeated the pool before that.  It didn't take long for the melting ice to get conversations flowing among the regulars. 

I introduced myself to Sa and I introduced him to Sb and Sc can't be left  out because she had been telling her friends that she'd been swimming among the "boys club" who didn't speak to each other. 

Sa is currently in between jobs, leaving town from time to time for interviews out of state although he prefers to stay in Texas. His special HR skills and the position he had gotten used to requires special employment match up. Sb owns a Tex-Mex restaurant that he named after his wife who actually manages the place. He was originally from Columbia married to one from El Salvador who at that time when he met her already had a young son. Sc is no longer married but has a daughter who now lives in San Diego with a two year old. Sc does work from home as a writer for the company Human resources department (writing newsletters and decoding government, Federal and State, regulatory rules, etc.). Just like that we all got to know each other.

Sb's son graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and so did my eldest. Sb started swimming at the behest of his cardiologist and wife, in that order, so as to prevent another heart attack. He has some kidney issues too but what is most laudable is that he is staying with the regimen. Sc is struggling with her swimming so I gave her pointers when she asked and she is clearly improving out of sheer determination. Sa, aside from his employment potential updates, also talks about his personal campaign to lose weight. It now looks like he may have to move to Philadelphia.

And so the quiet pool is no longer so. And we all got to know each other without the aid of social media or electronic gadgets.  That's how it used to be. But sadly, even confined to the inside perimeter of a waiting area, as in the doctor's office, or at the auto shop, or anywhere people are in close proximity to one another, conversing is no longer the natural conduit for social interchange because almost everyone is hunched over a world contained within the palm of each other's hands - the cell phone.

Next time, try a person-to-person conversation. There is naturally the risk of a non-response but you'd be amazed at what you could gain, or what you enable someone to gain. It is a win-win when we get to know and we can know when two sides are willing to no longer settle for, "We just don't know, we just can't know".

Most Everything is Just Right

Did you know that right at about this point as you are reading this, everything is going just right for you?  Think about it. Leading  up to this moment everything about you, around you, including your general state of mind, must be just about hunky dory.  Right? Otherwise, if you're hassled, stressed, or there are other things going on in your life that is not right, you will have no time for this mundane, if not entirely insignificant missive. In other words, you have a moment to spare right now, your mind is free from anything urgent because if you'd rather be doing something else then you ought to be doing that right now. This can wait, obviously. 

Actually, yes, this moment in your life is significant for countless reasons. First, you made it all the way right up to about now - alive - and this occurrence is  for  but once, and the rest of all the moments to come are each equally unique and will certainly never be repeated in the future - not even once. Second, a trillion, trillion things, countless uninterrupted moments had to line up just right to get you here. I mentioned in one of my earlier musings that it must take an unbroken chain of cell divisions and countless inherited and discarded traits over millennia after millennia for you to be alive today, because if a break had occurred at any time centuries prior, this past year, or just several moments ago, you will not be here, let alone be reading this. Keep in mind that Ancestry.com and every genealogy website capitalize on this very fact: the continuous and unbroken links of lives, countless lifetimes lived and remembered because, otherwise, what business is there to be had? Every living person, one of approximately 7 billion people on earth alive today, is at the tip of unbroken ancestry chains. Bear with me because there is a point to all of these.

To paraphrase the entire introduction to Bill Bryson's book, "A Brief History of Nearly Everything", trillions upon trillions of atoms,  an infinitely large number for us to contemplate, make up the human body. It took that unthinkable number to make you you. But the atoms in your body don't know that you are there; in fact, they don't even know that they (the atoms themselves) are there. 

Taken individually, any single atom in your body - from your bone marrow to the blood cells made there, to the keratin on your finger nails, to everything that makes up your pancreas and the tissue of your brain - is an inanimate object, unrecognizable and indistinct from all other atoms everywhere. But put together, they've become the whole you. Setting humility aside, for a moment,  nondescript atoms notwithstanding, you may rejoice that there is only one you.


But first, a reality check.  99.9999999 .... % of the approximately 7 billion people alive today don't know you, and neither you  them. But then, unlike the atoms that make up your whole physical body, you are aware that all of the other people are out there, and many of them  think the same way. Why we are aware, why we have this consciousness is a mystery because the parts that make us a single thinking entity do not themselves think.

Let's continue to set aside humility once more. It took a lot of resources from the universe to make you you and just you. Not only that but the process had to be done right and just so. We're still talking about you. Set aside everything else where and when things did not come out right. Because if those happened to you or it occurred in a way that some genes got messed up, or there was a DNA irregularity, or for any number of abnormal events then you may not have the ability to read this. So, set that thought aside and focus on you - the one for whom everything seemed to have gone right.

There is much to feel good about you and you have every reason to be grateful. And if you can't come up with anything at all, right now,  the next few minutes might help.  On the other hand, if you're comfortable with everything going on with your life, there is much more to rejoice about which you may have overlooked.

Here is how the universe made you. I am being inclusive here for those who do not believe in The Creator. First, the elements that make up your entire body originally came from far, far away, and from billions of years ago. In fact, there is nothing "local" about where you came from, if "local" is the entire solar system, which did not even exist long before the building blocks that will make you were already in existence. A long, long time ago from somewhere so unimaginably far, far away, a huge star depleted all of its hydrogen, as giants like it lived short lives that may have only lasted perhaps for only a few million years. By the way, a million years from the context of the age of the universe is a mere moment. As soon as it ran out of hydrogen, creating carbon and then all of it into iron, the star, in an instant, exploded into a supernova. Such an explosion was necessary to create the rest of the heavier elements by compressing with such tremendous pressure and heat the surrounding gases and dust near the star at the time. The iron in your body may have come from the original star but all the calcium, potassium, all the other heavier elements came from that supernova explosion. You are made of star dust. So is the gold and silver in your ring and in your smart phone, the titanium in hip replacement parts, the potassium in watermelons, etc.

You are literally made of recycled material. Yet, you are unique because the possible combinations of the parts that made you and from where each had come from, the specific moments of how you were conceived might have been totally random but a lot had to have been just right to make it possible. This brings us to what scientists call the Goldilocks principle or effect. 

"The Goldilocks zone refers to the habitable zone around a star: As Stephen Hawking put it, “like Goldilocks, the development of intelligent life requires that planetary temperatures be ‘just right’”. The Goldilocks principle is, of course, based on the children's story where the little girl named Goldilocks preferred the bowl of porridge that was just right. Not too hot, not too cold. 

That is how it started for you and all living things around you.  As far as you know, life, as of now, is only known to exist on this planet. That is because everything  happened to be just right. Venus that is too close to the sun is so hot water will boil off in an instant; Mars, a bit farther away, is much too cold for liquid water to exist, except as ice year round. Your earth is where water remains in liquid state under ordinary circumstances that it occupies almost 3/4 of the entire globe.  Air and water and just the right amount of warmth are the major precursors to life as you know it. Your habitat happens to be just right.

Wherever you are, whatever the status you occupy in all of humanity's hierarchical scheme of things, if you are reading this, you had already benefited from a lengthy period in life where most of everything happened to have been just right.  And, yes, there had to have been plenty of moments too where and when certain things did not go right. But lest you forget, here you are reading about it so you must have gotten over those moments when things didn't go right. To have lived this far in time, think that just a  century ago, even the most prolific dreamer of that time had no idea that this was to be the future. He or she never could have realized that their most ambitious list of wishes would pale in comparison to what today you are taking for granted. Just the very thought that you can tap your ideas into a pad and it is instantaneously transmitted over twelve thousand miles into another pad somewhere had to have been the literal equivalent of someone's wildest dream in 1919.

So, not only that everything so far had been just right for you, you have the capability to understand why it is. You see, as much ability that bats and dolphins can navigate by sonar, that the cheetah can out accelerate a Ferrari in 2.5 seconds of time from stand still, or a colony of bacteria can multiply exponentially in all kinds of environment, all of these creatures have no clue why they are able to do so. In just a few keystrokes right now, if you are inclined to do it, you will have more information on the subjects than Madam Curie or Isaac Newton could have had.

You just happen to have it just right. Now, we've set humility aside for some moments now so let our hubris take a rest. Think for a moment that if you believe you are one-in-a-million of some kind, a special person in your own eyes, if you are a citizen in China or India, there are a thousand others like you thinking the same way you do. From the context of the world's total population there could be 7,000 others who could think the same way. 7,000 one-in-a-million type of person is no longer so special, is it? Why this must be said is that to live just right means balancing between the tug of war between humility and hubris. 

The universe may have made you just right but here is something to think about. The Creator made it so, and if you must know, that your place is right in the middle from the hierarchy of size in the solar system, from the tiniest hydrogen atom to the largest structure, which is the sun. From an obscure science article written in Australia, I had read something rather interesting about your place in the overall scheme of things. The average human body, just about 5 feet tall, is right about in the middle. In other words, Danny Devito would be almost in between a single hydrogen atom and the sun. The link to an article below explains it more succinctly. 

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/03/30/2859247.htm

So, there you are, for whom most everything is just right, isn't it?