UNDERSTANDING

 My limited study of evolution convinces me that Homo sapiens have a genetic urge to understand. Both religion and science grew from the earliest efforts to control, in the first case and learn in the second. How does this apply to the current state of America?

It doesn’t seem conclusive to me simply to say Donald Trump is crazy mean and getting worse. I’ve scraped my mind and can’t imagine an historic member of the United States House of Representative or Senate who would not speak out against the current shenanigans. Now there are 217 in the first case and 53 in the second. Their silence drowns out the cries of the hungry, sick, and misbegotten. Why?

Our ancients discovered early on that neither sympathetic (imitative) nor contagious magic resolved emergences due to the weather. Later, science helped by uncovering the causes and developing protections.

It makes more sense to understand that our current crisis evolves not from the mind of a madman but the orchestrations of an international cabal of oligarchs who seek a world more from the minds of Orwell and Huxley than those of Locke or Mill. Their operational strategy follows Capone more than Lincoln. They understand very well how to impose silence and guarantee obsequiousness.

Doesn’t that make more sense?

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 SCIENCE

My life has turned out to be an interesting one. I’ve seen things my great-grandparents couldn’t have imagined. One example comes to mind.

A particular horror of my youth was polio. According to theMayo Clinic, “Polio is an illness caused by a virus that mainly affects nerves in the spinal cord or brain stem. In its most severe form, polio can lead to a person being unable to move certain limbs, also called paralysis. It can also lead to trouble breathing and sometimes death. The disease also is called poliomyelitis.”

In school, we suffered through films featuring youngsters like us confined to “iron lungs” that allowed them to breath despite the ravages of polio. Epidemics would spread through our world on occasion and the fear would come home, even into our kitchens. Someone told mothers that a test for early stages of polio would be to place the child face up on the kitchen table, the head hanging down over the edge. When instructed to raise the head to be even with the body, failure to do so was a sure sign of polio.

It's impossible to explain the terror that accompanied that simple command, “Now raise your head.”

Let us give thanks to science. Again, from the Mayo Clinic “A vaccination effort throughout the world has led to only a small number of cases to occur around the world in recent years. But poliovirus still spreads within areas with low vaccination rates.”

Science also gave us penicillin, antibiotics, x-rays, plastic surgeries, clean water, weather reporting and countless other benefits of modern life.

Sadly, in my state, we have applied the brakes to such progress. As I said, I’ve led an interesting life. Two college degrees, four years of military duty, a marriage in its 53^rd year, and a long career as a fairly well-respected professional brought me to a comfortable retirement, well … a comfortable semi-retirement. I still putter.

After all this, my family’s tax dollars go to schools that teach young Americans that science is not only suspect, but also false, and even evil in the sight of imaginary deities.

A White House spokesperson even coined the term “alternative facts” to justify lying to the American public and threatened loss of access to reporters who didn’t accept them.

Powerful groups, aided by media nonchalance are undermining the use of vaccines such as the ones that have diminished the horrors of smallpox and polio.

It is possible now for a child to complete college believing that the universe is no more than 6,000 years old and science that eliminated polio is the work of some imaginary demonic force.

I've lived and interesting life but not always one that made a lot of sense.

The Evangelical's Dream

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 SCIENCE

Interesting evening. While waiting for some soup to cook I flicked on the TV at random and was too lazy to change channels.

Well let me tell you.

It was a documentary featuring grown men, some with PhDs behind their names claiming that the Jewish book of Genisis actually spelled out dependable and reliable history. Yep. The universe is not billions of years old (Old Age Paradigm “OAP”) but thousands of years old (Young Age Paradigm “YAP.)

The reason, they claim, that we base scientific claims on the OAP is that scientists are too “invested” in it to admit they are wrong. So, facts must be tortured to comply with it.

The documentary aimed solely at torturing facts to comply with the YAP.

Time about is fair play, I suppose.

Of course, there are troubling issues like the dating of rocks based on radioactive decay.

No problem, the YAP scholars say. The Creator simply altered the time frames for radioactive decay from initial to present. A million years in in the early stages of a rock was only a second or two, depending on how busy the Creator was creating the 350,000 species or so of beetles, (Order Coleotera).

That, of course, reminds one of when British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane quipped that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Seems the dinosaurs were around until the flood, that wondrous event that created the Grand Canyon in a few months, not the ridiculously long time espoused by mainstream science (MS). The canyon and other majestic features are just remnants of the flood’s subsiding, according to their better science (BS).

I went to sleep thinking about the fact that, in my state of Arkansas, tax dollars that I have worked hard for are going to private schools that teach BS.

Reason

There’s a saying heard often in my profession that it provides situations in which two people, each with honest intent, can review the same set of facts and come to diametrically opposed conclusions. In other words, there are situations in which reasonable people can and do differ in their opinions.

Today, untold numbers of people will make decisions that couldn’t differ more in logic or potential results. We are suffering from a world-wide condition in which exposure to others is bound to increase—greatly increase—our being exposed to, and contracting, a fatal virus. Some will abide by the warnings of science and stay home behind closed doors, enhancing their chances for survival. Others won’t.

Only a minuscule portion of those on both sides of the prospect have ever read, or put much thought into the Sermon on the Mount. The odd thing is that if each person were to read it, they would more than likely use the Galilean’s sermon on that Judean hill to justify their behavior.

After all, he did say, as reported in Matthew 6:25-34 (NIV):

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[a]?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

There you go. Couldn’t be clearer. We don’t need no stinkin’ advice from physicians or scientists. We are protected as surely as the fowls of the air are protected. Let’s all gather up and go to church.

But wait, comes the advice from another. He didn’t advise the fowls of the air to go seeking the hungry hawk as an act of righteous defiance. In fact, he asked us to, in 6:33 (NIV) “… seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” First things first, they caution. Oh, and didn’t he, just before coming to The Mount, rebuke the Dark One with "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test?'" (Matthew 4:7 NIV)

And they will add, just in case we don’t get the message, that our most honored apostle of the faith will, years in the future, caution his flock in First Corinthians 10:9, (NIV): "We should not test Christ, as some of them did--and were killed by snakes."

What’s a person to think? Maybe this: The Galilean felt his Lord had given us a brain to use. Might he smile to see us trust it?

Off to earn today but here is a fascinating article from Science Daily. Maybe there's hope yet
Click Here.

Connections

Let me tell you about yesterday. You know by now how I try to connect all things. I think it comes from two sources. The first was a line from a Walt Whitman poem I read in the 11^th grade: “There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”

Another reason came up in a conversation last week with an old friend. I mentioned my long-standing love-hate relationship with my military service. (As I get older, it tends more toward the love.) The point I made to my friend, though, was that I learned one great lesson in dealing with said military service. That is that you had best decide, early in life, that you will try to be happy wherever you are, no matter the location or circumstances. Life has a habit of testing you, out of pure orneriness, and you’d best be ready.

Yesterday proved my point. My pal, roommate, partner, and caretaker and I spent an afternoon in the hot August (it waited until September this year) sun mowing pastures and yards at her farm. Then we made a dump-run to finish the day. (Yeah, she’s cheap date.) Pretty much hot, exhausted, and cranky, we stopped at “big-box-orama” and purchased a couple of salads for supper. Now for relaxed evening with a nice drink and the last episode of the first season of Goliath, the one where Billy Bob tries to slay the Giant.

Yeah well. We noticed some slightly darker clouds hanging over our “small-town” residence. “Going to get a little shower,” she predicted. I shrugged. For the umpteenth and yet still futile time, I hoped she’d be wrong. Nope. The rain came as if following orders.

We parked and she went into the house. “Lights are out,” she yelled. That’s Southern talk for “the electricity is not working.”

Well crap.

We sat in the dark for a spell. It was dark in the house. What to do? Wait it out. That’s all we could do. We tried that for a spell and it didn’t make “our socks roll up and down,” as they say.

Then she went outside. The rain had stopped. “It’s nice out here,” she said. Indeed, the sun had “crossed over the yard arm,” but it was till light outdoors.

You know what happened next. We dried the chairs, sat on our patio, enjoyed the lower temperature, observed Happy Hour, told whoppers, and feasted on our store-bought salads. I’ll swear, the misty sundown made her look like the 20-year old I’d married 47 years ago.

It was a magic time, and I wouldn’t have taken a thousand dollars for it.

During breaks, she checked messages on her cell phone. People were apoplectic about the outage. Ideas for revenge against the power company ranged from strongly-worded letters to: “a riot is an ugly thing but I think that it’s just about time that we had one.”

Me? I puffed a cigar and thought about what a miracle it is that puny homo sapiens could devise, through the seemingly outdated concepts of education and science, a system of powering a society in such a manner as we have. My wonder was not why the service was out, but how, and by what body of knowledge, it stays on so reliably most times.

We live in an age selected entitlements, don’t we? While we are all entitled to lights coming on whenever and wherever we flip a switch, we don’t seem to want to expand that entitlement to health care or human comfort to what the Galilean called, “the least of those among us.” Nor do we wish to expand it to provide fresh air upon which our gasping planet depends. And of course, some of our most treasured entitlements, especially the right to vote for politicians of our choice, stand in the path of complete extinction, like our planet.

It’s all connected and a little frightening, n'est-ce pas ?

Saturday Sermon

One of the worst memories of my youth is that of being forced, in grade school, to watch films of children my age locked into what they called “iron lungs.” Those were machines that allowed children with polio to breath. Yes, to perform the simple act that allows us to breath. Invariably, after seeing such a film, my Sainted Mother would decide, after school, to subject us kids to a homemade test for polio. You had to lie on your back on the kitchen table and hang your head over the edge. You lowered it, waited, and then had to lift it. If you couldn’t, you might be headed for one of those machines that allowed you to breath.

Know what allows us to breathe without an iron lung? Green plants do the trick. Trees do the trick. Science-based physical transformation does the trick. I know of no peer-reviewed double-blind study that supports a thesis that “thoughts and prayers” will do the trick.

In the news, I read recently that a sizable section of our population is composed of Americans who “don’t believe in the scientific facts of global climate change.” Believe? Science is not something in which someone believes or doesn’t believe. Goodness gracious. Jump from a tall building and see if the Law of Gravity cares whether you believe in it or not.

When the last tree on earth is cut, as the last tree on Easter Island was, nature won’t care if we don’t believe in the scientific fact of photosynthesis, not even if we declare loudly that we believe in individual property rights more than we believed in survival.

When we start bringing back the iron lungs for children with polio, the disease won’t care that we claimed a right not to believe in the healing power of scientific facts.

Reading the news today, I can’t help believing that the major policy determinant emerging from the current American presidency is the desire to eradicate the memory of President Barack Obama in the manner of Egyptian kings defacing the statues of their predecessors. No matter how sound, or popular the existing policy may be, the goal will be, not to amend it, not to replace it with a sounder tool, not to ignore it, not to admit, however grudgingly, the efficacy of a rival’s work, but simply to end it. “I’ll show him,” sounds better as comic book dialogue than as political policy.

Back in olden days, national policy often changed as a result of thought, dialogue, compromise, and a public administration concept called “satisficing,” or finding a solution, perhaps not the best, but one that got the job done. Yes, sadly, national policy was once settled by means of a bloody civil war. We should all behave in such a rational manner that it is never again solved that way. The signs are not encouraging.

Nowadays, national policy is changed or established by an executive order by one man. Another man has ended dialogue between the two legislative bodies of government. One man in a foreign country controls a broad swath of our foreign policy. Another man in a foreign country controls parts of our free-election processes. One man leading a secret organization led, for many years before his death, our national government’s direction regarding our First Amendment right to exercise religious belief or non-belief as we choose. His successors still do.

I’m sure that there is a name for all of this, but I can’t put my thumb on it right now.

As another hurricane prepares to slam into our east coast, public systems based on science will determine the amount and extent of damage to our native soil. Whether one believes in science or not, transportation and communication systems based on science will be the sole determinant of life and death for many Americans.

Don’t bother asking Hurricane Dorian if it believes in science.

When Trump Tower is under water up to its second floor, the Atlantic Ocean won’t care that an American president didn’t believe in climate change. The National Geographic Society, owned by a Rupert Murdoch-controlled company that owns the 20th Century Fox movie studio, the Fox television network and Fox News Channel, made a prediction. The following photograph suggests, based on our current path, how America will look after the ravages of global warming take control.

A bit of irony that will comfort me until my last hours appears here. As you will notice, the little homesite near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, once purchased by my sharecropping parents will be more valuable than Mar-A-Lago.

“Fear and Loathing …” is a catchy phrase for a book title, but no way to run a country. As author Hunter S. Thompson said, though, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” We bought the ticket, and now we are riding into oblivion in a country ruled by fear and loathing. What a shame.

           

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.” Tomorrow's children won't travel far in an iron lung.

Science eliminated these.
Disbelief in Science
will bring them back.

Why we are who we are

It’s interesting. There are approximately four billion DNA base pairs, or letters, that make up the human genome, an organism's complete set of DNA. Think about that for a moment.

While you are thinking, consider that a typical internal combustion engine car has about 10,000 moving parts.

Oh, you science majors may say that is a false comparison. That doesn’t make it less interesting. Science haters may say that it is false news. They learned so on Facebook. That doesn’t make things less scary.

Anyway, think about how many moving parts must operate in both unison and harmony for an automobile to be a Honda Accord instead of a Jeep Cherokee. Of course, an automobile is not the direct product of evolutionary forces acting unaided upon, as it now seems accepted, the genetic structure of an existing body. That’s why we can put it in working order with 10,000 moving parts.

That’s also why it took three billion DNA pairs and four billion years to produce a modern member of Homo sapiens. Now that’s a lot of connections working at once, the product of what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification.” Some connections serve uses that are no longer needed. Some confuse us. I read somewhere once that there is a genetic mechanism in our makeup that served to keep us alert when we shared the Savannah with creatures that ate humans for breakfast, lunch, and supper. No, it didn’t serve to warn us of danger. It warned us of a perceived lack of danger, for a feeling of safety may be the most dangerous condition of all in a violent world.

In other words, “You think things are fine? Think again.”

Could that archaic mechanism be what makes it counter-productive to tell a person suffering from chronic depression to, “Cheer up. Everything is going to be all right?”

Why do I bring this all up? It evolves (no pun intended) from a sermon I heard yesterday, full of the love and grace that eludes most TV evangelists. It included a story of a young man who was almost suicidal because his 3 billion DNA pairs had produced a sexual orientation that differed from his parents, siblings, and the majority of his peers. Why the difference? I don’t know. Multiply 3 billion DNA pairs times four billion years and look therein for the answer.

Do I understand it correctly from my friends who are fundamentalist evangelicals that we are somehow spiritually ordained to hate a person who has a slight difference in his genomic makeup from mine?

Am I supposed to assume that this slight difference is not the result of DNA but the result of a conscious decision by a fourteen-year old that puberty, psychic anxiety, fear of the future, a lack of popularity among peers, and a world seemingly gone insane does not produce enough psychic terror in one’s life? That, in order to round things out, he or she might just choose to adopt a lifestyle that would make them an object of un-reasoned hatred in members of society, including the adults who are supposed to be in charge?

I once knew an individual who thought so. “It’s a choice,” this person avowed, “a result of our ‘old sin nature’ generated by the Devil himself.”

Our what? Only someone as nefarious and full of venom as Franklin Graham could believe that.

As a side note, this individual assured me that a college professor had taught his class, at a central Arkansas university (not my Alma Mater thankfully), that a homosexual could be identified by a certain bump at a location in a certain place on their forehead.

I can’t find one on mine, although I do think Orlando Bloom is awfully sexy.

Anyway, this post-factual age could get me down if I didn’t occasionally run across thoughtful, caring, loving sermons like the one I saw yesterday. Contact me for a source.

There is hope. Study and believe.

Don't Get Me Started: 11, 2017

 Part of me says, “Oh, how nice for the temperature to be in the 70s on a day when 11º F was the record low and the 40s would be typical.” Another part says, “Oh my. It’s passing strange. Things change and we dawdle.” I have the feeling that I’m like a Titanic passenger who just heard Captain Smith order “Full speed ahead,” as we sail into a documented iceberg field.

“Quick! The Schubert.”

There, that got the systolic back under 200. More on the weather: It’s been like this all during late fall. Further, we’ve had no significant rain since August. As the old folks would say, “It’s drier that a popcorn fa....” Oh, let’s just say it’s dry. The weather is alternatively comforting and destructive. What can we trust? Certainly not our present government, as they say. Oh no, not our present government.

I’m a little older than most. I can remember when science was important in this country. There was no schizophrenia about it within our government. Now we have the idiocy of an official stricture prohibiting speaking about climate change while the entire United States Military operation is busily going about preparing for it, spending millions in the effort.

We have an official government policy of science denial as we provide aid to low-lying coastal cities that are being overrun by the sea.

Back in the 1960s, I read an essay in a college sociology class, the name of said essay being, Our Schizophrenic Society. I’ve not been able to find it lately, but it dealt with how young children grew up facing incompatible teachings, such as an emphasis on honesty by a father who cheated on his income taxes. Or, learning to appreciate, at school, a science that eliminated polio, while facing a denunciation of that same science on Sunday.

It produced a generation that urged respect for the environment and social justice while driving a gas-guzzling SUV 50 miles to work and back each day so their children wouldn’t have to attend school with kids of a different skin color.

In his recent book, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, Bruce Gibney blames many of our current problems on that generation raised in schizophrenia and fed on non-sequiturs. It’s true, no doubt, although the “Boomers” did help end our country’s involvement in an evil and wicked war. Oops, no. Most supported American’s involvement in the war, just not their personal involvement in it.

They were spoiled, greedy, selfish, wasteful, unbridled, shortsighted, and self-aggrandizing. Now they vote conservative and control things. Preservation of their privilege seems to be the primary concern. They can’t control the planet as an entity, though, so they just stopped teaching about it.

In short, it seems as if we’re headed for rocky shoals. I think it’s time to start resisting.

Late Morning Thoughts: December 8, 2017

I remember reading about evolution for the first time when I was about eleven. Sounded interesting. Made sense. I mentioned it to a fundamentalist acquaintance who spent the next hour describing a burning and eternal fire to which a loving deity sent people who believed in science. We only broke off our discussion when we had to go watch a film about kids who lived in iron lung because they had polio.

About a week later, I was still pondering the concept as I was taking a shower. I dropped the wash rag and, without even thinking, I clutched it with my toes and retrieved it. At that instant, I knew it was absolutely true, this science stuff.

Years later, I decided I didn’t know enough about the subject to allow me not to suffer fools lightly. I began to study the subject in earnest. I’ve probably read nearly 50 books on the topic and I’m still fascinated. Would recommend, as a starter, the late Stephan J. Gould’s All about Darwin. Then follow up with Origin of the Species. It’s fairly easy going.

Some specific facts amaze me from all the reading I’ve done. One: the early embryos of an alarming number of species are amazingly similar. Two: many species take the same number of breaths during their life. Three: We humans all start out as females in the earliest embryonic stages. The unlucky ones experience some folds and turns and end up as a an inferior model. The way things work is that genetic malfunctions like that offer some advantage, through modification, to the expansion of the species, so here we are. Four: males are inferior creatures who have to rely on size and finery to attract females. Five: Intelligence appears to derive from the size of the brain relative to body size, resulting a head too large for delivery at what would be full birth maturity, resulting in an extended gestation stage outside the womb.

These are all from Gould’s writings, so if I’m wrong, I learned it from him. I still trust him more than any TV evangelist I’ve ever heard.

Oh, one final fact, since the publication of “Origins” in 1859, practically every scientific discovery has supported Darwin’s theory of descent through modification. (He never actually used the term “evolution.” It came about later). There may have been no more prescient book ever written.

Just thinking, and wondering why we would elect a person to political office that would deny science but use antibiotics when facing a serious illness. Scary. Oh hell no. It's beyond scary.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 29, 2017

With apologies to Richard Dawkins and Joe E. Lewis, there seems to be a “Better Angel Gene” in homo sapiens. That’s good.

No, that’s bad It is usually only activated by disasters of some sort.

No, that’s good. That’s when we need it the most.

No, that’s bad. If it were activated at all times, there wouldn’t be as many disasters.

No, that’s good. At least we have the fear of disasters to bind us together.

No, that’s bad. Some evil forces thrive and flourish on fear.

No, that’s good. Evil opens our eyes to the noble in us.

No, that’s bad. It forces evil to form coalitions.

No, that’s good. It makes it more important to recognize evil.

No, that’s bad. We seem to have lost our skills of recognition.

No, that’s good. It means that it takes a Better Angel Gene.

No, that’s bad. It means that it takes a village full of better angels.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 27, 2017

Contemplating the epochal tragedy in Texas, we are blessed that a highly functioning public agency provided a detailed warning. Further, the existence of an agency standing by to help the victims of the tragedy provides an additional blessing. It bolsters my belief that good government can be a force for good in our country.

Imagine a “libertarian dream” in which there is no National Weather Service (NWS) nor its parent agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Also imagine there is no Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) waiting to provide help during and after such terrible weather events.

I’ve always wondered how Ronald Reagan would have been able to sleep at night watching the aftermath of a 9-11, or scenes of a storm such as the one in Texas. Among other things, he immortalized the phrase, so popular with the greedy and uneducated, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”

Hogwash. Someday we might discuss the perceived injustice of regulations that discourage or prevent people from making catastrophic settlement decisions. For now, though, let us praise the women and men of the agencies standing by to provide some measure of help to our brothers and sisters in the Lone Star State.

The workers in these agencies are highly skilled in areas such as science, mathematics, physics, computer technology, meteorology, statistics, public administration, and planning. They stand among us as some of the best and brightest. Their service to us, as I say, provides a blessing. Their skill and education form a solid first defense against natural disasters. Their agencies, along with an educational system that creates the expertise, remain national treasures.

Pity future generations when these same agencies are managed and operated solely by individuals who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, climate science is a hoax, and that it could rain for 40 days straight across the entire planet, but a man and his sons could build a boat that would preserve two members of every species on earth, even, according to some, a pair of the species Tyrannosaurus rex.

That’s why, in my opinion and mine alone, I think we need to, for future generations, elect better people to run our government, including people who believe in education and facts.

As for our national ship of state, again I recommend the immortal call, at end of day, from my beloved United States Navy: “Sweepers, Sweepers, man your brooms. Give the ship a good clean sweep down both fore and aft! Sweep down all decks, ladders and passageways! Dump all garbage clear of the fantail!”

Indeed.

Growing Up Southern: July 31, 2017

I was sickly as a youth. They were forever forcing needles into my arm or noxious liquids down my throat. Illness never was a pastime for me. As a result, I can count my serious illnesses as an adult—ones you would miss work for—fairly easily.

Now, hangovers from too much fun, muscles strained from kicking at dogs, fatigue from obsessive jogging, malnutrition from smart-mouthing a wife, and other self-induced idiocies don’t count, do they? Okay.

Let’s see, I had severe cold upon checking aboard the USS Hunley in the winter of 1968. I had the flu somewhere around 1989. I mean I really had the flu. Knocked me out for over a week. It was not a case we see so often when someone has a bad cold and elevates it to flu status. I had the real thing. Trust me.

Speaking of colds, you seldom hear about them anymore. We euphemistically call them “sinus infections now.” Why? I’m not sure, but I suspect it is so we can demand antibiotics. They have no effect on a virus, as we know. As we should know anyway. There is the placebo effect, and prescribing them gets you out of the doctor’s hair. So, there.

I think I read somewhere that each case of the common cold results from a separate virus. Once we have had a specific one, we become immune to it. If that is true, I had so many as a youth that I think I used them all up. That one I mentioned in 1968 was the last.

Other than the flu once, I did pass two kidney stones. The first instance took me to the emergency room a year or so ago, whereupon a couple of drips of morphine made me as unconcerned as a politician doing dirty work. The second? Well, it occurred a few weeks ago. I recognized the symptoms that time and used profanity combined with a gritting of teeth to see me through. All in all, the morphine was better, profanity cheaper.

Why am I telling you all this? It’s because a I have knee giving me fits and it really pisses me off. That seems to be a common response when one isn’t used to, and doesn’t enjoy, being incapacitated. Anyway. I decided to employ my normal treatment for pain: just working through it. This included profanity, stretching, walking, and picking peas, a chore that requires a good deal of stretching and bending.

That made it worse. I guess I’ll have to let someone look at it. I always remember the words of our beloved country doctor, though. “Those boys in Little Rock like to cut on you.” I think I may tell them that I’m “a screamer” and friend to scads of lawyers. Then they might want to think twice about it.

Oh well, I am lucky for 50 years of good health. I reckon a little attention won’t hurt.

Growing Up Southern: July 29, 2017

I learned about true love in the third grade. I’m talking absolute, undying, ephemeral, unspoiled, transcendent love. I guess I was eight or so.

The object of my awakening was a little older, early twenties I guess. She taught our class, and was named “Miss Roundtree.” Her father was some sort of state politician, but that meant nothing to us. Oh, I had rivals for her affection, no doubt, but that just made me work harder for it. I’m sure she noticed the way I went back over the blackboard an extra time when I was the “erasure monitor.” Diligence is important to a woman.

She had to notice when I put an extra flourish in writing my name, demonstrating a flair for good penmanship. I’m sure she knew that I was the only one who didn’t torment Linda Sue Castleberry.

She even remarked on how my life’s ambitions changed with the subject her teaching.

As we learned to read, I knew I would be a writer when I grew up, and told her so. When we studied nature, I announced my plans to become a doctor. When we moved to math, I was proud to announce plans for a career in engineering. I wasn’t sure what engineering was, but when she told us about a friend of hers who was good in math and became an engineer, that was good enough. I’m sure I would have announced plans for roofing houses had she mentioned it favorably.

But it was science, namely astronomy, that captured me. She had a special affection for it and passed that to me. She made the night skies a place of wonder and amazement. Hooked, I was.

I got off to a rough start in my obsession when I gave a report to the class about a planet that could be “seen with the naked eye.” I pronounced it to rhyme with “snaked” and the other kids laughed at me. Miss Roundtree just smiled. She knew a genius when she saw one.

Undeterred, I began counting the days when I could enter college and become an astronomer. That meant quit counting the days until I could quit school and join the Navy. Life choices can prove difficult. But then, the Navy had, itself, supplanted lighting out for Texas to become a cowboy. Plans change.

Anyway, Miss Roundtree soon had me standing out in the back yard of our house, amidst the South Arkansas mosquitoes and other bugs, staring into the night sky to find a constellation or planet. My mother thought I was crazy. I ignored her. What did she know about love, anyway?

A treat arranged by Miss Roundtree provided both the highlight and the ultimate downfall of my astronomical plans. She arranged for the class members to visit the home of a man in our city who had a telescope.

A real telescope. He had set it up in his back yard and we were allowed a brief look at a marvelous view of the moon. Oh, the wonder and fascination. What a splendiferous lifetime of study and discovery lay ahead. I began to dream of moving to a larger city when I was grown, a city where people would value my achievements. Look out world, here comes Jimmie!

It all crashed the next day with Miss Roundtree’s opening question.

“How many saw the moon through the telescope at my boyfriend’s house last night?”

Her boyfriend? She hadn’t said nothing about no stinking boyfriend. I didn’t even raise my hand. Those jilted in love often behave that way, retreating into themselves so to speak. I felt betrayed, fooled, led on. I had learned all those names of planets and constellations to please a woman who loved someone else.

Recess brought no relief. Even multiple scoots down the “slicky-slide” failed to remove the cloud of bitter disappointment. I ignored a smile from Penny Purdue, one of the prettiest girls in class. My mood was that sour. The sky was even dark and stormy.

To hell with astronomy. Falsely let to its lure, I would show that uncaring woman. She had dashed my plans for fame as a renowned scientist. She would rue the day she had deceived me.

Thus sulking, I heard someone call my name. Don Puckett, a sixth-grader, and the best athlete in school, was yelling that his team needed a right fielder. Me? A third-grader? Hot damn! I had new hope for life.

Anyway, there was always the Navy, or maybe the New York Yankees.

Life goes on.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 5, 2017

 To say the weather we’re having is weird is a bit of an understatement, like saying that the Internet is controlling a large segment of our life.

Had anyone told me 20 years ago that, here in the Arkansas Delta, on the fifth of July, we would be hoping for a few days of dry weather, I would have called them crazy.

I think it was a mere three years ago when it didn’t rain all summer. The old folks, in their predictable colorful language, said, “It’s as dry as a popcorn fart.” Now they say, "It's so wet I just saw some bullfrogs building an ark."

The odd thing is that this is the third wet year in a row. This, though, is the wettest. It will soon be the middle of July and folks will not have had to water their vegetable gardens. Some farmers seem to have given up on getting any crops planted atoll.

I see a rain forest in our future, if we have a future. There are those who believe, based on data collection, scientific analysis, and computerized statistical indicators, that we are at the beginning of a massive change in weather patterns that will result in much of the development on the East coast of America, as well as most of Florida, being underwater. That doesn’t bode well for a lot of people.

Of course, there are some conservative legislators who doubt this on the basis of … well they just doubt it, that’s all. They’ve even made it illegal in North Carolina, to make plans to accommodate such change. They’ve enlisted the help of some religious fanatics to assure us it will not happen unless their particular god deems it expedient for some reason or other. They say it would be sacrilegious for us to even worry about climate change.

Meanwhile, our military is spending millions in preparation for the changes.

It is a simple fact that most of us don’t like change. That is to say that we don’t like change unless it may benefit us. Heck, it’s beginning to look as if some of us would tear the whole structure of America down if we saw some personal benefit, or affirmation of internal beliefs, in it. Where you stand on such matters depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before.

It the matter of change, some of my friends like it and some of my friends don’t. And some people are in a position from where they can prevent us from doing anything about it anyway. We’ll just have to live as long as we can with whatever happens.

I just hope that the rain forest doesn’t attract alligators, pythons, or more mosquitoes.

Personally, I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about it much longer. In the great cosmic scheme of things, change doesn’t really care what we think about it.

Just Thinking …

Sailing to Oblivion: June 4, 2017

Fear and loathing is a catchy phrase for a book title, but no way to run a country. As Hunter S. Thompson said, though, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” We bought the ticket, and now we are riding into oblivion in a country ruled by fear and loathing. What irony.

Reading the news today, I can’t help believing that the major policy determinant emerging from the current American presidency is the desire to eradicate the memory of President Barack Obama in the manner of Egyptian kings defacing the statues of their predecessors.

No matter how sound, or popular the existing policy may be, the goal will be, not to amend it, not to replace it with a sounder tool, not to ignore it, not to admit, however grudgingly, the efficacy of a rival’s work, but simply to end it. “I’ll show him,” sounds better as comic book dialogue than as political policy.

There are even plans to renew the nearly 60-year-old cold war with a Cuban president who isn’t even still alive. This poses economic damage, with no benefit whatsoever to the average American, to our farmers and many businesses, not to mention simple humanity.

Then there are the plans to renew the long-failed attempt to eradicate drug problems through incarceration. Of course, this plan has another element in addition to pure spite. The idea seems to have germinated from the mind of a man who has substantial investments in private prisons.

The idiocy of this policy becomes more evident when one considers that voters, even in a conservative state such as mine, are increasingly voting to legalize the use of marijuana. And too, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to name more than a few people one knows who have never used drugs in any form. As the movie character said, “I’ve been to college.”

In the news, I read yesterday that a sizable section of our population is composed of Americans who “don’t believe in the scientific facts of global climate change.” Believe? Science is not something in which someone believes or doesn’t believe. Goodness gracious. Jump from a tall building and see if the Law of Gravity cares whether you believe in it or not.

When the last tree on earth is cut, as the last tree on Easter Island was, nature won’t care if we don’t believe in the scientific fact of photosynthesis, not even if we declare loudly that we believed in individual property rights more than we believed in survival.

When we start bringing back the iron lungs for children with polio, the disease won’t care that we claimed a right not to believe in the healing power of scientific facts.

When Trump Tower is under water up to its second floor, the Atlantic Ocean won’t care that an American president didn’t believe in climate change.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Ain't that the truth?

Reconciliation: 23

Old sayings are just that, but some are true, like “The chickens will come home to roost.” I’m afraid we are due for some arrivals in this country. These comings home may not be pretty.

For example, I fear we will pay a price for our present obsession with violence. I often udpdate the lessons from Europe in the 1930s and 40s with my own status. To wit:

First, they came for people of color, but I’m white.

Then they came for the poor, but I’m white and male, meaning I was born with enough advantages that poverty was easy to avoid.

Then they came for the women who dared speak out, or take control of both their destinies and their bodies.

Now they are coming for news reporters. I’m not one, but my courage will be tested for I have friends who are, and I respect the profession. Will I stand tall when the time comes? I wonder. I even made up this little bit of doggerel to express my concern:

I can’t but wonder how brave I’ll be.

When they come for my friends, but not for me.

Oh, they’ll come for me eventually. They’ll even come for my friends who don’t share my political beliefs. You see, they are all good people who simply have a different view of governance, and good people will surely be on the list. Goodness and decency are so rare as to make headlines lately.

Another returning “chicken” will be the price we will pay for the coming annihilation of public education in our country. My darkest nightmare is a world like that described in The Time Machine, the 1895 novel written by H.G. Wells. In his imagined world, there exist, above ground, the gentle but clueless and helpless Eloi, food for the underground monsters, the Morlocks. It is a world reduced to ignorance and violence.

Why one of the richest families in our state, along with the owners of our only statewide newspaper and our present Secretary of Education, would seek a future of this sort is a mystery. Perhaps it would leave just enough room for computer operators and worker drones, along with the very rich and the mercenary warriors necessary to guard the belongings of the rich. Who knows?

I’m just glad I won’t be part of it.

In religion, I fear that, in this country, we will pay a price for the abandonment, by so many, of the Social Gospel in favor of the Prosperity Gospel. The life and words of the Gentle Galilean can be twisted into a powerful and destructive tool by the greedy and uncaring.

We are seeing now the beginnings of the chickens of “hate media” coming home to roost. Those with any knowledge of history are increasingly horrified.

But why worry? The planet is going, by all current indications, to get us first. That chicken isn’t coming home to roost. It is coming home to exact the Sixth Extinction.

Oh, and have a nice Sunday.

Reconciliation: Day Nine

 I’m not quite sure why, but there is lots of controversy today about our LGBT brothers and sisters. Seems everyone has an opinion. I know that I have mine. And I will try to understand yours.

Mine isn’t based on religion. I think religion should be limited to a spiritual examination of one’s own self and not of others. Again, I learned that from The Galilean.  That said, my opinion, if that’s what we may call it, derives from science. If Watson and Crick led us anywhere, they led us to a glimpse of how vastly complicated is the human genome.

Although I’m not smart enough or educated enough to understand the makeup of the DNA structure, I can, barely, glimpse its marvelous complexity, and see how a minor connection here and there can determine our sexual preferences.

It’s that simple, again in my opinion. Some of us are born one way and some another. We all, as fertilized eggs, start out as female. In fact, Stephen Jay Gould wrote that all mammals start as amazingly similar fetuses. Phsycial diversity occurs with devlopment, as should mental diversity.

 Anyway, a less fortunate (as ranked within our household) fetus will undergo a fold here and a wrap there and eventually produce a male of the species. I don’t find it hard to believe at all that somewhere in this amazing process, a sexual preference is formed that transcends the male-female preference orientation. Moreover, I can easily imagine how a fetus of one gender becomes transplanted as that of another gender. Don't know why. It just does.

It is just science, I believe, not sin, not a conscious choice, and certainly not a fit subject for the judgement of others. It is a wondrously complicated Universe in which we are fortunate enough to exist for a brief millisecond, and the quiet contemplation of it, it seems to me, is much more satisfying than spending time nourishing our prejudices, whether from the Bible, the locker room, or the coffee shop.

You may believe differently. I will try to understand that, to the extent that your belief is based on sound analysis, and you don’t allow your belief to escalate into some sort of hegemonic torment—physical, legal, or mental.

Marriage among the similar sexes? If you wish to attend a church that doesn’t allow that, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution allows it. Remember though, marriage between two people is a fairly recent idea. Will and Ariel Durant suggested that marriage was originally devised, in Western civilization, as a mechanism whereby a man could possess a legal claim to, and protection of, his harem.

I don’t think my wife would buy into that concept in this day and time. My point? Ancient concepts of morality can, do, and should change.

Finally, for those who may find their images of what same-sex partners do in the privacy of their bedrooms distasteful, think of something else, like, maybe helping the poor, or the least of those among us. It is accepted dogma that one can’t think of two things at once. We should all try to choose wisely.

As for distasteful acts, consider how the orchids must feel when they contemplate what goes on in your bedroom under the guise of procreation.

And, for the individual who once reported the claim by a professor at a major central Arkansas university (no, not mine), I have found absolutely no evidence whatsoever that one can actually determine if someone is gay by a bump in a certain spot on their forehead. Sorry.

Just thinking.