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The Single Step with which the Journey into the Noosphere Begins

O.K., so this is an intermediary blog, I am a day or two behind and want to readjust the dates, so I am cheating, writing about writing, which may have some benefit in a Finding Forrester kind of fashion, because as I write to myself about what I would like to write I may discover what that actually is.

I want to write about the power of words to shape thought and how that grew out of the ability of thought to shape words, from the time we were chattering monkeys in tree tops, learning to differentiate between EEEEE!!!!! meaning snake and EE!!!EE!!EE!! meaning bananas, to the time we were nomads on the plains, and if you saw your point man running then you’d better start running, too, and those who were better able to read the signals survived and spread their genes and eventually more abstract symbols, i.e. words, were developed, and those that could use them were probably regarded as wizards, or holy men.  I want to write about how we mimicked animal communication, even bees communicate, distance and direction is communicated by dance and perhaps early scouts, hunters and soldiers, came back and used something similar before words were invented, but once you had words you had oral history and as soon as the 1^st man invented paint, we had bison on the walls and entire species were made immortal, in a sense, at least the concept becomes immortal, if not the corporeal essence but that is a 1^st step, and the more we learned to communicate, we learned to count, and write and give names to things, and again the people who could do such were regarded as magical, the word word I’m sure is related to weird and glamour and grammar and glimmer as well are descended as well from a Scottish word meaning to have arcane knowledge, which at that time very well may have meant knowing how to read and write.

Words are magic.

In connection with this is the idea that any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to an inferior technology as magic but there is another aspect, the invisible active agent, things make things happen that nobody perceives and it’s generally thought of, in magic, that that’s because they happen too fast but is it any less magical when things are happening too SLOW to be conceived, glaciation and deglaciation, the drift of the continents, the pushing up and the erosion of mountains,the changes in the human way of looking at the world which creep on, slowly, generation by generation although sometimes they come much quicker and we all must either adapt or be left by the cultural side of the road.

There is more.  I will return to this subject.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The Health Care Bill, weak as it is, is a major victory for Obama.  He’s up 7 points in opinion polls.  His party is energized.  The Republicans are in disarray.  The Teabaggers are spitting and hurling curses in increasingly impotent rage.

Things look good for November, but the Democrats could still screw it up.  They remind me of a bunch of little kids playing soccer.  At first, like when they are 5 or 6, they couldn’t score a goal if you put them in front of the net with no goalie and the ball at their feet.  Once they score their first goal in an actual game, their confidence soars and there’s no stopping them.  That’s where I hope they are now.

But I’m still nervous.  In the spirit of working with Obama and not against him, here are 3 suggestions for programs which wouldn’t cost all that much but would probably be extremely popular.

1. Cut Israel off.  They can take care of themselves very nicely, I’m sure.

This wouldn’t cost any money at all, in fact it would flat out save a couple of billion a year.  Sure, the money is not given directly but is basically a kickback for American arms manufacturers, but only left-wingers are aware of that at all.

Obama would not lose the Jewish vote.  Of course he would lose the right wing, Israel (Likud) first, one issue type of Jews (Joe Lieberman) but they weren’t with him anyway.  The move would be extremely popular with the majority of Americans (the Israelis stopped being the lovable, plucky underdogs long ago.  1967, I suppose.) and I suspect even the majority of American Jews.

1. Here’s an idea to create jobs.  It would cost a bit to set up, but then it would be in profit very shortly.  100% recycling.  It would be good for the environment, create millions of jobs – low paying jobs, most of them, but isn’t that what’s needed?  Not all of the unemployed are brain surgeons and rocket scientists – and actually provide a new source of raw materials, which could be sold, thus defraying expenses and also used for R and D, so that the art and system of recycling is constantly refined to become ever more profitable.
2. A proper, full scale investigation into the Bush administration.  Start with the financial irregularities, of course, because that justifies it and plenty of big money people might suddenly pony up rather than face prosecution down the line, so the investigation might even pay for itself.  Financial irregularities are just the beginning, though.  There’s the wiretapping, which was probably mostly CIA agents listening in on sex chat lines, the torture and the trashing of the constitution and the Geneva Convention, the CIA outing and yes, dammit, 9/11 which never had anything even close to a proper investigation and even if they prove conclusively that Marvin Bush had nothing to do with it, just the introduction of the circumstantial evidence that exists, pointing out the cozy relationship between the Bushes and Bin Ladens for instance, could irreparably damage the Republican party and guarantee a 2^nd term, with a co-operative congress.

Observations on the Zodiac

My wife and I put out a newspaper once a month called Watson’s World News.  Mostly it’s just an advertisement for our school, Watson’s School of English, and it is also a helpful aid for teachers looking for a lesson plan.

We choose the kind of stories which wind up on various “strange news” sites, there are offbeat inventions and crazy lawsuits and celebrity scandals.  There is very often a story or two about animals who act more human than humans.  I simplify them a bit, and we do translations of some difficult words at the bottom of each story.

Anyway, we also do a monthly horoscope column.  In some ways, it’s the easiest column to write, because I just find a site on the internet that has the prognostications and…well, I wouldn’t call it plagiarizing.  I think of it as an adaptation.  The two most popular sites (in any event, the ones that always come up 1^st on google), astrologycafe and Susan Miller’s astrology zone, write more words per sign per month than I put into my daily blog, and what we have in the paper is a one column, 3 or 4 line blurb.

So, if they say “your energy is high this month and the stars are aligned in your favor.  You should take advantage of any new business opportunities that come your way,” I say “Make hay while the sun shines” or “strike when the iron is hot” and figure it’s a good excuse for the teacher to teach that phrase.

I’m not a true believer but I do toy with stuff like that.  I read Tarot cards, and use the Zodiac shamelessly as a conversation starter.  I took an astronomy class once, and was stunned at how vehemently the professor objected to Astrology.  The great distance between the stars, the fact that they’ve changed position, stuff like that.  He had a point, but the fact that it has nothing to do with the stars doesn’t prove that birth season has nothing to do with personality.

I did the thought experiment with members of my family (I come from a pretty large family) and everybody fit their signs pretty well, with one big exception.  My father was far too consistent and calm to be a typical Aries.  So, 1 out of 9.  Does that prove or disprove the whole thing?  I suppose it depends on how strict and literal you want to be.

There’s one interesting thing that I’ve discovered while writing the zodiac column.  It’s not so much that each individual sign’s fortunes change from month to month, but there are good months and bad months across the board.  For instance, for next month, pretty much every sign said “There will be communications problems after the 18^th.”

It’s logical, I suppose.  If a Leo is going to have communications problems then every Cancer or Scorpio they deal with is going to have communications problems, too.  We do not live our lives in isolation.

So, they phrase it a little bit differently for each sign – as do I – and count on the fact that most people just read their own and ignore everyone else’s.

It’s true, though.  You can check it out.

Why Space Exploration is Necessary

The political debate is swirling around health care.  Sometimes it swirls around taxes, or war or crime.  It does not tend to revolve around the things that are really important to me:  Marijuana and space exploration.

We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on wars, but relatively minor amounts on space exploration, which is beyond a shame.  It is downright dangerous.  Our very existence as a species depends on space exploration.

First, there is the meteor thing.  Meteors enter our atmosphere all the time, but usually they are not that big and they mostly burn up before hitting the ground and, of course, 3 out of 4 land in the ocean.  So mostly we don’t notice them at all but we know, from the very few people who have been into space, that they arrive quite frequently.  We also have geological evidence of some of the bigger ones.

We know that a meteor strike killed the dinosaurs and there is growing evidence that they have caused other mass extinctions throughout history.  It’s only a matter of time until a big enough one to wipe out the human race comes hurtling toward us.  We may get a few years notice, just with the telescopes we have now, but we don’t yet have the capacity to destroy or divert one.  It would be better if we had that technology by the time one is discovered, rather than having 5 years to try to improvise a solution.

My faith is not that strong that there will be a Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum capable of saving us.

Secondly, there is the alien factor.  Now, if there is intelligent life in the universe, it is very, very far away and we are probably not high on their list of priorities.  No more so than, say, a rare species of bird or reptile in a remote corner of our own world.  So, it is unlikely that they will visit us soon but if they do, and we are not yet a space-faring species, we are in trouble.  Chances are, they won’t respect us at all.

If, on the other hand, we meet them halfway, we have a chance of establishing diplomatic relationships on something like equal terms.

I don’t expect it to happen tomorrow, or anytime soon, but better safe than sorry.

Third is the burnout factor.  This is perhaps the most inevitable of the three even though it is a long time away, thank goodness.  In about 4 billion years our sun is going to burn out and die and everyone still living on Earth will go with it.  If we haven’t all left by then, that’s it.  It will be curtains for the human race.  No more Shakespeare or Jack Kerouac.  No more Beethoven and no more Beatles.  Everything we ever did, wrote or thought will be gone, meaningless to the rest of the universe.

I find that unacceptable.

Water

So, I asked my son what topic I should write about and he said “water.”  Probably because he is watching a cartoon called “Mr. Raindrop” which takes the anthropomorphization of cartoons to a bizarre extreme, having characters who represent Earth, Water, Fire and Air.

But I really can’t think of a better topic for a blog post.  We argue about health care, but if we don’t have a clean, reliable water supply we not only risk epidemics but we will all wind up stinking like pigs in short order.  I remember when I was a child my mother, who managed to get us all to adulthood alive, had two remedies for any illness.  Drink lots of water and go to the bathroom.  Flood the disease or poop it out.

I also see water as the key to solving the problem of global warming.  Of course, the problem is caused by too many pollutants in the air but the first disastrous effects will be water based.  Hurricanes, floods, erosion of coastlines, saltwater seeping into the freshwater supply and ruining crops, causing famine and economic hardships galore.

In my book “Perfectomundo” I talked about solving this problem by creating a giant lake in the middle of the Sahara desert.

Of the few people who’ve read the book, many have suggested other ways of drawing saltwater harmlessly inland, such as canals a la Venice Beach (or, for that matter, Venice).

I think it’s a great idea.  It turns normal real estate into high priced real estate, because there is a place to tie up a boat to, it cools the air and makes for a more romantic neighborhood, because an evening stroll is always more pleasant and inspirational if it is next to water, and it can prevent flooding, both by slightly lowering the level of the ocean but more so by not filling the canals all the way to the top, except during times of hurricane and flood.

Of course, we are also on the verge of cheap desalinization.  One takes the word of Dean Kamen with a grain of salt, because Segways have not completely revolutionized urban transport, but his “slingshot” is an idea whose time has come.  If his invention doesn’t actually revolutionize desalinization, somebody else’s soon will.  Then the deserts will turn green and the ocean level will drop.

It doesn’t reverse global warming, but it provides relief from some of its worst symptoms.  It may not, by itself, cure the disease, but it would help us get through it.