Being and Becoming....."It's like a Chord"

     For 40+ years, I have used the piano/chord  example to clarify when the understanding of an "emergent phenomena" is perplexing.  I, either gained this from one of Ilya Progogine's books or from someone furthering his exploration of Complexity during the 70's or 80's.  I followed, kinda, while I was mostly trying to make mortgage payments.  I read Gleick's Chaos book and followed some of the Santa Fe Institute stuff, but I never really "got it".  By the 90's I picked up Computational and waited for Wolfram's book and read the musings of smart guys on Yahoo Groups. 

     Fast forward a few decades and now we are awash in examples of "things" that are dubiously real, but are incontravertably present and valuable, i.e. BitCoin and NFT's and, well, GMO's and  immigration reform, and racial dynamics and on and on.  Of course much of human consciousness is still mired in a Mythical/Newtonian Determinism such that "Being" must rule the day and "Becoming" is presumed to be just a managed linear extension of its precedent.

     Summarizing, it seems to me that 50 years into complexity/chaos studies evidencing that dissipative structures naturally arise in our entropic world, we might have embraced more "far from equilibrium" novel arisings. But, then again, in our algorithmic world, moving to AI dominance at break-neck speed, are we seeking to be just better at replicating our "known", or will we be creatively uncertain and at risk in an "emergent unknowable universe"?

Early "Boosters" for "Low Red" Communities

     The Covid vaccine/herd immunity analytics are starting to come in.  The good news is that nationally the US has done better than might have been suspected a year ago....not as good as Israel but better than Europe and most of Asia.  Surprisingly, neither invention, production, nor distribution, proved unsurmountable. Indeed it appears that were it not for "politics" we might well have reached "post-covid" this year.  Over simplified, but it seems that the virus mutating asap just can't stay viable with 75+ percent of the available transmission agents (humans) protected either naturally or by vaccination. Historically these levels were achievable without extraordinary difficulty, but in the 21st Century every aspect of human existence is political, and...  

     Of course these historic viral wars were before the "High Red" people realized that Total Red had been numerically overwhelmed by Total Blue, thereby threatening virtually all historical power structures ending the longstanding culture that had served High Red so well. Not to be vanquished by unequal birth rates and uncontrolled immigration, High Red responded by 50 years of  "psychological/subtle war" seeking by all non-corporal means to maintain their base while containing Blue expansion. No strategies were off-limits....not even Covid Death.

     Blinkist forward, High Red poisoned the vaccine story with religion/conspiracy talk feeding anti-liberal, anti woke, all things quantitative, stories and myths.  Yes, it frightened some Low Blue, but early numbers suggest that urban vaccine rates are fairly Red/Blue equal. Not so for rural Low Red dominated communities. Here in my town, running on fundamentalism and country music, we are having a very hard time selling vaccine.  Perhaps it is that the "daniel/lion" meme is strong, or that disdain for elitism/technology is overpowering...who knows!  

     What we do know is that when, we the vaccinated country people, both Blue and Red, run out of immunity we sure hope that Pfizer and Moderna have a "booster" ready to go...cause there ain't gonna be no "herd immunity" in our less than 40% vaccinated "neck of the woods".   

Combat Cable Competition

      After Trump (hopefully not "between Trump", as I can't even imagine it) the polarized cable warriors have no 3rd party to vilify/deify.  Neither side is able to offer much that is inflammatory about Biden, good or bad. But, in that the show must go on, both red and blue have pretty much turned to vilifying each other. Frequently their segments will offer as much as 30% "competition play-back", always cherry picked for ease of ridicule.

I know no stats on how many viewers watch relatively equal amounts of red vs blue, but I suspect it is small.  Unless you are in this rare group you increasingly not only love/hate Trump, you now love/hate all of the people who align with your enemy, the "communist/fascist" media outlets,  and by inclusion, all of those brave enough to claim allegiance to "my news station". 

I can't remember his name, but a self promoting pundit offered up during the days of Trump fever, "Buckle up buttercup...it's gonna be a rough ride". Frighteningly likely, unless Biden can start a  "foreign contained war" to provide Chris & Chris and Sean & Tucker a minimum ration of propaganda meat....otherwise they may have to cross the line into "being news makers"....  perhaps by pouring enough gas on the Qanon/BLM fissure that cable will get to cover "the rockets red glare" in Kansas City, and Denver, and Birmingham, and all the other places who historically showed plain old boring Americana.

Why?....I guess so we will switch to AT&T and then back to Verizon    

$1.7 Trillion Dollars Later

Forty five million Americans owe a staggering $1.7 trillion for their college education.  Well actually, not really.  You see, 40% of those who owe this debt did not graduate from college....they just hung-out for a few years and then found that they had to pay back $700 billion from High School Graduate earnings.  These stats seem so absurd to my post 75 years sensibility that I would hardly believe except that Elizabeth Warren talks about it all the time.  She wants to cancel the debt.  Might as well, it's like the national debt...it's never going to get paid.  Much of it is securitized through Sallie Mae and it's probably held mostly by Japan and China.  Maybe we could swap Hawaii for full redemption.  After all, we would have 45 million "brights" who could then add another $1.7 trillion to our $1.3 trillion credit card debt. "Forgive us our debtors"...I mean..."Forgive us, "your dubiously educated", borrowers". 

Dr. Shi infected you and me....probably!

     Now that the world is kinda free of "Trump Rule" we're likely to see more "event transparency".  A recent example is an extensive private sector, non-institutional, paper by a respected science researcher, Steven Quay.  The summarized 193 pages is that the COVID-19 virus was 99% certain to have come from research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  The claim is now, a year after first suggested , supported by comprehensive scientific data.  Today's widespread gene technologies seem to make the case, that if not air-tight, is at least as strong as the DNA evidence used for criminal trial convictions.

     Quoted below is just one of a dozen genetic profile patterns that strongly point to a non-natural first cause. 

The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV- 2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.

    Concurrent circumstantial evidence, Wuhan Virology Lab proximity, negative animal infections, stored blood negative antibody evidence, infection tracing to specific hospital alpha-patient, all suggest that this most likely was an experimental therapy event gone wrong.  If so, this was a damn bad mistake, but when half of the world is hooked on "progress", well....shit happens. 

     Maybe even worse than 100 million sick people is the event evidence that humans will pursue covert actions regardless of the consequences.  While Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may well have chosen, if the fact pattern is true, to have alerted the world, most likely it was not within her personal power to have done so.  Yes, Gary Cooper blew up his building, but that was a movie.  Reality check says that we are selfish, social, and tribal, and oh, by the way, we also kill for advantage and sport.

PS:  No doubt other ELE's (extinction level event) will arise on our blessed/cursed little blue planet. Of course, none of us are safe, but to close on an upbeat, we here in the Ozarks are among the least likely to be complicit in offering the world dangerous technologies.  Our worse mistakes will likely be eating too much grease and idolizing Elvis way too long.