"ZOONOTICS"

     Best we figure out how to live in the post "great shift" era.  Will the chaos that dominates this transitional time yield to Trump's old world "Miracle", or will we be dragged, kicking and screaming, into tomorrows "AI  World".  Eric Weinstein talks about the "twin-nuclei problem", i.e. nuclear energy at macro scale and CRISPR at micro scale.  There are unending examples of these tribulations that haunt our future.  An example, close at hand, and new to my awareness is the consequences of AI applications to Industrialized Porcine Production. 

     So......coming soon to your town....."ZOONOTICS"  Our own lives are being threatened by this hubristic optimisation process. The appearance of new human diseases such as Covid-19 – so-called “zoonotic” diseases that cross from animal to human – coincide with our modern era of optimisation, industrialised agriculture and subsequent wildlife habitat loss. One 2014 paper on zoonotic diseases states that 60% of all emerging diseases are now zoonotic with animal origins, and 80% of new pathogens come from the top pork-producing countries – places such as China. With meat consumption growing worldwide, we might just eat enough to snuff ourselves out.

     For detail try:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/behind-chinas-pork-miracle-how-technology-is-transforming-rural-hog-farming

Baby-back Ribs, anyone!

92.5 degrees

The 2020 year has been a record breaker in many categories.  Notable is the extraordinary Hurricane Season.  Today, I heard a Hurricane Scientist offer a fact that struck me as amazing....the water temperature off the coast of Miami on the 4th of July was 92.5 degrees Fahrenheit.   No wonder it was a stormy year.

Like.Dislike.Accept.Reject.Repeat

     Transactional Websites force people to "declare".  We are now well beyond a generation routinely submitting to cyber clarity.  Of course no one wants social discourse to be rigidly explicit...we like nuance, but....it seems to me that a little more "declaration" would be welcome.

     Surely, we cyber literate beings can handle two "online modes", a "nuance mode for heart matters", and a "declaration mode for routine transactional encounters"

     Perhaps it's me, but, it seems that most of my day is wasted by do-overs and misfires because too many people either "can't or won't" declare.  I am not sure what's happening in the 7th grade, but someone needs to be explaining to young minds, no matter whether they're on their way to MickyD or MIT, that all of our lives will be better if we actually knows WTF "we be just sayin"!

Bernie does Paul Revere

      I do not know what Paul Revere was doing before his midnight ride to alert the colonies that "THE BRITISH ARE COMING".  I do know that for the Covid Season, Bernie Sanders has been low profile having acquiesced to the Democratic Moderates.  Yesterday, however, he did his best to set afire the American Electorate with a scathing press conference responding to a week of Trump's casual announcement that he wasn't going anywhere based on something so "within his control" as a "democratic election".  Bernie, much younger than Paul Revere, but equally intense, said,

"THE DICTATOR IS COMING".

     Bernie, was not the only public figure messaging America about this first, in two and a half centuries, assault on what we all take for granted.....Democracy.  Virtually every political, corporate, and social luminary offered  some variation of "this is just not right and we're not going to  let it happen" , but.... alas, five years into, Trump vs. America, with America trailing 0-17, the refrain was somewhere between hollow and pathetic.  Clearly our present institutional leaders are no match for an adversary with power and without moral boundaries.  Except the Michael Moores, the Bill Mahers, and perhaps the Maxine Waters, all of whom are perimeter players, the current "first chair leaders" only know how to color inside the lines...."they know no rule that vanquishes a rule-breaker".  Can you imagine Adam Schiff mobilizing a contra armed force?

      As best I can see, there is no Robert E. Lee, nor Che Guevara. nor al Baghdadi waiting backstage to save America from AUTOCRACY, albeit that that might be a blessing,.....so perhaps the 65+ million likely voters who represent 175+ million Americans should just:

  Trash their absentee ballots

   Turn off Cable TV, so they can't see MSNBS/CNN

Convert their meager wealth to gold

Hoard staples and seeds

  Learn Mandarin and Russian

Suggest that their adult children move back home

Delete the previous, remembering that they already have

Vacation in Beijing, Istanbul, Ukraine, Dubai

Look forward to Ivanka's more rational leadership

chasing '80 and....just sayin!

     Ruth Ginsberg died today and, sadly, her remarkable life was instantly overshadowed by the never ending red/blue smackdown. Will coverage of her now disclosable liberal leaning sway the electorate?  Yes, for accuracy, but likely, only about 3 in 130 million, or simply not at all.  We are all fixed in our biases, regardless of the polling/media motivation to keep the election relevant.

     One aspect of the divide is notably asymmetrical.  All the blues know their voting why's and therefore's. They know categorically that they will pull the "against Trump" lever. For reds the logic chain is much less clear. You hear musings about taxes, and trade and IRAs, and conservative judges, often laced with "Trump Behavior" acknowledgments, but always ending with party allegiance.  

     These "identities" are so strident that they surely arose from a more primal human attribute. My 77+ sense leads me to this:  At some point after Sapiens were declared the winners in the "inter-species wars", Sapiens took up the "strong/weak wars".   Given the lessening species survival pressure, the physically weaker humans found opportunity to develop subtle skills to offset their physical power disadvantage.  Over time the strong subsets competitive advantage narrowed, but their well being improved resulting from their adoption, albeit slow,  of  the weak subsets progressive skills. This fragile equilibrium exists today and although no longer tied to gender or brawn, it, through the mandate of story,  explains why red stays red and blue stays blue. 

     Even when red is lead by a psychopath and blue wants to follow an ageing communist, we all line up with our strong/weak story, a story we chose in our early youth and which we rarely unwind...it's all we have.  Yes, the strong/reds know that they need Dr. Fauci, and the weak/blues know that Schumer and Shiff are just plain weak, but....

     No matter how much we might revere Ginsburg, or need $1200, or cry for the Mexican kids, or love Ronald Regan, or listen to a thousand Bloomberg ads, 99% of us are locked either strong or weak.