Seventeen Dollar Dinner

 

It was a very good dinner but in a world where a huge portion live on two dollars a day this might seem excessive.

 
 My son and I were clearing out the house, part of the estate of a relative, and I remarked; “If this had been Bangladesh there wouldn’t be enough left to haul away.” This is all going to the land fill. There are things that are being recycled: paper, fabric, clothing, and house hold goods, but what is here is one of two forty cubic yard dumpster, and these dumpster will not hold it all. There is enough to fill another. This house is a modest two bedroom house: kitchen, dining room, one bath and living room with a basement built in mid twentieth century.

My remark about Bangladesh may have in a modest way been flip, but it is remarkable how much we can afford to bury.

think of it as carbon sequestration

per capita energy used: 2 or 400, the range of energy use among societies

good times on a sinking ship (changing planet) D.C.

The Virtual Conveyor

  The Virtual Conveyor

Our lives move on: naturally, slowly, quickly. The world stands still and we are dragged by the currents. Anything that we keep, we cling to. Memory is a hazard: to remember anything that is beyond the horizon, out of sight.

two cars up on blocks in the yard, two memories...

Alcohol is poison but in small enough quantities it only kills the things we need dead.

We need hope even if it requires us to ignore the facts. D.C.

A Summer’s Evening

Sam

Sitting at dusk in the early summer evening on the porch Sam came to me on that porch.

He appeared as if an apparition. Sam had no long and tortuous crawl from the primordial ooze. He owed no long line of creatures that preceded him his eventual being. He on this pleasant summer night seemingly against all probability condensed, fully formed in an instant. All the treads of the universe that pulling tight where they crossed became Sam. It was as if it was a dream, a natural place where the most unusual of circumstances were the most usual. Sam was familiar and friendly like an old friend, a friend I had not seen in some time. We had catching up to do but no shared experience, friends in common but none who knew both of us.

By the time I had mustered the composure to speak, Sam spoke; “I feel I know you, but I am sure I don’t. I’m Sam. I’ve come, but I’m not sure where I am. May I sit? I feel as though I’ve come a long way.”

I found myself in an odd silence, wanting to speak but without the means, the sort of odd paralysis that comes in the waking consciousness after a deep sleep with the profound inability to move.

“What the hell just happened here? Are you lost?” As I woke from my waking dream not so much agitated as confused, I thought I had merely lost track of the moment and found my self confronted with a stranger.

Sam stood, moving back so slightly.

”Sorry, sure, have a seat. I must have dosed off. You look familiar.” I said.

He sat down on the chair across the table from me. “Thanks.” He said. “You didn’t look asleep.”

“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.

Jake, the kid down the street, road by on his bike shouting as he went by, “Who’s your friend?” I looked up as he road out of sight. I did not have a good answer.

“What would you like: Coke, Pepsi, iced tea. I have some ginger ale, tonic water. Some booze but not much selection. No three two beer but some other. I like the Pepsi and so does Jake but Georgia who stops by occasionally likes the Coke. I’m sure she would come without the Coke but I have it anyway.” I said, running on as if I was being paid by the word, uncorked in some peculiar way.

“Ginger ale with ice, thanks.” He said.

“I’ll be back in a minute. Make yourself comfortable.” I said. The screen door shut with a thud behind me, punctuating my departure. I came back with a glass in hand expecting not to find Sam, a dream I had shaken with the short walk to the kitchen.

“Thanks.” he said. “I have so much to tell you.”

We talked through evening well into night, sat in the moon light as it rose, revealed the mysteries of the earth and of the heavens as if they were as plain as tomorrow’s grocery list. These were the satisfactions of life’s questions that no human had ever heard, from someone who he had never known and always knew. We sat quietly to consider the whole of evening for a few moments. Sam stood as if to stretch, shake off the dampness of the night, and then said, “I must be going now.”

At that moment the threads of the universe went slack and Sam left back through that pleasant summer night and I sat in the moon light.

Before I could collect my thoughts he was gone.

As clear in the moment that everything was that I had first heard this past evening, it was now only as a smooth round stone among so many other smooth round stones. D.C

Tangents

He did not come with a spear or a bulldozer or Armageddon to move the world. He came and stood without intention in one place and not another and shifted the coarse of the wind and the water and the tilt of the axis of the planet ever so slightly, in a way that could not be known except that he was seen there. D.C.

*****

It was a can of sparkling water. It gushed forth when opened. It sprayed on to the dash, the windshield, and the occupants of the car as we raced down the expressway. “It’s alright. Don’t get excited. It’s just carbonated water and a little flavor, no sugar. It’s not sticky” came her advice. “I don’t like it. It’s not doing what I want. It has come to kill me.” was his retort. “Oh, I see. It has nudged the world in some imperceptible way so that you will die of causes seeming unrelated but because of that otherwise harmless spray of foam?” came my response. “Yes.” he said. D.C.

*****

Human culture has become the master of amplifying their power and intervening intentionally in small ways that have big consequences, and when the planet changes in ways that are unfortunate we are surprised. D.C.

*****

(photograph from http://www.beaconsprings.org/)

This is of a project on fifteen acres to rehabilitate the soil that was poorly used and the building of a house to illustrate a better use. D.C.

True or False

It does not have to be true to be valuable.

It does not have to be correct to be valuable.
It cannot be incorrect and be valuable?
It does not have to be true to be valuable.
It cannot be false and be valuable?
It does not have to be right to be valuable
It cannot be wrong and be valuable?
valuable: legal, ethical, moral – in that order
valuable: correct, true, right – in that order

It does not have to be true to be valuable.

Paranoia is Easier than Hard Work

18 November, 2011

A week ago the weekly discussion group’s topic was conspiracies, mostly Freemasons. My take on conspiracies is that generally conspiracies are more about the fears of those who believe in conspiracies than the actual occurrence of conspiracies. It is easier to believe someone has done something to us rather than to believe our circumstances are arbitrary or maybe by our own neglect. No doubt there are groups who conspire to aspire secretly to power and wealth by subversion and corruption but our need and ability to see conspiracy much outweighs the conspiracies to be found (but mostly it is about sex and money). Secrets are not kept well. There is always someone who wants to brag. Our willingness to believe in the grand conspiracies may make use blind to the mundane and close that is more fundamental. We see the world with cultural minds. It is in part about the we and the they in the world. (Just because someone is paranoid does not mean that they, the ubiquitous they, are not after them.) Or maybe, we are afraid of that which goes bump in the night.

A traditional Scottish prayer

From goulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord, deliver us!

This week’s topic was foster care in Native American communities. The attendance was half or a third of the previous week’s attendance. A problem that needs attention and one that could yield to some concerted effort, but does not pique our interests in the way nefarious, dark forces of the world are planning our demise do. Most of what we see as conspiracies is human behavior without overt, planned evil. The residue of culture and institutions is the kind of evil that is hardest to deal with. I knew an old Jewess who had fled Germany during the time of the Second World War. She said, “The universe conspires against us.”: not humanity, not the world, “the universe”. The Native Americans must see the conspiratorial in the way they have been treated.

********************************************************************

Why People Believe in Conspiracies

A skeptic's take on the public's fascination with disinformation

By Michael Shermer, September 10, 2009, Scientific American

After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Who is they?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?”

“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.

Examples of these processes can be found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explains, noting the JFK assassination as a prime example. “Knowing what we know now ... film footage of Dealey Plaza from November 22, 1963, seems pregnant with enigmas and ironies—from the oddly expectant expressions on the faces of the onlookers on the grassy knoll in the instants before the shots were fired (What were they thinking?) to the play of shadows in the background (Could that flash up there on the overpass have been a gun barrel gleaming in the sun?). Each odd excrescence, every random lump in the visual texture seems suspicious.” Add to these factors how compellingly a good narrative story can tie it all together—think of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, both equally fictional.

What should we believe? Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and that all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim. The problem for skepticism is that transcendentalism is intuitive; empiricism is not. Or as folk rock group Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep ...

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Paranoia Strikes Deep."

Vitamin B12

The vitamin that most strict vegetarians go wanting is B_12. That begged the question of how to supplement the want.

20 ea. 12 ounce servings of beer has the US RDA of B₁₂

if :       a 12 ounce serving of beer has 0.12 µg of B₁₂ ¹

and:    the US RDA of B12 is 2.4 µg of B₁₂ ²

then:   20 servings of beer has the US RDA of B₁₂

Dave was outside sales for a local wholesale supply house. He had a customer who on his way home from work every night would buy a case of beer. His wife and he would sit down in front of the television each evening and split that case between them.

Mike was an Irishman here on a green card. He had been here for twenty four years without having been back to Ireland. We tried looking up the street view of the house he lived in in Ireland on Google. They had not been down his road.

Mike on non holiday evenings would drink 12 beers, on holidays he drinks whiskey. I asked him how much he cuts back on the beer for the holidays. He declared he does not. The beer is his base line consumption so the whiskey is in addition: a fifth a day.

He lost his job at the plant when he lost his wife to cancer. He was drinking too much. I wondered how much that took.

The US annual per capita consumption of beer in 2011 was 20.8 gallons as reported by the Huffing Post ³. This is beer only, not spirits or wine. As is most often with statistics or even calculations of quantities when reported in the press once the digits are on the page all else is at best incomplete. The US Census Bureau reported a US population of 311.7 million for 2011 (I take this for all populations counted and estimated, legal and illegal).

Now,

does this mean 20.8 gallons for every adult and child in the US,

does this mean every person 21 years and older,

does this include binging teenagers after Friday’s football game,

does this mean only admitted drinkers,

or is it the average for the eleven guys most frequently found down at the corner bar: probably not those eleven guys.

Dave’s customer and Mike were (if they took no holidays from drinking, drank 411 gallons of beer a year (but still were not getting their RDA of B₁₂)) taking up the slack for me. In any case, I am not keeping up.

1) USDA Basic Report 14003, Alcoholic beverage, beer, regular, all

2) USDA Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs): Estimated Average Requirements

3) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/27/americans-soda-beer_n_885340.html