California’s intense rain storms finally brought problems to my home. I own a “big” lot (a little over 5 acres) with an old “orchard” of eucalyptus trees that were planted around 1905. The trees were planted in rows to form a 25 acre “forest” intended to be harvested and sold to the Ford Motor Company for the front axles of the soon to be marketed Model T Ford motor car. The Model T didn’t use wooden axles, but it was an attempt by a local entrepreneur to be prepared for a new market. (I heard about this scheme personally from the entrepreneur’s granddaughter, so am tempted to believe the story.) Eventually this forest was cut up into home sites, some 2.5 acres and some 5 acres. I purchased a five acre plot in 1991. Most of the trees have been removed to make way for our house, a small barn (now my shop) and pasture when we had animals (horses for my daughter, sheep for my wife, goats to eat the weeds.)

Last Sunday I was awoken by a text message from my neighbor asking if I heard the load boom in the backyard. I was asleep and missed it. However, in the morning the source of the noise was obvious – my barn was sporting a very large tree out of it’s roof. A 20 inch diameter eucalyptus tree had fallen onto my barn, camper and pickup. The limbs reached over the top of the barn and were resting on the roof-top solar array. At first glance it looked like a disaster.

However, after a morning of cutting and cleaning away the smaller branches and leaves, it turned out that the solar array was unharmed, as were the camper and pickup. I still can’t determine of the roof was damaged because the tree is still sitting on it.

The shed roof took the brunt of the problem, and is still holding up much of the weight of the tree – protecting the barn roof. It doesn’t look like it in the picture, but the crooked part of the trunk is resting on the shed roof. The three 4″x4″ posts holding up the edge of the shed roof were driven straight down into the ground about 24″ like big nails. The tree was very “bushy” and had smaller limbs reaching far beyond the ridge of the roof, and out over the top of the camper on the left. You couldn’t see the barn through the limbs and leaves. Those were all removed in order to lighten the loads on the barn and roof. I think it is going to take a crane or something similar to get this tree off of the barn without causing further damage – the earliest that can happen is perhaps in two or three days because my tree is just one of hundreds in the area.

Luckily it appears that most of the cost of removal and repair will be covered by insurance – I finally get something back from twenty years of paying premiums. I will have another year’s worth of firewood out of this nice big tree.

I have been wondering about the nature of grief. This is a very “hot topic” for me right now because my wife died unexpectedly toward the end of October. It has been a terrible roller coaster since then – sometimes I can ignore my feelings, but then they come roaring back at the most unexpected times. My reactions and actions are mostly a big surprise to me, I don’t know what I expected to experience, but it hasn’t been that – whatever “that” is.

An interesting part of this is that it appears to be so much like other people’s experiences. Instead of “that’s odd” I often get “oh yes, that is what happened/happens to me” when I share my experiences with others who have encountered the “existential” loss of another. By this I mean someone that we have “bonded” so closely with that another that our individual selves have somehow evaporated. My experience with my marriage has been that during the past 20 years or so there wasn’t so my “me” and “you” as “us”. In many ways I had become her and she had become me, and we liked it that way. I didn’t lose my sense of individuality, but instead took on a personality and experience of life that was MUCH fuller, much more meaningful, and much more fun. It took us a few decades to reach that place in our relationship, but it finally happened. Before this happened, I was “me” and she was “her” – but eventually that dichotomy vanished – we were we.

Losing her wasn’t just losing a partner, it was in some sort of very real sense the death of myself, the “me” that I had become “we.” Now I am searching for the next “me” – not particularly with a new person, but someone that is really, really different from the we that I had become accustomed to. When I try to describe this to people, those who have a deep loss agree with me. We end up sharing our experiences, and often share tears. This can be because of a death, or because of a divorce – that doesn’t matter so much because the experience is one of losing a loved one, but more importantly lose “the loved one” – what we had come to believe was “our-self.”

What seems odd to me is that I knew almost nothing about this before I experienced it. Nobody talks about it, almost no books or articles talk about it – it is almost as if the idea that we experience a loss of self, and experience a loss of our place in the universe is taboo. We hear a lot about the five (or four or seven or whatever) stages of grief, we hear about how it will moderate and finally not be such an important emotion, we hear lots of things. We hear that eventually we will be able to feel joy when recalling our lost partner. But, we almost never hear that we will become an entirely different person. We don’t hear that the old “me” will need to be replaced by a new one – whether we like it or not.

This evening a neighbor told me her story of getting an old Corvette and just driving, and driving and driving. Searching for what? I think she was searching for a new “me”. My first instinct when my wife died was to get a trip on a cruise ship to Alaska so I could just sit it bow of the ship and watch the world come to me and fade away. Unfortunately, it was the off season and I couldn’t get ride. I just wanted to sit, think of nothing in particular, and let my body find another “me”.

I wish I had known about some of the things that I have been going through. I wish I had known I was going to be so disoriented that I couldn’t keep track of time or place, so confused as to not be able to make sense of what I was reading to distract myself, so fragile that I could break down in tears at any time and any place. I wish I had know that I was going to have to create a new “me” from scratch, and that might take years (or decades). We never talk about the actual experience, we talk about the “safe” topics, but almost never the actual ones until we have experienced it when perhaps (if we are lucky) we meet someone who is willing to share the “real” experience of grief.

I came across an interesting quote that expresses my idea that making dramatic changes to the way that society operates doesn’t necessarily take a lot of energy or work. Unfortunately, I failed to note the attribution for the quote – so it is I have to apologize to the author (whoever they were). The quote had to do with the difficult task of projecting the future of mankind and society.

“Any prognosis much consider that men can change their angle of vision and therefore change the future.” – unknown

It appears that mankind may have entered up a period that we are creating an existential (in the sense of “existing”) threat to itself because of the high potential of the outcomes of having exceeded the carrying capacity* of the physical world. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of earth in a number of related and interdependent ways. Perhaps the biggest problem is that our population has grown so much that there may be no means of sustaining it into the future. However, it isn’t as simple as just increasing the number of people, the increased number of people is related to our cleverness in finding ways to expand the available resources in order to support the population explosion. However, in order to accomplish this we have had to increase our use of natural resources even more. It is an escalating spiral where growing more food, having more energy, making more goods, providing better heath care, and others results in the ability to have more surviving children, increasing the population. Providing the increased population even more of these benefits feeds back to create an acceleration of the population, and an exponentially accelerating increase of the use of natural resources.

It appears that we might be reaching a limit where pollution in many forms will have the cumulative effect of causing a collapse of the bounty of the earth. Some well known examples are: poisonous chemicals in the air and water, global warming due to green house gases, collapse of fisheries due to ocean acidification, sea level rises due to melting glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms.

The point is that humanity seems to have painted itself into a corner with no obvious ways out. The earth will be fine, after all it is just a big ball of rock and dirt – it doesn’t care about what sort of life exists on it. In fact, it is just rock and dirt and doesn’t “care” about anything. Life will undoubtedly continue, it has demonstrated an amazing resilience in the face of many disastrous events in the past. The life forms will likely change, but that will eventually happen no matter what – that is what evolution does. However, in the short term it might get a bit uncomfortable for people. Humanity will probably survive whatever the future will bring, but it is almost certainly undergo great disruptions and pain in the process. This doesn’t matter in the grand, celestial point of view – does matter to those of us who will experience it.

Assuming we haven’t already gone past “the tipping point” where there is no possibility of avoiding a catastrophe, what is it that keeps us from changing in ways that could avoid that outcome? It seems to be related to a point of view, or as mentioned in quote, the “angle of vision.” We continue to act as if short term gain is worth more than existence of the species. We continue to act as if “our” children will do fine in the future, even though it is obvious that “their” children will likely die horrible deaths because of malnutrition and disease. We seem to think that we can close our boarders in the face of billions of people worldwide being forced from their homes because of climate changes and rising sea levels. Our view is that growth and increasing is an inherent desirable and good thing; that increased usage of energy translates to prosperity; that it is appropriate and expected to take as much as possible from the environment and available resources if this results in increased short term profits to a few without taking into account the cost to others that don’t share in those profits.

What if all of those assumptions about what it means to be “successful” are recognized as merely being our current angle of vision? What if we could change that a little bit so that “success” translates to making a better long term future for all, rather than a better short term presence for ourselves? What if family size and reproduction rates were judged by how help future generations rather than being a sign of ??? (Actually I can’t imagine what good thing a large family is a size of, so I can’t finish that sentence.)

What if all that is required is a change in humanity’s “angle of vision”? What might the new angle look like? Is there a different way to look at the world that results in our staying within the carrying capacity of our earth while enjoying the good things that we have come to expect? Maybe that includes a new definition of “good things” – perhaps changing ideas from “having a big enough heater to keep us warm” to “being warm enough.” The first vision is that one solution works, the second vision doesn’t constrain the approach.

While this seems trivial and obvious, it doesn’t appear to be so. I am currently reading a book by Bill Gates called, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”. It is all about the need to produce more power, using more efficient (and more profitable) means so that more giant corporations will be interested in investing. The book assumes we need more power, owned by fewer people, generating more profits. Always looked to growth as the solution. It doesn’t spend much time talking about achieving the goals (warmth, coolth, food, transportation, etc) using fewer resources and less energy. It is focused on the benefits of “more” instead of “enough”.

What is the new point of view where we can all realize that we are wealthy once we need no more?

*Carrying capacity: noun: the maximum population (as of deer) that an area will support without undergoing deterioration. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/carrying%20capacity. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

There is a major, dangerous, misunderstanding of the relationship between greed and wealth.  For those whose net worth falls within the bottom 50% or so (in the USA this includes those with a net worth less than about $120,000) the definition of “wealthy” seems to be having a net worth of more than a million dollars (“millionaires”).  Perhaps this has escalated to more like $2,000,000 given the recent inflation of housing prices and other things. For this group of people, anyone with over perhaps $20,000,000 is incomprehensibly wealthy and therefore they must be “greedy” (otherwise why would they have accumulated so much wealth?). 

The idea of “greed” or “greedy” describes an insatiable appetite for something, often money, power or both. This definition does not include the evaluation of how much a person has, it is referring to the insatiable desire to have MORE.  It seems to be based upon an opinion of one’s self that their “worth” as a human is based upon how much stuff (or power) they have.  When judging themselves they always come up short, so they always need more.  Greed has nothing to do with how much a person has accumulated, be it very a small amount resulting in living in poverty or very large fortune and living in grandeur. 

Greed is a state of mind.  Several traditions refer to this unfortunate person as the hungry ghost. It is not possible to determine if a person is greedy or not based upon their accumulated wealth, or lack thereof.  Perhaps greed, or generosity, can be judged by observing a person’s actions – but even that is not guaranteed. As they say about a lot of things, “it all depends.”

I think this is an important question because it is related to our understanding of the “proper” way to treat capitalism, private property, and charity. Important questions for society are, “How much should a person be able to accumulate, and how much poverty should they be forced to endure?”  Does Society (meaning the combined opinions of us all) have a responsibility to control either of these limits?  We speak as if compassion dictates that there should be some sort of bottom “safety net” (even though there are many very large holes in that net).  What is almost never discussed is the possibility for a “cap” of some sort on how much a person should be allowed to accumulate.  In the 1950’s a type of “cap” was partially implemented by very steeply progressive income tax rates with a top tax bracket of 91%. Of course, since there weren’t many in this income bracket and the presence of many “loop holes” in the tax codes, the upper income bracket that didn’t actually result in higher income taxes for anyone, but it was in interesting concept.  What it did accomplish was a re-definition of “income” versus other types of revenue, such as “capital gains” to avoid being in the high tax bracket. A way to avoid “income” taxes is to avoid having an “income,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding the benefits of an income.  

Assuming that “greed” isn’t necessarily related to income or accumulated wealth, and allowing for the possibility that wealthy people aren’t any more prone to being greedy than poor people, what could be causing some people to become very rich?  If, perchance, they aren’t driven by greed – what are they being driven by?

What if the problems with the great income disparity and the associated insanity that is driving us to environment ruin and wars are just the consequences of (or symptoms of) shared opinions?  Maybe those dysfunctional opinions are simple, such as the idea that “economic growth” is always the best goal (it is always “good”), and that it is our duty to make as much as possible.  What would happen if we changed those opinions to others? 

An interesting thing about opinions is that they are not real, there is no THING needed to change opinions, they are just dreams in our mind – they are our best (or current) guess about how things work.  Opinions can be, and often are, changed in the blink of an eye – no natural resources, no energy, and no greenhouse gases required.  If so, what might these shared opinions be, and how could they be changed to something more sustainable, equitable, beautiful … fun?  How can we do good and have fun without resorting to war, poverty or the destruction of the environment?

Some shared opinions include: (1) Growth is good, normal and required for a successful economy. (2) In order for an economy to work, everyone needs to be striving to maximize their returns on their investment/work/effort.  The idea is that a healthy economy is based upon a give-and-take where goods and services are traded on the “invisible hand” of supply and demand with everyone having the responsibility to strive to get the best “deal” as is possible.

What if supply and demand mentality is the shared opinion that causes the plethora of problems we see all around us?  What if we changed that opinion to the opinion that all development, changes and actions need to be based upon something else, perhaps achieving consilience in our decision making processes? 

Consilience

In science and history, consilience is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can “converge” on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. (Wikipedia)

What if everyone impacted by decisions had to agree that it is in their best interests to do so? What if things had to be desired, affordable, safe, environmentally sustainable, in alignment with evolution, and otherwise an agreed upon “good thing”, something at least as good without it and preferably better.  In this model workers would have to be protected and compensated fairly, profits would remain “reasonable”, prices would be “affordable”, the environment would be protected and improved, etc.  What if this had to be a unanimous decision rather than one based upon who has the greatest power, or possibly a simple majority resulting in everyone being in agreement that it is for their better good?

I realize that this is a rather utopian, unreachable goal – the organisms on the earth did not evolve to maximize every living entity.  Some get eaten and some eat, but this has evolved in a way that is balanced on the large scale even if not quit so balanced at the individual level.  What humans are currently doing is not balanced at any level, either for the individuals or the global community of organisms – or the global environment.  However, I think it could make a huge difference even if it can’t actually be accomplished, just using this idea as a goal might be sufficient.   I don’t offer it as a prescription, but rather as an alternate goal to always attempting to maximize profits.  I think of this as a goal closer to the idea of “first, do no harm.” Of course, many decisions don’t have a “no harm” alternative, including the alternative of doing nothing.  So at some level there is a risk assessment and acceptance aspect to this approach.   

Conceptually, informed individuals are the ones to decide if the risk is acceptable.  However, there is a major problem built into this in that the scope of doing harm is far greater than directly harming people, and even when the subject is limited to individuals they are seldom informed, and individuals do not represent all of the people impacted by a decision.  In a practical sense, proxies must be used to represent those without a voice (such as the environment beyond just humans), those who have insufficient access to information, and those who don’t know how to understand or interpret the information that they do have.  “Informed decisions” making that depends upon those being impacted is not possible.   Therefore, simple risk acceptance approaches are limited to an extremely small subset of the decisions. 

Our current approach of acting as if anything is acceptable as long as it violates no laws has been shown over the course of human history to not work.  For example, the extremely low cost of petroleum based fuels is the result of a “free” resource (buried oil), fact that the price of oil does not include the total costs created by things such as pipeline leaks, air pollution and global warming.  If the price of these fuels included the true cost that society pays for their use (now and in the future), then they would not be economically viable and we would have found other, less costly, solutions.  Expecting laws and regulations to properly manage risks, degradation and human suffering is a fool’s errand.  They are always too late, to limited, and too easy to violate.  Expecting regulations to achieve timing and correct outcomes from the point of view of universal consilience results in an expensive and frustrating exercise of continually chasing one’s tail. I am not suggesting that we should remove all regulations and let industry and individuals do whatever they would like, I am suggestion that they are a necessary minimum but that meeting them does NOT necessarily mean that the proposed “project” is acceptable, cost effective, or desirable from the point of view of the global (or local) community.

Achieving universal consilience will be difficult and time consuming.  It will undoubtedly put restrictions on the ability to make large profits. One big problem is that it depends upon the “good will” of those involved in making decisions.  That is where the idea of having a new “opinion” comes into play.  In order to work, the decision makers all need to be of the opinion that the goal is to maximize the benefits and minimizing the costs, to all affected parties.  It won’t work if it is a struggle for everyone to get the most that they can, it only works if it is a struggle to find a solution the benefits all. 

Science can help assess potential impacts, and help understand the associated risks/benefits, which inform the process of achieving consilience.  However, science can never know enough to cover all of the important considerations.  Science does well with those things that science knows about in terms of measurements, data collection, theories and calculations/predictions, but these only work in few very narrow areas of consideration.  Not only that, but because science is basically the creation and checking of theories – it is often wrong in the details, and sometimes wrong in the big picture as well.  That doesn’t mean it is useless – it just means that the answers should be taken with a grain of salt – they provide the best understanding that we have at that moment in time, subject to change should new information be found.  My point is that if we are to solve the apparently existential problems facing humanity we need to find a new criteria for deciding what to do other than maximizing profits for those making the decisions.  We need to find a way to come up with a new opinion – an opinion that moves us toward globally sustainable and fair solutions, rather than what has been the norm for hundreds of years in many cultures (but not all of them).  There are many, many examples of cultures that have successfully operated under the opinion that sustainability and equity are the obvious criteria for decision making.  It is within the ability of the human animal to operate in this way, we just need to change our opinion of what is best and “good”. 

This morning I enjoyed my pre-dawn hot tub in a gentle, cool rain. I had on my new felt hat, which kept my head dry – and the rest of me was in the water so I couldn’t get any wetter. The clouds were glowing from the reflection of lights in town, just enough to show the silhouette of a large, leafless, Valley Oak tree just to the west of my hot tub. A large evergreen Live Oak tree formed a dripping canopy above my head, converting a gentle mist into large drops of water that splashed around me in the hot tub.

I was rather transfixed by the beauty of these two trees, marveling that while they appeared to be as stable as the rocks in the garden, they are actually very much alive and full of the mysterious “life force” animating all beings on the earth. In their own way they “experience” life – perhaps sleeping in the case of the deciduous Valley Oak, or in a dreamy wakeful state of the Live Oak. In any case, they are alive, growing, making and using energy, fighting off predators and disease, healing wounds, reproducing and perhaps enjoying life. It became clear that they were just like me, perhaps just operating at a different pace. It appears that live moves more slowly for them, but it is always moving and always active. When they are awake and the sun shines, their leaves and green parts make sugar that is stored for later use. During this part of the day they make and release oxygen into the atmosphere. At night, they are still awake and working, but using the stored sugars plus oxygen to grow through the night. Luckily for us they make more oxygen than they use – our lives depend upon it.

As I sat in the warm water marveling about these two great trees, my attention turned to the many other trees and plants in the area. A neighbor shares space with a big, bushy palm tree that seemed to be reveling in the rains that have been so long in coming to California. As the day grew brighter at the approach of dawn it was clear that all of the plants were greener, freshers, more flexible and perhaps happier than they appeared a couple of weeks ago before the rains settled in for the winder. I don’t know if plants can experience “happiness” or “joy” – but it sure looked like it to me.

I wonder if they have an “experience”, I wonder if they have anything approaching “awareness” at any level; or are they just chemically powered machines? I even wonder if they are separate from us, or if they are truly an integral part of something like a larger, global, organism described by all of DNA/RNA on this tiny blue ball we call home. Do the trees “experience” this shared life similarly to my other organs, such as my liver? Is my liver alive? Sort of… but it is not independent of the rest of “me”. The same applies to all of my body parts – they are clearly alive, clearly react to their environment, but only “experience” anything as a part of the whole. There “experience” seems to be associated with my mind’s experiences, not theirs. Are they “sentient” or just part of a sentient being?

According to one source I found on the Internet, sentient describes a being that can feel pleasure and pain. Clearly, not all parts of my being share in those experiences. I am not even sure if my liver, or hand, can experience pain. They can certainly be damaged, injured or become diseased – but it seems that the “feeling” of pain is somewhere else, it seems that it is my mind. If that is true, then the “me” that is made up of all of these non-sentient body parts is really just the part of me that has feelings/emotions. If life on earth is really one big individual composed of all of the individual parts, then those parts of this “individual” (Gaia?) that experience feelings creates sentience for all of the other parts. There is no more difference between me and the trees as there is between me and my liver (or brain). In that case it seems to imply that the entire earth is a sentient being, and it behooves us to treat is accordingly. We are not separate, we are all part and parcel to the whole – the whole being everything on this little blue ball. For us to remain healthy and experience pleasure more than pain, we need to take care of all of the parts.

A few days ago I had a rather irritating encounter with one of a friend that I have known for several years. A group of friends came to visit me and go to lunch. I offered to buy lunch for the group at a “nice” restaurant in the area. All went well until one of the ladies started complaining that I only bought one bottle of wine for the group (of three). (I had offered to purchase whatever they would like to eat or drink.) She thought I should have purchased three bottles. Obviously that was silly since we all knew that as these folks were almost certainly only going to have a glass each. I bought a separate glass for myself because she ordered a bottle of rose which I don’t particularly like. They were all free to order whatever, and how much, they wanted. I thought it was rather odd to accuse me of being stingy with the wine given that I offered them to pick anything on the menu – which included some rather pricey wines.

Things seemed to go alright until such time as the meal was finished. I picked up the bill as I had promised, but she insisted on adding a few dollar bills as a tip. I thought that was odd, and told her she needn’t do that – I was treating them. However, using a stage whisper, she explained to one of the others that she did this because “I am wealthy and wealthy people never leave good tips”! Perhaps I didn’t leave a big enough tip, but she had no way of knowing and it wasn’t something I normally advertise. I tipped almost 25% for the meal that I bought for her, which seemed generous to me. Besides, she couldn’t see how much I had paid – she just made the idea that I hadn’t tipped enough because she is convinced that I am stingy.

She spent the rest of the time during the rest of the afternoon insulting me about how selfish I am because I haven’t given away all of my money to poor people such as herself. She insisted that I don’t give sufficiently to charity and am never generous but am always greedy. Her reasoning was that she decided that I am too rich Therefore, she assumes that I am always stingy, and therefore I am a terrible human being; even though I recently gave her $1000 so she could get hearing aids and had just paid for her lunch. It was just weird. Perhaps I am too stingy, and perhaps I am not generous when I should be – but for her to launch into such a extreme bit of insults was pretty odd. She started it before she had a glass of wine, so she wasn’t reacting to too much alcohol – she apparently had created a mindset about how horrible I am because I have saved up enough money to retire (I hope). I would have been happy to discuss the whole thing if she could have listend, but she wouldn’t (or couldn’t).

I am not at all sure whether I am “wealthy” or not. I worked hard for many years as an independent engineer, saving money with the goal of having sufficient investments to allow me to retire without having to rely upon charity or the government for my support. My planned budget is designed to be empty by the time I die at perhaps age 100. I include a rather large “gifting” component in my budget that gives me a little discretion should the future bring unforeseen expenses. My “wealth” is in place of a retirement plan because I have always worked as an independent consultant and therefore have no retirement plan beyond Social Security.

I don’t think many people with retirement benefits (from the government or otherwise) realize how valuable those plans are and how large an investment is required to achieve that level of security. For example, it takes more than $3,000,000 in low risk investments to achieve a retirement equivalent to a typical $100,000 a year retirement plan in California. I suppose poor folks consider an investment portfolio of $3,000,000 to be wealthy, or a budget of $100,000 a year to be exorbitant (and perhaps it is). An investment sufficient to achieve an adequate income stream when needed during retirement years carries considerable risk. An income of $100,000 per year in California is considerably less than can be achieved by a typical two-income couple for white collar workers and other professions with a single wage earner doing things such as firemen and police officers.

I am not sure where the break between “normal”, “poor” or “wealthy” lies. Personally, I don’t consider myself wealthy, I consider myself to be adequately funded to finish my life without having to depend upon others. If I ended up with left over “wealth” upon my death, that has been directed to assist my grandchildren (or perhaps great grandchildren) in getting an education and having a little “nest egg” to start their lives as adults. It certainly won’t be sufficient to cover their expenses, but it might be enough to help with something like a down payment on a home should they desire to purchase a house. Gifting any more than I currently am doing would not be prudent because it would leave me at risk of financial disaster, with the result of depending upon others for my support. I worked and saved for fifty-five years with the intention of not becoming a burden to my loved ones, or the State.

Obviously, at some point accumulating sufficient money can certainly make a person “well-to-do” or maybe even “wealthy. I am not exactly sure where this point of being “wealthy” is to be found. Perhaps it is when you have enough money that there is no longer a reasonable way to use, or lose, it. Another measure might be conspicuous consumption. For example, yesterday I noticed a brand new Bentley automobile in town – maybe this implies that the owner is “wealthy”. I certainly can’t afford to drive a $300,000 car – but I don’t know anything else about that person so can’t really can’t judge his situation. Clearly it is possible to spend down very large amounts of money in a short period of time, many professional ball players have demonstrated that in rather spectacular fashion. I don’t know how you can spend over $100,000,000 – but they seem to figure it out on a regular basis.

The issue of some people judging people to be “bad” because they have accumulated a lot of money is interesting. I think it offers a bit of insight into a particular set of prejudices that people create for themselves. I find it to be quite common for people to assume that if you managed to gather enough money to retire without using government subsidies or charity you must be nasty and greedy (even when you happen to be giving them money to help them along). My “friend” was absolutely convinced that my only concern is to get as much money as possible so I can die wealthy. She is convinced that I don’t donate to any good causes, don’t contribute to Society, and am just mean and nasty because of my overwhelming greed. Perhaps I am mean and nasty (I have friends that don’t seem to agree with that idea), and perhaps I don’t donate as much as she would if she had my resources. I agree that I might have these types of faults – but I really don’t think they were evident in this situation. .

It is unfortunate that the topics of income, savings, wealth, financial security are taboo in our culture. That taboo means that we can’t share our experiences and rationales, which means that we all stay firmly planted in our pre-conceived set of prejudices and judgments. This keeps us pointed to others as being “at fault”, that the others are the cause of whatever ills we are thinking about. It keeps us from understanding from a wide variety of points of view, and keeps us from creating solutions. There are two things here- one, perceptions: we see the world and people, not the way they truly are, but the way WE are. The way WE think we are (or pretend to be) and the way we REALLY are

I would like to explain my long absence from writing my blog offerings for those who might be checking it out now and then. There aren’t many of you, but it seems like the polite thing to do.

Back in July my wife had an “event” that landed her in the emergency room at a local hospital, followed by a few days in intensive care. She had a period of seizures with no apparent cause. The hospital did all of the expected tests but found no cause other than possibly a late onset epilepsy. After a few days of total incapacitation, she woke up one morning “cured” and we went home. When she had the event, I decided to drop my focus on everything except for her well being.

Three weeks went by uneventfully, so I decided I could travel to Cincinnati to attend a conference, and she would stay with our daughter just in case something came up again. I was in Cincinnati two days when I got a call from my daughter that my wife had another event and was back in the emergency room. I got a ticket home as soon as I was able, and was at her side that evening. They symptoms were similar, but this time the MRI showed many “shadows” indicting cancer. A biopsy confirmed that it was advanced brain cancer that because it was disbursed was inoperable. At that point I totally re-focused on only her. Thus the hiatus on my blogging. She started a regime of 6 weeks of radiation treatment 5 days a week coupled with chemo therapy 7 days a week.

She once again “got better” and things were almost back to normal for a couple of weeks, then back to the ER, followed by another “recovery”. Things were apparently going as hoped for up until the beginning of week six. Starting at about week four of the treatments she became very tired and slept a lot, but that was expected. Then when it would have been the last week of therapy she had another event, but this time it was vastly worse. She went into a coma for a few days, and then died.

That was about six weeks ago and I am just now recovering from the shock enough to write this short blog. I am still deeply in a state of shock and grief, but am finally starting to have a few hours where I can think about doing other things, such as this. I am not expecting a quick improvement, but at least hope to begin the process of moving along with my life.

One of my plans is to pick up on my blogs again, but perhaps maybe a bit more like some sort of diary where I write about important events or experiences in my journal toward some sort of “normalcy”. I decided to take some time to stop “planning” my days, but instead just go along with them to see what happens and develops. Interesting, and perhaps important, events seem to happen almost daily. Some are probably only interesting to me, but I will share them just in case anyone else finds them worth considering.

Of course, my blog has almost no “followers”, those that do visit seems to only do so once or possibly twice before the go on. I suspect they are searching for “hoes” (as in whores) looking for porn and are quite disappointed by finding that “Hoes” in my family name, not a description of the content. However, I refuse to change my name, and refuse to change the name of my website, so I will just keep doing what I am doing – knowing that I am unlikely to get much of a following. I am mainly just writing to hear myself think, so I don’t suppose it matters.

I was sitting outside in my hot tub (“spa”) this morning enjoying the splendid view of my favorite constellation friends; Orion, Taurus, The Pleiades, Gemini, Canis Major, Cassiopeia, Perseus, and a few others. The weather was perfect for star gazing with a moonless morning; 55F, no wind, clear skies and quiet. I like to lay my head back and just watch – today I saw 5 meteors (I suppose they might represent an early start on the Orionids which are leftover pieces of Halley’s comet). I usually spot 10 to 15 satellites and perhaps one or two meteors during my 15 to 30 minute morning soak. I didn’t see any satellites this morning – perhaps I was too early in the day for them.

In any case, while semi-dozing and watching the stars I got to thinking about where it all came from. The current theory is that it all started with a big bang – and then things just happened after that. The “just happened after that” part is the job of “science” to describe. Once the bang happened it seems that the rules of physics came along for the ride, resulting in all there is. Things just are because they are. Perhaps a different bang would have resulted in different rules – or not.

The mystery for me isn’t so much about how the universe evolved following the bang, but instead – what banged??? If the universe is something and the pre-universe isn’t that, then does that mean it is nothing (no thing)? How could nothing bang into existence? Or are we just some sort of fluctuation around zero so that from the BIG picture point of view there is still nothing. Not only did this big bang apparently happen, but the scales (energy, mass, distances, time) involved are unimaginably huge. “How very odd” is about as far as I can get along this line of thought. The story seems to be that there was (perhaps is) nothing at all, no anything, no energy, no waves, no ….. nothing. Then “it” (nothing) got really bored and turned into everything – all at once! This didn’t even happen in a flash because it was so dense that nothing could flash. It is more like the universe was vomited into being. Maybe “it” rolled over in bed.

Once the change happened, then the physics geniuses can play their favorite math games and describe how it evolved into atoms, and molecules, and galaxies, and stars, and eventually “us” – but they can say nothing about the transition, or before the transition. Interestingly, apparently there was no “before the transition” because there was no time and time is necessary for a “before”. This odd state of affairs turns the entire discussion into a pseudo-discussion because there was actually nothing to discuss.

The results of this pondering was a simple, “huh??” Not being ready to give up on useless pondering, as the trees become visible in the pre-dawn light I got to wondering about the nature of life on earth. I have already discussed my revelation that all existing life has always been alive and thus was never “born” or created except when it all started 3 billion or so years ago. Of course a lot of things have died since that time, but none of the things that are alive now have died yet. The thread of life is continuous, and apparently arising from the same event all those billions of years ago. We (every current life form) are all “cousins”.

But I wonder if that is actually true. It appears to be true, but I keep wondering about two other possibilities. One possibility is that there were initially many different starts of life, but only one survived to the present. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this happening, but it certainly seems like a reasonable possibility. However, to me the more mysterious question has to with whether it all started with a single molecule randomly achieving the kind of self-replication that resulted in the ability to replicate, mutate and diverge into the splendid diversity we enjoy, or did it start with a lot of pools of gunk (molecules) all of which acquired the necessarily characteristics.

A thought experiment might help clarify my question. Consider a lab experiment where a bunch of precursor molecules were mixed in a vat (or a test tube) in such a way that “the beginning” life molecule was formed. Would we have billions of “the beginning” molecules that then go on to create billions of new threads of life (albeit all of them identical, or nearly so), or would only one such molecule form creating just one thread of life? If it is the former, then my idea that life all goes back to a single beginning is false – it goes back to billions and billions of single beginnings. If so, then life comes from billions of beginnings, and we are not cousins at all. We are all based upon complex crystals (DNA and RNA) formed by the reaction of similar chemicals like two grains of salt – very similar because of the chemistry involved, but not related to or sharing a very long chain of reactions. If this is the case, then I wonder when and how often life has started afresh.

I was once again left with “huh?” – not even knowing if there is a sensible question to be asked. Am I once again pondering another “pseudo-question”?

For the few of you that read my blog, I apologize for the long delay. My wife had a seizure at the end of July that ended up with a few days in the hospital. There was no diagnosis at that time. We went home, things were stable for a couple of weeks – and I went to Cincinnati to attend a conference. While I was at the conference, there was a repeat causing me to find a flight home ASAP. This time there was a diagnosi of inoperable brain cancer. That was another stint in the hospital followed by about 10 days in a rehab center. Then home again for a couple of weeks, and then another “event” and another week in the hospital.

I spent much of the time in the hospital with her, going home late at night to get a few winks and take care of pressing things on the home from. It was exhausting to say the least. During all of this I was unable to find the time, or the brain power, to do much of anything except take care of the things that needed immediate attention – mostly my wife’s adventures. We are finally home once again, wondering when this will all repeat. She is getting daily radiation treatments and chemotherapy, which really makes her exhausted. It is still very difficult, but right now a little calmer (partly because she is so exhausted).

This week we are trying a new process of hiring a care giver to be with her for the mornings, giving me time to catch up on other things – including writing this blog. I finally had time to dig through the pile of papers that have been growing on my desk and see a number of past due bills and things like that. Hopefully I will be able to get to some of those tomorrow or the next day. It seems like there isn’t much going on, but the day is full of things to do – video appointments with doctors, two hour trips to get radiation therapy, meals, once a week in-home visits from the physical therapist, the occupation therapist, the speech therapist, a nurse, trips to get weekly lab tests, difficult and time consuming medication taking because she can barely swallow the many pills each day, visits from friends and neighbors (wonderful, but exhausting for her and time consuming). We have action packed, full days of doing nothing.

I am beginning to write a short paper on the system safety aspects of the hospitals that I noticed while hanging out with my wife for hours and days at a time. This paper is going to be published in the next issue of The Journal of the System Safety Society – I’ll post is here also for those that might find it interesting. I write a short (2 or 3 page) article for each issue of the journal. The topic varies depending upon what has caught my attention at the time – this time it has to do with some problems that I identified with the hospital system(s).

Mainly I am writing this blog just to let people know I am back (perhaps – depending upon the future events concerning my wife’s illness).

I just read The Genesis Machine by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel. I found it one of the most difficult reads that I can recall. I don’t mean that it is poorly written, it is not. I don’t mean that it is hard to understand, it is only mildly difficult to comprehend. What I mean is that I can’t stand the topic and the implications. Reading the book felt a little like watching a horror movie where you know that it is just going to keep getting worse and worse, finally ending in total disaster. Unfortunately, the disaster that seems to be at the end of the story involves the human race.

The book discusses the wonderful things that gene editing (via CRISPR and other tools) is accomplishing with regard to medical and agricultural advances. Truly amazing things are being done in the benefit of mankind (such as Golden Rice that was created by inserting chrysanthemum genes into rice dna to create rice that is high in vitamin A) – but with that amazing power for good comes an equally amazing risks. Not only are these tools being used to create new vaccines, to prevent genetic diseases before birth, “cure” a vast array of genetically related diseases but it is being used to create new organisms that would never come to pass through “normal” breeding processes because genes are being introduced from other species that would never be in the gene pool.

There is an amazing amount of “mix-and-matching” between species being done in laboratories around the world, and many new traits being introduced into species germ lines of species (including humans) that will propagate and mutate into the distant future. Brand new organisms are being created using artificial intelligence techniques putting together entirely new sequences of genetic codes – not cobbling together parts from difference species, but starting from scratch and making new life. Currently, all life seems to come from a common ancestor from billions of years ago. Now scientists are starting all over again, with a new man-made germ line. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout the book there are comments along the lines of “this is great as long as it isn’t released into the wild”, or “we know the potential risks well enough to understand the cost/benefit assessments”, and “great harm could be done so we have to have regulations to keep people from doing these sorts of things.”

What could go wrong with something that has great power (including devastating bio-weapons)? All that there is between catastrophe and amazing benefits is people’s willingness to “play by the rules” instead of achieving great wealth and/or power, with the understanding that this all has to be error free with people never making any mistakes. The history of humanity isn’t very good with regard to abusing power, understanding all of the implications of a new development, and working error free. Over the past decade, there have already been many abuses, poor decisions, and mistakes with regard to gene editing activities. They will continue – there is zero chance of controlling them.

So now that we have let that particular genie out of the bottle, we can only wait to find out just how bad things can become when “what could go wrong” – does. I see no possible path around multiple catastrophes at an ever-increasing frequency. It is easy to predict some of the “what could go wrong” scenarios (such as release of a new super-covid type pandemic), the accidental destruction of entire species that turn out to have important beneficial roles in the environment, and many others. However, there are also many unknown unknowns that we will discover – with the disclaimer of “who would have thought of that?”, or “nobody would do a thing like that.” We are going to learn a lot of new lessons – I really hope it works out for our descendants, but I think they have yet another earth shattering set of problems to attempt to solve.

These kinds of true stories really leave me in a gloomy state of mind. What idiots people are. The list of mankind’s insanity just keeps getting longer as we get technologically more “advanced”.