South Park’s Manbearpig to the rescue.

Tags

Manbearpig, Public policy, South Park, survival

The popular world population argument is “don’t worry,” because the rate of growth is slowing down. Therefore it will not be a problem. But there is a problem because even with the current living population, we will consume most of the one-time use resources. At my age of 84, I may see the beginning of this process but probably won’t live to see the end of it.

Cartoon comedy can discuss issues which are impossible in cool discourse, and therefore that medium can explore beyond the problems facing us today. Actually, today’s problems have been latent and around for a while, but we in general, and the public in particular, aren’t interested in problems until we have begun suffering personally.

In the TV show South Park there are some episodes about the Manbearpig, (this is actually worth watching) which are about how long-term personal greed is catching up with the community’s resources. The elders, now living in elder care facilities, lived beyond their income for their whole lives by spending capital they did not create. Think of nice cars, beautiful homes, cheap oil, coal, natural gas, and public financing of their university educations by selling off Indian land to private people and using the money to build the universities and pay the professors. (free Land Grant Colleges).

That has been great for my generation, and because of that one-time use of resources we had a better education and, in general, made a lot more money during our careers. It was expected that we would pass on the one-time bounty to the newer generations, but that hasn’t happened, and we refuse to pay taxes to properly support our universities here in Oregon. The result is that our next generation is going into deep debt which will take these kids years to pay off if ever, to obtain what people of my generation got for free. My parents didn’t support me economically, and I supported myself and worked my way through a Master’s Degree without owing any debt at all. We got it all for free. The young people today I know are deep in debt, and for an education that may not have much of a future in economic rewards.

South Park then took the next intellectual step with my generation which lived a high life off of capital they didn’t create and are now in nursing homes. They showed how those people are now living off of Social Security that in most cases will far exceed the money they supposedly put into that system. I am not living in an elder home yet, but many people twenty years younger than I am are in those homes and consuming resources they supposedly earned. But much of that is money created out of fantasy, and the people who will actually pay to keep these old people alive are those now being underpaid because they can’t get a job fitting their expensive education.

Those old people are living off of their future debt, off of future work, but it is work which they are not going to perform because they will be dead. They have put the people living in the future into debt to those who created a system for shifting responsibility for paying off debts to other people. Watch the South Park conclusion where the whole town is offered a contract by the Manbearpig.

“Five wonderful years of bounty and great living, and then everything will be a thousand times worse.” OK!

It’s crazy and it worked for us. Unfortunately, if you are reading this you are still alive and will soon be paying off the debt for these moments of fun.

Helping others to find meaning in their lives.

Tags

Creating meaningful goals, Ever evolving kindness, Giving meaningful life, hope, Infinite hope, Infinite kindness, Kindness, Meaningful life, Personal survival

From our early moments of recognizable individual human life at Carnegie Stages 10 through 23 there is an inborn direction of development.

Carnegie Stages of Human fetal development 10-23

For mind-expanding detail go the source of these images at embryology.med.unsw.edu.au

What is the meaning of life? We can see when scanning in retrospect back from stage 23 to 10 in these pictures of the Carnegie Stages of human development, a strong trend was being formed toward becoming a human being. However, if we were to look only at Stage 10 it would be difficult to see a difference between us and other animals, even chickens, and to form any idea of what that tiny fetus would become. The question “What is the meaning of life, or even its developmental direction?” becomes incomprehensible. We must let it follow the directions of its DNA coding.

Here is a comparison of the rate of growth for several species.

From this chart, we can see that it takes a human embryo 58 days to reach the embryo Carnegie Stage that a chicken reached in 10 days. The general point illustrated by that observation is that the meaning of life is different for different creatures.

When we speak of the meaning of life for human beings, we begin with a fertilized egg, then a blastocyst, an embryo, a fetus, and then beyond the Carnegie Stages seen above through birth, infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood and old age. Each of these is an illustration of a living organism going through a normal biological life cycle and on to death.

But these do not begin to approach what we are asking when we say, “What is the meaning of life? Of my life?” We might ask if the meaning in life has gone up over the last hundred years as our life expectancy at age 10 in 1850 was to age 45 and now it’s over 70? It probably didn’t go up because of a better emotional world view but because of the discovery and suppression of the causes of disease. And yet here in the U.S., there is a consecutive three-year decline of life expectancy because of suicides known as “deaths of despair”, mostly because of self-medicating drugs. Go to World of Data Life Expectancy for an abundance of these kinds of statistics.

I think suicide is the extreme example of lost hope for a meaningful life by a person, and what I have been writing about are ways of restoring a meaningful hope back into people’s lives. There are billions of people alive today and every one of them has different goals for their lives, so it is an abstract and generalized answer. It is those goals that give those living people’s lives meaning and the hope of moving toward those goals is what gives them the courage to face the sufferings that are expected to occur.

Hope promotes life. I have searched for the kinds of hope that are universally available to every person and I have been evolving some concepts that are easily learned and applied. Once they are applied by a person everyone they encounter will become new sources of hope and of a meaningful life for them.

The universal source of hope is kind actions toward another being. These kinds of actions as they are done create habits of kindness towards one’s own being, and if you apply them you will soon find that you are living with a very kind and helpful person… You! Here is the 5th idea to be explored and tested.

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We find unbounded hope by being infinitely kind, and by:

5. —helping everyone to find meaning in their lives by helping them find a personal path to unbounded hope and infinite kindness.

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Idea 5 expands on the other concepts by moving beyond your own kind acts and showing the paths toward kindness to other people. You can do kind acts for the unknown people who will follow your path without those others even being aware of your actions. These are your voluntary acts, and they are always obviously in your control and thus are not setting you up to be taken advantage of. But doing visible acts is even better.

When you do something out of your own personal kindness, it remains yours forever.

Hope and kindness #21

Tags

Common sense, hope, Kindness, Society, Species, survival, Unbounded hope, Wisdom

Version 21 revealed as …

We find unbounded hope and give personal kindness by:

1. —exploring the orderly nature of our bountiful Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from everything that it makes possible.

2. —striving to physically survive as individuals and as communities by seeking opportunities to live and thrive in every possible place.

3. —creating attractive self-balancing societies, so you and I and all living beings can have meaningful lives in our sustainable worlds.

4. —manifesting and becoming known and accepted as dedicating our wisdom and energy to alleviating the suffering of all beings.

5. —helping one another to find more fulfilling meanings for our lives by treating everyone as we should to help them attain their kindest self.

6. —appreciating that we as a fellowship of people expressing diverse views are more likely to discover beautiful ways of living our lives.

7. —making a habit of giving our attention to individuals and acknowledging their successes within our shared Universe.

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This 21st version expands hope and focuses personalized kindness as a path to a fuller more meaningful inner life.

We just want to be right!

Tags

Being right is easy!, Being wrong is easy!, Keeping friends is easy., Losing friends is easy.

It’s perfectly reasonable to want to be right, to be right about everything, and especially right about what we believe, and especially right about what we just said. The problems of our world are many, but we are compelled by reality to solve them as best we can with the resources available. Time, attention, and money seem to be demanded every which way we turn and it seems impossible to attend to it all. One reasonable response is to get depressed and shrink away from all the demands that the world expects of us. Another reasonable response is to get angry and lash out at every insult that comes our way, and everything is an insult if you look carefully.

Being right becomes easier if we filter all these inputs through our natural filters built into us by our basic nature and our filters built on top of that by our experience. Thus, we can approach every new situation with two filters that limit what we must think about. If we squeeze those inputs by joining a social group, they will give us some more workable filters on the realities coming our way, so many inputs to our reality become simple to accept or to reject. Thus, there is less and less that we must attend to and think about when confronted with some person who says or does something we don’t understand immediately.

I just want to be right, and by limiting what I encounter and instantly categorizing it as good or bad, my world becomes easy to cope with, and I am always right. Those people are more than misinformed, they are choosing to accept a reality that is clearly wrong; thus, they are bad people and to be expelled from our local reality. We are right and they are wrong is easy to say and thus to believe. So, we double down on what we say and accept as friends others who have doubled down with us, and the world becomes even easier.

The only problem is that this often creates enemies and conflicts, and sometimes gets us hurt and sometimes gets us killed.

Adding more emotional fire to our new Universe

Tags

Challenging morality, Eolution of an idea, Evolution of kindness, Family survival, Personal survival, Species survival, Survival through dispersal, Ultimate happiness

The content of Version #19 states clearly the goals for a sustainable society, but it doesn’t have enough love, and people are going to need a passionate belief in giving love to others to give them enough hope to endure the tragedies of their own lives. The new version must provide access to an infinite hope and this is a new kind of hope that is increased daily by our cultivating habits of kindness toward other people and thus to ourselves. We grow hope by giving hope to others through our kind actions toward others.

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For comparison here is the old – Version #19

We find hope and give kindness by:

1. —discovering the orderly nature of our Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from everything that it makes possible.
2. —striving to physically survive as individuals, families, and a species by seeking opportunities to live and thrive in various unique places.
3. —creating an ideally balanced human society, so you and I and everyone else can have a meaningful life in a sustainable world.
4. —being accepted as dedicating our wisdom to the great tradition of alleviating the suffering of all living beings.
5. —helping one another use our abilities for our own and others’ well-being by treating them a little better than we treat ourselves.
6. —appreciating that we as a fellowship of people expressing diverse views are more likely to discover wonderful new ways of living with one another.
7. —making a habit of giving attention to other people and acknowledging their need for appreciation in a cooperative existence within our shared world.

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Version #20

We find hope and give kindness by:

1. —exploring the orderly nature of our bountiful Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from everything that it makes possible.
2. —striving to physically survive as individuals and as a community by seeking opportunities to live and thrive with others in many different places.
3. —creating an ideally balanced loving society, so you and I and everyone else can have a meaningful life in a sustainable world.
4. —being known and accepted as dedicating our wisdom and energy to the great tradition of alleviating the suffering of all living beings.
5. —helping each other to find more exalted meanings for our lives by treating one another as we should treat our most morally developed self.
6. —appreciating that we as a fellowship of people expressing diverse views are more likely to discover beautiful new ways of living our lives.
7. —making a habit of giving our attention to individuals and acknowledging their need for appreciation within our shared Universe.

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This 20th version explores kindness and cooperation with a more challenging idealism.

Saying goodbye to the tipping point

Tags

survival

I am a cheerful person most of the time and I have been trying for decades to add a little cheer to those whom I encounter. I remember the exact moment and place where that happened. Not the date, but the thoughts and feelings of being depressed about things in general as I approached the Med, my coffee rendezvous for decades. I wasn’t going to visit my gloom upon my friends and decided to be cheerful. I was able to maintain that false cheer for a few minutes, until the conversation became interesting, which it always did, and I forgot to be cheerful and returned to my anxious gloom. Each on the next several days I remade the promise to myself to be cheerful toward my friends and every day the same result. I forgot myself and returned to my gloomy state and proceeded to pull the happy discussions down a notch.

The next experiment was not trying to be cheerful but to watch my friends behavior and try and help them to become cheerful. That worked a lot better because it is easier to watch another person’s expressions than to watch one’s self. I cultivated some habits around that simple strategy for not being gloomy and by helping my interlocutors to be happier I became happier too. I have long given up doing these experiments intentionally, but the habits are still with me, and often when a group as I was today, I notice that people are laughing along with me as I develop my arguments on whatever it is that we are all chewing on.

With that nonsense exposed it is time to face a simple and obvious fact of current reality. The population of the world is still exploding and the resources of the world are about to become too difficult to retrieve. Malthus said that two hundred years ago and was wrong because he didn’t factor in the energy reserves provided by coal and oil and a few smaller energy sources, and the creativity of humanity to develop ways to exploit our planetary resources. Paul Ehrlich brought this to the modern world in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, but once again the creativity of the unified human species was able to delay the onset of population collapse. The bad luck that those two predicted is about to run out because of the infinite capacity of living organisms to reproduce, it doesn’t even have to be a logarithmic growth a simple tiny growth will do if it is infinite it will consume all of the resources available to its species. We are still in a fortunate condition for enjoying the good life the Earth is still providing to us. But, even us geriatrics may witness the tipping point, and young adults will have an increasingly difficult time, and it brings tears to my eyes sometimes when I see happy children and realize that they are unlikely to live to my age without experiencing a wrenching suffering of humanity.

But, I’ve run out of time again and once again my advice is to enjoy yourself.

Inventions for future problems based on food

Tags

Ideal population, Overpopulation brings famine, population, Survival of food, Survival of humanity

Ultimately all life is based on the food supply available to a living species, and that includes humans. Thomas Malthus developed that idea back in 1801, and he expected that most individuals of the human species would be living in a state of subsistence. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” He didn’t recognize that the recent invention of the steam engine would change that state of affairs and many more methods of generating energy out of fossil fuels would be invented. Our current civilization is based on the production and consumption of fossil fuels and a world that can absorb their combustion products. Both the supply of fossil fuels and air and water to store the combustion products are huge compared to an individual human, but we now have 7.7 billion people, and all of them wish to live as well as possible. Even at current projections, the supply of these one-time-use resources won’t last for the lifetime of children alive today.

Humans are creative, and many of them are aware of these problems and will probably dedicate their lives to finding ways of combating this population-versus-resources problem. Already there are huge wind farms, and solar panel farms too, that are not fossil-fuel dependent once made, and they will no doubt grow in size and efficiency. These will supply energy for many of the needs now filled by fossil fuels, and if there is great effort to make those limitless energy systems ubiquitous, civilization could potentially last as long as the sun shines, which might be a million times longer than our current society’s life expectancy. That’s not likely with the swarm of other problems that will inevitably arise, but it is potentially possible.

And yet, Malthus and his theory of population expanding to the limits of the food supply will eventually be right because the population of well-fed people can expand to an infinite size! But the world is fixed in size, and its resources are fixed also, and so there is a limit to how many people it can supply with necessities, such as food, water, and shelter. What’s the solution?

There are two solutions to infinite population growth: either humans voluntarily as a whole species limit their population to the carrying capacity of the world, or natural processes will do it for them. If humans can consistently limit their population to half the ultimate carrying capacity of their world, everyone can live well. If humans can not do that, nature will slaughter them in a myriad of unpleasant ways, and if all else fails they will be starved back to compliance within the limits of what’s available.

When nature is overstressed and cannot produce enough resources, food being the critical one, it creates political problems which often result in war. The problem with war as the solution is that we already possess weapons of annihilation! Not weapons of mass destruction, but weapons of annihilation. Once those weapons are used, it will be difficult to bring a war to a reasonable end, and most of the people of Earth will be killed. Sorry, but the inventions to solve these problems are social inventions.

Because humans are scattered far and wide and some have stockpiles of food, a few may survive long enough for the planet to recover, and we can repeat the cycle. Or not.

Near ideal blood pressure is 105/70.

Tags

Blood pressure, Blood pressure is 105/70, Ideal blood pressure, survival, What is the ideal blood pressure

Perhaps trying to figure out what ideal blood pressure is, is a fool’s search, but I am such a fool. When I read about health recommendations on such things as personal weight, or BMI, or exercise, or what to eat, there is a massive amount of documented information, and most of it is directly contradicted by some other well-documented information. The same problem applies to blood pressure.

Until as recently as 1977, when the first official guidelines were formulated for blood pressure, doctors were saying systolic blood pressure should be 100 plus your age. Then the accepted goal was changed to 140/90 but just this March 2019 the new goal, based on research using new drugs, was declared to be below 120/80. One might wonder who paid for that research based on manipulating blood pressure with drugs?

About twenty years ago, when I occasionally drove a 96-year-old friend of mine to visit her doctor, she came out one day saying everything was fine because her blood pressure was 196 which she was told was just perfect for her age.

That sounded ridiculous to me, but what am I to do? What’s any ordinary person to do, when a doctor makes a statement, but submit? What I did do with this present post is to find what appear to be sources of authoritative information, choose those with boundaries and then pick the middle number between the boundaries. That’s how the title of this blog post was created. That method generates an exact number.

However, it is obvious that every one of the 7.7 billion people on the planet at this time, or any time, will have unique qualities that will push their needs away from any fixed ideal number. The problem is no one knows what their ideal number really is, and furthermore, that number changes every minute because the demands on one’s body change every minute depending on the exact thing that it is encountering. That new situation constantly requires an adjustment, which the body was designed to optimize by the process of survival and reproduction of the generally best adapted of one’s ancestors.

Our clearly human ancestors have been around for a hundred thousand years, or five million years if we include chimps, or half a billion years if we include those with blood flow systems. Thus, there has been plenty of time for what became our species to experiment with optimizing their DNA and to genetically load our living DNA with what works, and to let get weeded out what didn’t work as well. The shortened idea of that line of reasoning is that if you are alive now, and reading this, you are a survivor of that process. Yippee.

Unfortunately, no matter who you are and how perfect, or imperfect, you appear to yourself, or to other people, your body is trying to move toward what it considers to be perfect. The myriad processes that got you here have programmed you to strive for that better place. Thus, there are something like 7.7 billion people right now trying to adapt to what their body thinks is ideal.

Perhaps you see the problem with such a bounty of bodies seeking perfection, and yet there is no clear published ideal of perfection to be aimed for with our voluntary lifestyle, only … below 120/80. There is no statement of how far below that recently declared upper level. Below systolic of 95 can be an indicator the person is dying, if their pressure is usually much higher, and that’s close to my stated near ideal systolic. Hmm? However, there can be generated a central point for a very healthy person that is probably close to an ideal and which would rarely be far enough away from their genetically perfected ideal to create a problem.

Using that line of inquiry, the Ideal blood pressure for someone who has recently walked, but is now sitting and rested for five minutes is 105/70. Adding or subtracting 5 points from those numbers would mean that 110/70 to 100/70, or 105/75 to 105/65 would be so close to the unknowable ideal as to be undetectable and insignificant. Strangely, this method of choosing an ideal would mean by the pre-1977 rule of thumb, 100 plus your age that our ideal would be the blood pressure of children.

Even with this broad definition of what is acceptably close enough to an ideal blood pressure to be called near-ideal, there don’t seem to be many Americans who presently qualify. A year ago I squeezed into that zone occasionally and did so more consistently when I weighed ten pounds less than what I presently weigh. That becomes a motivation for me to get seriously back into line with my intermittent fasting way of life. That is easy to do. I just limit all eating to a six-hour window. After staying within those time limits for a week my body is not hungry and is perfectly comfortable all the time.

105/70 may not be the ideal blood pressure, but it is close enough to be called near ideal blood pressure.

Moving on to version 18 seeking distant alternate residences

Tags

Family survival, Personal survival, Species surviva, Survival through dispersal

The previous versions of my pronouncements for a sustainable world view required the survival of an individual and the groups of which they are a part, which suggests that they become a living part of as many remote niches as possible, such that when there is a collapse of one of their niches they will have another to which they may easily flee. But that becomes a problem because it means that they will be inserting themselves into a place where they are going to be consuming that other locality’s resources and will be rejected by some of those individuals who are already there consuming the resources of that place. Therefore, it is necessary for our individual to previously have entered into that location with some presentation of a value that they are bringing into that community and assert their right to present that new value. They must fit into the interstices between existing beings who are themselves already competing with the other co-inhabitants of this location who themselves are already struggling at that place, to the best of their abilities, to maximize their personal livelihood. All niches will have some spaces some of the time and it is at those times, and into those spaces, that our individual can enter, at least temporarily, as an accepted part of the community. Perhaps after they have visited for a few times, they can create an accepted permanent role for themselves.

Those are the abstract ideas laying the possibility for an individual or a group to insert itself into a new niche. It seems possible to insert these ideas into the just-published “2-striving to survive as individuals, families, societies, and species by welcoming opportunities to live in strange new places.” by changing it to, “2-striving to survive as individuals, families, and species by seeking opportunities to live and work in strange distant places.”

The words, “welcoming opportunities” was changed to “seeking opportunities” because finding new niches within which to live requires an individual’s effort as is implied in the word seeking. Whereas “welcoming opportunities” is passive and only requires their watching for things to fall into their possession. The word societies was dropped as being otiose and prolix as the word beside it, “families,” fills in well as it often refers to larger groups than close relatives. Changing the words new places to distant places is closer to the intent of the argument above, because the further one moves away from the deadly collapse of an existing niche where one was living the more likely their survival. An example of this would be to move from Germany to Tasmania in 1939 if one was Jewish.

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Version #18

We find hope and give kindness by:

1. —discovering the orderly nature of our Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from all that is possible.
2. —striving to survive as individuals, families, and species by seeking opportunities to live in distant places.
3. —creating an ideally balanced human society, so you and I and everyone else can have a meaningful life in a sustainable world.
4. —dedicating our wisdom to the great tradition of alleviating the suffering of all living beings.
5. —helping one another use our abilities for our own and others’ well-being.
6. —appreciating that we as a fellowship of people expressing diverse views are discovering wonderful new ways of living.
7. —making a habit of clearly acknowledging other people and their need to love one another and our Universe.

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That was an unexpected turn of my hope-filled world and yet it is obvious once stated.

Moving on to version 17

Tags

Family survival, Group survival, hope, Hope and Kindness principles, Kindness, Personal survival, Species survival

The first principle of life from the very beginning was to survive as an individual and the second was to reproduce itself. Of course, these were not mental operations, they were functioning “laws” that are only slightly less universal than the four fundamental interactions of nature – gravity, weak force, the electromagnetic force, and strong force. The difference is that those four must create an environment where living processes can exist. There are many other things existing in the universe that are dependent on the interactions of those four, like the creation of stars, the formation of denser elements, and the formation of planets, oceans, and volcanoes. All of those things and many more required operating “laws” that permitted them to appear in an appropriate environment created by former actions.

When creating the former 16 attempts to form a functioning way for humans to live as a species for a long time, it seemed appropriate to express the ideas in a socially expansive way. There arose a problem with that method when it was unconstrained by the fact that there are other people, and beings that will take advantage of a person and a society behaving as suggested.

The problem is simply the non-application of Darwinian principles. Those individuals, species, and societies who survive are the ones who are to be found in the future. They are those who adapted to at least one environment where they survived and therefore became survivors. That is most likely to be a species that possessed the ability to disperse widely into as many of the environmental niches as were available. For the people who hold to the hope and kindness principles that I have been exploring, there must be provisions for coping with potentially deadly consequences of future environments and people.

After presenting the above argument there is a natural transition from the existing hope #1—discovering the orderly nature of our Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from all that is possible. We can now presume that to survive we can include that in the orderly nature of our Universe. The line following that introductory hope can now be – #2 striving to survive as individuals, families, societies, and species by welcoming opportunities to live in strange new places.

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Version #17

We find hope and give kindness by:

1. —discovering the orderly nature of our Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from all that is possible.
2. —striving to survive as individuals, families, societies, and species by welcoming opportunities to live in strange new places.
3. —creating an ideally balanced human society, so you and I and everyone else can have a meaningful life in a sustainable world.
4. —dedicating our wisdom to the great tradition of alleviating the suffering of all living beings.
5. —helping one another use our abilities for our own and others’ well-being.
6. —appreciating that we as a fellowship of people expressing diverse views are discovering wonderful new ways of living.
7. —making a habit of clearly acknowledging other people and their need to love one another and our Universe.

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That was an unexpected turn of my hope-filled world and yet it is obvious once stated.