Shona

Wax On, Wax Off!

Perhaps the most memorable part of the original 1984 Karate Kid movie for me was the scene when the Kid, Daniel, first shows up to his new teacher’s home for a lesson in self-defense, and makes a sacred pact to obey, no questions asked, in exchange for being taught karate. Pat Morita, as the teacher, hands Daniel a sponge to wash his collection of “Detroit” cars. Daniel is then is told to wax them, as well. Morita demonstrates the hand and arm motions to put the wax on the car, and then wipe it off. Wax on, Wax off. “Don’t forget to breathe!” I love this scene.

Of course, later we find out that the “wax on, wax off” motion is identical to a basic karate move used to block and attack. The Karate Kid learns karate by repeated practice performed doing what he considers menial work.

Way back when, students learned to write by practicing writing. With a thick pencil, then later, a thinner pencil, and eventually, a pen. By repeating the motions, we learned to write legibly, and without having to think too hard about how to make each letter.

anonymous ethnic tutor helping little multiracial students with task in classroom — Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

Piano students have to practice scales and guitar students have to practice chords. That’s just the way it is. Acquiring a skill requires practice.

Learning how to safely forage for edible mushrooms requires knowing the difference between decurrent, attached and free gills, and gregarious and solitary growth habits, as well as how to make and interpret a spore print, among many other characteristics, to identify the spore colors. It scares the crap out of me when people show some software a picture to get an ID.

Green Russula, an edible choice mushroom that I was afraid to eat as I was not sure I had correctly identified it at the time.

It also, as I finally figured out, requires being able to interpret the descriptions of the changing shapes of the caps, often from convex to flat to concave, as the mushroom ages. I drove myself nuts looking through five mushroom books trying to identify a giant white mushroom with a large concave, almost funnel shaped, cap. I finally found it in one of the books. As my studies continued, I learned that this mushroom had been misidentified and argued about by experts for decades. In any case, the convex shape wasn’t what finally helped with the ID. The convex shape was simply because these stunning, large white mushrooms were well into the spore spreading segment of their lifecycle. The convex shape seemed distinctive to me, because this is generally not the time when people capture images for identification guides. They generally capture the photos when the shrooms are young and fresh and colorful and convex. This is only one aspect of why it’s generally not recommended to teach yourself mushroom foraging. I did take to heart the adage that there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters.

Learning has to start with small skills, and mastery of the basics allows us to gain greater skills. This goes for such tasks generally characterized as “Thinking” as well as playing a musical instrument, swimming competitively, or practicing medicine, repairing cars, or gardening. As the practitioner acquires more basic knowledge of the objects and practices associated with a “body of knowledge,” it’s possible to be more creative with those data and skills, and accomplish more and more. The knowledge builds on and feeds itself.

What is going to happen to humanity if we don’t learn how to learn?

This is the scariest thing for me about SALAMI, or Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences, a more accurate description of what we call AI, or artificial intelligence.

Note that SALAMI and Bologna might be related.

It’s pretty ridiculous to call machine learning intelligence. Intelligence requires conscious awareness, and compassion. It must be grounded in empathy, resulting from awareness of the pains and fears and longings that all humans, most animals, and perhaps even plants, are subject to. It’s part of being alive.

Objectivity is scary, as well as having been proven mathematically and philosophically to be non-existent. I don’t want someone to give me objective advice. I want advice that’s RIGHT for ME! Part of wisdom is knowing how to GIVE advice that’s right for the person seeking the advice!

A professor at a large, accredited university recently told me that many of his current students truly think that they don’t need to know anything other than how to look something up on Google. They believe they will be able to Google their way through their engineering careers. He told me that the students would not want to read a long text book, that many of them don’t buy the short textbook he requires now. I replied that I was not going to pander to ignoramuses. The movie Idiocracy was hilarious, but it’s scary to contemplate the fact that that’s where we’re headed.

We need to wake up, and smell the roses and the coffee, or all we will have left to smell is shit.

pink carnation flower and pink rose flower in clear glass vase beside mug of coffee — Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

OR

HERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A PHOTO OF SOME MANURE. BUT NONE OF THE IMAGE SERVICES ASSOCIATED WITH MY CURRENT SOFTWARES SHOW A SINGLE PHOTO OF A FARMER SHOVELING MANURE. ALL THE FARM PHOTOS ARE OF CUTE ANIMALS OR BEAUTIFUL GRAINS, FRUITS, ETC. 

WHY THIS CENSORSHIP ABOUT SHIT?????

This is the skatole molecule, according to Wikipedia, it’s what makes shit smell like shit. The Wiki article also shows a small image of human “poo” alongside a shot of elephant “POO.” Hmm, looks like precursors to ammonia and methane in there.

By Dschanz – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4834135

Tiny Bird’s Nest Fungus on Dead Twig

Strange Fungus

October 21, 2022

Growing on exposed root of overturned hardwood

And a Hen of the Woods on another overturned tree root system

Consequential

Consequential damages
emerge like weeds
at the side of the road,
sometimes bursting into bloom.

March of the Papery Traces

Note the small hole is the leaf third from the lower left corner. Photo from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula somewhere in the east.

They stood up and brushed the bits of damp twigs and moss off of the seat of their jeans. They lifted the forest green backpack to their left shoulder, then wriggled their right arm into the other strap. There were no papery traces of these events. Only unreliable neuronal traces. This was way before the days of the selfie stick. Way before the days of the ubiquitous cell phone camera. Way before the possibility of becoming the person whose soul lived inside their body. Way, way, way before the days of hormone blocking therapy. In fact, even for them, it was hard to think back to that scene without naming self as he.

Mom probably thought that the solo trip would reinforce the manly aspects of Marco’s personality. Were that true, mom’s idea failed. Miserably. That was the weekend when Marco became March. Not Marsha. March. From then on, only March would do.

From the Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Papery Traces 14APR22

Several members of the group said they liked this piece. Many of them are newer members who don’t recall my early flash fiction and who don’t care for the Knomo Choicius stories. :>(

They challenged me to write the novel. I offer this to anyone who wants to keep going with it. Acknowledge this link, please.

But maybe I will keep going a little bit. Here’s the beginning of the next chapter…

Some say that Jesus was not a man, but the ultimate androgynous being. That Jesus truly understood the human condition, in its fullness. At 17, March wasn’t sure about all the suffering stuff. But the idea of androgynous wisdom? That was worth investigating.

100th Anniversary of the END of World War I- Reprise

Please click below to hear the audio Recording of the actual sermon. Note content is an elaboration of some of the points made below.

Today is November 11, 2018.

It is the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first World War.

Some wars, as the Hindu’s great scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, tells us, are justified. Sun Tzu of China also wrote a book held in longstanding honor that explains how to determine when war is justified. Sun Tsu’s classic, The Art of War, is still used today for its advice on how to gain a speedy end to any war that is justified.

We in the West have our own traditions justifying war. The Trojan War between the Achaeans (predecessors of the culture occupying what we now call Greece) was fought due to a pact between rich landowners to defend whichever of them took the most beautiful woman of the times as a wife, from anyone who tried to take her away. The Hebrew Bible documents many wars fought at the direction of God’s commands to cleanse the Promised Land of its supposedly sinful occupants.

At that time, people were led to believe that they were doing good by helping their God to annihilate offending peoples. I personally have a hard time deciding if this seems morally superior or inferior to the idea of preventing Helen from leaving her short, fat, ugly Achaean (Greek) husband and going off with the handsome Prince of Troy. I am also struggling to come to a conclusion about whether ethnic cleansing is superior or inferior as a supposedly legitimate cause of war, compared to one fought over the refusal of a king to return his cousin’s domain after the allotted time had elapsed since the dice gambling match forced him to go into a 13 year exile.

Are all of these reasons morally inferior or superior to the ones that Americans have used in recent times? (Securing our supply of oil? Liberating Afghan women from those who were forcing them to give up their right to education and liberty to walk about in town? Destroying what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction?)

Apparently, back in the Bronze age, in what we now call the Middle East, wars fought to perform ethnic cleansing were considered good deeds. The episodes of what today would be called ethnic cleansing, or genocide, were thought to endear the people to their god. Because of this, Israelite editors of the Bible made up the story of their ancestors’ destruction of the great city of Jericho. Historians and archeologists seem quite certain that the city of Jericho was already a pile of ruins at the time of the Israelites occupation of Canaan. But it was important to tell the story of the destruction of every resident of Jericho- man, woman (except the certified virgins of child bearing age), child, even the livestock. Important to remind God of the obedience of the people, and important to remind the Israelites of their fierce warrior natures.

Now, before you, dear reader, accuse me of being NEGATIVE, wallowing in the horrific deeds and attitudes of the past, I want to say that THE FACT that we now find these deeds HORRIFIC gives me some hope for future progress. As the great Rabbi Hillel said, what is hateful to you, do not do to others.

Sure, it’s great to give charity, and to smile as you go about your daily business. But destruction is so much swifter than construction, that you could be loving and kind 364 days a year, and on that one day of destruction, ruin more than you built. Perhaps that is likely if we try to suppress our negative aspects, rather than bringing them into the light of day to figure out how we can move beyond them.

So first, let’s avoid destruction of the beautiful, the useful, and the spiritually uplifting.

How much progress have we made in the last 3 or 4 thousand years?

The kings of Assyria and Babylon used to have their scribes count the enemy hands in the piles that the warriors made, so they could brag to their god of how many enemies his army had eradicated. Most of the armies of the day only killed men and children, sparing all women of child bearing age, and taking the livestock. Women were spared as the men of the day had an incorrect belief that THEY carried the complete genetic seeds of their offspring, and the females were merely incubators.

Getting back to more modern times, World War I resulted in 10 million civilian deaths and 6 million military personnel deaths. Another 20 million were injured. In the heat of the battle, many soldiers had been brainwashed as to the necessity of continuing to kill until the moment of cease-fire at 11 am on 11/11/1918. The last soldier was killed at 10:58 am. This was almost six hours after the announcement of the cease-fire. The combatant had become so filled with hatred that they did not want to waste a chance for a little more glory on the battlefield, a few more enemies killed.

But, as a result of this bloody, horrible war, many people did start to undertake organization building for the purposes of reducing the pain, suffering, and losses of war. Some people also worked to reduce the likelihood of war.

As we look back in history on this hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, we can’t celebrate the end of war. We can’t even celebrate the end of the desire for war. But we do have some progress to report. We have the knowledge of the Buddhist prayer that all beings be happy, and more importantly that all beings have the causes of happiness. Again, I’d like to suggest that we not pray for the currently unrealistic end to war, which would leave many people in untenable conditions. Rather, I pray for an end to the causes of war.

What are the causes of war? I am not a historian, so probably no historian would take my opinion into account. However, I think that injustice is the biggest. I will claim that I’m not the first to think along the lines of social structures contributing to war. Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli wrote (in 2007) an article called “Political Bias and War,” in the American Economic Review, 97 (4): 1353-1373. I haven’t read it because I don’t want to pay for the article at this point. From another article by these authors, which I found in its entirety, they apparently make the case that PEOPLE LIKE to CHOOSE those with belligerent tendencies as leaders to negotiate for them. They also provide information that led me to understand that in hierarchical societies (all human societies), the LEADERS actually tend to benefit from war more than the citizens. Let’s think about the rich Americans who benefit from selling arms. They are not the ones being shot at on the battlefields! Be that as it may, these two historians see war most frequently resulting from bargaining failures. To me, bargaining failures is a “HOW wars start” factor, while injustice is a “WHY wars start” factor.

If peace and justice prevailed everywhere on the face of the earth, and people LOVED peace and justice, I think that there would be a lower driving force for wars.

But injustice is the hardest thing to eradicate. Or perhaps I should say that the manifestations of injustice are very difficult to eradicate. When we start to try to disentangle a single strand of injustice, we find ourselves pulling on one end of what seems like an infinite spider web.

Two years ago I studied the Flint Water Crisis, in order to prepare a presentation for an engineering conference. The “ROOT CAUSE” of the children’s lead poisoning was eventually found by the American Civil Liberties Union to be a failure of democracy. Of course with any big failure, there are multiple points of view. From another vantage point, the Flint problem was economic in nature. The city had been a thriving center of manufacturing, but the losses of the automotive industry had left it as the home of one of the most poverty stricken populations in the country. But defining the situation in those terms is philosophically defeatist. It implies that poor people don’t have a right to safe drinking water. Or it leaves poor people waiting for charity.

Calling the situation a failure of democracy leads to more immediately actionable plans. The control of the government of Flint has now been returned to its elected mayor from the State appointed emergency manager, who took control after the bankruptcy of the city. Several years on, there are still a lot of lead pipes in Flint, and some people are still relying on bottled water to drink, although it’s been safe to wash even babies in the water for some time now.

There are still ongoing lawsuits over the actions taken by the officials appointed by the State, who abused their authority and ignored safety warnings from the employees of the water department. Some of these former authorities are facing criminal charges. (Feel free to contact me for a copy of my slide show or paper on the subject.)

Should all humans have safe drinking water? Is that a matter of justice? Lead in drinking water has been shown to cause irreversible brain damage in infants and young children. The brain damage leads to a higher incidence of behavioral problems, and even murder rates. (My previously mentioned paper has references to a scholarly article on this issue.) Of course “normal” people don’t want violent, brain damaged people in their neighborhoods.

What about toilets? Should all humans have toilets?

And education? Should all humans have access to basic education? Should they learn how to read, do arithmetic, and practice basic hygiene?

Are these issues of justice?

If we are able to envision a world of both peace and justice, we bring it closer to reality. Jesus’ teachings encouraged his followers to enter the Kingdom of Heaven within. Yet, as we leave the Halloween season, and approach the Thanksgiving Season, overshadowed as it now is in the American Retail environment, by a frenzy of Christmas capitalism, let’s rejoice that Christians have not totally given up the idea of the Old Testament prophet, that one day there would be Peace on Earth.

If all of us spread the word that our chances of Peace on Earth coming sooner will be improved once we start praying for an end to the CAUSES of war, we will be doing a small part to making it happen.

Spring Is Here

Even though we just got more snow, the birds announce that the season is changing. These views were from my back window. There were at least 20 robins hopping around for hours. There were some sparrows who later joined them, and then a crow started strutting around!

And a hawk circled

over the snow spotted ground

then flew off, northward.

And the rain having

melted the snow,

the robins party, party big.

I do not know if Spoonbills are migratory, and this photo is from March of 2020 in Assam, India. They are pretty amazing birds! These two were courting.

Haiku and Other Musings

I’ve been making it back to my Thursday morning writing group fairly regularly for a month or so now. It’s great to be back. So much talent, I sometimes wonder what I am doing there….But here were my creations for the morning.

Even Einstein

It is spring. There are
birds chirping from branches bare
or needle spiked.

Spring announces self
with light not temperature.
Light velocity

In four dimensions
Defines the universe that
humans can perceive.

Even Einstein did
Not know this on inventing
relativity.

Comments: I am reading J. W. N. Sullivan‘s book from 1949 called The Limitations of Science. He was considered one of the greatest lay science writers of the 20th Century. I first encountered his writing in The Life of the Spider. What a lovely book! Also worth reading is Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. But back to The Limitations of Science. Mr. Sullivan, just a few years after the publication by Einstein of his theories of Special and General Relativity, explains it in a way that I feel like I understand certain concepts that I never have before. Apparently it was not until others started working with Einstein’s equations that the concept of the velocity of light as perhaps the fundamental measurement in the universe was arrived at and perceived as meaningful in reality, not just useful in a mathematical description of reality.

Why?

Jay hated the question why.
Jay hated the word why.

He told me that he had concluded that there is never an answer to the question why.

Whether this was a result of his training as a psychologist or his personal spiritual search, I never could quite fathom.

Jay is no longer speaking with me.

I don’t believe I did anything specific to end the relationship. Over the years, I have often been wrong, and am usually the first to admit that to myself.

But after not seeing him for a while, and then a friendly unexpected encounter at Meijer, I have never gotten a reply to any attempts to reach him.

So obviously, I ask myself why? He was a good friend and support to me when we had first met. Sure, I can think of things I did that he did not appreciate. But the relationship did not end then. Anyway, at that time my question would have been how did I wrong you, or what did I do, not why are you not returning my calls.

Now, of course, I better understand the Buddhist teaching of dependent arising. However, in my mind, that teaching does not mean that the question or word why is completely useless or meaningless. It simply points to the fact that there is never a simple answer to the question. There are always and always more steps beneath the platform of conscious perception.

A popular manufacturing process troubleshooting method proposes a mere five whys. If perchance we do dig deep enough, we will eventually get to the point where there is no answer. Whether that question is why does God exist, or why the Big Bang happened, we humans will never be able to produce an answer that will be accepted by all humans.

A fellow industry consultant apparently believed that the answer to all whys was “Because of Adam and Eve.” That tells you how old this discussion was. Because now we would say simply “Because…Adam and Eve.”

To get back to the main point, we can’t now and won’t ever be able to answer the fundamental why from within the only fundamental what that we can know. We now know, but only in part, as through a glass, darkly. The promise of the Gospels, that one day we may know in full, is a false one. The Unknowable will always “out-be” the Knowable.

So suck it up.

But keep asking why about the little things. That can only have the effect of instilling an attitude of wonder. Wonder is a help. Wonder gets us through. Whether it’s optimistic or pessimistic wonder, wonder opens our mind to the possibility that things, or at least our appreciation of them, could change.

And there was Joy!

Joy to the world, proclaimed Jeremiah the Bullfrog. Or so sang Three Dog Night back in 1971, on Jeremiah’s behalf. It is funny that they picked Jeremiah to proclaim joy. Jeremiah of course is associated with the Jeremiad. The strong warning of imminent doom. But maybe that is the joke in the art form.

Anyway, those were the days when music was music. It had catchy tunes. At least usually. Those were also the days when Phillip Glass experimented with sounds that were on the margin of what I considered music, but the experts now consider him one of the most influential composers of the 20th Century.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought that music was the only avenue humans had to overcoming the sorrows and troubles of the world. Only through music could joy be experienced. The great composers could presumably experience joy and help to midwife it for others. Schopenhauer thought, and wrote about how, all art could play this uplifting role in human life. But he reserved the highest levels of joy to the potential accomplishments of the musically inclined.

Osho, on the other hand, or maybe we are now in need of moving to the feet, having already used up both hands, between Three Dog Night and Phillip Glass and then Schopenhauer, taught that joy did not ever, and does not now in the present, require music, or any other aid, to manifest in our hearts. All we need or needed, according to Osho, was not even love. Nope, all we needed, da du de dah, is to drop our constant ruminations about what has already passed, and worries about what might be. Just stop listening to the fear mongering of the ego. That’s it. Osho, despite this simple advice, is/was in no way optimistic about the ease anyone will / has encounter(ed) on their path to achieve a joyful victory. But, he teaches, when we truly find ourselves understanding that we are in a hopeless position, and that our ego’s false preachings will never bring us the peace we seek, then, and only then, in the inner silence, there will be joy. Maybe even, I wonder, on looking back on our earlier experiences, we will see that there was then also joy. The greatest joy. Joy to the world. All the boys and girls. Even joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea. I’m so full of joy that I regret that joy was not explicitly allotted to the simpler forms of eukaryotic and archaic life. Why wouldn’t they have joy too? They never had egos to drop.

What is the Human Condition?

Who knows what these bugs are? But they are doing what they were made to do. Glorious lust, but short-lived. Bugs mate when the opportunity arises. Humans sometimes have a little more choice about it. But we are still driven by many natural and social conditions to want to mate.

Never confuse the human condition for human nature. The first is real, the second mostly used as an excuse for personal failings, of self and others.

The human condition is a consequence of the evolution of consciousness. The pain associated with it results from conflicts between the necessity of providing for the body and the higher ethics we’ve developed to make life bearable. Modernity has brought with it ever greater conflicts due to our membership in complex, nested and overlapping sub-groups. These include family, neighbors, residents of our town, village, city, etc., fellow citizens and other residents of our nation, other nations around the world, professional societies, clubs, and more.

So-called “human nature” is a distorted epi-phenomenon arising from the sequence of difficulties that the powerful have created and manipulated for their own gain.

Humanity has not yet figured out exactly what real human nature is, but surely there is a strong component of co-operation and helpfulness.

Without that, we would not have thrived as much as we have.
Merwegon the Great