Science and Nature

I wrote a rant the other day. It was about how people frequently make claims that some "god" gave them this or that right, and how I find such proclamations to be disgusting in that they are totally without any evidentiary support and are simultaneously self-serving. (It's an excuse that is pulled out whenever difficult questions are asked. A "Get Out of Jail Free" card.) I sent it to a friend for comment before foisting it upon the world at large. He offered some excellent commentary.

Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Kevin Barrett wrote a very interesting article on "ponerology." Last night my mind piped up and asked me if I'd even considered that perhaps sociopathy is a function of one's position in the pecking order rather than the apparently current belief that it is something an individual is either blessed with (sarcasm intended) or not. My experience on this planet leads me to believe that this question may be worthy of consideration.

Winter is arriving in fine style here, as those of you who read the news and/or follow the weather know. As I mentioned earlier, we got a lot of snow earlier in the week, and yesterday evening, the winds picked up and more snow started flying. It almost feels like I’m back in Wyoming! Except Wyoming doesn’t have the monster evergreens that are everywhere ... nor the green that persists here, even this late in the year.

Well. I must’ve done something right by the weather spirits this year. I have been privately commenting on how much I’ve missed the snow—and as if on cue, the other day we got a decent (for here) accumulation. Amazingly, it’s stayed cold enough for it to mostly hang around. I awoke this morning to cloudy skies and a slightly thicker blanket of snow; and now, the snow is flying thick and fast—enough to compete with any plains or upper midwest snowstorm. The forecast is calling for 3–6 inches today, with a little more possible overnight.

Within the past month or so, I’ve encountered an astonishing assertion in several places. Not only is the assertion astonishing to me, it’s surprising that individuals whom I know to be intelligent and critical thinkers have offered it. This idea is—to perhaps oversimplify it a bit—that “brains are brains”. That is, absent congenital defect or physical trauma that obliterates part of one’s brain, all normal human brains are roughly equivalent in functionality. I’m going to try to refute this idea in two different ways, because each seems important. They may not appear to be so different to others, however.

Coffee and chocolate are the key to long life, sez someone besides me. No, seriously—a British scientist is quoted in this report advancing the claim that 20 polyphenol-rich foods are essential to fulfill one’s maximum individual lifespan. Luckily for y’all, I just happen to use several of the delectables on his list in my truffle offerings!

It didn’t go as intended—which was a given before we’d even set off—but our weekend away was nonetheless filled with a lot of pleasure. The snolfs got to try their fishing poles, at long last; but, not having tried to learn anything about their equipment nor the fish in the waters they were plying, didn’t get so much as a nibble. Snolf the First was especially frustrated, because his supposedly better reel kept tangling the line when he’d try to rewind, but Darlin’ Daughter’s willingness to share her rod offset that frustration quite nicely. They learned how to cast fairly quickly, and did pretty well at it. They apparently chose the most garish of lures they have—a big red and white stripedy thing—and it looked comically out of place in the clear, cold water of the lake. Maybe the fish were as amused as I was; all the same, the snolfs enjoyed themselves, and I enjoyed watching their antics and seeing their happiness.

We had other kinds of fun as well, but I won’t bore everyone with a detailed recounting. Suffice to say that we found more interesting things to explore than we had time for, and we intend to return to the area.

Lobo and I were each a bit preoccupied in our own ways by the doings of humans in the world at large, and that was hard to shake over the weekend. Yet, nestled up in the mountains, trying to avoid human interaction as much as possible, we too were soothed by the music of wind in pines or rushing rapids; we enjoyed seeing birds of prey coasting on thermals; in short, nature provided a welcome balm.

And I wonder how it is that regular individuals—not the petty tyrants who administer and bureaucratize and dictate the rules and regulations by which we’re supposed to order our lives; in being such creatures they show they have no soul left to reclaim or rejuvenate—can so seemingly placidly plod along with those restrictions and orders.

How can someone breathe deeply of fresh, clean air; take in the breathtaking beauty abundant in nature; feel a child’s small hand slip into theirs as they walk side by side; how can any person observe or even think about the countless ways the world displays its beauty, even amongst man-made jungles, and then turn to become a cog of the state?

How do people who see the glories and the wonder–full potential of our world willingly go off to kill others in some faraway place? How can they blind themselves to the potential of those faraway places, or worse, trash the beauty there?

What does the state offer that is so powerful, so enticing, that people willingly turn their backs on their own dreams and goals, and become its thralls? I do not think most people are intrinsically that evil, nor that stupid, to choose such a deal with such a devil. But its siren songs sing to them in ways I cannot hear; or perhaps more accurately, I heard but never stopped questioning, and hence the song held no charms for me.

I may be nothing but an aging idealist, yet I cling to the belief that many people’s eyes could be opened if they would just look a little harder, or have a key question dropped into their minds. While I often ask “why”, it seems to me that for many, pointing out the contrast between a life as it is, and that life as it could be—as it was meant to be, free from busybody interference and coercive intrusion—by asking “how” might be the right key.

When I wrote in the introductory column to the most recent Sunni’s Salon that “we aren’t holding high hopes for a bumper crop of anything but lessons learned”, I wasn’t indulging in false modesty. And it is now official—as reports start to come in, even friends with self-professed brown thumbs are reaping their rewards. So, how does Sunni’s garden grow? Let’s go out to the patch to review the sorry state of affairs.

I am finding the ongoing changes in and challenges to my thinking interesting, and sometimes even amusing. To be clear (and repetitive, I know), I have been a science-oriented person as far back as I can remember—wondering about how things work and how to test ideas and wanting proof for everything. I still consider myself a scientist, even though I have not worked in that realm for years ... yet the way some individuals apply scientific theories is problematic for me.

A while back, I mused on a possible outcome of the economic situation in the USSA, in Lemonade for Voluntaryists?. And today, I discover that the lemonade is starting to flow.

We finally had a deviation from the unusually damp and cool spring here, and I made good use of it. I’ve been dodging the showers as best I can, getting the garden plot ready for planting. Yesterday morning, I finished that task; and in the afternoon, the snolfs and I finally got the garden planted!

My, my, my. The bad news has been mounting fast for all the healthocrats protecting the USSA flock. Crows might become an endangered species soon. It could happen ... if all the nanny-ninnies were intellectually honest enough to admit that they’ve been wrong for decades.

I’ve been kinda-sorta following developments in wind and solar energy, but not very diligently; I don’t expect to have a need for that kind of tech anytime soon. A Reuters article from yesterday sure caught my attention, though: Pioneers show Americans how to live “off-grid” claims that prices have dropped enough that both technologies are increasingly feasible for home use. And of course, the increasing costs of energy have upped the appeal. An excerpt from the article:

[Author Nick] Rosen estimates that there are as many as 350,000 U.S. households meet their own energy needs, and growing at 30 percent a year.

"As people are losing their homes, or finding the rent or mortgage too much to pay, they are choosing the off-grid alternative because it is so much cheaper," Rosen said

While installation costs for the solar panels, wind turbines, converters and batteries needed to power up an off-grid home were prohibitively expensive a few years back, improved technology and ramped up production has driven down costs significantly.

Popular solar-powered systems are made by Sharp Corp, Kyocera Corp and silicon Valley-based Nanosolar, among others, and according to the website Low Impact Living (click on www.lowimpactliving.com/), installation costs have fallen by more than 80 percent over 20 years.

"The cost is falling all the time as there is more and more manufacturing plant coming onstream. In fact, there may even be a glut in solar panels next year which would be very good news for the consumers," said Rosen. ....

Power utilities such as Arizona Public Service, the principal subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corp, is among utilities in several U.S. states that offer subsidies to consumers planning to meet their own power needs, so as to ease demand for a growing on-grid customer base.

"Not only is it getting cheaper to generate non-grid electricity, but it's getting cheap and comfortable to set up your off-grid home, and there are even bonuses from your local utility company for doing so," Rosen said. ....

The cost of building such a home is little different from that of building any other home, and with a range of energy sipping appliances such as refrigerators, hi-fis and even hairdryers now available, the forced austerity associated with off-grid living is also changing.

"You can have hot showers and a cold beer," said [off-grid developer Lonnie] Gamble. "You have no water bill, no sewer bill, no power bill and you can harvest something fresh from the greenhouse ... why would you ever do anything else?"

Two things stick out from the article—only one of which is in the bit quoted. If one is completely off the grid, why would one be in contact with “your local utility company”? Seems to me the privacy gained from them not coming on to the property, reading meters and the like, would itself be worth going off-grid. Second, “trend analyst” author Rosen is quoted as saying that he doesn’t think as many as half of all American homes will ever be off-grid, which strikes me as an amazingly short-sided attitude, particularly for one in the trend analysis biz. If that stupid OPEC lawsuit legislation continues, and if the greenies keep the USSA’s reserves out of bounds, the resulting price pinch could be enough to tip a lot more people that way. And it is possible that the grid could fail or be taken out for a large part of the country, and in some way that would require routing around that in order to regain some of the niceties of modernity. Doesn’t take much imagination to come up with such scenarios at all.

Anyway, it’s good to see such a major leg in the self-sufficiency puzzle getting more interest.

Not that the greenies have a monopoly on hubris—many humans seem to have the idea that what they have created, or what they value, must be preserved as is for all time. But environmentalists showcase the concept so very well, not only in their actions but in the fact that their most formidable opponent is often nature itself.

Isn’t amazing how a person can dance all around a common theme without seeing it? It seems to me I’ve been doing that in my recent posts—both implicitly attack the authority inherent in many current systems. Yet I was clueless as to that until just now.