Truly Yours

‘Truly Yours’ is one of those phrases that has a distinct Hallmark quality to it. The sort of words one is expected to whisper to one’s lover in moments of particular intimacy. But what in the end is truly ours? We will examine each of the things generally thought to be truly ours in the revealing light of two questions – does/did/will the thing in question belong to someone else? and can someone/something take it from you?

Let’s begin with the large and move toward the small.

Land. Is your land truly yours? The land was created with the formation of the Earth 4.5 billions of years ago. Many living things have called it home and passed across it long before your birth. Before the rise of our species, the advent of paper, the laws written on it and the men with weapons who will theoretically defend your property rights. The land did not ‘belong’ to anyone. Even after the rise of these things the land has changed hands many times and will again after your death if not before. So, it has belonged to others and will again. It can also be taken from you at any time by the same government that you depend on to defend it against others. Is it then ‘truly yours’? No.

What about your possessions? Most of these have no doubt been manufactured and purchased. Some few you may have made yourself. If you bought something used then it has already had a previous owner. When you die. If the objects are claimed then they will have another owner if not then they will go into a landfill more than likely. Can they be taken? Here we must answer yes, for what thing do you hold so close that it could not be taken by theft, fire, flood, earthquake or financial ruin? Are our possessions truly ours? Since we have them only at the sufferance of thieves of proper skill and motivation and circumstances of sufficient severity I would say they fail the test.

What about our bodies themselves? Surely these might be said to be truly ours? A case might be made for this. The hands I use have not belonged to anyone else. However, the organs I have might well be used after my death since I have signed up for organ donation in the event of demise so perhaps not. Can they be taken from me? Indeed they can. Disease or accident could easily rob me of any of the organs of my body. (I view organ thievery as an unlikely possibility). In addition the molecules of my body certainly were not manufactured by me, but rather by some unnamed and ill-fated star gone to black long before my birth and these molecules, unlike the organs they compose, have indeed been used before. I cannot know how many of the molecules presently in my hands were in hands before mine but it seems likely that some were and some shall be again

Well then, how about my memories? If anything those could be said to be mine right? No other would have the same memories as I even of the same events. This is true however, time will rob you of your memories and death itself will surely take them all.

So what then is yours that is proof against thieves, proof against catastrophe and proof even against time itself? Have we eliminated everything? No we have not. There is one thing. That one thing is your decisions. Thieves cannot take them back from time, nor can disasters remove them. This is not to say that all decisions you make will in the end have great importance, but they are the one thing that are truly yours. They should be made with care.

And here we come to one of my ‘beefs’ with religion. In religion I do not even have the small consolation of my decisions being truly mine. The all-powerful, anthropomorphic deity could negate any and all of them at whim. Likely it could erase me from the time stream itself if it chose to do so and this is true of all humans. Our bad decisions can be erased by this being if benevolent, and any good decisions would be a pale reflection of our infinitely superior creator. They count for nothing as the future was decided before we were created. In this view we are in a state of perpetual childhood. We will never ever grow up. Perhaps our species is a long way from maturity, but I for one would like to see us reach it. And once that maturity was reached we could say that it was truly ours.

Through a Glass Darkly

When I emerged from the womb at (9lbs, 6oz) there were already 3.14 billion human beings inhabiting our planet. Today there are 6.5 billion (give or take). Each of those six-and-a-half billion people needs to eat. Each of those six-and-a-half billion needs fresh water to drink. Each of those six-and-a-half billion needs air to breathe. Each of those six-and-a-half billion produce urine and feces, which must be treated so that they can be absorbed by the environment. Many of those six-and-a-half billion need fuel to warm their homes, many of those six-and-a-half billion need fuel to cook their food. Those are needs, we have not even begun to discuss wants.

Once upon a time I lived in a different, more rural town. One night while I was driving home I saw a young deer lying under a small spruce tree beside the road. It was dead. For the next several months I looked at it as I passed and watched the changes. First all of the soft internal organs went, then the hide went and last of all went the bones. There came a day when the deer was completely gone, as if it had never been there. If you think about it makes perfect sense. Otherwise the woods would be so chock full of deer bones you couldn’t walk.

Human beings are not like this although we once were. Only a small fraction of the waste we produce is recycled. This includes gaseous wastes like carbon dioxide which comes from the burning of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are used to run the machines which plant our food, harvest our food, transport our food, package and process our food. Fossil fuels are burned to make the electricity which runs the pumps which pump the water to grow the food, and which pump the fresh water to us (and to the plants where it is bottled as well as being the material the bottles themselves are made from). Like many of the bottles the carbon dioxide from the burning the fossil fuels accumulates. And accumulates. And accumulates. The more of it there is the more heat from the sun it traps in the atmosphere. The more heat it traps the more things will change. Things like rainfall patterns and the strength and frequency of storms. This will cause droughts and floods. This will cause a loss of crops. This will ultimately cause starvation. Today there are more hungry mouths than there were yesterday. Tomorrow there will be more hungry mouth than there are today. With each new person the problem grows, especially here in the developed countries.

Simon and Garfunkel said it well ‘a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest’. If we want to avoid starvation on a biblical scale then the discussions should begin now as to how many of us the earth can comfortable hold. If we want to avoid further disruption of the climate we need to drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels now (yesterday preferably). I do not believe that either of these things will happen. Most people don’t want to hear that there is a problem or that they will be expected to make any sacrifice whatsoever for the common good. They want to drive their hummers to the NASCAR races, have their pork bar-b-que’s afterwards and then go home to watch the latest ‘reality’ show on TV. I do not think that they will hear anything or do anything until their own children or grandchildren are screaming from hunger and thirst. At that point they will weep, wail, gnash their teeth and say that it’s too late and that nobody predicted it. They may indeed be right about the ‘too late’ part. It may already be too late. The books I read on this subject always end with that little hopeful upbeat message just like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ did, but I think that’s just a sop to sell the works themselves, because a message saying ‘we are doomed and there is nothing you can do about it’ would likely not sell as well (I might be wrong about that, the ‘Left Behind’ series is doing okay I hear).

Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but I do not believe the phrase used by the Easter Islanders - ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth." - has been heard for the last time on our world.
This is what I see in my glass. Unnecessary death and unimaginable suffering until we learn to be like the deer. If we ever do.

Catastrophic Success

That's what a member of the Bush administration would have called it. Naturally anyone else would call it failure. On Monday night I hiked into the Pemigewasset Wilderness to set up camp with the intention the next day of hiking what I call the 'Great Ring' a horseshoe of mountain peaks some 25 miles in length. When I got to Lincoln NH I realized that I had neglected to bring my filter bottle (which filters spring and stream water so you don't get Giardia or one of the other malicious microbes which can hang out there). Unfortunately the outfitter in Lincoln did not have a filter bottle so I settled instead for buying some iodine tablets (which I had also left at home). I figured I'd just carry some extra Gatorade for the journey and everything would be okay. On the way out to the campsite I realized that I had forgotten another vital substance: deodorant. So I dropped my pack, jogged back to my car and snagged that. I can lay partial blame for my haste on the swarm of biting flies in the parking lot which hurried me along. I reached my usual camping site beside the stream, the one I stayed at in the previous year when I tried this same stunt (emphasis on 'try' there). I used the last of the remaining sunlight to pack my day pack for the next day. Food: bag o' gorp and two Clif bars. Drink: Four bottles of Gatorade. Clothes: A lot in case it suddenly became winter at the high elevations (which is possible). Then I tried to sleep (emphasis again on 'try'). I don't know exactly how many hours of sleep I managed to get, but it wasn't a lot and my dreams were of things like coyotes and bears. The owls serenading me didn't help. Except for bears nothing in the forest presented an overt danger to me, but that didn't keep me from noticing every little sound. In the pre-dawn darkness of 4:30 in the morning I gave up and started breaking camp. I had some gorp and a few combos and the remains of a diet coke (talk about the breakfast of champions). As I was packing up my tent the flashlight died and I cursed it with great cursings. It didn't actually 'die' per se. It decided that what it would do was work for about four seconds at a time and then fade out until I shut it off for a minute. Rinse and repeat. With that handicap I packed everything up and stowed my big pack in the bushes across the stream. By this time there was the dimmest hint of dawn which allowed me to see the path as a dark ribbon through the bushes. So off I went into the lightening grey. The beginning was not auspicious considering that even on the first of many mountains I had to pause and catch my breath. This was not a particularly difficult mountain either. It was a bad sign of things to come, and come they did. So up I went over Mt. Flume and then on to Mt. Liberty. After Liberty was Haystack where I began to seriously, as the phrase goes, 'drag ass' but up I went. Over Lincoln and Over Lafayette. I had drunk two of my Gatorades early on, but then I had pretty much stopped drinking. I rested longer than is typical for me on Mt. Lafayette in the hopes that my digestive system would take the opportunity to catch up and re-stock the precious bodily fluids. It didn't so on I went. After an interminable period of ups and downs (which I had barely remembered from the last time) I reached Mt. Garfield and there, after DEETing my clothing heavily (there were bugs) I laid down on the rock and after shivvering for a time I did something unusual for me. I fell asleep. Rocks as most everyone can attest are not the most comfortable of places so this was a bit surprising. By the time I reached the peak of Garfield I had lost all of my 'oomph' for ups. I could do level or down, but any up was a struggle and if I continued on with my plan there would have been a huge up in my future. By this time it was 3:00, and since I had left the useless flashlight behind there was no possibility of going on in the dark even had I the strength (which I didn't). So as I had done last time I took the 'turn of shame' which is a cut off you can do at about the halfway point of the 'horseshoe'. Down I went. I am not exactly sure when I stopped sweating, but I did. I have had heat exhaution before and am all too familiar with the symptoms which is why I either dunked or poured water over my head at each stream to cool me off. After seven long miles I came to one of the large bridges and paused for a moment. I was queasy, but I still had one full gatorade in my pack and I didn't want to keep carrying it. So I thought to myself: 'I can handle just a swallow or two.' I was wrong and I knew it almost immediately. I leaned over the bridge trying to settle the stomach, but to no avail which is why I was on my knees dry heaving into the grass only moments later (I had eaten nothing since breakfast about 12 hours previous so there was nothing to bring up). I felt a little better after that and after some more long miles I gathered my big pack from where I had left it and made it back to my car (which I was happy to see). I drove down to the Lincoln McDonalds and decided to test my stomach on some diet coke (I don't know why but fountain soft drinks seem to be the best thing when the stomach is upset). My stomach passed that test and when I got to the Town Near The Mountains I got two of those little meat roll thingies that you see at the Quik-e-Mart because for some reason I was really craving meat. I had food with me (uneaten from my journey) but I wanted meat dammit! They went down and did not, thankfully, make a return journey. When I got back to City By The Sea I had even more meat and it was good. So was the shower and the brushing of the teeth. Yeah, I had forgotten the toothbrush too.
Guess I'll have to be better prepared next year. Third time's a charm right? As for the 'success' part I didn't die on the slippery rocks and I burned a goodly number of calories. Yeah me.

I Protest

The day began misty when Snowman and I drove down to the appropriate co-ordinates at 9:30 where there were a few people gathered in the parking lot behind the school. Snowman's comment: "They are all old." Which was mostly true and included me. We met one large fellow from City by the Sea who believed that the government destroyed WTC#7 on purpose with planted charges. I cannot go that far I'm afraid. If I did there would be no point to protesting. What difference would protesting make to a government that would have the will to do that to it's citizens and ability to keep it secret? If that is the world we live in then the game is already lost.
We took the very comfy bus to a field where we gathered with other protestors


including someone in a polar bear suit -

I got a few positive comments on my sign and one young woman even took a picture of it.

Once we we all gathered together we set out (a little bit late) through the town where we received mostly positive feedback (smiles, waves and flashes of the peace sign) from onlookers. We did a few chants as we walked: "What do we want? PEACE!* When do we want it? NOW!", "Hey hey ho ho Bush and Cheney have to go!", "Stop the funding for the war! Bring the troops home now!" Those were the big three. Snowman and I joined in sporadically. I was fairly hoarse by the end. There were a few people along our path who took exception to our politics including one woman at a flea market who gave us the finger for quite a long time as we passed by and another woman who shouted "Get a life!" at us. I was tempted to ask if I could have hers but didn't. There were some others who gave us the thumbs down as we passed and many who acted as if we were poor relations come to ask for money i.e. they scowled and looked away. The organizers asked us at the beginning not to respond to hecklers so we didn't for the most part. After a pleasant seaside walk out to the Walker's Point checkpoint we chanted a bit and then turned around and walked back to the field.



There was no organized counter protest, although I did see one woman with a hastily made sign saying "He's your president", but she didn't say anything, not as I passed at least. As we marched back Snowman and I maneuvered up to the front of the line in order to be first (or nearly so) onto the bus that would take me back to my car. There was no way that I wanted to wait for the second trip. And so ended my first political protest. Not a bad experience overall.

*on the return trip when they asked "What do we want?" One of the kids in the line responded: "PIZZA!" rather than "PEACE!".

Sign Sign Everywhere a Sign

Tomorrow will be a first for me. I am going to attend a protest of 'The Decider' who is here to pay homage to George the Greater and his mate Echidna. The infosite said to make a sign and 'be creative' so I gave it my best effort (despite running out of room sooner than I anticipated). One side of the sign says " SLITHER BACK TO THE CESSPOOL YOU CRAWLED FROM MONSTER" and the other side says "STOP POLLUTING OUR STATE WITH YOUR TOXIC PRESENCE! GO HOME!" So what do you think? Too subtle?

A Mother's Choice Part II

According to some estimates there are tens of trillions of cells in the adult human body (of which I happen to be a possessor). In most (but not all) of these is a nucleus and in that nucleus is DNA. My blueprints. That double helix has determined a lot of things in my life and will continue to determine a goodly number of things right up to my death (which barring accident or environmental influence it will also determine, the seeds of creation and destruction both). Until the 1950's when Watson and Crick puzzled it out the shape of it was the subject of speculation. The secret code was locked away in an ivory tower, inaccessible. After that human beings began working on picking the lock to that tower.
I had meant the first thread to be a discussion of cloning rather than designer genes (which I think deserves it's own thread). So here we go.
If my own mother had had the choice I hope that she would have made them. If she could have chosen for me to have good, straight, cavity resistant teeth I hope that she would have made that choice. If she could have chosen for me to have good knees rather than ones that pop out in a rather agonizing fashion if I bend them the wrong way I hope that she would have made that choice. If she could have chosen for me to be able to see perfectly well without glasses I hope she would have made that choice. If she could have chosen for me to have a full head of hair for the entirety of my life I really really hope that she would have made that choice and lastly if she could have chosen to remove from my genes the predilection for the early onset of circulatory and heart disease which has marked me and the taint of which is there in the nuclei of those tens of trillions of cells I hope that she would have made that choice as well and left me with a better legacy than the one that I now bear.
I will state unabashedly that I am for unravelling The Code and for re-writing it better. What do I mean by better? Better as in eliminating all of the inheritable diseases. Better as in increasing our resistance to viruses. Better as in increasing our resistance to bacteria and parasites. Better as in increasing our resistance to toxins and radiation. If we could do that why would we not? If we could free every baby born on earth from these burdens why would we not? Imagine a world where no one needed braces or glasses. Imagine a world almost no one got sick. But that isn't the controversial part of course. After all who would stand up and fight for our right for cancer susceptibility? These things are in the Code of some people already. We just need to make sure that everyone gets them.
The Code dictates other things as well - my gender; my shape; the color of my hair, skin and eyes. So where is 'better' there? The answer of course is in the choices of the parents. I don't know what choices they would make, but I think they should have the ability to make them. And if you disagree (as I know some of you do) the question comes again: If it is not harming you then why would you deny those choices to others who would make them? If everyone wants tall, blue-eyed, white-skinned boy children then so be it. I personally suspect that they wouldn't. Isn't part of the fun of having children that they look like you (at least to some extent)?
Evolution tells us one thing very clearly: Change is inevitable. Until now evolution has determined those changes, but soon we will be able to give eyes to blind chance and be made better thereby.

A Mother’s Choice, Part I

On the two hour ride from the airport to home after our across-the-pond vacation we had a long and heated discussion on, of all things, cloning and genetic engineering (due no doubt to the fact that we are poor sports fans and I can’t discuss music in any depth since the musicians in the family have failed repeatedly to successfully explain the concept of a musical key to me).

For the last two million years or so the pressures of survival and evolution have been dictating the genetic make-up of our species. Those best adapted to pass on their genes did so and those least adapted did much less so. That was then, and this is now. Those primitive people’s had no idea why they looked the way that they did. Likely they thought it was just the way things were, but now we know. I am not saying that we now know all there is to know about the subject, but we do know enough to be dangerous and we become more dangerous by the day in this regard. Now we know about, DNA, about genes, about testing for genetic abnormalities, diseases and gender. Very soon I think we will know about human cloning and perhaps a little while after that about genetic engineering, not of crops and domestic animals mind you, but genetically engineering of people.

The first question off the block is what is wrong with human cloning and what uses might it be put to and are these bad? I have always thought that the major attraction of cloning would be the ability to have exactly what you wanted in a child. You see someone you like or go to the handy neighborhood Genebank and look through the catalog and pick out the set of features that you are looking for, get the DNA and presto (well nine months later presto), but there are other possibilities as well. Possibilities like banking the DNA of your children ‘just in case’. If there is an accident then you get a ‘do-over’. This becomes more problematic as the children age obviously. There are also those people who are egotistical enough to clone themselves and raise themselves as children (alternatively they could have others raise them as children). I came down on the side of choice personally. Although I am not a parent I find the idea of getting pretty much the child you want and eliminating chance appealing. The problem though is that unless you are cloning yourself you are not passing on your genes so it works poorly as a genetic survival scheme.

Songbird was against human cloning (with one unusual exception), the Princess was aghast at the thought of having herself as a child because it was so ‘unnatural’. Snowman kept bringing up cloning our dogs (very poor cloning candidates) and I am not sure where he stood on the whole human cloning question. I am pretty sure he wasn’t enthused by getting one of himself. So how about you?