Making Peace

Tastes like Chicken

We Sapiens, if we are special, it is because we can look ahead.  If you're still tiptoeing around the word "death," perhaps it is time you confront the fact that while you may or may not be more than a biological being, you are at least that much and one day you will die.  Learning to die is the key to virtue.  Dying well is a legacy (and frankly a favor done) for your loved ones.

The Economist took a shot at explaining the issue and it deserves a recommendation,

Roughly every half a second, someone, somewhere in the world, dies – and nearly a person a minute in the United Kingdom. Yet ours is an age in which death has become taboo. “For all but our most recent history death was an ever present possibility,” writes Atul Gawande, an American surgeon and author of the bestseller “Being Mortal”, which has established him as a leading authority on the end of life. “It didn’t matter if you were 5 or 50. Every day was a roll of the dice.” But things have changed. Fifty years ago, most of us would have died at home. Now, though 70% of us would like to, only 12% do, leaving the vast majority to die in hospitals, hospices or care homes. So many – perhaps most – of us no longer know what death looks like. “A hundred years ago, everyone knew how people died,” says Min Stacpoole, a clinical nurse specialising in palliative care and based at St Christopher’s Hospice in south London. “Now many people are frightened of having a dead body in their house.” 

Read more at the link.

What does it mean to be human?  It means being willing to eat what no one has eaten before.  Apparently, chickens were domesticated long before anyone ever thought to ask, "What do we mean when we say it 'tastes like chicken'."

As he noted recently, the staggering number of chickens in the world — 20 billion or so — is reason enough to study them. And although it may be hard to believe, it seems that neither potpie nor chicken Parmesan was the reason humans domesticated them.

“It looks like from all the evidence that chickens existed for a very long time in association with people and they were not food,” he said. Today, chickens are just behind pigs and poised to overtake them as the most common source of animal protein in the world. But before the raising of chickens became industrial, they were far less important to human diets, and for thousands of years, their primary role seems to have been in cockfighting or various rituals. Estimates of the time of their domestication are from 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, but a recent report from an archaeological dig in Israel concluded that they were first eaten in significant numbers about 2,200 years ago.  

The chicken project will investigate, among other things, just exactly what we were doing with chickens for all that time.

What does it mean to be human? It means we've all got a little bit of Cain within us, and it has been there since the get go

When it comes to the origins of warfare, there are two main schools of thought. One school believes the propensity for violence is embedded deep in human nature; the other believes that it arose in response to the need to protect property, a symptom of humans’ move from nomadic hunting and gathering towards a more settled lifestyle. Those who support the latter idea argue that the Paleolithic era was generally a peaceful time, with little evidence of organized violence between hunter-gatherer groups. 

But new research complicates that second argument: In a study published today in the journal Nature, a team of anthropologists describe a prehistoric mass grave whose inhabitants died a violent death, evidence that small-scale warfare was alive and well even among hunter-gatherer communities.   

Adam and Eve mourn Abel

The site, discovered in Nataruk, Kenya, in 2012, housed the remains of 27 people, including 12 intact skeletons. Based on carbon dating of the bones and surrounding sediment, the researchers estimate that the deaths took place somewhere between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago..

Not that this makes us special, other animals go to war as well.

What does it mean to be human?  It means you do not need to just work against attempts to abrogate your liberty from the left.  It does not mean you just need to resist attempts to abrogate your liberty from the right.

It means you need to resist all attempts to abrogate your liberty.

Sen. Ben Sasse is heading to Iowa to campaign against Donald Trump over the next two days, with plans to appear at events for Senate colleagues Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and "possibly other constitutional candidates," according to a statement from the Nebraska Republican's office."We are in a moment of constitutional crisis. America already has one post-constitutional party; we don't need another," Sasse said in the statement, two days after he unleashed a rapid-fire series of questions for Trump on Twitter.
...
"We have a President who does not believe in executive restraint; we do not need another," Sasse continued in his statement on Tuesday. "I am not endorsing any candidate-- I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances. I'm pro-Constitution and if that makes me anti-Trump, that's Mr. Trump's problem."

The Apocalypse is Postponed

or at least one study suggests it may be.

As climate change accelerates ice melt in the Arctic, polar bears may find caribou and snow geese replacing seals as an important food source, shows a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE. The research, by Linda Gormezano and Robert Rockwell at the American Museum of Natural History, is based on new computations incorporating caloric energy from terrestrial food sources and indicates that the bears' extended stays on land may not be as grim as previously suggested.

In other words, the polar bears probably won't starve to death.  You're fear and anxiety were so much wasted energy.

Everywhere I look I see contemporary man filled with fear and anxiety.  Hence my reticence to emulate to conform to what makes a man "contemporary."

I'd rather be a dinosaur at peace with himself and the world in it than to walk around on eggshells, always afraid to offend, always thinking what it means to be a classical human is offensive.

I kill to eat.
I am a tribal animal.
I am both an individual and member of a communtiy.

Honey badger don't care.  Polar bear don't care.  Wiscur don't care.

That doesn't mean I do not want to be the best human I am capable of being.  Race horses want to win.  Cats want to kill.  I want to emulate the best of what it is to be "man."  I want to embody the classical virtues: courage, temperence, justice, and prudence.

I don't count catastrophic thinking amongst the human virtues.

I don't care if the woman on TV is quoting Dick Cheny trying to make you afraid of Iraqi nuclear weapons, Barak Obama trying to make you afraid of global warming, or the cashier at Best Buy pushing the extended warrenty, they are using fear to sell you something.

Refuse to be sold.  Refuse to be afraid.

Repeat after me,

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

You should not be surprised when the fear peddled to the masses turns out to be 
overblown.  We should not be surprised when it turns out the world will keep on spinning even if the globe warms.



News Flash: Mass Marketing Lies

We will face obstacles in the future and global warming may well be one of them, but don't buy into the fear.  Yes, we will have to let go of some of the things we love, but who lied to you telling you the universe passed without change or loss?

Danger is real.  Fear is in your head. 

Fear is introduced in order to make you irrational, to make you act quickly so you will accept the choices as they are framed to you, so you will buy what is being sold.  Fear never solved a problem, fear never questioned the two false choices being offered.  Critical thought takes place in the absence of fear.

We are driving change on this planet.  That ship has long left the harbor.  It is time to own this fact rather than lament it, to own and adapt to change rather than fear it.  It is time to realize that while we are a key influence, there is much we can not control. 

Change the things we can.
Accept the things we cannot change. 
Wisdom to know the difference.

Homo Sapien: Tribal, Cosmopolitan, Realist, Unafraid

This is the Anthropocene, let's do it rationally and neither hyped up on fear or asleep in front of the television.

So I am glad it looks as if the polar bears will adapt to changes in their enviroment.  I am not surprised, they are survivors.  Just like their fellow apex predator: Homo sapien.

Edit: Oh yeah, and despite what Al Gore predicted, we are well into a period of low hurricane activity.  Though when it returns to normal or goes above (remember to get average will we have as many years with increased activity as subdued activity), I am sure you will hear about; and you will be told to be afraid.