We stand of many shoulders

I was young, still in elementary school and had not a clue which direction my future would take when I was asked “What do want to be when you grow up?” Having just read a book on cultural anthropology (although I think the title was something like Recent Discoveries in Archaeology) and the chapter that grabbed my attention was a discussion on flint knapping in the Stone Age. Without a clue as to what I was doing I decided to try to make a stone spear point, just for fun.

Little did I realize that the period of time between simply knocking two stones together and deliberately pressure pointing a flake was at least 40,000 generations of slow and painful development and all I got for my battering two rocks together was an abused rock and several smashed fingers. My respect for our long lost common ancestors was one of life’s epochal events that lead to my appreciation of history and understanding that we all too often forget the powerful shoulders we today stand upon!

From the Oldwan hand axes of 2.6 million years ago to the sophisticated Achuelean axes of 500,000 years ago reflect a development of the human brain to do strategic planning. The Stone Age hand tool tells us of an ability to see the final object within the lump (or later flake) of stone in the makers hand. This ability to visualize abstract goals reflects the development of the human fore brain (prefrontal cortex) and its capacity to see what you want and the proficiency to verbalize what your mind is seeing. An ability that many anthropologists did not believe our ancestors had.

Several studies have trained students to make Achuelean tools but rarely do the students produce an object that would meet the standards of the original makers of Stone Age tools. It has been surmised that given sufficient time and experience modern man could match the casual efforts of our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Modern Neuropathology studies have determined that the mental effort required to visualize and make a stone tool actually alters the physical structure of the brain, which in turn made it easier to do it again and make it better this time.

We owe it to our remote ancestors who started out beating two rocks together for everything that we now know as modern society.

Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped when I smashed my fingers!

Easter Thoughts

5 April 2015

The day before Easter I was nonplussed to see that many local churches were having their Easter Egg Hunts on Saturday. Adding to my confusion was learning that the eggs were plastic and the contents were candy.

I feel that I must be alone in remembering that religious thought about Easter includes recognition that an egg is the perfect symbol for the rebirth that both spring and the Resurrection bring with them. Out of a closed container with no identity the germ of life flourishes and out of a simple egg a complex life emerges.

As an “older gentleman” I can remember churches having Easter Dawn services, in my case on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean shore and that a real “Easter Egg” was presented to church members in remembrance of the resurrection that is the sole reason for the day. Since those youthful days the Yuppie and Millennial generations have adopted political correctness that doesn’t allow for individual performance or attitude.

Real eggs might have Salmonella and grubby fingers might get the egg dirty while they take that awful shell off it and then they could make the innocent child sick! Anyway clean candy, stuffed into a plastic egg is always better for the kids and who cares about their weight and dental condition, that’s all in the future and we don’t think about that.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I believe that an honest appreciation of the historical and religious beginnings of our society, and an honest application of those beginnings to our social thought needs to happen.

Random Thoughts

8 Mar 15

While enjoying a soft spring like day by trolling through the Internet I ran across two “news” items that are joined by the narcissism of the actors, but are otherwise unrelated.

It seems that America’s most inept fugitive is not happy living in the workers’ paradise that is modern Russia and has applied for political asylum in Switzerland. Edward Snowden would “love to live in Switzerland”, but after being rejected by the 21 other countries he has requested asylum I suspect that his latest desire will be frustrated by the reluctance of yet another government to welcome a self-aggrandizing fugitive into its space. Mr. Snowden is reluctant to return to the United States because he claims he would not get a fair and open trial. My feeling is that he would get a most public and open trial (and one that is as fair as the legal system allows) but that he knows that if he does return to this country he would not get out of prison for many years.

The other news item concerns the continuing quest by the militant Islam State, the self-styled Caliphate to destroy anything they proclaim to be modern and contrary to their religious viewpoint. In addition to messily executing anyone they feel is even a minor threat to their squalid existence they have now taken on the task of destroying artifacts of civilizations that predate by millennia the “religion of peace” they claim to follow. After destroying Assyrian statues in a museum in Mosul they set their sights higher and are now destroying the large (by ancient standards) city of Hatra. A city that was founded in the 13^th century BCE, about 1900 years before Mohamad even thought of repurposing a nomadic moon god as the center point of a religion he created as part of his efforts to build a personal empire.

But ISIS doesn’t care that all of today’s people and cultures are built on the successes of past people and cultures. In their narcissism they seek only to destroy that which they cannot claim. I also find it interesting that they are using explosives and bulldozers to accomplish their goals. Their level of civilization is so far removed from societies of today (including other Muslim cultures) that in order to be true to their belief system they should be using stone hammers to batter the past into oblivion.

The common thread between Snowden and ISIS is that both are so self-absorbed that they fail to see that humanity views them as unworthy of respect and good only for the dustbin of history. Unfortunately it looks like tossing both into the past will be a long and painful process.     

Looking But not seeing

This story is several years old and is about a family in Union County IL who try to be self sufficient. The Benson family has a small farm with a woodlot that is growing a reasonable amount of sugar maples.

Early Spring with its increasing hours of daylight brings a sap rise in the trees that can be extracted and boiled down to maple syrup. With just a little effort the family could make a lot of sugar for the year. We have all seen pictures of sugar bushes with buckets hanging from the trees and read annual newspaper articles about syrup production. It's almost iconic.

The Benson's use a traditional syrup collection method and hang buckets on the trees to collect the sap, but one Spring morning in 2012 they found their house surrounded by a police SWAT team who was there because someone had told them the sap buckets were indicative of a meth lab.

Fortunately the police had both common sense and a sweet tooth and the Benson's gave each of the officers a sample of their product. But I wonder what level of paranoia it takes to call a bucket hanging on a tree a meth lab?

Some People .......

As stated previously, I'm a people watcher. I love to observe people doing strange things while believing they are acting in a normal manner. Sometimes my observations are made while surfing the Internet, and on special occasions I even run across of tofer of people being ... "people"

An oxygen thief by the name of Frank Van Den Bleeken is serving a natural life sentence in a Belgian prison for the rape and murder of a young women. In my mind a major part of any prison sentence is the taking away of the felons right to choose much of what happens in his life. Do the crime and you will do the time ... endless, repetitive and boring time for the rest of your life in this case. But this guy decided that endless, boring days until the natural end of his days were causing him emotional distress and under Belgian law an unresolvable emotional state is sufficient grounds for euthanasia. A state review board (in this case an actual death panel) agreed and decided that he could be transferred to a facility in Holland where he could then (and this is my thinking) evade and abrogate the sentence imposed by the court.

Now I grant you willfully dieing is a very strange way to get out of prison, but the people who agreed with his thinking are also demonstrating a equally strange sort of logic. He was sent to prison for a reason and should not be allowed to substitute his own solution for a problem he caused by his own sick behavior.

Fortunately the Ministry of  Justice overruled the decision and Mr Bleeken remains in prison.

Good Deeds and Their Just Reward

The faculty at Harvard University rallied to the support of the Obama administration during the planning and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (now THAT is a wonderful misnomer!) and in fact several of them were central to writing the act and helping conceal  the impact of the legislation on the general public and individuals. But all good deeds are ultimately rewarded and the faculty at the school is now up in arms because the Health Care Insurance they worked so hard to implement is now biting them on the economic ass.

Their present health plans are reported to be one of the most generous plans, far exceeding the scope of plans available to the nearly everyone else... it can well be called a Cadillac to plans. Under the law they worked so hard to create they are now seeing their benefits being eroded and their cost rising exponentially ... and they are "unhappy". 

In their resolution opposing the changes to the University health plan they claim it is causing "distress" and generating anxiety" in addition to imposing a financial burden on their pocketbooks. Welcome to the world the rest of us live in

It brings a smile to my heart to see these emotionally isolated  Ivory Tower Twits coming face to face with reality. Can you say Schadenfreude?

Fresh Times are Coming

New Year always brings a moment of reflection ... what was and what might the future hold. My Lady and I have a tradition of planning where we want to be this time next year. Great plans are afoot even as we speak and only time will tell if we achieve them.

Future plans are always built on past experience, and I've had lots of experience! Some of the memorable have been:

Family - I have a great family that I'm proud of, my wife is a joy, our kids are wonderful and dear to our hearts and the grand kids are magnificent. I'm blessed that they allow me to associate.

I'm self employed and suffer from a boss that is too good to me, but in the past I've had my fair share of bosses that ranged all over the leadership landscape. The best bosses always had a sense of humor.

We need to spend more time at the range this year and hopefully expand our armoury. Not that we anticipate bad things, we just like being able to express our feeling through loud noise.

To all who know, work and associate with me, and for all who have not had the opportunity to do so

Happy New Year