Your body is run by a bunch of bureaucracies, just like the Pentagon.
An ER doctor said I collapsed when I tried to stand up because there was a communications problem between the bureaucracy running my nerve system and the blood system’s bureaucracy.
When I stood up, the blood bureaucracy didn’t get the message that my brain needed more.
For hundreds of hours over the last 15 years, I’ve been studying what scientists think makes the Universe and our bodies work the way they do. Most of what’s been found is complicated and pretty serious. My goal has been to translate the serious into a language most teens would understand.
Along the way I came to two conclusions. One is a different way to examine what PhD’s think about the most basic workings of our Universe. The other is that both the Universe and our bodies are run by bureaucracies.
Tomorrow, I’ll post several colorfully illustrated pages about ALBERT EINSTEIN’S MISSING TOE and other things you probably never heard of.
You might strongly agree or disagree. Whether you speak the language of science or speak the language of common sense, or both, I’d like to hear from you. And, if you pass the post along to someone else, I’d like to hear from them.
For today, I leave you with this because the issue of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) keeps popping up in the news. This has to do with Alien’s ratings.
Someone figured out why our rather uninteresting one-star solar system has not been visited by aliens.
They only want to visit those with three or more stars.
Climbing out of the 1930’s Depression, I am in the last generation that can remember the impact of a world at war. A war that rattled the structure of our daily lives for years, much more than the Vietnam War or anything since, at least in America.
I am among the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves. There were tight limits on what we could buy and eat. And there were shortages.
I saved tin foil, string, rubber bands, and poured fat into tin cans for the War Effort. (Delivered the fat to butchers to help in the manufacture of explosives for bombs.)
I saw cars resting on blocks or big stones because tires weren’t available. My dad bought a Chevy before Pearl Harbor was bombed. Soon, he like others, “gave it up” for the war effort. For about 15 years we only used public transportation (busses, street cars, subway or trains).
Milk was delivered early in the morning and placed in the “milk box” next to the front door. It wasn’t pasteurized or homogenized. We shook the bottle to mix the fat on top with the rest of the milk. My grandparents had an ice box. Every second or third day a man carrying a large, heavy block of ice climbed to the second story porch in the back and placed the ice in a box with two doors. Ice on top, food below.
I saw gold stars in the front windows of grieving neighbors whose sons died in the War. There were many.
As a kid, even scarier than the War was the possibility of catching Polio. There was no vaccine.
On Saturday afternoons, the movies were newsreels, with the announcers yelling their stories, sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons. And at the Ridge Theater, we watched the scurrying rats.
Without television, I imagined what I heard on the radio. I had little real understanding of what the world was like. But I did know it was scary. There were “black-outs” to protect us from bombs from airplanes that never came. All lights were out. All shades pulled. “Wardens” patrolled the streets and knocked on our doors if lights flickered through the windows.
Until the street lights went on, our playground most often was between the cars parked on Greenview Avenue. Fortunately, few cars interrupted our games.
I saw the ‘boys’ come home from the war and build their little houses.
The Government offered loans to returning Veterans to get a home, an education and spurred colleges to grow.
Telephones were one-to-a house, often shared (party lines). Usually, they hung on the wall in the kitchen (privacy was rare). Eventually, our phone had a little box with a slot for nickels. Every once in a while we’d be told by an operator to feed the slot to keep the phone line “open.” My grandmother yelled into the phone from Sioux City to Chicago because she knew it was far away. I still yell when on the phone.
Computers were called calculators. They were hand cranked.
Typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage and changing the ribbon. (You might have to look that up.)
INTERNET and GOOGLE were words that did not exist.
Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on radio in the evening.
Then the war ended. The “tight” country was exploding with growth. Pent-up demand, coupled with new installment-payment-plans, opened many factories for work.
New highways produced jobs and mobility. Building infrastructure was a priority.
The radio networks expanded from 3 stations to hundreds. And, eventually, TV eased onto the scene.
My generation’s parents, suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.
My sister and I, and our friends, weren’t neglected. But, we were glad to play by yourselves until the street lights came on. Our parents were busy discovering the postwar world.
Suddenly it seemed to us there was overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed, enjoyed yourselves, and felt secure in our future … although depression poverty was deeply remembered, and still is. As was religious and other discrimination.
I finally came of age in the 50s and 60s, in the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland.
The Second World War was over and the Cold War, terrorism, global warming, and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with continuing unease.
Only my generation can remember both a time of great war, and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.
My peers grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better.
We are “The Last Ones.”
Almost all of us are dead. Those still alive, still covered with our own psychological and physical black and blue marks, should feel privileged to have “lived in the best of times!”
Thank you T. P. Hurwitz for passing an earlier draft of this along.
Everything we see, we hear, we feel, and what we believe, is relative to how we process what we see, we hear and we feel.
For instance, we stand on a corner and watch a bus.The passengers behind the windows are moving from left to right.At that exact moment the passengers see us sliding from right to left.(That’s a simplified explanation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which is about physics, but also works for some metaphysics.)
So, please consider these four harsh and quite unpleasant big-picture statements that really are about money.
Millions of otherwise reasonable Americans and citizens of other countries think supporting an unborn baby’s right to life is more important that their grandparents’ right to life.Or vice-versa.
Millions assume the survival of a business is more important than the survival of its staff and customers.Or vice-versa.
Millions believe health insurance is a privilege only for those who can afford it, and the government should not be responsible for the others.Or vice-versa.
Millions are convinced it is more important to strengthen the safety net for wealthy people and businesses than the net for poor people (including the working poor).They essentially argue that a strong circulating dollar is more important than a strong DNA.Or vice-versa.
Millions of others probably are like me.We bounce around in the middle between the vice and the versa.We know that once in office every politician’s vote affects constituents’ quality-of-life and quality-of-death.We know that some votes seem relatively innocuous yet unforeseen consequences can lead to tragedy.
E.g, an unfilled pothole causes a car to veer into an oncoming vehicle.Injuries occur.That might not have happened if either of the drivers had learned about defensive driving.But, someone made a budget decision to drop drivers-ed from their school curriculum because the money was needed to upgrade its football stadium, which grew in size.Meanwhile, it had been a hard winter and someone elseknew there were too many pot holes and too little money to hire more workers.So potholes grew too.
If you’ve lived in a rural school district, that kind of thinking would not be unusual.
But, we don’t ask our elected officials (down to county and lower levels) how they determine whose life is worth saving or improving, and whose life is on the other side of the divide.And why they think the way they do?Especially in allocating budget monies.
For the most part, those of us in the middle don’t have an opportunity to ask decision makers about the pros-and-cons they considered when choosing options that affect our lives.Especially the cons.
So, we depend on the rapidly shrinking “edited and fact checked” free press.We know that most of what we hear or read is provided by people who thrive on providing us what we want to hear or read, without nuance, or even what we in the middle consider to be fact-checked.
Unfortunately, with minimal exceptions, members of the media neither ask nor report on the often complicated decision-making process.In part they have given up and assume politicians will not answer, or bureaucrats will pivot off onto another topic, or the person behind the podium will stop them from even having an opportunity to ask.
Grandmas and grandpas like me have no knowledge of what is going on behind the facades erected by newsmakers so we fear the worst.We fear for our future and fear for the future of our children and their children.
No matter what we may say to others, behind the facades we ourselves have built, we are relatively sure fear is stronger than hope.And we fear we are as expendable as a battered old penny.
Or vise-versa.
What do you think?
———————————————————————————————————uncredited picture from BestLife.com
We are bombarded with dictums. The Ten Commandments. Constitutions. Scientific Theories like Newton’s and Einstein’s. And all those theorems in Geometry.
After decades of mulling I have concluded there is only one universal law.
Globalization alert. A new book estimates that 80% of active ingredients in your medications come from China and India. (China RX: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine)
What if that’s fake news, what if the number is 90%?
My country doesn’t stockpile drugs. Does yours?
My country’s regulators don’t have enough funding to monitor all drug imports. Does yours?
poor georgie's almanack 