Category Archives: genetics

Why Does the Physical Universe Exist?

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Why Does the Physical Universe Exist?

Why do we even imagine we can ask such a question and find an answer?

The total energy of the universe exploded out of an infinitesimal pinpoint of reality erupting into the void of nonexistence, to cool and diffuse as the wake behind the expanding bow wave of the Event Horizon, precipitating into the swelling space-time of intergalactic, interstellar and interplanetary emptiness, and granulating into matter-energy that expresses gravitational potential by its mass distribution; that itself slowly contracts into accumulative material bodies, and ultimately into light-void centers of matter extinction that in their turn evaporate their confined energy by quantum flickering between existence and nonexistence, until those singularities of space-time pop back into nonexistence once voided of any reality.

Will that cycling between existence and nonexistence also be enacted by the Event Horizon? Will it just diffuse away into the void of nonexistence?, or will it rebound into a new universal contraction?, or will it oscillate in some as yet unknown Limit Cycle alternating existences and nonexistences? Could we guess that such a coiling and uncoiling was inherent in the Totality, as reflected in the eddies of reality shed behind the Event Horizon and which we see as the cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth?, down to the coiling and uncoiling of the very molecules that convey the persistent genetic patterns of which we each are momentary expressions and disposable links of Life’s transmission?

Why do we imagine there could be a Supreme Consciousness creating and controlling this dynamic? Why would such a Supreme Metaphysical Constant, beyond any limitations of space, time, materiality, personality, emotion, ego, boredom and need, bother with the triviality of creating a toy universe of existence to occupy and confine its unlimited awareness? Is this not simply a yearning on our part for magical extensions of our brief flashes of confused awareness of eternity: for a heaven, or even a hell? Isn’t our existential philosophizing just another vortex coiling and uncoiling in the human psyche tumbling us distractedly along our brief stretches of time?

For us the answers may all lie in our acceptance of tumbling along with grace and kindness, and without fearful clinging to the questioning. In doing that we may experience the constancy of the eternal during a few moments within our brief spans of conscious awareness. Of course we will never know, but miraculously we do have the choice to live as though that were true.

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On Gloating Over The Death Of A War Criminal

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By Stan Goff on 2 July 2021 (on the death of Donald Rumsfeld):

No one cracked on Donald Rumsfeld harder than I did for a few years there.

Just finished DB Hart’s book on universal salvation, which contends that even Rumsfeld falls within the ambit of Christ’s salvation. I found it utterly convincing.

Some know I don’t do ritual corpse kicking, which I see as virtue-signaling in far too many cases (and which I’ve done!); and posting this right now may seem a little masochistic . . . like I’m inviting people to protest this claim (don’t worry, plenty of Christians also still cling to the idea of some eternal torture for those of us who went waaay off the rails in this life).

We think Donald Rumsfeld made himself the way he is, because we cherish the belief that we make ourselves the way we are, and moreover (unstated) that those of us who didn’t turn out like Rumsfeld (or ‘choose your villain’) never even contained the potential to become like him. That we are ourselves not superior beings, and not substantially determined by a complex chain of “nurture,” by luck or lack thereof, by history, and by accidents.

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I thought Stan Goff’s comments important enough to comment rather fulsomely on, as follows:

I found C. G. Jung’s comments on this question illuminating. His were given post WWII, about Nazism and Nazis, and “collective guilt” of the German population (and others).

Jung advocated people learning about their “unconscious” (which he wrote so much about) because most of us (our personalities) are contained in (or is) the unconscious.

Among the elements of our entire psyche, Jung included a “shadow”, a part of us which we (our conscious ego) denied about ourselves. This deep “negative” part is where we have the dirty, nasty, perverse and violent thoughts THAT WE ALL HAVE, but block from affecting our actions by the workings of the more conscious, logical and moral (and educated) part of our consciousness.

Jung’s point was that the many self-styled “moral” people who claimed ‘I would never have been a Nazi nor acted like one, because of my morality’ were precisely those most in danger of becoming so, because they were blind to their intrinsic potential to become so — as everyone is — and thus unprepared (a deficiency of consciousness) to recognize the external psychological influences pulling one into that direction (basically: brainwashing you).

For Jung, the successful operation of “morality” to keep an individual free (safe) from the worst potentialities of evil erupting from their unconscious into action, was knowing that: ‘anything the worse villain — like a Nazi — can do, I am equally capable of doing, so I must consciously keep myself from falling into that, I cannot rely on remaining safe from it unconsciously.’

In more modern times we might say that, genetically, we all sprout from the same root, and all the potentialities of human form and expression are coded within us, and those that are actualized have emerged by a combination of our personal genetic spectrum (our alleles) and our learned conscious (logical and moral) behavior.

So, yes, “corpse kicking” is embedded in the Id (“virtue signaling”), and can be recognized as such, and re-channelled, by the Super-Ego (the non-asshole top layer of the Ego). We all want Rumsfeld to “burn in hell,” but what’s the point? (It’s too late for prosecuting him in a war crimes trial. The U.S. must have the world’s best “social security” and legal immunity programs for retired war criminals: as, why no Nuremberg II for the Vietnam War?)

The best we can do about people like that (successful war criminals who have moved on) is to — as best as we can — clean up their messes, care for the surviving victims, and try embedding that tragic past into our society’s historical memory as a lesson (accepted and learned) for eliciting safer and better behavior in the collective future.

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Our Virally Porous Walls

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Our Virally Porous Walls

“The Invisible Invaders” is the title of Peter Radetsky’s book on “viruses and the scientists who pursue them.” It is a richly detailed, smoothly written primer on the subject for the non-biochemist. This book arcs through four topics:

first: a history from 1744 to 1930 of the development of the medical science and vaccines aimed at combatting infectious diseases (for smallpox in 1796 by Edward Jenner [1749-1823], for rabies in 1885 by Louis Pasteur [1822-1895]); the discovery of the virus in 1898 by Martinus Beijerinck (1851-1931); and the discovery in 1917 by Félix d’Hérelle (1873-1949) that viruses could attack and kill bacteria — which are living cells;

second: the science of virology, and the present understanding that viruses are parasitic forms of ribonucleic acid (RNA) or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that invade living cells and hijack their functional programming, so as to reproduce and expel more viruses;

third: modern-day concerns and discoveries about viral diseases: colds, herpes, flu, hepatitis, cancer, AIDS;

fourth: gene therapy inspired by natural viral action, the intentional manipulation of biochemical dynamics to thwart viral infections and to artificially create designer proteins for desired purposes.

Radestsky states that: “[Most] of us have little idea of the impact viruses have on our lives. For they are not simply dangerous enemies, the only organisms besides ourselves that pose a threat to our survival; they’re our co-travelers in life, our most intimate fellow workers. Viruses are literally everywhere — inside us, outside us, constantly permeating the boundaries of the self… They may swap our genes around, rearrange our destinies, act as agents of the ecosystem. In their admirable simplicity and appalling efficiency, they may be the most successful life-form of all… if they can be said to be alive in the first place.”

COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2). We can metaphorically visualize a viral pandemic in a manner similar to the antique and unscientific ideas that the causes of inexplicable epidemics were astrological “influenza,” and bad airs, “malaria,” wafting out of swamps; by imagining viral epidemics as very tenuous and filamentary clouds of sub-microscopic nucleic acid particles, each wrapped in fat and coated with protein, that are all coursing through our atmosphere, propelled by air currents on every scale from weather systems to human exhalations, and despite their extreme fragility have the power to penetrate through our civilization and into our very bodies and once there to penetrate into the core genetic control units of our cellular functioning — and disrupt it.

We can never perfectly wall ourselves off from viruses, to them our bodies and our patterns of living are so easily permeable. Our surest defense against viral diseases for which we have no vaccines is avoidance of infection. Such avoidance if afforded by a combination of distancing from infectious people and environments (whether visibly or invisibly contaminated), and the conscientious frequent application of personal hygienic practices and household and occupational sterilization protocols. Physically, and mindlessly behaviorally, we are an open weave to viruses, a rich meshwork of protoplasm waiting to be virally colonized and explosively exploited.

The reason we have been hit so hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and with its still increasing force, is that the United States is a nation and society structured like a Matryoshka Doll that imprisons its people but is transparent to viruses. We each are walled in by many types of barriers intended to exclude us from the ‘tribal clubs’ of others, those barriers being: ageist, bigoted, cultural, ethnic, financial, intellectual, political, racist, religious and sexual; we humans can come up with an endless array of repulsive distinctions about ourselves.

We have a multiplicity of forms of imposed isolation, of social distancing, each tailored to the individual’s demographic characteristics, to their sociological DNA if you will. We all live within walls, within outer walls, within still outer walls, and so on for many layers of confinement away from the more favored tribes and classes, yet also shielded from the more unfortunate ones. This structure of social fragmentation and hierarchical survival is the embodiment of capitalist civilization. It is the separations and differences and conflicts and jealousies and inequalities that exist among us that create the necessary socio-political spaces and the material opportunities to prosecute individualistic capitalist schemes, those personal drives toward profits — and also for crimes and wars.

That drive towards profits — in its extreme it is pure narcissism — is impossible to even imagine in a hypothetical society of ideal socialism, a society that has been largely homogenized in the sense of eradicating all the artificial exclusionary distinctions that define the house-of-cards capitalist paradigm. That those distinctions were always illusory and only seemed intellectually sacrosanct and physically rigid was because the popular will of the nation’s many individuals had been trained over many generations by pro-capitalist anti-socialist mass indoctrination to unconsciously project the capitalist paradigm that is imprisoning them.

The COVID-19 pandemic has collapsed the illusion of that paradigmatic rigidity, of the reality of capitalism. The viral ‘cloud’ has easily penetrated through not just our bodies, but the exclusionary distinctions we previously thought of as either protective shields or barriers to our aspirations. The collapse of those illusions is experienced by the benefactors of the capitalist economy as fears of economic depression and of political revolt by the laboring masses. The collapse of those same illusions is experienced by the masses excluded from prosperity in the current paradigm, as an awakening to and anger over the unreality of the many strains of slavery we all have imagined ourselves into for so long, and an awakening to the breathtaking proximity to us of the bracingly real alternate and liberating paradigm of socialism. We can actually all live better, happier and more securely starting right away! It is solely a matter of popular will.

During this pandemic many have already stated the obvious: any successful effort to end these epidemics will necessarily be a socialist action, and the more socialist those efforts are, the greater the degree of their ultimate successes. Our exclusionary ‘walls’ and clashes of hoarding behaviors are transparent to viruses, only social solidarity can be made reasonably opaque to them. To effectively combat viral epidemics we must close up the now-gaping weave of human civilization. Such a closing up will encounter much friction and resistance, as each person seeks to preserve their private bubble of self-importance, money-making, irrational fantasy and bigoted exclusivity, which are the forces of repulsion within our atomistic social collectivity. The capitalist benefactors will actualize their resistance to the closing up of the human social weave, their economic collapse fears of the awakened and just anger of the exploited masses, by tossing bribes and police-enforced compulsion at them: the smallest, cheapest weight they can put on the lid of the bubbling cauldron of neoliberal capitalism to keep it from flying off as it boils over.

Despite the widespread and atomizing disorientation of American society in reaction to COVID-19, as if it were some impending apocalypse, it would be wise to become disciplined, rational and socialist, and to realize that this pandemic is but a skirmish in the monumental and unavoidable karmic war we now must face against our own narcissistic desecration of Nature, and which we call climate change.

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A Strictly Personal Looking Past The Pandemic

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A Strictly Personal Looking Past The Pandemic

This morning there was a Red-Tailed Hawk perched low in the woods outside my window for a least forty minutes. It was a large very calm bird perched not too high up in the trees that were downhill from my window, so binocular viewing was good, but it was too difficult to take a picture today. It was perhaps a young bird since its colors were mainly mottled, grey-brown on top, white with grey-brown blotches below. It had no obvious strong red on its tail feathers, but the wing and tail feathers were very clearly banded, partly like a tartan, and very crisply.

I have a sense that wildlife in general is seeping back into the daytime outdoor spaces they shy away from when humans are active. My neighborhood, in a canyon, is extremely quiet: no buzz saws, no leaf blowers, no house construction noises, very very few cars going down the road, no trucks, Amazon Prime delivery vans are about but again quite rarely (though I notice more of them in general since the lockdown began), very few walkers (with or without dogs), no house party noises, no landscaping services nor tree cutting services around, no water nor phone nor cable utility trucks (Pacific Gas & Electric is supposed to be inspecting power lines for fire safety), and on the weekend no mail nor garbage nor recycling trucks.

I can hear deer clomp and turkeys forage through the leaf litter; but the usual small birds and songbirds of this area seem to be gone today, and have been less in number over the last five years; a climate change die-off? Except for the odd pulses of breeze — rain should be coming later today — it is still and quiet throughout the canyon and the hillsides forming it. The Earth seems to be awaiting humanity’s fate with fatally baited breath: COVID-19.

We humans — the lucky ones that is — are shuffling around in our rooms in our bathrobes and slippers, with coffee and tea mugs or cocktails in our hands, and burrowing our heads into our cross-connected electronic attention-deficit infotainment memory holes. For the luckiest of the hapless people, society as we used to know it is slowly collapsing in on itself; and for the largely unseen and more socially distanced than ever before extremely unlucky people that social collapse is miserable and catastrophic. “That’s the way it’s always been” reflected our Apex Narcissist philosophically, to his cognitive limit in this regard, about these pandemic days.

Richard Eskow wrote a touching and reflective ramble on life and death, from his personal perspective as an older American man during this indeterminate period of the COVID-19 pandemic (COVID in the Web Of Generations: A Faint Hello From the “Only” Ones, 20 March 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/20/covid-in-the-web-of-generations-a-faint-hello-from-the-only-ones/).

Some of Eskow’s thoughts are:

“I’ll tell you a secret now, one that older adults carry with them every day: We walk with the dead. Oh, a lot of us don’t admit it, not even to ourselves. But once you’ve reached a certain age, the dead are with you wherever you go. Your parents are dead. Mine both died in the last couple of years. Your aunts and uncles, the ones who nurtured you and reminded you what sanity was when your parents went off the rails? They’re dead, too… I’m 66. I know now that I walk with the dead, and with death. That awareness is part of the job description, at least if you’re wired a certain way. That said, though, I’m not in any fucking hurry to go. I’ve got 20 good years, if I’m lucky. Maybe 30… This system is dying, infected with a contagion as old as humanity: greed… The time will come, the bell will toll. It sounds obvious, and it is. Until it happens. Then it feels as new as birth, as new as waking up in an unfamiliar room… And so, in the meantime, all I can do is pass on what the survivors of past worlds told me while they lived. They said you can survive by remembering to love. They said you can learn to care, even if caring doesn’t always come easily in this life.”

The present personal isolation people have receded into to avoid contagion can be heaven for introverts who are in safe circumstances. In my own case, it has led me to think back over my life, since I am celebrating my 70th birthday this week.

Since 2009 I’ve played the game of remembering where I was and what I saw “fifty years ago.” For me, the years 1959-1962 had to do with Cuba (which I visited twice to see my grandparents), the Revolution (which I saw in its glory of triumph), the Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis (which nearly killed us all). 1963 was about JFK, 1964-1967 about dreading the Vietnam War draft while in high school, and having so many dreams about my “future.” 1968-1969 was about my roller-coaster ride in college, the highs of really getting into the science and chasing girls (who were always way smarter and more mature than I was), and the lows all 1969 of fending off the draft board while I was 1A (my deferment had been revoked in error, and they refused to correct that error). 1970-1972 was a combination of being a psychological wreck after surviving the December ’69 draft lottery, and the super-high of imagining an abundant Green Energy future after that first Earth Day on 22 April 1970 (perhaps the greatest day of my life). 1973-1976 was getting past Nixon, and the graduate school grind. 1976-1978 was in my view the peak of collective life in the U.S., including the first two years of the Carter Administration, and I had the illusion that that Green Energy future was about to begin and I would become one of the first generation physicist-engineers running its new-style engines, like Montgomery Scott in the original Star Trek science fiction television series. I was wrong.

During 1979-1980, President Jimmy Carter was pulled to the right by Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Advisor, who laid the trap of the Afghan War quagmire the Russians sank into (and then later and still now the U.S.!), and then that bastard Reagan gained power in November 1980, and John Lennon was assassinated a month later by a gunshot to the chest fired by a narcissistic asshole, and Lennon’s death seemed emblematic of the instant death of all my illusions and those of the youthful “Imagine” dreamers of my age. It has been neoliberally downhill since.

After 1980, I realized that the best I would probably ever be able to do was to support my family. There was little chance I would change any part of our society — let alone government policy — toward green energy, environmentalism, energy efficiency and all that (even though I’ve tried doing so to this day). The political power people just wanted bombs, and my science employers just wanted more government subsidies.

For the biotech and computer people it was all an obsession with patents and getting rich off the need, addictions and misery of the masses. It is so damnably telling about our mercenary times to remember that doctors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, each a developer of a polio vaccine (by 1955 and by 1960), put their discoveries into the public domain, giving up many billion in royalties and saving billions of lives since. Frederick Banting, who with the help of a few others invented the process for synthesizing insulin, patented it in 1923 for a token payment of $1.00 so as to ward off all other patent attempts by drug companies, and put the use of the method into the public domain.

So, even with numerous bumps in the road, humped over with the help of a Faustian bargain for brainy employment, I’ve managed to support my family, get three kids decently — though not always perfectly — cared for and off and independent for the two oldest, and well on the way to that for the youngest. And, I’ve got my little beat-up house in a reasonably pleasant hilly spot, and still have a little bit saved up (of which college tuition and a major and unavoidably necessary house-property repair three years ago took half). I’m banking on my okay pension and social security allotment for the duration, so I’m at the mercy of the thugs in Washington as regards the future of my social security.

When it comes to dying I’m just hoping that I go out like my father, a massive hemorrhage suddenly wiping out the brain, and the body dying off in just a few days. That way I won’t have the indignity of a long lingering death as a cripple during which all my remaining money will be drained away to the point of bankruptcy. My quick death is the only way there will be anything left (in the way of financial assets) for me to pass on, at least hopefully this house if I get to pay it off. It’s all quite a poker game, isn’t it?

It’s not hard to look back on my parenting and see many things I could have done much better. Hindsight is 20-20. But I’m glad that many of the efforts I made were good ones, and that my kids are all good and strong people, in many ways all smarter than I am. In my own case the work I put into helping raise the kids, despite many errors with each of them, is pretty clearly the best work I’ve done at anything in my life. I can accept being a failure at all else, but would hate being a failed parent. So, their successes are my consolation for everything else. I’ve had my fun and some high points with technical stuff (physical science, energy advocacy) and writing (ranting and bad poetry), but nothing in the world has changed because of it, and that’s okay because I can feel good about the kids.

I only wish I had been more perceptive way back when, to better appreciate the people who were kind, accepting and tolerant of me, who gave me help that I did not always recognize, and who graced my fairly clueless young adulthood when I pursued my simplistic dreams of sports cars, girls in miniskirts, protection from the Vietnam War, achieving science learning highs (and being high while learning science), and visions of saving the world through science by finding sources of unlimited electrical energy.

For me, enlightenment came through caring for my family and helping to raise children, along with a little bit of reading about Zen Buddhism. But having children was the touchstone of my essential insights. A Skinnerian behaviorist might say this is all just a genetically programmed self-delusional sense of fulfillment in male human drones to ensure the propagation of the species. Maybe so, what’s it matter? The same would then be true of that Red-Tailed Hawk who winged through this patch of its forested domain, and perched in dappled shade to regard its territory with such majestic calm.

And the same would be true of our two young cats, who move between periods of lying about sprawled out resting before the heater or curled up in a cardboard box in absolute luxuriant comfort, or rolling over and wrapping their legs and paws about my forearm as I massage-pet them while they stretch and purr, as I draw my nails along their upturned throats and the lines of their their thin lips, which they sometimes open to knead my hand with their strong sharp fangs, with exquisite precision. Our cats will burst into activity out of their keen vigilance of human activity in the kitchen when food bowls are presented, and from there gleefully go frolicking out onto the wooded hillside, delighting in their primordial wildness.

I have had too much knowing eye-to-eye personal contact, and traded too much hand-and-body-to-body personal touch with other living creatures, each with their own warmth, elegance and intent, to ever believe any of us are mere generic behavioral biological machines, though I know that fundamentally we are each unique gene colony organisms whose evolutionary role is to transmit genetic programming for birthing and animating through a lifespan future and always subtly unique examples of our particular kind.

What is not biomechanical about the more brainy creatures, which can include humans, is that we can become aware of our role in the great chain of being, the propulsive urge of life to continue on Planet Earth, by both our conscious actions emanating out of our cerebral cortexes, and our embedded instincts and emotions emanating from our limbic systems, instincts and emotions we share with so many of our fellow heterotrophs.

So, like everyone else I want to continue healthily so I can keep enjoying the greatest show on Earth: life. While I have many many preferences on how other people should think and behave so that show will unfold as I believe best, I realize I have infinitesimal power to mold reality to my vision, and trying to force that conformity can only drive me mad and destroy me. Thus I have to tread that knife-edge between letting go and giving up, and my compass for determining that pathway is how fares the wellbeing of my family.

To frolic like the cats and soar like the hawks with calm and elegant self-assurance, while finally remembering with appreciation long-lost friends as I should, dumping all lingering superficial careerist ambitions of a clueless past, and being grateful for having been able to move the next generation of my family (and others) forward into their own fulfilling independence, is what I now take with me as I look past the pandemic into my own uncertain yet hopeful future.

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ADDENDUM, 25 March 2020

Raymond McConnie Zapater
25 March 2020
FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS MANGO GARCÍA

Dear Dr. García:

Some of us ageing fools can relate to your feelings and past experiences as humane baby-boomers. I also had to dodge the draft for three years while bumbling in North American and European Universities and not being able to shed a 1-A classification. I had to flush the god-dammed card down the toilet to wash out that stain without having to embarrass my Dad furthermore. After the Complutense in Madrid was shuttered and the youthful leaders and “foreign interlopers” of the revolt were chased down by Franco, without considerable funds, I wandered alone hitching rides across Southern Europe and the wondrous Islamic world of Southwest and Central Asia before settling in a secluded hamlet with the Pashtun, deep in the Hindu Kush, “somewhere ‘they’ can’t find me”, hearkening that old song by The Moody Blues. Who would have known then that those valiant, elegant, generous, hospitable successors of the lost tribes of Israel and the Scythian and the Parthian would become the more recent targets of the “bastards from Washington” in their ceaseless search for enemies. Actually, Pashto is a Semitic language with a Persian script.

And, so it went … This long story pertains to all of us rebels of good-will still trying to survive as fugitives in Junk Terror Acropolis even though the Vietnamese people did get rid of the North American hordes and established their own stupid criminal regimes. At least, it was their own bitter wine. I almost vomit when the other night I heard right off in the first episode of Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” that the United States had gotten involved in that genocidal venture “with good intentions”. Even though the sixteen installments that followed belied that initial assertion absent any allusion to it, I couldn’t explain to my thirty-three year old PhD candidate living at home and his mother why the statement was yet another lie by the national security state. It’s unconscionable that Geoffrey C. Ward (the writer of the series) set it forth as a salvo revisionism, and that Burns would allow it if he were paying attention. I had escaped watching that series in honor of my Puerto Rican friends who were drafted and never returned and of one in particular, who, as a green beret, was dropped in a black parachute into the thickness of northern Laos on reconnaissance, but who found for himself a Buddhist monastery, took refuge there and remained to train monks in the arts of modern warfare, so they could defend their communities from the Americanos. Manny was MIA for years during the war until he surfaced in Saigon where he boarded one of the last helicopters out of that quagmire after treading the Ho Chi Minh Trail with other fellow monks and soldiers. Once in the “Land of Liberty”, Manny served five years in Attica (under the Rockefeller laws) for dealing an ounce of pot to a friend turned informant. Thereafter he became a candlemaker and sculptor in San Juan where he died.

After graduate school, my long-standing girlfriend cum wife and I left the perfumed colony of Puerto Rico to settle in Philadelphia where we raised four boys against all odds, and with a little help from our friends. The intention had been to spare our kids a colonial mind-set and still preserve the Spanish language as the Lingua Franca home and country. They are doing pretty good with that. It’s easier to live in the trigger of the Gatling gun than in the target. Puerto Ricans of the diaspora have learned that lesson.

I also walk among the dead especially when I endeavour to visit my one-hundred year + old aunt in Ponce. She is my link with the past generations. I go every three months to see her at a convent of Catholic nuns who look after the elderly. Everyone else is gone: those who haven’t yet among my family, relatives and friends are queuing up with me. The pecking order is up for grabs.

Our boys are strong decent upstanding citizens. They made it through college and graduate school facing their own provocations unlike those contended by their father. Three of them crossed the vastness of North America seeking the promised land in California while the more sensible one thought that the East Coast was a better option for him and his Puerto Rican live-in girlfriend who’s attending medical school. Like you, raising a family alongside their mother has been my saving grace. Who knows how and where I would have ended up? I also loved drugs, sex and cheap thrills not unlike Janis Joplin. Thankfully, my mistakes are solely mine to contend with going forward. I’m chastened by my karma and the teachings of the Buddhadharma, for sure.

Although I have a few solitary retreats under my belt, this quarantine is driving me overboard into the ocean of nirvana and samsara.

Beg your pardon for the long-winded screed!

Allow me to say the following without being trite – I love you!

May you have much health, happiness and a long life.

Respectfully,

– Raymond McConnie Zapater

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Manuel García, Jr.:

Dear Señor Zapater,

My favorite joke on the “Dr.” thing (from the New Yorker): Maître d’ of a fancy restaurant, on the phone: “Yes, doctor, a reservation at 7:30, and may I ask, sir, is that an actual medical degree or merely a Ph.D.?”

Yours is one of the best letters I’ve ever received in my life. I believe what you have recounted would be a wonderful contribution to human (and even Americano) consciousness.

First, your adventure through life has been much more dramatic, exciting and scary than mine. So, I salute you for surviving with such verve and elegance, and I commend you for la familia. You are clearly very well put together, as is shown by your excellent and vivid writing, and by your evident knowledge of cultures, philosophy and life.

My impression of the Ken Burns TV series on the Vietnam War (the “American War” for the Vietnamese) is that the reference in the first episode about ‘America getting into the war inadvertently and with good intensions’ (despite the rest of the series entirely belying that canard) was a sop to one of the Koch Boys, who was a generous financial contributor making possible the production of the series. You know, “and now a word from our sponsors.” I’m guessing that Koch Boy just wanted to plaster his name-tag on an artful electronic edifice he thought might last, and thus be a pedestal to his self-imagined glory. There are a lot of pedestal seekers and pedestal self-polishers in this world; the former throw their money at their vanity, and the latter usually try to write and publish themselves into popular acclaim.

During my time in college, in 1970, I met an absolutely beautiful woman in one of my basic science or mathematics classes. She was very friendly in a most upstanding way, and I was smitten and daydreaming of much closer contact. She asked me if I would help her understand some of the assigned work, which Mister Science Boy was delighted to do. She was a Puertorriqueña, and her English was good, but a second language. We arranged for her to visit my dorm-apartment room one day to get on with this work. Somewhere in the subsequent verbal exchanges over this it emerged that she was married! So she brought her husband with her to my apartment, and we ended up having a wonderful time learning about each others’ lives.

She was enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania (in Philadelphia, your home-away-from-home town!) on her husband’s GI veteran’s benefit, going for a degree in nursing (I think). She introduced her husband: Patrick Murphy. He was a recently discharged Vietnam War veteran, and had become a repair technician for the Sweda Cash Register Company. So, he worked at a wage-paying job during the day while his wife went to college. When I first spoke with Patrick Murphy he didn’t quickly understand me: he was pure Puertorriqueño and spoke minimal English! How the hell was that? It seems his grandfather or great-grandfather had been a US sailor in the Great White Fleet during the Spanish-American War, and had jumped ship in Puerto Rico in 1898, stayed there, married, and fathered children, who had their own children one of whom was this wonderful guy with his family-traditional name: Patrick Murphy.

He was a veteran of the US Marine Corps, into which he had been drafted in Puerto Rico (as you know, Puertorriqueños living on the island can’t vote for voting representatives in the US Congress, or for the US President, but they are more than welcome to fight and die in the front lines of America’s imperialist wars). I thought during the Vietnam War we boys could only get drafted into the US Army, but I was wrong (I’ve been wrong about a lot of things). He told his story. At the boot camp that the Boricua recruits had been taken (I’m guessing in North Carolina) they and the other mainland recruits were lined upon arrival. The Army drill sergeant facing them barked out “All of you who speak Spanish take one step forward! Left face! Forward march!” And there before the line of Spanish-speaking recruits was the Marine drill sergeant.

So most of those boys ended up in the forward deployed combat units of the always-first-to-attack Marine Corps in Vietnam during the height of the ground war (for the U.S.). Patrick Murphy, though deployed in Vietnam, was shunted into a mechanics role, probably because of some manual dexterity aptitude that emerged from his testing, and that exposed him less to the hazards of combat patrols, which along with surviving the various shellings of the bases he was stationed at, got him through the war alive. I would look at his lovely lively wife as we three enjoyed each others’ company, and think “he really deserves her.” Patrick Murphy told me of a common experience of US Latino Vietnam War soldiers on combat patrols during the war: their platoon commander (the usual white First Lieutenant West Pointer or maybe ROTCer) would call out one of his ‘spics’ (Spanish speakers, a.k.a. ‘no-speak-eh-de-inglesh’), like “Rodriguez, go out on point!”, to lead the file of soldiers into the jungle, and thus be the most likely first killed in the inevitable ambuscade by sniper or mine. Patrick Murphy and his lovely wife (Linda?) will always live in my memory of a sunny day in 1970 when we all felt a resplendent future lie just a few years ahead for all of us young Americanos.

My own hodge-podge memorial of the Vietnam War is posted here:

Haunted by the Vietnam War
22 February 2015
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2015/02/22/haunted-by-the-vietnam-war/

I understand exactly how you feel about your mother. Mine is 95, and living quietly, independently and happily in Santa Rosa. I was lucky in the parents I was given: papá Cubano-Español, y mamá puro Boricua.

And now, I must steal from you to complete my reply:

“Although I have a few solitary retreats under my belt, this quarantine is driving me overboard into the ocean of nirvana and samsara.

“Beg your pardon for the long-winded screed!

“Allow me to say the following without being trite – I love you!

“May you have much health, happiness and a long life.”

With deep appreciation y cariño,

Manuel García, Jr. 

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Letter to a Man Dejected by a Woman’s Leaving

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Mother and Boy-Child

We received your “fish out of water” poem today, and each read it. I know how disappointed you are, and we are each sorry for you.

I can’t offer any advice, because that’s always unwise, and because I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what to suggest that might do any good. I think it’s all a matter of luck.

Over time I have observed that every woman is the hub of a wheel, and that wheel is a family. The family can be real in the sense of actually existing children, or perhaps other emotional dependents to whom she is “necessary” (as Ralph Waldo Emerson defined it), and at the pathetic extreme maybe just house cats or a husband-on-a-leash dog.

For most younger women their family-wheel — beyond their parents, grands and uncles and aunts — is potential. It may be the conscious thoughts and plans for the future application of their fertility, or (more likely) the unconscious behaviors that work toward the accumulation of resources and the “building of the nest,” which in our capitalist society is conceived of as “security.”

We males are merely pollinating drones to these queen bees, so they can sprout the entangling vines of their family-wheel potentialities, regardless of whether we are lovingly used over a long period, or briefly squeezed like a travel-size tube of toothpaste then immediately discarded. It’s just nature’s way. Romantic love for a man is nature’s way of short-circuiting his intellect so he will enjoy falling for the mating interaction long enough to possibly help fulfill the statistical necessities of maintaining the species by reproduction.

As I said, whether the experience of any man’s use by a woman to fulfill her biological (including psychological) imperative (whether overtly conscious, or unconsciously instinctive) is a happy or unhappy expenditure of a portion (or all!) of his life-force, is a matter of luck, pure luck.

So poetry is an excellent tonic to accompany, or wake, the experience.

Specifically about the family-wheel, I observe that any man wooing a women with children is doomed to fail unless and until those children become enthusiastic supporters of his aims. This is not usual. The children (regardless of age) always want primary access (and for some even control) of their mother (biological or not). This grows out of their dependency/survival psychology, as I’m sure you can see (the needy id).

Also, as already noted, mother’s first allegiance (except for sociopath and deep narcissist moms, like drug addicts) is always to her “children,” whether human, animal or imaginary. It is a foolish man who tries to separate a mother from her children in order to capture her love for himself. The good quality or dysfunctionality of these children is irrelevant. Little Red Mother Hen will always clutch her chicks under her wings rather then strut off with Rooster Cockburn no matter how long and loudly he crows. That Rooster Cockburn does get in every now and then is purely a matter of luck and on the run.

My own sweetie has recently been renting a lot of “modern” movies of old people finding love even as they and their best friends are dying off. It makes some sense that after one is retired (these movies are about white people with more than adequate financial means living in advanced countries — like the well-paid actors playing the parts), and the kids are grown and “gone” that senior citizens who would like some canoodling could find each other for some periods of enjoyable shared company.

But these movies would not be nearly as enjoyable if they included the many dreary realities and personal compromises that are necessary to keep two mature adults in an extended romantic haze. Older people have their ways, their quirks, their likes and dislikes pretty well cemented in, and it is not such an easy thing for any two oldsters to mesh these without serious compromise. It would seem to me that “dating” for old people would work best as a smattering of sequential quickies. For me of course this aspect of love remains theoretical, and I have no inclination whatever to engage in experimentation to verify my theoretical analysis of senior citizen romance.

I think the best we can do at any point in our lives is to work and play at those activities and tasks that give us our sense of fulfillment. I’m thinking of artistic, intellectual, manual and body-active, and social activities — not “work” or “business” activities — that just absorb you and make you feel alive. Things that are the best use of your irreplaceable time; things that may seem “boring” and “trivial” and “selfish” to others because such personal activities don’t make you an accessory to fulfilling the desires of these “friends” for receiving unearned entertainment and attention. You act out of a sense of appreciation and enjoyment in being alive — almost autistically, rather than acting so as to define yourself by the approval of others, and in the hope of happiness coming from the outside world into you: independent centeredness versus a hollowness of dependency at the mercy of a fundamentally selfish and uncaring world.

Anyway, a man of independent centeredness (emotionally, psychologically) toodling away happily in whatever his form of engaging craziness may be, could bump into another independently centered person (possibly female) who shares enough of his interests that the idea of sharing company for a while seems appealing. I think this is the best way to luck into love. It requires a light touch, as regards pressing requirements on the other person’s way of life so as to make it “better” for you. I think the required light touches are more likely to occur with partners (it’s always “temporary” but of unknown duration) who meet in this independently centered way.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t discount the possibility of deep love and strong long-term emotional (and financial) commitments between couples. It’s just that I think they are best, and most likely to succeed (be fulfilling to both), when the individuals are independently centered and aware to relate — and extend their caring — with a light touch. Even so, whether if turns out “good” or “bad” is mostly luck.

I suppose this is all just a theory of karma. If I’m just leading a fulfilling life in an honest way then I’m more likely to find myself in the company of another person (or persons) who are doing the same thing in their own way. Maybe there will be enough overlap of interests to make it attractive for both to share (some of, all of?) the doing. Even in this ideal though, you know that “the other” is always an independent life-force entity whose flight plans and orbits are never slavishly determined by the gravity of your being (or at worst your self-centeredness).

So, like you I have at times both surfed the waves of love with incredible exhilaration (1), and I have also been dashed to smithereens against the rocks of bitter dejection, by catastrophes of ruptured love (2). What I’ve learned is that it is pointless for me to even pretend I now know something about romantic love (even though I may assume this pretense to write a novel), or “relationships,” or “women,” or (gulp!) “sex.” But I do think I know a little bit about “people,” and my talk about “independent centeredness” and “light touch” reflects that (3), and goes far beyond the confines of romantic and sexualized love, which for most people is merely desire labeled as “love” (4).

Finally, time and your own good sense to keep busy doing what you love doing, what you are good at doing and gives your time alive its sparkle and zest, are the best balms to soothe the tenderness of a broken heart. Your true friends will give you the space you need to work out your new accommodation with reality at your own pace, and they will be happy to know that you’re still here in our wild and woolly life-zone, toodling away at your unique line of creative independently centered insanity.

My only advice: keep writing poems.

Over and out,
Mangogarcia.

(1) Fuck Yeah!
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/12/23/fuck-yeah/

(2) Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2016/11/30/pre-traumatic-stress-syndrome/

(3) The Touch of the Open
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/08/31/the-touch-of-the-open/

(4) Love and Desire
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/08/28/love-and-desire/

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Political Memes, Opus #2

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Why do what’s right when you can make money?
Why be courteous when you can get ahead?
Why be truthful when you can lie to get your way?
Why share when you can have it all?

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Telling the truth is not hard,
guaranteeing you’ll like it
is impossible.

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The Socialist overthrow of Capitalism
would be a greater victory
than the capture of the Roman Empire
by Christianity.

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It must be a terrible heartbreak to have lived through the 1960s, and clearly remember the Civil Rights struggles and your protests against the Vietnam War, and then have had Reaganite Republican children and Bush and Trump Republican grandchildren. What a waste of all your child-rearing sacrifices, after having dreamt of an approaching just and democratic world, to bitterly realize that your turn at genetic transmission had been hijacked by fascism. Because of Hillary Clinton’s connivance in thwarting the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, and her being singularly responsible for bringing Donald Trump to power, there will never come a time in which I won’t detest the women (and men) who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary elections, and still insist she should have been US president. I pity Trump voters, despite them being at least disappointing and at worst horrible people, because they are infected with a self-defeating and obdurate stupidity. Hillary Clinton-loving people are supposedly more intelligent and moral, but are in fact absolute failures who are irredeemably vain and selfish, and thus unworthy of concern.

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West God In Rut
Wine God Strut
We Trusting Do
Go Turd In West
Wet Gin Or Dust
Go Trust I Wend
I Trod New Gust
Wet Gin Do Rust
West Rust In Dog
Wet God In Rust
In Dog We Trust
I Got Us Newt’rd
In God We Trust.

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It is so sad to see intelligent, fundamentally decent people
in the prime of their lives
lost in bitterness,
unreachable to friendship
by those outside their exclusive club of resentment.
It is a sadness like grief for a loss in the family
of one still living
but forever beyond contact.

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American society is ignorant, self-absorbed,
fearful and thus cruel, surrendering to enslaving greed,
and soulless by lacking a compassionate unifying vision.

Its best hope lies in the individual development
of strong moral character, and thus socialist vision,
by enough people to revolutionize the entire culture.

Manuel García, Jr. — 23 March 2018

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Zionist manifest destiny
in Palestine and beyond
is a war crime, which
Americans should not
subsidize nor sacrifice for.

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VW is Germany’s Ford, Audi is VW’s Lincoln.
US VW’ers pretend having MB & BMW status
they’re too poor and chintzy to pay for,
by being pushy obnoxious drivers.

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Inflation is money’s shelf-life.

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Extinction sooner is better than profits delayed.
(It’s all about the money.)

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Genocide is the original sin of the real estate industry.

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“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just;
that his justice will not sleep forever…”
– Thomas Jefferson,
(Commerce Between Master and Slave, 1782)

“Freedom is the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell
(The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

“If a nation values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is
that if it is comfort or money that it values more,
it will lose that too.”
– William Somerset Maugham
(Strictly Personal, 1941)

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals
to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1966)
(The Responsibility of Intellectuals)

“It’s typical for educated classes to be more effectively controlled
by the indoctrination system to which they are directly exposed,
and in which they play a social role as purveyors,
hence coming to internalize it.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1985)
(Intervention in Vietnam & Central America: Parallels & Differences)

“Nothing is easier
than to convince oneself of the merits
of actions and policies that serve self-interest.”
– Noam Chomsky
(Year 501, The Conquest Continues, 1993)

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The Victim Queen controls the World by projecting an infinite spectrum of dislikes.

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“I don’t want to have to think!”
Why humanity will extinct itself as soon as possible,
and pat itself on the back for doing so.

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God is a self-righteous excuse
for inflicting unconscionable cruelty.

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Will there be Love in 200 years?

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My biggest mistake:
having unrealistic expectations
of people I don’t know.
(Mainly everybody.)

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An old type of “joke” applied by racists/bigots who happen to be People-Of-Whiteness, against Black People (also known as People-Of-Color, and/or include: African-Americans, Afro-Caribbean, Africans) compares them disparagingly to apes: monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas. Genetically, there is only one race: the human race. And, we are all a species of primate: apes. Genetically, humans and chimpanzees are 98.8% identical. There is a greater difference between chimp and gorilla DNA (94.8% same) than there is between chimp and human DNA (98.8% same). White skin only developed in humans after 12,000 years ago (after the Ice Ages) and most likely after 6000 years ago. Very well preserved human DNA from recently uncovered human remains in Britain, from 6000 years ago, was analyzed to determine that such early Britons had black skin (very deeply dark brown, or “negro” skin color), straight black hair, and blue eyes! Racial jokes are the lame humor of ignorant people.

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U.S. Political Parties:

Libertarian:
the sociopathic anti-war pro-greed party.

Republican:
the sociopathic pro-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism.

Democratic:
the anti-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism,
and now fighting off an insurgency
by democratic socialists.

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The only 2 excuses for voting Trump:
1. You’re a bigot too,
and he lets you feel good about it.
2. Dementia.

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The Gates of Heaven are locked shut
to bar the dark children
of the despoiled colonies
from climbing into the Olympus
of their White Gods
who luxuriate in the effulgence
of their self-satisfying beneficence
that is the envy of the sacrificed
whose blood and sweat
are fermented and distilled
into the intoxicating ambrosia
swilled
at the never-ending
Harvest Feast of the Gods.

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I could whisper words of milk and honey in your ear,
and tell you sweetly what you want to hear.
I could entertain and lull you like the smoothest joint
But, really folks, what would be the point?

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Your Genetic Presence Through Time

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The propagation through time of your personal genetic presence within the genetic sea of humanity can be visualized as a wave that arises out of the pre-conscious past before your birth, moves through the streaming present of your conscious life, and dissipates into the post-conscious future after your death.

You are a pre-conscious genetic concentration drawn out of the genetic diffusion of your ancestors. If you have children who survive you then your conscious life is the time of increase of your genetic presence within the living population. Since your progeny are unlikely to reproduce exponentially, as viruses and bacteria do, your post-conscious genetic presence is only a diffusion to insignificance within the genetic sea of humanity.

During your conscious life, you develop a historical awareness of your pre-conscious past, with a personal interest that fades with receding generations. Also during your conscious life, you can develop a projective concern about your post-conscious future, with a personal interest that fades with succeeding generations and with increasing predictive uncertainty.

Your conscious present is the sum of: your immediate conscious awareness, your reflections on your prior conscious life, your historical awareness of your pre-conscious past, and your concerns about your post-conscious future.

Your time of conscious present becomes increasingly remote in the historical awareness of your succeeding generations.

Your loneliness in old age is just your sensed awareness of your genetic diffusion into the living population of your conscious present and post-conscious future.

To present the above ideas in a simple quantitative way, consider a model human population in which:

— every individual lives 75 years,

— at age 25, every individual mates and produces 2 children.

In this model, reproductive mating is assumed to produce 2 children so as to maintain a stable population by adding one replacement each for the mother and father (who only have one reproductive mating per lifetime; but any number of non-reproductive matings are allowed).

So, 175 years prior to the birth of a model individual here, 128 ancestors (ggggg-grandparents) are born. The genetic concentration leading to the target model individual proceeds forward with the birth of 64 gggg-grandparents 150 years prior to the birth of the target individual; 32 ggg-grandparents 125 years prior; 16 gg-grandparents 100 years prior; 8 great-grandparents 75 years prior; 4 grandparents 50 years prior; and 2 parents 25 years prior.

During conscious life the target individual has 2 children when at age 25, acquires 4 grandchildren when at age 50, and acquires 8 great-grandchildren when at age 75, when he/she dies. The number of progeny increases during the post-conscious future of the target individual, with a diminishing portion of the target individual’s genes in each descendant as their generation number increases.

You can see from the Table that you would have very little genetic connection with ancestors older than your great-grandparents (earlier than generation -3, or 75 years before “your” birth, in the model above), and thus (usually) a diminished interest in family history before that time.

Your most closely related other individual(s) is(are) your brother or sister (a twin in the model), with whom you share 100% of your genetic sources: 50% from your mother, and 50% from your father, for each of you, though your father’s mix may be different between the siblings, as well as the mother’s mix being different between the siblings. Identical twins would have identical paternal mixes, and identical maternal mixes.

You can see that for progeny beyond the +3 generation, your great-great-grandchildren, your genetic contribution is minor, and so your concerns about such distant future progeny (beyond 25 years after your death) is usually diminished.

So, the 175 year interval of human history that you (as a model individual, as above) would most likely have the greatest personal interest in would include the 75 years prior to your birth (your ancestors’ histories), the 75 years of your model lifetime (your conscious life), and the first 25 years of your post-conscious future (during times of conscious living for your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren).

In summary: You are genetically concentrated from the pre-conscious past, genetically prominent in the conscious present, and genetically diffused into the post-conscious future.

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ADDENDUM, 15 June 2018

One can formulate a normalized genetic presence (NGP) parameter as follows (which I describe as it is applied to the specific population model used earlier):

(1) For your pre-conscious time, at each generation divide your potential genetic presence (which is equal to 1) by the number of ancestors (carriers) born at that generation. This will be a fraction, and we call it your potential genetic presence because it occurs prior to your live birth.

(2) For your conscious life time, at each generation form the sum of (a) + (b):

(a) your living genetic presence, which is defined as the ratio of your total genetic complement divided by the number of organisms carrying them. This number is 1/1 = 1 while you are alive, and it is zero after you die.

(b)  the sum of your transmitted genes, normalized by the number of your LIVING progeny, as follows:

— 2 children are each 50% carriers of your genes, thus there are 2 organisms carrying a total of 1 genetic presence of you (jumbled, of course), thus: 1/2 = 0.5, (from your 25th to 100th year, in the model), PLUS

— 4 grandchildren who are each 25% carriers of your genes, so there are 4 organisms carrying another 1 genetic presence of you (jumbled, of course), thus 1/4 = 0.25 (from your 50th to 125th year, in the model), PLUS

— 8 great-grandchildren who are each 12.5% carriers of your genes, so there are 8 organisms carrying another 1 genetic presence of you (jumbled, of course), thus 1/8 = 0.125 (for a brief time during your 75th year, as “you” die then in the model; they continue to your 150th year),

(3) For your post-conscious time, your NGP equals the transmitted genetic presence carried by your living progeny:

— after “your” (model) death, you continue to calculate transmitted genetic presence factors for advancing generations of your LIVING progeny by a similar logic to the previous steps.

The following TABLE 2, and graph, show the NGP over time of a target individual in the model used previously.