amanita poisoning and natural selection

An antidote for amanita mushroom (death cap) poisoning, known for some time in Europe, is now being tried successfully by Dominican Hospital. On the surface, this is a good thing, but things are not always how they appear.

People actually pick these mushrooms, confusing them with editable types. This is rather like confusing a redwood tree with a manzanita. Since almost everyone knows that there are toxic mushrooms, particularly anyone who goes mushroom picking, you might think they would avoid anything they were suspicious of. Apparently not. Then, they don't just nibble, but make a meal of these before finding out if there are bad effects.

Now, remember Darwin's natural selection, the process by which individuals most fit survive to pass on their genes. “Most fit” for an antelope means being able to run fast, for a hawk, having good eye sight and for a human, being intelligent. So, people who do really stupid things don't survive, thus they don't pass on genes for stupidity. However, if we take idiots, cure them of the idiotic things they do to themselves, well, there goes the gene pool.

People who climb mountains in a snow storm, do skateboard tricks without a helmet, drive too fast on narrow, dirt, mountain roads, play Russian Roulette, pick fights with heavily armed toughs in a bar or pick unknown mushrooms are saying loud and clear, “I'm too damn dumb to live.”

Drilling and environmental protection: the pendulum swings.

The pendulum swings, always back and forth, never stopping in the center, and so the ramifications of the Gulf oil spill will play out.

Environmental damage has led to restrictions on drilling, off our coasts, north, west and east. Then, with the middle east situation, a new push for energy independence and more competition for petroleum products, the "drill baby, drill" mantra is again being heard.

Now, with this horrible spill, the voices for more drilling will be all but silenced for a time. However, with demand for oil rising even faster than the world's population, prices will go up while supplies become limited. The oil producing countries of the middle east, growing less enamored of the US due to our policy of making friends with them by making war on them, will be happy to sell to growing Asian economies, hungry to develop and to put their newly affluent people behind the wheel of autos.

So, in a very few years, collective memory being all too short, Americans will forget this spill and the call for drilling will again be loud and clear. And since the pendulum keeps swinging, another spill will start the cycle over again.

The reality is that until we develop alternative sources of energy well enough to end our dependence of fossil fuels, the pressure to drill will continue. Given a choice between drilling in ecologically sensitive areas and taking millions of cars off the roads, Americans will conveniently forget what is happening in the Gulf.

So, what can we do? Accountability is the key. When we allow an oil company to drill, there must be stipulations, rigid controls. We need further research into safety, with our government and the oil companies engaged in the best engineering and science. Once best practices are codified, these would be the law of the land regarding any new drilling, constantly updated as new knowledge is gained.

Would this be 100% effective? Nothing is 100%, but done right, we could raise the bar to very nearly 100%. When our river levies that are built to 25 or 50 year flood standards fail, we usually upgrade to 100 year protection, which all but prevents any further failure. The same type of thinking should apply to drilling, even though this would be done by a public and private mandated team effort.

immigraton and perception

The new Arizona immigration law, along with the protests against it, has just increased the polarization of the immigration issue. Concerns about the negative effects of illegal immigration on one side, and about immigrants' rights on the other are adding fuel to this growing fire. What is the reality of the situation?

From a societal perspective, perception is reality, literally, not metaphorically. Unlike observer independent reality, such as rocks, trees, elements and stars, things that would still exist even without humans, social reality is observer dependent, but is none the less real, as in national borders, elected offices, corporations, marriage and money.

Does illegal immigration pose a serious threat, a mild threat or none at all? That's a matter of perception. Does Arizona's law constitute a major assault on the rights of Latinos, a minor assault or none at all? That's also a matter of perception, and who and where you are influences your perception. The non-Latino in a border community has a different experience than a recent immigrant.

The central problem is that immigration has become something that is perceived to be an important issue, an emotional issue, an area of concern to many people. Areas of deep concern need to be addressed, and solutions offered, before they grow deeper and more polarized. Frustrated, angry people tend to make bad decisions. Think of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany. Our constitution probably prevents something that radical from happening here, but even lesser reactions can be disastrous.

There is no shortage of talking heads who will agitate for anger and retaliation on both sides. If reasonable people don't solve this problem, unreasonable people will step forward to do so. A vocal candidate will undoubtedly come forward with immigrant bashing a central plank in his or her platform. We've had our war on terror, war on drugs and war on poverty. Perhaps we'll have our war on immigrants. Some people are already advocating that.

I imagine that most people see some immigration as non threatening, even, I suspect, a small amount of illegal immigration. At some point many see it as a cultural or economic threat. One person crossing the border has a face, is an impoverished, desperate person seeking a better life for himself and his family. A half million of these are a faceless invasion. And that is the reality of perception.

Recent events have raised a red flag, and if these issues aren't addressed, more people, currently neutral on this issue will start to become polarized. The end result will be a protracted conflict and is not going to be pretty.

my favorite campground

I've camped all over northern California, preferring the quiet, out of the way places to the crowded RV and boom box camp cities. While I've had many nights alone, near a stream in some scenic spot, one place stands out, for several reasons, as my favorite.

The first time I visited was on impulse. Taking a very leisurely trip up the coast, I decided to explore the Mattole River, turning off the 101 near Garberville, on the road to Shelter Cove. Then, turning off on a side road, I drove through Ettersburg, a very small community. Just outside of town, in the mid afternoon warmth, I opted for a swim in the Mattole, a wonderful little river in an almost unspoiled part of Northern California.

I continued on to Honeydew, a store and a wide spot in the road, and then on to Petrolia.
It was there that my map and curiosity led me, as a side road runs five miles down to the beach, a section of the coast rarely visited. At the end of the road, paved part of the way, dirt the rest, I found a lovely BLM campground, twenty sites, right on the beach. Only two other sites were taken, so I took my pick.

The first thing that impressed me and actually brought tears to my eyes was the sign, indicating that this beach was adopted by the second and third graders at Petrolia school. There were wonderful paintings of beach and sea creatures and a caption: We love our beach; please take care of it." I wiped away the tears and took a photo before exploring.

There is another parking lot, just south of the campground, the jumping off point for the 25 mile backpack along the lost coast to Shelter Cove. So, within a few yards walk, I'd left civilization behind, along with the normal trash one expects to find on the beach. I walked a couple of miles in total solitude, accompanied only by the sound of breaking waves and the cries of sea birds.

The mouth of the Mattole is a mile to the north, and just south of the campground is Punta Gorda, slightly east of Cape Mendocino, the westernmost place in the lower 48, just a dozen miles north.

After spending one of the most quiet nights I can remember, I drove back to Petrolia and started north, along the private lands along Cape Mendocino, which I wish was open to the public. And the road twisted steeply up and away from the beach. After miles of narrow road winding through the hills, I came back once again to civilization at Ferndale, the little Victorian town south of Eureka.

Yes, this campground is an hour and a half off the main road, so if you are in a hurry to get somewhere, it's not for you. But, if you want peace and quiet and an unspoiled beach to wander, and you don't mind slow, winding roads, you will be rewarded.

Rethinking Nuclear disarmament

Intellectually, I know what President Obama is doing about reducing nuclear arms is a good thing. Yes I know that nukes are bad, cause lots of destruction and radioactive fallout and all that. But...

You see, there's a part of me that feels that once I've bought something, spent good money on it, I should use it, like the electric blanket that feels like I'm sleeping in a waffle iron. But, what the hell, I can't return it, so suffer with it for a short time before dumping it.

Well, I spent good money on nukes, as did my parents. In fact anyone who paid taxes from the 1940s through the 1980s paid something toward developing and building nukes. I hope you can see where I'm going with this.

Who knows how many millions or even billions were spent building enough bombs to blow the earth half way to Uranus. And now we have them stacked up, in ICBMs, in silos, perhaps even under our downtowns. In all these years, we've only used two of them. Two out of how many thousand? We proved in WW2 how effective these babies are. Put an instant end to the war in the Pacific. And that beautiful mushroom cloud. Remember the final scenes of Dr. Strangelove? Awesome.

But I digress. Now, before we toss all these potent reminders of what a bad ass America really is, we should remind the world again. Our government has identified a number of international bad guys, nasty dictators, genocidal maniacs, political leaders without a sense of humor. Why not, and take a moment to consider this before reacting, drop a few on some really nasty folk?

Perhaps a half dozen of these big 100 megaton fusion bombs, not those wimpy fission firecrackers we used on Japan, would get people's attention, reminding them to behave or else.

After that, when our state department sends the message, "Don't slaughter your own people," they will undoubtedly listen.

So, if I've convinced you, write our President and tell him to bomb someone. After all, that's what made this country great.

Frames and definitions make all the difference

Any argument, theory or line of thought will be indelibly shaped by how you frame it and define terms. Therefore two people can cite the same idea, using the same words and mean something totally different, perhaps even opposite meanings.

A illustrative example of this is the once highly popular "behaviorism." Starting with Pavlov and his classical conditioning and through Watson and Skinner, the theory was framed to depict the subject as a passive reactor, rather than an active actor. Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to salivate when a bell was rung, the bell having been associated with giving the dogs food. Skinner went so far as to claim that linguistic acts are conditioned responses to stimuli, and his definitional ambiguity earned a critical rebuke in 1957 from linguist, Noam Chomsky.

In behaviorism, the subject simply responds to stimuli and can be conditioned to respond to secondary stimuli, such as the bell. This makes the subjects, dogs in Pavlov's case, passive agents, responding but not initiating. This theory rejected something we all are personally aware of, the inner condition of our consciousness, yet, in spite of that, many philosophers and psychologists were enamored of it for a long time.

Pavlov could have framed his experiment another way. By ringing the bell in conjunction with food, he allowed the dogs to construct a chain of expectations, where they first expected him to feed them, and then learned to expect the bell to indicate that food was shortly to follow. Then when the bell no longer was paired with food, the dogs would have started to suspect that the bell wasn't a reliable indicator of food and eventually that the bell was irrelevant. The same kinds of reframing could have been applied to Skinner's boxes, with his rats and pigeons.

At the purely observational level, both frames would look exactly the same: Man rings a bell, dog salivates, then food arrives. However, looking at the dogs as either active or passive agents creates opposite psychological scenarios. Had this been framed the other way, whatever psychological theory would have arisen, it would not be what we now think of as behaviorism.

Now substitute any political or social theory for behaviorism and you can see the foundation of much current misunderstanding.

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