Bullet Ants Won

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family

Today Camera Girl put me in charge of two of my grandsons one nine and one twelve, for one hour.  She had fed them twice and occupied them all morning with games and movies.  She just needed enough time to start up her dinner and clean up after their plates and bowls.  So, I said, “Sure, no problem, we’ll go shoot some pool.”

So down to the first floor and the pool table.  After they fought for five minutes about who would break, we began the game.  But apparently watching each other (and me) take our turns was too infinitely boring.  I attribute this time dilation to the bowls of ice cream they had just inhaled.  Glucose, sucrose, lactose and galactose were coursing through their blood streams at concentrations that reduced their attention spans to milliseconds at most.

So, they started wandering around looking for something to fiddle with.  First, they found the lat-machine.  I only had a hundred pounds on the cable but neither of them weighs close to that much.  So, I see them suspending themselves from the bar.  And then I notice they’re swinging from it and I have to step in, “Hey, hey cut that out you’re gonna get hurt!”  Finally, they listen and move on to the weight bench so I have to start yelling again.  That’s all I need is for one of them dropping the bar on a foot or something.

So, we compromise and they start taking turns on the rowing machine.  At first, they’re still taking a turn at the pool table but soon enough they’re just cycling back and forth between them doing a couple of hundred meters each on the machine.  Having been completely abandoned at this point I cleared the table and came over to where they were rowing and watched as they amused themselves with something that I considered tedious exercise.

Mercifully, after a half hour, they wore off their sugar high and we went back for another game of pool before starting back upstairs.  With twenty minutes left I convinced them to take a walk around the yard.  They put on their rain boots and we walked around in the soggy air.  It was gray and humid but walking is always good therapy for kids.  It engages their muscles and makes them receptive to speech.  I asked them about their plans for the summer.  They had none.  I asked them what they were doing tomorrow.  They said swimming in my pool.  This was news!  I said, “Okay, let’s just check with your mom.”

Then they found a small rubber ball and began an impromptu game of soccer.  It quickly became animated and eventually spirited (violent and combative).  Then the ball ended up in the pond (swamp) and that was that.  By that point, Camera Girl came looking for us.  My hour was up.  I had fulfilled my responsibility honorably and she released me from bondage.  Now they would spend another two hours watching a movie about dragons and warriors and then head home for dinner.

But the movie ended about a half hour earlier than their departure time so they began to get antsy.  Camera Girl was trying to stop them from playing soccer in the living room so I tried an experiment.  I turned on the movie “Them!”  Well, it was like hypnotism.  As soon as the black and white image of the New Mexican desert appeared on the screen, they became catatonic.  They sat down and didn’t make a sound.  I knew there wasn’t enough time to reach the good stuff so I advanced the DVD to the first ant attack.  Adolescent boys and giant ants.  Magic.

It is remarkable how much mental energy is expended herding adolescent boys.  They have an amazing propensity for changing gears and battling each other.  But herd them we must.  Letting them get bored is a big mistake.  Their ability to get into trouble is remarkable.  Without supervision and organized activity, the number of broken windows and smashed electronic equipment would become prohibitively expensive.

On the drive home, we spent the time discussing whether giant carpenter ants were less deadly than giant army ants or giant bullet ants.  Bullet ants won.

Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD

photog Current Events , , ,

The last twenty-five hundred years of Western History seem to be divided roughly into five-hundred-year chunks.  500 BC to the beginning of the Christian Era was dominated by the Greeks and their successors the Macedonians and the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great’s conquests (remember I said roughly, the Romans finished off the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms in 30 BC).

Then the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe for the first five centuries of the Christian era.  When Rome fell, we had five hundred years of interregnum.  From 500 AD to about a 1,000 AD the petty kings fought each other over the carcass of the Roman Empire and the Church attempted to keep the peasants alive and give them hope.  By 1000 AD some stability had been restored and the “Dark Ages” were replaced by the High Middle Ages and civilization began to coalesce and Europe was no longer just a maelstrom of savagery.  And just exactly around 1500 AD Europe exploded into the Age of Reason and the Age of Discovery.  Science, technology, commerce and learning were everywhere and the Renaissance Civilization of Europe conquered the world.

And now here we are at 2,000 AD and European civilization is collapsing into some kind of squalid self-hating cult.  All of the remarkable triumphs of science and technology are despised and feared by the technophobic ignoramuses that crowd around the campuses of the universities where pseudo-intellectuals pose as philosophers and preach a false gospel of defeatism and anti-European hatred.

So, are we doomed to repeat the five hundred years of dark ages that swallowed up Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire?  I guess it’s possible.  It certainly looks that way.  But history doesn’t repeat itself.  We live in a very different world.  Even the powerful Islamic caliphate wasn’t able to roll any farther than Iberia and Asia Minor so Europe had a chance to reassert its independence.  But the world is a very different place today.  China and other non-European powers are emerging.  If Europe and the United States were to decay into weak entities their independence and survival would be far from a guaranteed result.  It truly behooves the leaders in the West to address the loss of morale and direction that is currently ubiquitous in Western countries.  It is basically an existential necessity at this point.  And there is very little time left to reverse the situation before it becomes impossible to solve.

What is needed is a cultural revival.  And a revival requires a leader.  Someone has to focus the resources of the state to purge the negative aspects of the present culture and replace them with institutions and goals that will strengthen society.  And the institution that must be restored and strengthened the most is the family.  All the reforms should work to restore the nuclear family to vigorous health.  Laws that encourage women to stay home and care for children while their husbands work are the most important aspects of a revival.  All elements of society that are detrimental to the family should be weakened and discouraged.  No one should be telling children that they can decide what sex they are or any other madness like that.  Traditional sex roles and other stabilizing patterns should be showcased and encouraged in entertainment and educational media.  Society as a whole should be focused on restoring healthy lifestyles and activities for everyone.

If a program of renewal is pursued strenuously, I think it’s not impossible for us to stave off the destruction of Renaissance civilization.  But where do we find the leader to initiate it?

All God’s Children

photog photog's Corner, Religion ,

Over the course of the last thirty years more and more exoplanets have been “discovered.”  In most cases the astronomers use changes in stellar light output measured by their instruments to infer the diameter of a planet transiting in front of its star.  And what they’ve discovered is there are thousands of these planets.  In fact, they seem ubiquitous.  Everywhere we look we find them.

And this has convinced an awful lot of people that life must be ubiquitous in the universe too.  And that intelligent life must be common too.  This would go a long way to encouraging the crowd who believe that human beings are nothing special and any belief in the divine origin of the human race is completely unfounded.  The story goes we’re just some monkeys that got a little smarter than the other monkeys and have become a blight on the face of “Gaia.”

I have to say, I completely disagree.  I look at the Earth and compare it to the other planets in our solar system and I’m struck by how many factors conspire to make Earth a paradise while leaving all of the other planets different flavors of hell.  Everything from the effect of our large satellite, to the strength of the magnetic field to the balance between elements and compounds that make up the oceans and atmosphere, to the exact orbit of Earth around the Sun.  And that’s not to mention the remarkable way terrestrial life has shaped the environment in remarkable ways.  Plant life has increased the oxygen content of the atmosphere and life has changed the environment in innumerable ways.

And then we have the fossil record demonstrating the prodigious changes that have gone on for billions of years to produce the current flora and fauna of this remarkable world.  From the one-celled origins of life to the present-day complexity of creatures as varied as hummingbirds and blue whales; birds of paradise and Siberian tigers; dragonflies and giant pandas.  And us.

I’m sorry, I cannot believe that all this is just the random result of fermions and bosons rattling around the aftermath of the “big bang.”  To quote the immortal words of Vizzini, “Inconceivable.”  And I know he was dead wrong every time he said it but that is my rock bottom intuition.  All of this is purposeful.  All of this was directed.  We are here because life has meaning and human life is the soul behind the giant mechanism.  We are the witness and the object for which the whole dizzying array was created.

We are the guests of honor in a parade that stretches out to the detectable limits of the universe and back and forth in time from, “Let there be light” to the end of “Revelations.”  We’re here to make sense out of the wonders of creation and to use them to figure out the full potentialities of the human mind and soul.

And I don’t believe for a minute that we’ll destroy ourselves utterly.  History has shown just how stupid and cruel we can be.  Humans can be more vicious than any predator.  There are no depths we can’t sink to.  But that is lowest part of our nature.  We have not yet begun to figure ourselves out.  We’re still ignorant children.  But we will grow up and we will grow out of our ignorance.  And then we will become what we are supposed to be.  God’s children.