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a poem by NancyGene
Fine and juicy pangolin,
served with bats,
or spotted cats,
striped tiger skin.
Make your choice then we’ll wrap that
ground rhino horn,
small dogs unborn,
some right whale fat.
Fresh and wet, the markets hum
with turtle eggs,
the scourge to come.
1. The coronavirus outbreak has been traced to a wet market in Wuhan, China.
2. The virus did not escape from a lab experiment.
3. The coronavirus resembles viruses that have been found in bats and pangolins.
4. Humans either contracted the virus directly from an animal or through an intermediate host which had contracted it from (probably) a bat.
5. Visit an Asian market in your community and let us know what you see.
6. Look at pictures of wet markets in China and read the descriptions.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html
When my Grandmother was growing up in Philadelphia in the 1910s, she and her friends used to yell "Chinaman, Chinaman, eat dead rats!" whenever they'd pass a Chinese restaurant or laundry.
When my Grandfather was growing up in Brooklyn, he would fill a sock with flour and hit the Jewish kids in black clothing on the back. Both behaviors are wrong.
Of course they are.
My Grandmother was a child at the time and she and her friends were scared to death of the Chinese. This was during the time when everyone talked about the "Yellow Peril," and such.
My Grandfather was a bully; the Jewish kids were likely scared of him. He graduated from 8th grade 2nd in his class, yet the teacher sent him to 1st grade for a day because he was such a pest. He could still recite the "Cremation of Sam McGee" when I was a child.
My maternal grandparents were very kind and generous. They were both very forward thinkers, hardworking and god fearing. I’m grateful for being blessed with such amazing role models in my early years.
I guess it’s what we choose to take from our youth that makes us who we become.
It's good to have role models.
My mother's parents were very loving and fiercely loyal to us. My father's mother was the closest thing I has to a role model, she thought for herself despite being kind and loving. My father did encouraged me to study and pursue a scientific career.
Sounds like you were lucky also.
What follows is a long caffeine fueled rant that you all can ignore:
Truthfully. Dumb luck or lack of it guides us all.
Our parents give us advice. But in the end of the day anything can happen
at any moment.
Our cells are little nuclear bombs that can go off at any time (cancer etc).
Every time we drive a car, anything could happen.
Our families. If our parents had died when we were little.. If they were
afflicted in some way that made them unable to give us advice.
If we have genes that lean towards addiction, if we lifted that bottle to our lips.
Every day we go about our business. If something happened to us. A truck
veered off course. Someone at the factory made ice cream with dirty hands which gave us a food poisoning that sent us to hospital, where we caught MRSA and died.
If we came to the path of a madman. A thief in the night.
If a meteorite landed on us.
If a plane we were on crashed.
If a stray dog went nuts on us.
If a song pissed us off and we were loudly talking about it in a public transit and a druggie in a psychosis was offended.
If a electric appliance caught fire in the middle of the night as we were sleeping.
If we fell down doing whatever and struck our head.
If a viper, cobra or some poisonous snake popped out of a hole while we were having a picnic and bit us.
Or a hormone filled bull moose decided to decimate us with his antlers.
Or if a mosquito bit us and gave us the west nile disease. Or tick that gave us lyme disease, which went bad.
If we went to a gun range and some mad woman decided to blow our brains out.
(happened here some 10 years back)
If there was particularly large hail and we found ourselves outside. With no
cover.
If we found ourselves from a room rapidly filling with carbon monoxide, lets say we went to sauna and the chimney was closed (happens in Finland).
If we were walking on a glacier and the ice below us suddenly gave up.
If someone blew some rock without a rubber cover and one of the rocks from the explosion decided to fly straight to our head.
If a jet engine decided to fall on our heads after breaking free from a jet plane.
If we drank from some cup we thought was fancy and it was actually covered with some poisonous material that slowly drove us crazy and made us commit a suicide.
If a police that was chasing a violent criminal decided that we were him and decided to shoot us in the head.
If the patch of coffee we were drinking had somehow been laced with arsenic.
If we were following some instruction on the internet for building X and it did not go very well and the X turned out to be a death trap.
If the food we ate was not nutritious and we slowly killed ourselves due to malnutrition.
If the person we wrote to on the internet was a serial killer and chose us as his random victim.
If the doctor that was treating us, was tired of it all and decided to give us a pill that killed us.
If our clothes / shoes etc were laced with something poisonous accidentally and gave us a deadly rash.
If the medicine we ingested was actually made wrong and it killed us.
If the fast food we ate was made by some fool with corona virus and it killed us.
Do I have to go on?
Dumb luck keeps us alive.
Dumb luck makes us possibly smart and rich.
We do not control poop.
Writing the above made me realize.
What is the point?
All these personal stories of vindication we tell for ourselves. I guess it makes us feel good when we tell a story in which we are heroes that overcame insurmountable odds. But really?
What is the part of free will in a world that can kill us all day and all night long. How do we rise above our circumstances when it can be the very mind we have that is afflicted? How many "special" billionaires there are.
I do not know a single one.
Smart people have genes that make them able to retain information and cognitive functions good enough to process that information. "Stupid" people do not. The only hope for "stupid" people is luck. For smart people, they can use their faculties.
My previous epilepsy medication actually began to deteriorate my memory. One hell of a feeling. To realize it all depends on just some chemical balance in
my neurons. Throw that a little off and I am a drooling idiot.
This one gives me a better memory, but now my emotions are muted! Oh vey!
Yes! The very faculties are affected by dumb luck of upbringing, genes and
every day life. Why be proud?
If you find yourself from Ivy league college and you do well. Good. If you find yourself from a roadside picking up trash. Good.
Were you 100 % in control getting there? If you tell yourself yes. Well. It is not reality.
Free will. Is there free will?
What does free will amount up to in a world where we are like flawed ships sailing on the sea of life.
Should we not care for others because they made bad choices or were unlucky?
What is a choice? If one person lifts a bottle to his lips and is not affected by it, ignores it and goes to a life of study was that person stronger than the one who lifts a bottle to his / her lips and goes on a life long binge?
What do we have to consider there? That the two were the same? Do we have to consider their brain structure, their affinity to addiction? Their very genes?
Or can we just say that a is good and b is bad?
Of course it is easier to do the latter.
Occams razor is a theory that when you have to make least assumptions about a question the answer is right. The more you have to speculate, the less likely the answer is right.
But what about complicated problems? Like right here. The life of a person A and person B.
Can you compare?
Trump vs homeless person?
What is the thing that made Trump president of the united states / made the homeless person homeless. Did trump excel because of his free will / did the homeless person fail in some unforgivable fashion to become homeless?
Could Trump not have had any of the things I said far above happen to him and
die? Could the homeless person not have had some random lucky event that I did
not describe above that would have led that person to find his true gift and
excel? Maybe that person could have been a world class bicyclist that wont the
Tour De France ca 1995. But that one random event did not happen which would have led to it.
Why is the world such?
What do the answers tell about us?
I think that is the big one. What do the answers tell about us. If we just casually say, A is better than B. Then, it tells something about our callousness, about not wanting to spend our time thinking about it and
that leads to us building a world thus.
If how ever we think about it. Go to the voting box having thought about it
and vote someone who also thought about it. We build a different world.
If we recognize that we are sailing on this sea of life in a raft made of
sugar that is melting rapidly and we see other people around us doing the
same. From the homeless person to the president of the united states and
we do not do rash judgments. Then.
We care. We love one another. If we care and love one another. Then we
do not count out the guy who has to resort to dumpster diving. Or the
sociopath who became the president. We look at all of us with our faults
as a doctor would. Flawed things with different amounts of luck.
We look at reality. Instead of a story that the person told himself
or a story we told to ourselves to explain the world in simplified terms.
The thing is. We have no hope of understanding the world as it is. It is just
way too complicated. But in the end of the day, the one thing that matters is:
We are all human beings. With the same value. Divided, yet we share the experience of living.
Antti