Civilization corrals the Amygdalas: Howler Monkey Gods

Amygdala Hijacking sounds uncivilized. But it's hard to imagine a society without it.

Societies will always vote for a dictator over chaos, or in reaction to a fear of anarchy.  But this isn't a political post, at least not yet. 

First a disclaimer... I believe in "Western Civilization", but think the term "West" is in some ways a historical accident. The great library burnings in the mideast, Alexandria, and most especially the Aztec/Inca libraries destroyed by self-proclaimed Spanish "Christians" hid the evolution of other logical and obviously city-pyramid-construction-capable cultures. 

But while "cultural cleansing" is a historically obvious problem, the current DEI narrative fails to recognize its universality. Am I mistaken, or didn't Hopi Indians build pueblo structures whose sole purpose was to protect them from the Apache "race". Incas had wars and who knows how many libraries were burned by Alexander the Great? Or how much of the greatest loss - the library of Alexandria - was pilfered from other libraries in Mesopotamia and south Asia conquests?

So the theme today is taking an actual provable problem and weaponizing it to achieve Authority. And as the symbol of that authority let's not use "high priest" or "ayatollah of e-waste" or "priestatollah", but the Mayan Howler Monkey God.

Recycling Rates and the Inverse "Normal Curve"

What do the wealthiest people in the world have in common with the poorest people in the world?  

The poorest people in the world have the highest recycling rates. They cannot afford to feed their own children, and so the scrap value of a discarded can or bottle is a resource they cannot pass up.

The richest people in the world also have higher recycling rates - but not as high, because they can afford to purchase things that cannot be recycled. The rich have more education, and understand why we need to fund a recycling "system" to preserve resources for future generations.  So we have children's interests in common, but weirdly different children as the wealthy purchase for their own children expensive objects that are nor very recyclable (like Nintendos or X-boxes).

Who recycles, who cares about recycling?

It's an inverse bell curve, or "normal" curve.

Einstein's Amygdala Part 3: The Predatory Business of Labelling Competitors as Predators

To reiterate the below-the-fold conclusion of Part 2:

Today, in most of the world, the highest risks to our health are affluence-related.

Over-eating. Driving cars too fast. Ingesting newly developed drugs. New inventions like handguns. But as compared to the highest risk of death a mere fractional 200 years ago, the biggest risk today is having lived twice as long as the average human 1% of evolution ago. The entire list of these affluence-related risks and outside risks today is a lower risk than faced by 30 year olds, centuries (seconds in evolution relativity) ago.

Einstein's theory of relativity places the fully formed amygdala in a perspective setting, similar to the relative speeds of sounds from trains, speed of light, all the great Einstein thought experiments explaining relativity. 

The press and social media constantly portray business and trade as if it takes place between predatory cats and baby rabbits. And it is natural for humans to give equal weight to every new fear.

Photo by me 2021. Lots of people photograph this cat in San Juan. Some of my

own photos over the years have been flagged by Google as unattributed, fodder for

another blog someday

Einstein's Amygdala Part One: The Baby Rabbit Rescue

January 2022, first blog of the new year. And I can tell this is going to be a multi-parter.

One day in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when I was a teenager in the 1970s, my adored and adorable white mutt persian cat - Samantha - came to the door with a baby cottontail rabbit. As I recall, she was clutching the baby rabbit by the scruff of its neck, as Samantha did with countless litters of her own kittens over the years. But I knew she was a hunter, she'd likely eat the baby bunny, and I reacted quickly to save it.

Samantha gave up the baby rabbit to me with what seemed a minor fuss as compared to times I'd tried to get back a prized bird or mouse. I rushed to show the baby rabbit to my little brother and sister, who cooed and said how cute it was, and I started to tell them about a wild cottontail my great aunt and my mom and I raised successfully when I was 3 years old, and the memories of...

... Wham. Samantha was back, with a second baby cottontail rabbit. We were so occupied with the first, stupidly in hindsight. Bunnies are born in litters of five or six. The eyes were not quite open, so this was a nest of bunnies, and Samantha hadn't fought to keep the first, either because she was on a fire-fighter rescue mission to save all the other bunnies, or she knew there was plenty of lamb hasenpfeffer where that came from.

So I gave the first and second baby rabbits to my siblings, and followed Samantha this time, out into the side yard of our brown split level home on the corner, down the hill toward the small park across the street. Samantha went on with her mission, and this time I was tracking her. She entered some leafy ivy covered portion of the yard, and quickly emerged with Peter Rabbit #3. I grabbed both the cat (now growling) and kitten still in her mouth and carried them both back to the front door, where our mom was now preparing a box for the involuntary kitten-bunnies. We got the third baby rabbit out of Samantha's mouth, and then shut the cat in the lower floor of the house to keep her from returning, whether as Terminator 1 or Terminator 2 - this fluffy white Schwartzenegger was in the penalty box.

But how long, realistically, could we expect to keep our "free range" cat, who'd been free to live her life indoors or out for 15 years? Some moral blue district suburban PETA subscriber today would tell me to keep all cats indoors, and never remove their claws, accept the collateral damage to the wallpaper and furniture. And today no doubt the population of humans is doubled, and the standard of living of humans now supports far more cats and far larger home spaces. But this was Arkansas in the 1970s, and I came from a family of Ozark farm dwellers. Rabbits have as many litters as they do each year because they have evolved to be food. If not for the owls, bobcats, foxes, falcons, coyotes and wolves, rabbits would suffer a mass overpopulatoin, disease and starvation. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution left us with rabbits facing far fewer pumas and grey wolves, and if some farmers grandkids cats caught and ate a few, it was merciful violent mitigation of the dearth of carnivores humans had created over just the past few centuries. 

My 1978 Pentax K1000 pointed at my sister stirs amygdala counter-threat