Einstein's Amygdala Part Four: "None of this is on the Front Page"

From our care-giving, nurturing, fear-projecting feelings - as kids have for baby rabbits.

To Rule-making - as regulators do, to make us feel like it won't happen again.

To Manipulating - Insiders using the rule-making to hobble competitors.

The people with money know how to rub our amygdalas, and we purr like cats. What we value could be the cat, could be the baby bunnies, might be the childrens' reaction to kitties and bunnies. What we need to do is realize how much is at risk in the looming great extinction.

As Twitter climate philosopher & cat-shoulder-perching specialist Ben See @ClimateBen puts it

Remember:

1. The oceans are being killed.

2. Forests will soon be gone.

3. Fertile soil is disappearing.

4. Megafauna risk extermination.

5. Insects are vanishing.

6. Climate chaos is inevitable.

7. Extinction is now.

8. Plastic is in our blood.

None of this is front page news.

Ben See's point is that what SHOULD BE front page news is NOT being covered on the front page.

What does make it to the front page is seldom-enough related to environmental protection. When we do get the attention of reader amygdalas, the story is often "gotcha'. Pollution regulation and enforcement is priotized to real estate value, and increasingly used to shore up stockholder value. (I re-read upon Keynes vs Friedman over the weekend, suffice to say both mens' concentric circles of caring gravitate towards living humans rather than those yet to be born)

In Einstein's Amygdala Part 3, the ways for-profit businesses manipulate Regulations to the detriment of competitors was portrayed as a way to massage the fear instincts which our brains have developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. As noted in Part 1, the list of things that might kill us was exponentially longer a mere 500 years ago, but our brains remain as hair-triggered as when we were running away from tigers, lions and bears.

Today in Part 4, I'm looking at how the finite potential we have to focus our attention is being squandered by the masturbating NGOs like Basel Action Network, those who produce ads and policies and laws and rules and outrage off of #POVERTYPORN and #POLLUTIONPORN that has ZERO association with the causes they attribute the Earth's real problems to. THIS IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF A FINITE AMOUNT OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS TIME AND ENERGY. AS MUCH AS I AM FOCUSED WITH ALL MY SOUL UPON MAKING THE PLANET LOVABLE FOR ALL OF OUR GRANDKIDS, I'M GUT PUNCHED BY THE CALLOUS, GREEDY WAY THAT SNAKE OIL SALESMEN ARE TRIGGERING OUR CARING AMYGDALAS WITH ZERO SCIENTIFIC BASIS OR EVEN SCANTEST OF EVIDENCE.

Once again, eye-candy poverty porn non-profit Basel Action Network has a press release this morning (but I'm putting that "below the fold")

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 Two: Creating Popular Regulations

So all of the wild baby rabbits lasted 5 days, seemingly content to feed on pieces of bread soaked in milk and eggs.  Then they got sluggish. Then they suddenly seemed wide awake and active, and we kids were elated. This is what some animals do just before they die. We buried the baby cottontail rabbits in the woods. My mom, raised on a farm, said it was par for the course.

So from a child's perspective, our amygdalas had been yanked around, rewarded and punished, over 5 days falling in love with wild baby rabbits that your mom says probably won't survive the initial cat bite.

Deceased. late, extinguished, Monty Python "no more" baby rabbits is a headline we don't like, so it's easy to write a story... to imagine a reporter covers our dead bunnies, and the press demands a solution.

So what lessons would we expect innocent, naive, emotional children to learn? If they were in charge of regulating cats and rabbits, what rules might the children create which an experienced, educated, creative, thoughtful, highly intelligent person would not? Even though the Einstein does have an amygdala, we imagine that the higher power of intelligence would design a better rule - or not try to design one - rather than let emotional bunny-centric kids rule the roost.

Or what if the Rabbits were Super Intelligent, and could Propose Their Own Rules?

Bugs Bunny Square Dance from Loony Toons "Hillbilly Hare" (set in my home state of Arkansas)

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

2021 Pandemic Response - Seeking One True Size To Fit All

Here on a foggy mountaintop in Marshall, Arkansas (population 1300 and change), I'm preparing my family's bags to return to our disparate homes - Vermont, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brooklyn and London. The kids are adults with careers and degree studies in Europe, my partner has a continued sabbatical in Spain. I should have more time to blog when I'm on my own again, though re-making this thing over and pruning back to the best branches seems daunting.

So let's try this. I can explain and represent the views of my conservative red-hat Trump was robbed family members to my more educated, more erudite liberal relatives. First, let me explain something to blog readers - the reddest of states has both.

Here is a conservative in my family who I wuld not want to become sick. He's 89. He loves oysters. He lives in the South of France, where vaccine hesitancy is highest. Today's blog will use CV-19 policy and opinion variance to illustrate how there is not "one correct answer". 

(Publishing prematureley as a place holder, last post of 2021 Coming back to edit, time to pack the car).