History

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Some of this is metaphorical

I’m back on the smartphone to write today’s post, and I’m on my way into the office quite early.  I’ve already been awake for hours, but there was truly no point in getting up so far ahead of time, so I just laid around*.

I did get a bit of extra rest, because yesterday I left the office early, after only about a quarter of a day.  I didn’t really get any extra sleep, but at least I decompressed a little.  This means, however, that I am well behind on preparing the payroll, so today is going to be irritating.  It must be done, though, and no one else is going to do it.

I guess it’s good to be useful.

Yesterday, my boss suggested that I ought to take about three or so days off sometime, and do something fun.  But I just shrugged, feeling worse for having to say it, and asked him, “Where would I go?  And what would I do?”  In my head, I added, “There isn’t anything.  Or anyone.”  I really do nothing for fun, and certainly there is no one with whom I do anything fun, or even just hang out.

On the other hand, I don’t want just to hang out with someone and do something.  Trying to do some random activity with some random person would be more stressful than doing nothing.  My tastes and my personality are at least somewhat esoteric.  I wish I could find another member of my species.  But I fear perhaps that I’m just a mutant or a hybrid or something, and there is no other member of my species.

Certainly I feel no real sense of kinship with any of the major figures in any of the political parties.  The most vocal people on both the left and the right are flagrant idiots, and most of their statements** are, as I think I said yesterday or the day before, “idiocy on performance enhancers”.

The specific idiocies tend to be different on the two sides of the current spectrum.  The most extreme people are as different as Hitler and Stalin‒very different in their ideological dogmas, but all too similar in all the ways that count the worst.

Never trust anyone who is sure they know what’s right, because it’s pretty clear that no one does.  And people who believe that they know what’s right‒not just for themselves, but for everyone‒are capable of committing grotesque atrocities, all the while fumigating their self-image with the fact that they have good intentions.

You know what was built with good intentions, right?

My inclinations tend toward classical liberalism, à la John Stuart Mill et al.  I have sympathy for the most sensible of progressives, and I am a fan of progress in general.  But, of course, arrogating the word “progressive” to yourself (or “anti-fascist” or “patriot” or any other such “Look at me, I’m a good guy!” terms) does not actually make you progressive by any sensible use of the term.

Likewise for conservatism‒I can  sympathize with the notion that one should not just haphazardly make changes to long-standing ideas and institutions.  All improvement is change but not all change is an improvement.  Random change is as likely to be bad as to be good‒probably more likely, like random mutations in the genome of a reasonably well-adapted organism.

But there are so very many “conservatives in name only” and “Republicans in name only” in the sense that they are not really in line with anything that the GOP has traditionally promoted, nor any sensible conservatism.

As DMX said, “Talk is cheap, motherfucker.”  Or, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, progressive is as progressive does, conservative is as conservative does.  And perhaps most egregiously, Christian is as Christian does.  Ugh.  Dealing with that hypocrisy*** would take a  whole post at least, and right now I don’t have the stomach for it.

So, to make myself a bit clearer, in case anyone was confused by my recommendations that the left should avail itself of its 2nd Amendment rights:  the reason I addressed them thusly was that they are traditionally the side that’s been more opposed to personal gun ownership and use, and so they are less likely on average to have guns.

It is the “right” who are currently in power (in the US) and they are pushing many boundaries of constitutionality (and they also tend to be fans of militarized police forces and the like).  So, if you fear that they are going the way of fascists and authoritarians in the past‒and there is at least some evidence to support this thesis‒then you must admit something the right has long since pointed out and of which it has in principle been aware:  it is harder to oppress an armed populace than it is an unarmed populace.

I’m against oppressors, authoritarians, totalitarians, etc., on any side, largely because I know‒to the extent that I know anything at all‒that they are mere flesh and blood, mortal, tiny-minded Naked House Apes.  This fact is not shameful in and of itself‒no one chooses their own nature‒but when nearly hairless, ridiculous-looking primates start thinking that they are something fundamentally superior or even divine, that they are anything but dust in the wind, then they start making messes.

If it were only themselves that they were hurting, things would be better.  Though it would still be sad, it would be morally tolerable.  But like drunk people getting behind the wheel of a car or like people who refuse quite safe vaccination against highly communicable and dangerous diseases, they become a danger to other, innocent**** people.  And, when threatened with the unrepentant use of force (deliberate or negligent, active or passive) by such supremely finite minds, people have the right‒if there is any right to anything at all‒to protect and defend themselves, and their loved ones, and the innocent, and the helpless, with force.

Of course, even this must be done judiciously, and one must always exercise the principle of charity against even one’s perceived opponents.  The presumption of innocence is crucial, and not merely at the obvious level.  Otherwise matters are prone to degenerate into mindless feuds.

It’s not that your opponents are not monsters; it’s that you are also a monster.

That’s enough for today.  I’m already exhausted.

*Weirdly enough, this is unrelated to getting laid or sleeping around.  Believe me; it’s completely unrelated.

**I was going to use the word “argument” but that would be an insult to the word.

***Based on the gospels, Jesus really did not approve of hypocrisy.

****In this matter, at least.

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No one else here will save you

It’s Saturday, and I’m writing another blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, actually, you can say that‒nothing is stopping you from enunciating those words‒but if you do, you’ll either be mistaken or lying.  And it would be hard to excuse you making that mistake, since I’m right here, reminding you that I did warn you, and I’m even putting a link in* to the post in which I warned you.

As for topics about which to write, well, I don’t know.  The world is such a boring place right now.  There’s nothing interesting or troubling or unusual happening at all.

I was being tongue-in-cheek there, as I hope was obvious (though social media and the internet more generally have shown us that this can never be taken for granted).  However, it’s also true that the tragicomedy of current politics is not really very interesting, any more than is any other set of primate dominance conflicts.  To the primates themselves, and perhaps to those who study them, it might be interesting, but to everything else in the universe‒including yours truly‒it’s just a bunch of noisy, smelly, stupid animals making a mess while jockeying for positions in a contest that only matters to them (and not even to all of them).

But it is still a potentially violent process, and there tend to be brutal injuries and fatalities, so I’ll repeat my admonition:  it’s fun to repeat the slogan “punch a Nazi” but it’s important to recognize that that is just a slogan, like “catch the wave:  Coke” or “nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”**.

The actual Nazis‒you know, the real ones from 30s-40s Germany, not just the people you call Nazis the same way some might say “your mama”‒were stopped by people with real weapons, and it required real violence and personal danger.  Passive or verbal (or even fist-based) resistance works against relatively civilized opponents, like the colonial British in India, but would not work against actual Nazis, actual fascists, or against other actual totalitarians like the Soviets or Pol Pot or Chairman Mao and his successors, or the various smaller-scale dictators, authoritarians, totalitarians, and just generally other bully types throughout history.

Such people are not civilized‒not completely‒and they will use force against those who oppose them, or just against those whom they don’t like, or of whom they don’t approve 

You can say “punch a Nazi” when you’re talking about people who just act like Nazis, or who seem to sympathize with such ideologies, but when it comes to actual “Nazis”, the slogan should be more along the lines of the Joker’s three favorite things‒dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline.

Or, as Chris Cornell sang in his Casino Royale Bond song:  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The political right in the US has long been the group of people who are most fervent about defending the 2nd Amendment, but the right has betrayed so many of its former ideals already, and totalitarians (and would-be ones) will generally do their best to disarm a populace they want to control or oppress or simply to kill.  So, if you’re at all serious in thinking that those on the current “right” are akin to Nazis‒and this is not necessarily wrong‒I say again, get weapons and train yourself to use them well.  Learn the arts of sabotage and improvised munitions.  Take a bartending class and learn to make a Molotov Cocktail***.  Heck, buy a flamethrower; they’re legal (and ironically, they don’t count as firearms).

Of course, in fighting against oppressors, it is essential to remember Nietzsche’s admonition about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses.  Learn from the examples of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution; “revolutionary” ideologies tend to turn into paranoid self-policers, but not necessarily in a good way.  Remember, many of the initiators of the French Revolution ended up meeting the Guillotine themselves at the hands of their own co-revolutionaries.

Remember Robespierre.  Remember Trotsky.  Don’t become just as evil as the people you oppose.  Also, remember the presumption of innocence (even for people you hate) except in true, immediate danger to life and limb.  Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they are evil (and just because you like them doesn’t mean they are not).  Just because you are fighting against “bad guys” doesn’t mean you are necessarily a “good guy”.  To be a “good guy” requires self-reflection and self-criticism and devotion to the concept of fallibilism.  Remember, Stalin fought against Hitler and helped defeat him, but he was most assuredly not a good guy.

On that cheery set of notes, I wish you a happy weekend.  Wishes may be useless, of course, as ineffectual as “thoughts and prayers”, but they are real, nonetheless.

*Not referring to the website/social media platform LinkedIn.

**I know these slogans are really old, but none that were more recent popped into my head, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to think of one.

***Yes, I know, it’s not a real drink.

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Sticks and stones…

I don’t really know what to write about that’s personal at the moment, so I thought I’d weigh in on a matter that’s occasionally been popping to my mind.

Those who believe that we are marching toward fascism in the United State—and I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong—need to start availing themselves of their 2nd Amendment Constitutional rights, if they haven’t already done so.

Many have long held that the 2nd Amendment did not secure the right to keep and bear arms as protection against ordinary criminals or terrorists or even mad people like school shooters and the like.  They maintain that it is a measure put in place to protect the citizens against the potential depredations of an oppressive government (such as the one against which the founders had recently revolted).

I’m not Constitutional scholar enough to know for certain what the definitive intention of the writers of the 2nd Amendment was, and given how disparate the interpretations thereof are, I would suspect that no one is.  But we don’t really need to dwell too much on that, since we are the ones interpreting the Constitution now.  Here are the words:  “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The argument can be made that the 2nd Amendment is a straightforward compound sentence with two separate subjects.  The first part basically says that we all know that any free state of any kind is going to have to have some kind of military.  It’s a necessity.  But the second half says that because of the fact stated in the first part, the right of the people—not the militia— to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The point, I am led to understand, of this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that since the government is always going to have a militia—and since over time, governments may become tempted to use those militias against their own citizens—the citizens should be armed, so that they can at least fight back.

In any case, whether you buy that interpretation of the 2nd Amendment or not, it’s a good point to consider now.  If you honestly think that the current government is really striving to enact a form of fascism in the United States, and that it will oppress innocent people and use force against them—and how are laws enforced other than through the threat of literal violence by the police or the military?—then you need to be prepared for active resistance, not just rhetoric.  When name-calling fails (impossible as that might seem), what are you going to do to resist unlawful encroachment by those who seek to use the offices of government to further their own selfish ends?

Thomas Jefferson had his faults, of course, some of which are difficult to understand, but he did almost solely write the founding document of the United States of America*.  He was also, based on some of his writings, a bit of a radical recurrent revolutionary, at least in principle.  He famously wrote that he thought there should be an armed revolution as often as every twenty years if people wanted to remain free.  “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?  Let them take arms…the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is it’s natural manure.”

I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek he might have been when he wrote that, but it doesn’t really matter, because the message is the message, and it stands or falls on its own, regardless of who said it or why.

If you hate oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes, it’s hard to blame you.  But while the slogan “punch a Nazi” is funny, and seems vaguely tough and “cool” to people who’ve never been in a serious fight in their lives, the Nazis—the real Nazis, the originals—were not defeated by people punching them.  They were not defeated by protests.  And though words helped, they were not finally defeated with words, certainly not the sort of words we find tossed about on social media.  They were fought, they were captured—and when nothing else could be done, they were killed—by other armed people.

I cannot recommend going out and killing people you don’t like just based on political differences.  That’s catastrophic, cosmic-level idiocy.  But if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are actually under immediate threat carried out by armed individuals, then such people must be resisted with arms, if one wants to have any chance of success.

Imagine how hard the Warsaw Ghetto would have been even to make happen, let alone for the people there to be gradually massacred, if most or even just some of the original 400,000 Jews who had been put there had been armed and had recognized that their lives were in danger.

Imagine if all the Jews and Gypsies and gay and handicapped people in Germany and Austria and Poland and France and Czechoslovakia and so on had all possessed personal firearms.

There are, last I heard, more guns in private hands than there are citizens in the US.  Whether or not one sees this as a good thing depends very much upon one’s criteria for goodness in this matter, but it is true that it is much harder for the Thought Police to kick in people’s doors to enforce conformity if a good percentage of those people are armed and know how to use their weapons to fight** in defense of their lives and those of their families.

Anyway, I thought this was an important point to make; at least it’s one that nags at me.  It’s very easy, and relatively safe, to argue with people on social media, calling them names from the other side of the country or the other side of the planet.  But when would-be oppressors from any part of the political spectrum come to enforce their ideas violently upon others, clever online memes are unlikely to stop them.

I don’t condone armed attacks against people who aren’t in the muscle end of the family, so to speak, and in any case, such things often backfire.  But if the SS or the KGB or the DHS or any other manner of secret police are coming for you and those you love, though you have committed no actual crime, and if you aren’t sure what they’re going to do if they capture you/them, it seems perfectly reasonable to shoot as many of them in the head as you can.  You can at least make their job both difficult and dangerous.

Words may never hurt me, but sticks and stones can break my bones, even if I don’t choose to use them.  So, if I honestly think such things are coming, I really should pick up my own sticks and stones.  It’s vastly better to use reason and discussion and politics to settle differences, to arrive at compromise, to make things work as well and as honorably as we can for everyone, but when faced with a literal and immediate threat of deadly force, it is perfectly moral to defend oneself with deadly force.

*That’s the Declaration of Independence, in case you were wondering.

**This is crucial.  Guns are not magic talismans, and if you’re going to get one, you should learn how to use it.  You should train and indoctrinate yourself in gun safety, and—equally important—you should practice so that, when necessary, you can use your weapon very unsafely.

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In the voids between galaxies, it’s already next year, but there’s still no life there.

It’s Tuesday, now‒the first Tuesday of the new year.  This is not anything particularly interesting, of course.  It’s really just another day.  But it is also the last day of the first week of the new year, the 7th day of the year, as indicated by the fact that it is January 7th.

“Brilliant, Holmes!” I hear you say.

In this case, though, it truly is elementary.  It’s also pretty boring, so I’m sorry to go on about it.

There have been troubling things in national news, of course:  the terroristic suicide attack-by-vehicle in New Orleans; the guy who blew up his cyber truck; severe cold weather striking large swaths of the eastern US; and, of course, no one has yet yelled “Psych!!” regarding Donald Trump’s election for a second term as president.

I’m not as rabidly anti-Trump as many; he’s just a man, of soft and squishy flesh and blood, like everyone else.  He’s also just one more incompetent government official on a world stage that might as well be a collection of (poor quality) Three Stooges clones.

It would be remarkable and praiseworthy if humans actually elected smart, calm, intellectually honest government officials with personal integrity.  Alas, when holding elections, humans seem unable to be as rigorous in their evaluation of candidates as they would be when screening babysitters or even gardeners.  And, of course, since few people are in the habit of reflecting on themselves in any way to improve on their own flaws in judgment, it seems unlikely that things will change very quickly.

This is all nothing new, of course.  The modern shape of cyberspace and the borderline-antisocial media add little twists and peculiarities, introducing new dynamics to the system.  But the dominating principles of primate social and sexual dominance hierarchies and displays have not changed much, if at all.

The only really interesting thing I’ve found in the news is the statement about a new study‒an elaboration of a first theoretical paper from some years ago‒that proposes a potential alternative explanation for the fact that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating that doesn’t require “dark energy”.

The cosmological principle, which underlies the usefulness of standard model, lambda-CDM cosmology, states that, on the largest of scales, the universe is uniform and homogeneous.  However, on anything other than the largest scales, the universe is decidedly clumpy.  This is because of gravity, of course, pulling things together in regions where things are more dense (making them still denser) and making the spaces in between ever more rarefied and so on.

But, of course, gravity is not just a simple attractive force; it works its effects through the warping of spacetime, and in ordinary circumstances (so to speak) its effect on time is far more significant than those on space.  This is a very real effect, one for which we have to adjust when using GPS satellites for instance, so while general understanding of it may be relatively rare, it is not an esoteric bit of physics.  It’s textbook stuff.

The point being made by this new hypothesis is that perhaps there is no real dark energy, but instead, in regions where more mass exists, time slows down.  This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s quite true, and indeed, to a large extent, all the apparent physical effects of gravity are produced by the differential flow of time between places where the manifold is more vs. less curved.

So, in the places where matter/energy is relatively scarce, time moves “more quickly”.  So, since the universe is definitely expanding (due to the Big Bang), those regions are going forward through their expansion more quickly than regions with more matter, and so the space between galaxies and clusters appears to expand more quickly, and as the comparative difference, the contrast, in energy concentration increases, the difference in passage of time will tend to increase, too, producing an apparent accelerated expansion.

[Note to self:  how would this model be expected to affect the extreme measured uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background?  Is this going to be a point of evidence against it?]

This is not a definitive, tested hypothesis, but it rests on sound principles.  It probably won’t supersede lambda-CDM, but it has the potential to do so.  This is no crank, RFK Jr. style hypothesis by any means.  I haven’t read the papers involved yet; rather I read articles and watched some videos about it; I will try to learn more.

But, since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe in the late ‘90s was the single most exciting (non-personal) event in my life, the idea that there is a new approach that might change that again is also truly exciting.

It makes me wish I had just gone into physics as I had originally intended.  However, post-open heart surgery, transient cognitive impairment, and an exacerbation of depression triggered by the same thing, made it too difficult, in the short term, to keep up with my physics and math classes in the semester after my heart surgery, so to English I went.

But as I picture the large-scale universe differentially flowing through time and thus expanding at relatively different seeming rates, producing this wonderful, higher-dimensional twisty-bulgy-filamentous shape, I can at least feel a little twinge of the joy of contemplating science.  My only real contribution to science was in studying the effects of gliotoxin on naked DNA in vitro, and though that’s quite interesting, it’s not exactly cosmology.

Oh, I also wrote a pretty decent review article about the various effects on cognition and other neurological functions of heart-lung bypass as done during open-heart surgery.  Clearly, that was motivated by personal experience.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  Tomorrow begins the second week of the year, but I don’t expect to write again before Thursday.

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It might be the pate of a politician, which this blog now o’erreaches

Hello and good morning, o dedicated reader(s).

I honestly don’t feel very much like writing today‒I feel extremely low even for me, very gloomy, very pain-riddled and dysthymic, my mood made worse by the diminishing daytime in the northern hemisphere‒but since I did my little throw-away non-blog last Thursday, I figured I might as well do something today.  I don’t know if anyone truly looks forward to my blogs‒it’s hard to imagine someone’s day being worse because they didn’t get any input from my thoughts‒but just in case someone does, I will write.  Or, rather, I am writing.

I don’t want anyone to think that my depression is unusually bad due to political events, and certainly not for anything parochial, provincial, local in time and space.  Cat forbid!

I’m sure that people throughout history have thought that whatever local politics was happening just then, at that moment, was Earth-shattering and of monumental importance.  But, of course, as Ozymandius reminds us, all the great people and events of the past, all the presidents and emperors and warlords and whatnots, are but headless, trunkless, disintegrating statues in a featureless desert.

Actually, most of them are never even that.  During the Cold War, admittedly, especially the latter part during maximum arms race and belligerence between the US and the USSR, it was possible for politics to engender the destruction of much of civilization (and I truly didn’t think the odds were good that we would avoid thermonuclear war for very long*) but even then the moment-to-moment politics was almost incidental.

The Cold War and its existential dangers lasted through numerous presidents and premiers, the former of various political parties‒Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), all the way up to George H. W. Bush (R).  And, of course, on the other side, we had Stalin (C), Khrushchev (C), Brezhnev (C), Chernenko et al (C), and Gorbachev (C).  One might imagine that Bush, Sr. and Gorbachev would be truly celebrated historical figures, given their leadership positions at the end of the Cold War, but I don’t see a lot of evidence thereof.

Now, political stupidity** has, of course, caused havoc locally on many an occasion.  More people were killed thanks to the ideological idiocy of Stalin and Mao, for instance, than were killed in wars in the 20th century, despite the immensity of those wars.

But, of course, nearly all the people who died in and around the first world war at least (and most of those alive during the second) would have been dead by now, anyway.  And certainly, everyone who died unnecessarily during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars would definitely be dead by now, whatever might have happened.  And all the people slaughtered by the hordes of Genghis Khan would be dead now, no matter what.  And certainly anyone killed due to the mismanagement of even the worst of the Caesars would be dead now‒as dead as Julius Caesar, as they say.  And the people of Greece and Macedon and “Asia Minor” and Egypt and Persia and all those other areas would be dead now whether Alexander the Great had conquered his known world or not.

I recall a column that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (back when it used to be worthy of his writing) called “Remember the 6 billion” (roughly the population of the world at that time).  His point was that, within the following 120 years at most, every single person then alive would die…and for the most part it would go entirely unnoticed, because new people are constantly sporulating to take the place of the ones that fall by the wayside.

The “Great Men” (and women) of history are mostly just names and caricatures; they have no effect on the long term structure of civilization.  We recall that Alexander was a brilliant military leader‒an artist in that realm, perhaps‒but his contributions to that field have no major bearing on modern life.

The ideas of Archimedes, for instance, have had much more durable effects, but that’s because they are discoveries about the nature of the universe, of reality and its underlying rules or tendencies, and so they are, in a sense, universal and universally discoverable by any intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos.  Ditto for Galileo and Newton, for Maxwell and Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck and their compatriots.

Not that we should not celebrate those achievements and discoveries, but they are in some senses nonspecific to any individual.  Even the work of Darwin, which may seem both specific (har!) and provincial, since it refers to life on Earth, is probably at least as universal as the work of Newton or Dirac or even Emmy Noether.  Natural selection applies to numerous things even within the higher orders of civilization‒languages, political systems, forms of transportation, the durability and character of bureaucracies, etc.  A form of it may apply to the formation of planetary systems and the potential origin of life therein, and even to the possible bubble universes of the hypothetical inflationary multiverse (or more specifically in Lee Smolin’s speculative notion of universe natural selection through black hole related cosmogenesis).

But politics‒well, it’s provincial in pretty much every way.  Can you imagine any truly alien race caring who got elected president or which party ran the poorer campaign, why one did better or the other worse?  Go canvas the dolphins for their opinions, or the octopuses, or the corvids, or ask a beehive or a termite mound or an ant colony.  Try to get them to give flying fuck at a tiny little that’s ass*** about the minutiae of human politics.

No, my depression, like my pain, is endogenous, or at least it is not trivially reactive.  It is always with me, a truly dark passenger (who often takes the wheel).  It’s probably a product of my atypical, alien neurology, but of course, I’m not anything like as alien as a cephalopod or hymenopteran or a cetacean.  I’m just humanlike enough to exist in the uncanny valley:  weird enough to be unsettling, but not weird enough to be interesting or cute or “beautiful” because of it.

So go ahead, catastrophize or hyper-celebrate about the latest political farce, not recognizing that a lot of what went wrong on all sides was that very tendency to demonize, to catastrophize, to overreact and to be self-righteous.

There is a saying that came into prominence sometime in my teens to twenties (I don’t recall the first time I heard it).  I initially found it irritating just because it was such a “new thing”, but I think its message has endured and even grown in value:  get over yourself.

Everyone needs to take this admonition to heart.  We are all just virtual particles, not-quite-really-real bosons that can carry some degree of information or “force” when there are enough of us around, but which all ultimately pop back out of existence before our presence can even really be noticed by any outside observer.

That’s okay.  It had better be okay, because it’s not optional****.  And if that state of the world, that nature of reality, is unnerving to you, don’t mind it too much.  It won’t trouble you for very long.  No one here gets out alive.

TTFN

*We still haven’t avoided it for very long.  It’s only been a danger for about, what, 70 years?  Really, it’s a little less than that since we’ve had truly civilization-ending amounts of sufficiently powerful nuclear weapons.  So, since I’m just now 55 years old, the threat of global thermonuclear war is only about a decade-ish older than I am.  It could almost be thought of as my eldest sibling.

**Redundant?

***I would not put it past dolphins to try such a thing.

****It’s a bit like free will:  You either have it or you don’t, but you don’t have any choice in the matter.