Long for this world

A new and interesting book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner explores the scientific battle against - and the nature of - aging.

From Abraham Verghese's New York Times book review (8/1/10):

"This is a good time to be mortal," Weiner writes, noting that life expectancy in the developed world is abouat 80 years, and improving. Yet evolution has equipped us with bodies and instincts designed only to get us to a reproductive age and not beyond. "We get old because our ancestors died young," Weiner writes. "We get old because old age had so little weight in the scales of evolution; because there were never enough Old Ones around to count for much in the scales." The first half of life is orderly, a miracle of "detailed harmonious unfolding" beginning with the embryo. What comes after our reproductive years is "more like the random crumpling of what had been neatly folded origami, or the erosion of stone. The withering of the roses in the bowl is as drunken and disorderly as their blossoming was regular and precise."

Which suggests, in what I persist in putting an optimistic slant on, that once we are not compelled or directed or driven by hormones or demands of one kind or another we may began to choose to travel whatever random path beckons, for whatever reason.

"Drunken and disorderly" . . . or whatever.

Why not drop by . . .

. . . and see what the Friends of Irony are up to?

The one we feed

One day an old Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson. He said:

“There are two wolves fighting inside all of us - the wolf of Fear and Hate, and the wolf of Love and Peace.”

The grandson listened, then looked up at his grandfather and asked, “Which one will win?”

The grandfather replied:

“The one we feed.”

"Some men are a list of ingredients with no recipe."
-- from The Matter by Kim Addonizio

"Not every man is born with a boat to catch."
-- Carly Simon

Every reformation must have its victims.

You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return.

-- The Complete Works of Saki

500,000 people worldwide . . .

. . . die each year in road accidents. Apparently this is an acceptable sacrifice for the freedom of the road.

"Two-thirds of these deaths involve pedestrians," says anti-car activist Jan Lundberg, "of which one-third are children. Just in the United States about forty-two thousand people die per year because of auto collisions, nearly as many as the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Everybody knows someone who has died or been seriously injured in a car crash, yet cars have insinuated themselves into our social life - and into our psyches - so thoroughly that we somehow accept these deaths as inevitable, or not shocking, as opposed to perceiving them for what they are: a direct and predictable result of choosing to base our economic and social systems on this particular piece of technology."

What's worse is that even more people die each year from respiratory illness stemming from auto-related toxins than die from traffic crashes.

"We have become slaves to these machines. If a group of aliens came to this planet and said they would bring us all sorts of goodies like jet skis, tomatoes in January, computers, and so on (or at least they would bring them to the richest of us), on the multiple conditions that we offer up to them a yearly sacrifice of a half-million human lives, change our planet's climate, individually spend increasing amounts of time serving them, and socially devote an ever-increasing amount of land and other resources to their service, we would rebel in a flash. Or at least I hope we would. But that's the reality we face."

-- For more . . . Jan Lundberg's website: Culture Change

"I've known that there have existed people who were whole. I have known some. They went about almost naked, they did not have money, they were hunter/gatherers, gathering a lot more than hunting. They 'knew' things they could not possibly know. They slept in huddles, like cats do. They were nomads. They avoided confrontation and were appalled by (human) violence. Of course they were not civilized."

-- A man from Hawaii, in correspondence with Derrick Jensen