Category: Informational

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Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion

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The Next 100 Years

All right. We got the Next Hundred Years by George Friedman. Let’s see what George is talking about. Also by George, America’s Secret War. I’m just going to let you read it here. See it? All right. Cool. Forecast for 21st century. Let’s see, when was, 2009. So 11 years ago.

Here’s a nice little quote, “To him who looks upon the world rationally the world turns, present a rational aspect through relation is mutual.” All right. Overturn an introduction to American age, the Dawn of American age, earthquake, population, computer and cultural Wars. Let’s go there 50. 11 years ago. Let’s see how close he was.

In 2002, Osama bin Ladin, excuse me. Osama bin Ladin wrote in his letter to America, “You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.” Whoa.

Wow. Was not expecting that one to come out. Just like that. We’re in the Next Hundred Years just letting you know. Wow, didn’t see that one coming, that’s like a different book I was reading. See I’m trying to tell you, read these books, you just open them up, you never know what you’re going to read. It’s like, I’m trying to tell you Forrest Gump was like, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” Life is like a box of books, you never know what you’re going to get when you open it up. Okay.

“As this quote indicates that Al-Qaeda is fighting for the traditional understandings of the family, this is not a minor part of their program. It is at heart, the traditional family is built around some clear defined principles. First, the home is the main of the woman and life outside the house is a pure view of the man. Second, sexuality is something confined to the family and the home, an extra marital, extra familial sexuality is unacceptable.”

Remember, we’re talking about Population, Computers, and Cultural Wars. Boom. “Women who move outside the home invite extra marital sexuality just by being there. Third, women have their own, their primary tasks, reproduction and nurturing of the next generation. Therefore, intense controls on women are necessary to maintain the integrity of the family and the society. In an interesting way it is all about women. And Bin Ladin’s letter drives this home. What he hates about America is that it promotes a completely different view of women and the family. Al-Qaeda’s view is not unique to Osama bin Ladin or Islam. The lengths to which that group is prepared to go may be unique, but the issue of women and family defines most major religions.”

See, now we’re getting into what, the meat of what he was talking about. Excuse me, “Traditional Catholicism, fundamental Protestantism, Orthodox Judaism ,and various branches of Buddhism, all take similar positions.” I did not know this. “All these religions are being split internally as all societies. In the United States, where we speak of the cultural Wars, the battlefield is the family and its definition. All societies are being torn between traditionalist and those who are attempting to redefine that family, women, and sexuality. This conflict is going to intensify in the 21st century, but the traditionalist’s are fighting defensive and ultimately losing battle. The reason is that over the past hundred years, this very fabric of human life and particularly the life of human has been transformed.”

This is very, I’ve never really thought of it like this. “And with its structure of the family, what has already happened in Europe and the United States and Japan is spreading into the rest of the world. These issues will rip many societies apart, but in the end, the transformation of family can’t be stopped. That is not to say that transformation is inherently a good idea or a bad one. Instead, this trend is unstoppable because the demographic realities of the world are being transformed. The single most important demographic change in the world right now is a dramatic decline everywhere in birth rates. Let me repeat that. The most meaningful statistic in the world is an overall decline in birth rates. Women are having fewer and fewer children every year. That means not only that the population explosion of the last two centuries is going to end, but also that women are spending much more… Much less time bearing and nurturing children, even as their life expectancy, you know longer has soared.”

This is… How much is this? That’s extremely interesting. Now we’re probably, this is just chapter, but I also want to understand the fault line. So we’re going to read a little bit about fault line, the new fault lines because I’ve seen a cool picture. So we’ll go over it to.

So right here, this is the Pacific Trade Routes, right. Also in the new fault lines, he also says that successor States of the Soviet Union, I mean, this is older, but I mean, again, you see how I mean man, I’m trying to tell you, it’s crazy because if let’s say, boom, we’re talking about Soviet Union, boom, Cold War. Soviet Union. We learned a little bit about that earlier today or in this box.

And then Ukraine’s strategic significance. Right. And we’ll look right here.

And what they’re saying is, I mean, let me see if I can, before we go too far into it.

All right, ” are fragmented to this extent, it would have created chaos in Eurasia to which the United States would have objected since the U.S. grand strategy has always aimed for the fragmentation of Eurasia as the first line of defense for U.S. control of the seas as we have seen. So the United States had every reason to encourage this process. Russia had every reason to block it. After what Russia had regarded as America attempt to further damage it.”

Now, obviously during this all I’m going to, I just jumped right in, right, that’s because of time. But of course, I’m going to go more into where I was talking about. “Damage that Moscow, reverted to your strategy of reasserted its sphere of influence in areas of the former Soviet Union. The great retreat of Russia power ended in Ukraine. Russian influence is now increasing in three directions, toward Central Asia, toward the Caucus and inevitably towards the West, the Baltics in Eastern Europe for the next generation until roughly 2020. Russia’s primary concern will be reconstruction of the Russian state, and reasserting Russian power in the region.”

Let’s see, why are they doing that? All right, “Increasingly the geographical or geopolitical shift is aligned with an economic shift. Putin sees Russia less as an industrial power, than as an exporter of raw materials. The most important of which is energy, particularly natural gas. Moving to bring the energy industry under state supervision, if not direct control, he is forcing out foreign interests and reorienting the interests towards exports, particularly to Europe. High energy prices have helped stabilize Russia’s economy internally.”

All right. It didn’t. I mean, it shows, it talks about the Soviet, but it doesn’t go too much into it. But not, this is pretty interesting because then it talks about the new, the four Europe’s right here. Never really thought of it like that before we go. Look at the map and I’ll explain it to you, and then I got to go. The line is the Scandinavia Europe, then we have Atlantic Europe, we have Eastern Europe, we have Central Europe and those are the four Europe’s. So Central Europe is your Germany, your Italy, your Switzerland. Atlantic is, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal. Eastern is everything East of Germany and Italy. They don’t even consider… look, they don’t even consider Greece, part of Europe in this map.

Any who. That’s interesting. Oh, then we even talked about the Muslim state. We talk about Turkey in 2008. Oh man. Yeah. This is going to be very interesting. We talk about Mexico.

“If you’re looking for new challenges after U.S., Jihadist war is over. There are two obvious places to look, Mexico and Turkey are clearly not ready for a significant global role. And Europe remain insular and divided. That leaves two fault lines, Pacific and Eurasia. And in context of 2020, that means two countries possibly asserting themselves, China or Russia. A third possibility more distant is Japan.”

So it’s 2020. Remember he wrote this book in 2009, a lot of interesting things, it’s 2021 actually. China’s more dominant. Russia, a little bit more dominant. Like to see what else he has to say. Nonetheless, interesting book, interesting to see his perspective.

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Why Does Popcorn Pop

All right. Let’s talk about ‘Why Does Popcorn Pop?’.

There we go. What is that? Oh, that’s a sweater back there.

Surf and Turf, why you should eat oysters in months with an R. That makes abs-, okay.

Okay. Okay. All right, this is just completely random facts. I’ll just read a little bit, like here, this is, ‘in fact, at various times throughout history, oysters were all the rage. The Romans were the first to engage in oyster mania, collecting them from all corners of their far-flung empire. With the fall of the Roman empire, oysters fell out of flavor until the Renaissance, after which, oyster frenzy peaked between the late 17 and 19 centuries. In American England venters passer-by’s with plentiful and cheap oysters. People ate dozens of them in one city, and since oysters stayed fresh for months in cold storage, they were shipped all around the country. Even Abe Lincoln in Illinois couldn’t resist them. But alas, all good things come to an end.

By the turn of the century, oyster supplies were nearly depleted. Over-harvesting and a natural disease have steadily lowered their numbers. Today, wild oysters are increasingly rare and farm oysters rule’. I did not know that. ‘You may have heard of the oysters powers of an aphrodisiac. Oysters are packed with zinc, which the male body needs to maintain normal testosterone levels. The great lover Casanova ate 50 oysters every evening’.

Wow. Wow, that right there, some very interesting. Okay, here we go. ‘What popular expensive food was once the food of the poor?’. I knew this, I actually did know this. ‘You guessed it – lobster. The American lobster’, and then it gives its Latin name, ‘which is found from Southern Labrador to Cape Hatteras, is considered to be one of the most tasty of the lobsters and a culinary delight. During the 1700’s and early 1800’s, however, the American lobster was so plentiful in the waters of New England, that one could walk down the beach and pick them up. There were so many, in fact, that they were used as fertilizer and food for the poor’. They also used them in, they used to serve lobster in the jails.

‘Why is Maine lobster so highly priced? Simple. The colder the water, the better tasting the lobster, and the waters off the Maine are frigid. These waters are ideal for lobster growth. Given enough time, the American lobster can grow as big as three feet long and weigh some 44 pounds’. God! ‘Female lobsters taste better than the males and have more tender meat. How can you tell the sex of a lobster? Flip it over and look at the place where the head meets the body, and you will see two spiny appendages. If they are soft to the touch, you have a female. If they are hard, you got a male.

Other areas of the world have their own version of lobster. A similar European lobster, the Norway lobster, is quite popular. The spiny lobster, which lacks the delicious claws of the American lobster, is found in the waters off of Florida, California, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. They do not compare in taste, however, to the robust Maine lobster’.

Okay. Okay. That’s enough surf and turf. I guess for what I’m going to write for you, I’ll just pick a whole bunch of them and summarize them, right? Because I’m reading you the whole woo wop, right?

‘Thirst Quenchers. What is the most popular beverage in the world? Sorry, Coke and Pepsi, it’s not Cola – it’s tea’. So if you ever want to start a beverage business, think tea. ‘Today, tea is the most popular drink in the world, except for water. In the United States, over 187 million pounds of tea are consumed each year. That’s about 13 gallons per person’. Goodness!

‘The following should explain everything you ever wanted to know about the favorite tea. It is said that tea was discovered by the Chinese emperor Shen Nung around 2737 BC. The word Tea comes from the Chinese Te, pronounced Tay. Legend has it, the emperor accidentally discovered it when the wind blew some tea leaves into a pot of boiling water. Since that time, tea has been attributed with many healing powers. It eases upset stomach and indigestion, relieves fatigue and stimulates mental ability. The Japanese have a cult called Theism, which has actually raised the art of making and drinking tea to a near religious experience’.

All right. See, here we go, I think this is what I can talk about. We can go in depth about this kind of stuff over here. Tea, because this goes on for a while. We’ll go into Thirst Quenchers. What about orange juice? All right, I love me some orange juice.

‘Orange juice is America’s favorite juice. The enormous variety of orange juices available today is astounding. Taste varies between varieties, and from mouth to mouth throughout the growing season. Even oranges picked from the same tree can vary in taste. Those growing lower on the tree, and those facing North tend to be less sweet, and contain less vitamin C’s. Orange packagers eliminate these variations by blending several varieties, picked at different times and different places, to produce a more consistent tasting product’. I did not know that. ‘The main reason packaged juice just doesn’t taste like fresh squeezed is heat. Concentrates are evaporated with heat. Most chilled juices are made from concentrate. The best tasting orange juices are premium chilled juices, not from concentrate, which are squeezed in Florida, packaged in an expandable plastic bottle, pasteurized, and then flash quickly frozen’.

Yep, Thirst Quenchers, that seems like that’s where we’re going to go from. ‘Different types of teas, there are over 3000 varieties of teas. There are three broad tea classifications, green, black and oolong’.

So yeah, we’re going into Thirst Quenchers. Right? Boom. That’s interesting. Did not know all about that. Didn’t know that about oysters. I knew a little bit about the lobsters, and then the Thirst Quenchers, I did not know tea was that important. But I mean, it makes sense, because look at it like this, the Boston tea party, that was before soda and caused a whole revolutionary war, right?

All right. Talk to you in the next one.

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Storm In A Teacup

Storm in a Teacup. The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski. Let’s see what she’s talking about.

What goes up must come down. A moment in time. Why don’t ducks get cold feet? Spoons, spirals, and Sputnik. When opposite attract. A sense of perspective. Small is beautiful. Popcorn and rockets. Let’s do.. Making waves, 113.

All right. Making waves.

When you go to the beach, it’s almost impossible to stand for any length of time with your back to the sea. It feels wrong, both because you’re missing out on the grandeur of the site and also because facing the other way stops you from keeping an eye on what the ocean might be up to. And it’s oddly… Excuse me. And it’s oddly reassuring to watch the boundary between sea and land as it consistently renews and remodels itself. When I lived in La Jolla, California, my reward after a long day was to wander down to the ocean, sit on a rock, and watch the waves as the sun went down. Just 300ft off shore, the waves were long and low, difficult to see. As they rolled toward the shore, they’d get steeper and more obvious until they finally broke on the beach. I could sit and watch the endless supply of new waves for hours.

A wave is something that we all recognize, but waves can be hard to describe. The ones at the seashore are processions of ridges, a wiggly shape in the water surface that is traveling from over there to over here. We can measure them by looking at the distance between successive wave peaks and the height of peaks themselves. A water wave can be as tiny as the ripples you make when you blow on your tea to cool it, or bigger than a ship.

That’s true. Because you can make waves in your cup of coffee, but then you can also have a wave that totally engulf a Naval ship. One of those huge monster ships.

But waves have one quite weird feature, and in La Jolla it was the pelicans that made it obvious. Brown pelicans live all along the coast, and they look so ancient that you wonder whether they’ve just flown through a wormhole from a million years ago. They have ridiculously long beaks that usually stay folded up against their bodies, and small groups of these cautious birds are often seen gliding solemnly just above the waves parallel to the coast. Once in a while, they’d plonk themselves down unceremoniously onto the ocean surface. And this was the interesting bit. The waves that the birds were sitting on rolled endlessly toward the shore, but the pelicans didn’t go anywhere.

Right. Okay. That is true. All right.

Next time you stand on the shore, watch waves rolling towards you, watch the sea birds sitting on the surface. They’ll be parked quite happily, passengers being carried up and down as the waves go past, but they’re not going anywhere. What this tells you is that the water isn’t going anywhere either. The waves move, but the thing is… Wait a minute.

What this tells you is the water isn’t going anywhere either. All right. She’s starting to get a little interesting here.

The wave can’t be static. Oh, wait. Sorry.

The waves move, but the thing that is waving, the water, doesn’t. The wave can’t be static. The whole thing only works if the shape is moving. So waves are always moving. They carry energy, because it takes energy to shift the water into the wave shape and back again. But they don’t carry stuff. A wave is a regular moving shape that transports energy. I think this is partly why I found sitting on the beach and looking out to the sea therapeutic. I could see how energy was continually carried toward the shore by the waves, and I could see that the water itself never changed.

Waves come in many different types, but there are some basic principles that apply to them. The sound waves made by a dolphin, the water waves made by a pebble and the light waves from a distant star have a lot in common.

All right. Let’s sit there. I’m not going to read the whole thing. Let’s see where we are. Yes, because this is 20 some odd pages. I’m not going to… That’ll take me an hour to read it to you. But what she’s saying is, it makes sense. I’m trying to get where she’s like, “Make a wave,” but so far, it’s changed my perspective on things. So… I’m just thinking. In my mind, I’m trying to think what she’s saying, but let’s read a little bit more because if the waves aren’t moving anything, how’s a surfer moving? It doesn’t make any sense.

And these days, we don’t just respond to the waves that nature provides for us. We also make our own, very sophisticated, contribution to the flood, and it connects the scattered elements of our civilization. But humans consciously using waves to cement cultural bonds isn’t new. This story begins centuries ago in the middle of the gigantic ocean.

All right, why don’t we go learn something new.

A king surfing the ocean waves probably sounds like a snapshot from a particularly weird dream. But 250 years ago in Hawaii every king, queen, chief and chiefess owned a surf board, and royal prowess at the national sport was a considerable source of pride. Special long narrow Olo boards were reserved for the elite, while the commoners used the shorter and more maneuverable Alaia boards. Contests were common, and provided the central drama for many Hawaiian stories and legends. When you live on a stunning tropical island surrounded by deep blue ocean, building a culture around playing in the sea sounds perfectly sensible. But the Hawaiian surf pioneers had something else going for them: the right sort of waves. Their small Island nation in the middle of the vast ocean was perfectly placed. Hawaiian geography and physics filtered the complexity of the ocean, and kings and queens surfed on the consequences.

While the Hawaiians were chanting to urge the flat, windless sea to rise into ready-to-serve swell, the ocean thousands of miles away could have looked very different. The winds in massive storms shove on the ocean surface, dumping energy by forcing the water up into waves. But the waves in storms are confused mixtures of short and long waves traveling in different directions, breaking and rebuilding and clashing. Winter storms were common in at latitude of 40, 45 degrees, so storms would be to the north of Hawaii in the northern hemisphere winter, and to the south of Hawaii in the southern hemisphere winter. But waves have to travel. Even in the storm winds were dying down, the patch of ruffled ocean would have been expanding… Okay, let’s…

I’ve learned a little bit, but again, this is… I’m not the strongest of readers, all right. So, it was interesting that kings and queens used to surf and it was a prominent thing back in Hawaii. The energy with the waves, that’s interesting. Yes, being able to go through and read the whole thing and scan a little in more important things out of the book. That’s going to be fun trying to see where she goes with the whole waves and the energy and how… I guess we’re trying to tap into our energy. See, like the Physics of Everyday Life. So like she was talking about, we each make ripples.

So it’d be interesting to see what she’s talking about. Take notes and write a nice little essay and then explain to you at the end of it, after I read it all.

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Santa Sold Shrooms

All right. What do we want to talk about today? Let’s go. Ah, my legs are sore. Bood’s Poetical Works. No, I don’t want to learn about that right now. The Voyage of… Nah. What is it? The Associated Press Stylebook. That’s probably for writing. We have to do a whole series on writing. The Santa Sold Shrooms. What? What is this? Look at this, Santa Sold Shrooms. The origin story of the world’s most famous person. What in the… Just because I’m over here like, “What the.” You know what I’m saying? We are going to have to do this, right? So Santa Sold Shrooms.

Oh, whoa. This is way too small of writing. And we will kind of go over the story. Story time with daddy. Oh this is tiny writing. They could have made it a little bit bigger. Once upon a time, there lived a curious girl in a small village far away. The girl was so curious that her favorite thing to do was listen to stories from village elders. She would listen to them all day and then rigorously fact-check their wild stories online in the evening. She was only 10 years old, but already she wanted to know everything about everything. Late one winter night, the young girl came to give her father a hug and kiss goodnight. Mm.

He goes, “Daddy,” the young girl replied. And then he’s saying Santa means saint and Claus is a German nickname for Nicholas which is why so many people think Santa is German. Okay. Oh, whoa. I think they’re actually serious about this. Santa Sold Shrooms. I thought it was a joke, but I think he’s actually being honest because look at the dates a little bit. But he’s not German. Saint Nick was a Turkish Bishop, famous for secret gift giving to those in need. His lesson spread to Western Europe which Saint Nicholas later became Santa Claus. The only reason I know that they might be telling the truth about all of this is because I did know that story a little bit.

Okay. So right here, if you didn’t read it and you were just waiting for me to read it, she was talking about a Slavic wizard kind of looked like Gandalf, but dad was like, “Do you think that’s where the Santa image from the soda can came from?” It says the young girl was right. And it would not be the last time on this cold winter night. Okay, more like more North Pole adjustment. So where was I? Her father continued. Oh yes. And for over 150 years, Santa has been said to live in North Pole with Ms. Claus, but we know that’s not exactly true because North Pole was covered in shifting ice in the middle of the ocean, the young girl said. “That’s right,” her father said, proud of the little girl. That place is too cold. Even for Santa. Yep. So where do you live?

Okay. Lapland. So let’s go to Lapland. That’s where they say he’s at. So right, Lapland is the region that spans throughout the northern most parts of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia. It’s the closest habitable island in the North Pole. Okay. That’s interesting. There are smoky mountains and peaceful valleys that glow with the Northern Lights.

So Lapland. I had no idea about Lapland. We’re learning. It’s just like a little kid book, I guess, but I’m learning some stuff. Look at that. So now we’re talking about reindeer people. Look at these people. All right. Did you see the reindeer on the computer too? No. Wow, that’s very interesting. So Lapland is one of the world’s only population to native reindeer. And the Sami, these guys over here, were the reindeer herders. And they use everything from the reindeer. Okay, this is pretty interesting. We’re not going to go through the whole book. I apologize. I probably will because before I know it, I want to end up reading the whole thing. But there we go. It tells the kind of the story… Santa. This is pretty interesting.

So right here, we’re talking about chapter 10 “In Through the Chimney.” So it’s talking about the Sami people lived in a kind of a tree, a teepee made from cloth, wood and moss called a kota. And at the solstice time in the deep winter, the doors of the kotas were usually snowed over and this was Lapland, remember. It’s in the Arctic. So, okay. So what they’re basically saying is that the snow would be so high that this part down here would be covered. So you’d have to climb in from the chimney. Hence why Santa Claus is going through the chimney. This book is really… Wow, I’m interested about this. The origin story of the world’s most famous person, Santa Claus. That’s very interesting. That’s going to be fun. All right.