LifeItself

Have you wondered recently what makes us humans do what we do? Have you pondered why can we be so beautiful at times and act like crazed savages at other times? Why, for example, President Donald J. Trump, who swore to defend the laws of my United States and to protect our Constitution, is glowing about two Confederate generals? During the bloody civil war of 1861-1865, the Union of northern states declared loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, while the southern Confederacy fought to destroy my country and keep the savage slavery going.  So how can a U.S. president praise the two major traitors, who fought against everything we stand for and against the U.S. Constitution? Donald J. Trump Perhaps human history and nature can give us clues.  So who are we? Humans are large omnivores, whose ecological niche is to reset (remove mass from) the environment in which they roam. A human requires about 4 square km to roam freely in small egalitarian bands in their natural se...

OK, I am furious, so furious that words can't pass through my throat that dried up from anger. You'd expect me to take an easy path and lash out at President Trump. But this would too self-serving and wrong. Let's rewind a little.  Idiocracy is a 2006 American science fiction comedy film that tells the story of two perfectly average people who take part in a top-secret military hibernation experiment, only to awaken 500 years later in a dystopian society where centuries of negative genetic selection combined with advertising, pornography, commercialism and cultural anti-intellectualism.  The stunning outcome is the really, really dumb people with lifestyles that are devoid of common human attitudes we take for granted today. Today, we think that one should be educated, develop independent judgement, and be able to reach conclusions that are based on facts and logic. One should know something practical, like how to water plants or hold a wrench.  One should understand...

If you are like me, you may read, watch and listen to what is happening around you with disbelief. But should we be incredulous? Perhaps not... By chance, I looked at " What on earth are we doing ?," a sad commentary on human condition I wrote 6 years ago, and this passage caught my attention: Our Society “In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must be at all costs avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre dance party. We try to stay out of harm's way, afraid that they will go off, shatter our delusions, and l...

We are on the island of Sicily, near Syracuse, one of the five Corinthian colonies that also included the island of Ortygia nearby. Old people still remember that Leto gave birth on Ortygia to Artemis, the first of her twin god children with Zeus. Leto was a daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe. She was an early and favorite lover of Zeus. Soon after birth, Artemis helped Leto flee Hera's wrath and escape to Delos, where the other twin, Apollo, was born. Or was it the same island, because in ancient times Ortygia was also called Delos?  Who knows ? The fearless warrior and archer, Artemis, is my favorite goddess of nature and hunting. She protects all plants and animals. She is also an eternal virgin, and the goddess of the moon. This is her statue from Pompeii.  Photo by T. W. Patzek, 01/06/2017. Arethusa means "the waterer." She was a gorgeous nymph, who left her home in Arcadia beneath the sea and became A victim of the river god’s lust She’d tried to flee;...

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog, The Bird of Dawn , full of hope for the indomitable human spirit which can transcend and erode all repression, whether religious or political. A year ago, in The Way We Were , I connected the liberal Western Civilization, where my soul and body reside, to its ancient Greek roots. Both pieces have been wildly popular with the readers around the world, because they spelled out hope for humanity and its future. Today we are in Cefalù in Sicily, immersed again in a simpler world of the past, the world which graces us only occasionally when we leave our thoroughly modern, connected academic cocoon, powered by a high-rate throughput of fossil fuels that appear mostly as research funding, electricity, computers, and airplane tickets. Compared with Cefalù’s Arab fortress of 1063, and the Norman cathedral with the magnificent twelfth century mosaics our world is truly ephemeral. It cannot last for longer than a few more decades. Yet, this...

Where are you going, Great Britain? The ongoing vigorous discussion of Brexit seems to be vacuous on both sides of the argument, because it misses the most important physical realities of staying alive in Great Britain, not merely of who gets to stay there. The British Isles consist of some 6000 specs of land with the total area of 315,000 square kilometers (the area of Poland or Arizona). They are inhabited by over 70 million people (roughly twice the population of Poland and over ten times the population of Arizona). My own calculations of Great Britain’s carrying capacity pointed more towards 3 million people, who could be sustained by the local environment. This means that to stay alive the Brits must be a part of a global community; otherwise they will perish. And that’s that. Let me rephrase now: The United Kingdom is a small, overpopulated and rather insignificant country, which thought otherwise and consequently made a rather suicidal choice that would expose its terri...

In Part I of this post, I discussed production of gas from the four largest shale plays in the U.S. Ordered by production levels, these are the Marcellus, Barnett, Haynesville and Fayetteville shales. In my mind it is quite unlikely that much new drilling will occur in Fayetteville and Haynesville.  There will be some drilling in the Barnett and plenty in Marcellus, but significantly less than to date. Based on my calculations, I concluded that these plays may deliver between 3 and 7 years of U.S. gas consumption in 2015, a far cry from the 100-year gas supply postulated by many experts.  Consistently with this view, for at least three years I have argued that the large-scale oil and gas exports from the U.S. may not be good . Here I consider the two largest oil plays in the U.S.: the Eagle Ford and Bakken shales.  Eagle Ford is also a significant gas and condensate producer.  At their respective production peaks, these two shales together produced about 3 millio...