Social Distancing is Out. Peace and Love are In.

The CDC has done an about-face with new guidelines on social distancing this morning. Citing new data indicating that isolation, separation, and quarantine have an unforeseen side effect of aggravated loneliness, the agency came down on the side of hugs all around.

Dr Anthony Faustus, head of the National Institute for Maximization of Vaccine Profits was quoted as saying, “We knew people weren’t going to be too happy about staying locked indoors the first week of spring. But gosh darnit, whodathunk that it might affect their health?”

He went on to explain that some people kinda like getting within 6 feet of each other, and maybe there is some traditional folk wisdom in the idea that avoiding human touch isn’t all peaches and cream.

“This, of course, does nothing to mitigate the fact that sophisticated and very mathematical computer models demonstrate conclusively that germs are passed in every tactile encounter.” He referred with refreshing candor to the Scientific theory that germs cause disease.  “It’s a known fact,” he explained.

But the latest findings from the World Center on Epidemiology, reported in the April 1 edition of Health Reports Weekly, indicate that happiness, socialization, and human touch together are responsible for a 273.5% increase in immune function, which more than compensates the 62.4% lower risk of contracting COVID. In marked contradistinction to previous proclamations, people are actually healthier when they touch each other.

“After our algorithm to optimize best optimal distance of approach crashed the Cray-15 supercomputer, we re-evaluated the assumptions implicit in the calculation. We were as surprised as anyone to realize that the reason for the software failure was a ‘Divide by zero’ error. Evidently, the best distance between any two people is no distance at all. From a purely public-health perspective, that is.”

With this re-calibration, the CDC is now calling for universal hugs and kisses. They’re banking on a quick turnaround from the deficit in warm fuzzies that has plagued the country since the guidelines of March 10 knocked the country on its ass.

“From the beginning, this is what I’ve always said all along,” commented President Trump, astutely.

Airlines responded most positively to today’s news. Plans to extend legroom on domestic flights were immediately canceled, and Virgin Airlines is even offering discounts for lap-seating. Common stock of Delta is up 12%, leading the biggest one-day gains ever reported for the Dow Jones Transportation Index. 

In related news, the international implications of all this hugging and kissing have yet to be computed, but peace and love are showing the biggest gains in early trading on the Big Board.

Drawn to give our gifts

 

 

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

— Marge Piercy, born this day in 1936

 

Natural Abundance

The great lie on which our modern economic system is based is that much onerous and unpleasant work needs to be done to keep us all alive and well, and that without the impending threat of destitution, ostracism, and starvation, there would be no one volunteering to do all that work.

The truth is that, historically, tribal hunter-gatherer cultures have done well with much less than what we call a normal work-week, and they were doing things that were in accord with human nature, rewarding and interesting, not onerous. The truth is that with automation, very little work that is unpleasant or repetitive is left to sentient humans.

The truth is that genuinely productive work is satisfying and fulfilling, and most humans are called to do that kind of work, and in fact we feel destitute without it.

The truth is that with a different social and economic order, all 7½ billion of us could live in comfort without the “benefit” of activity that is onerous or distasteful.

I could go further and describe some of the distasteful work that workers are drawn into,  by poverty and lack of opportunity. I could characterize it as dishonest, destrutive, often coercive or downright violent, benefiting the few who hold power and property and allowing them to continue dominating those who have little. I could decry the agenda of the elite and call out their militarism and intimidation…

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I could, but instead I’ll just remind you that our lives could be far more rewarding and less conflictual if we self-organized for peaceful, productive activity in harmony with nature.

Denying the Fount of our Being

‘O lost so long in exile, you disclaim
The very Fount of Being whence you came,
Cannot be parted from, and, will or no,
Whether for Good or Evil must re-flow!
For look—the Shadows into which the Light
Of his pure Essence down by infinite
Gradation dwindles, which at random play
Through Space in Shape indefinite—one Ray
Of his Creative Will into defined
Creation quickens: We that swim the Wind,
And they the Flood below, and Man and Beast
That walk between, from Lion to the least…

The baser Forms, to whatsoever Change
Subject, still vary through their lower Range:
To which the higher even shall decay,
That, letting ooze their better Part away
For Things of Sense and Matter, in the End
Shall merge into the Clay to which they tend.
Unlike to him, who straining through the Bond
Of outward Being for a Life beyond,
While the gross Worldling to his Centre clings,
That draws him deeper in, exulting springs
To merge him in the central Soul of Things.
— Attar / Fitzgerald, Bird Parliament

 

 

Landlord tells restaurants: “Skip April Rent; Pay your employees instead”

JONESBORO, Ark. (KAIT) – As more and more restaurants make the difficult decision to close or change the way they do business, one Jonesboro property owner wants to make it a bit easier for them.

Young Investment Company announced Tuesday night on social media it would “not expect its restaurant tenants to pay April rent.”

Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős, born this day in 1913, was a prolific and eccentric Hungarian mathematician.  He was known both for his social practice of mathematics (he engaged more than 500 collaborators) and for his eccentric lifestyle. He lived out of a suitcase, and traveled the world, staying with other mathematicians, talking shop long into the night, sleeping on the living room sofa. “Property is a nuisance.” He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years—indeed, his death came only hours after he solved a geometry problem at a conference in Warsaw.

Erdős asked questions only a mathematician could love (or understand) and proposed problems for others in the most abstract and recondite areas of math, but also in practical questions of approximation, set theory, and probability. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics.

Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed. He firmly believed mathematics to be a social activity, living an itinerant lifestyle with the sole purpose of writing mathematical papers with other mathematicians. Erdős’s prolific output with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdős number, a point of pride for all mathematicians of a certain age. Your Erdős number is 1 if you co-authored a paper with Erdős, 2 if you have co-authored a paper with someone whose Erdős number is 1, 3 if you co-authored a paper with someone whose Erdős number is 2, etc.

[This text was edited from his Wikipedia entry.]

Hawks

Surely, you too have longed for this —
to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it —
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.

~ Lynn Ungar ~