Sometimes it's worthwhile to go back in time, to escape, to explore old newspaper clippings which reflect a grip on the future. Such retreats can be so much more satisfying than discovering that certain things we have been told in recent times simply are not so. For instance, we've been warned repeatedly that the salt-shaker and sodium in general will kill healthy users. Not true, science now informs us. And especially for the exercise-rabid segment of society, where folks have been assured over and over that strenuous military-style workouts for older adults are the key to longevity, medical reports list a growing number of cases where serious medical conditions (such as rhabdomyolysis), not physical fitness, culminate. (I feel somewhat vindicated, having assured myself every time I traded a brisk walk for the comfort of the sofa, that exercise will kill you.)
So there's this newspaper clipping from the last week of July, 1984, published in the Chicago Tribune. Yes, 33 years is a long time, but a little meeting conducted in Bar Harbor, Maine seems relevant to modern day trappings and predicaments.
"Mankind Evolving Backward, Theorist Says," reads the headline. How did they know, I wondered?
"I'm afraid we've reached a peak and that Homo sapiens is in a nose dive," warned Allan Wilson of the University of California at Berkeley.
The meeting, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and the March of Dimes, apparently unleashed a cavalcade of negativity regarding the human brain's future, essentially espousing how humans have outsmarted their own mental development merely by being clever and finding solutions to problems before brains can evolve in natural terms, thereby short-sheeting problem-solving necessities essential for brain growth in the species overall.
Our ability to override natural selection has also allowed genetic defects to thrive and remain instead of dying out, thus providing people with eyesight problems eyeglasses and those with hearing difficulties hearing aids. By accommodating birth defects and genetic flaws, humans have become "imitators instead of innovators," stated Wilson, copying one another rather than allowing gray matter to ascend to solutions over time. The genes which cause defects, rather than disappearing through evolution, go on to continue through successive generations of human births.
Forget the science -- the article had me at the headline, "Mankind Evolving Backward." My point is, just look around you: Antifa, BLM, semi-humans and masked savages raising hell in the streets in some nebulous quest for "social justice," etc. Oh yes, dear reader, that 33-year-old prediction came true, though in a much different way than anticipated.
Trump's DACA decision: Forget Paul Ryan and his band of Republican milksops. Obama's illegal DACA was little more than a way for parents to drop their kids off to a United States government day care center -- and leave them here for the rest of us to take care of their needs and expenses forever. If we don't start taking seriously the concept of "illegal" real soon and fighting for American laws, maybe we'll be ripe for gut-punches like Kim Jong-un's basket of deplorable nukes. How long will we be stupid? How long will the GOP continue kissing up to Democrats with decisions explicitly serving the donkey party? How long with the Republicans do everything in their power to defeat President Trump's agenda, the one on which he was elected handily? One more outrage for the stack -- and watch Republicans keep Obama's DACA monstrosity intact, even if disguised as something else.
