Aliens vs. gods: who to believe in?

I was pretty disappointed by my Facebook friends earlier this week. I saw the following meme and shared it: 

No idea who created this, sorry.

"Agreed!" I said. Then I added, "Of course, you could say the same thing about the gods..."

Not a single friend took me up on my snarky comment. 

Several folks said they believe there's life elsewhere in the universe and listed good reasons why we haven't met them yet: the universe is vast and they may be nowhere near us; there's life out there, but it may not be intelligent life (with the usual comments about whether there's intelligent life on Earth); aliens know we're here and they're avoiding us because we're primitive and warlike; and so on. 

But nobody rose to my point. Maybe they thought I was baiting them. Heck, maybe I was.

I'm not suggesting the gods are aliens; Erich von Daniken made a lot of money in the late '60s by popularizing the idea that ancient astronauts built the pyramids, but that hypothesis has been debunked long since. 

I'm also not advocating some version of Pascal's wager -- which, for the record, I think is stupid. You're familiar with it, right? It purports to use logic to convince people to believe in the Christian God. If God is real and you believe, the argument goes, you win eternal life; but if God isn't real, yet you act like He is, then you've lost nothing but gained a good life.

It's the "you've lost nothing" part that I have trouble with. If I go against my sincerely held beliefs, I have indeed lost something -- my integrity. Is that the sort of "believer" Jehovah wants in heaven -- a person who will say anything to get that eternal reward? I don't think so.

Anyway, that wasn't my point with the alien meme. My point was that there are people who have never seen an alien, but are willing to entertain the idea that they exist. Yet because they disagree with Christianity, they think anybody who believes in any god is irrational. 

Humans on earth have no material evidence for the existence of either gods or aliens -- but while it's okay to believe that alien life might be out there, it's nuts to believe the same thing about the gods.

I dunno. Just seems irrational to me.

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As a reward for tolerating my little thought exercise, I'm giving you pictures of my cat.

Tigs is weird about plants. He doesn't nom the leaves or the flowers; instead, he gnaws through the stems. I learned this the hard way right after I adopted him. He went after some roses so hard that he knocked the vase over and it broke. (Before somebody asks: no, roses aren't toxic to cats.)

So for Valentine's Day, I got him a bunch of those little spray roses. (I also stuck them in a brass vase so he couldn't knock it over and break it.) 

Things began innocently enough: 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

But then: CRRUNCHHH! 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

That was Tuesday. He's been at them all week. I got a final shot of the carnage tonight. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

I guess I need to get him some more.

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These moments of destructive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Happy February. Bah, humbug.

I know I hinted about maybe posting more this week about that star-shaped afghan I've been working on because I'd almost finished it. 

Well, I finished it. And it didn't turn out the way I thought it would -- one side of each star point was obviously narrower than the other side. So I ripped the whole thing. The. Whole. Thing. Weeks of work.

I'm starting over, though, and I'm going to be more careful this time. I was pretty cavalier about counting my stitches the first time, and it's possible that's why it didn't turn out the way it should have. Or maybe I should have tried to even things out by blocking the afghan. If it turns out the same way this time, even with careful counting and so on, I'll try blocking it and see if that fixes it. Anyway, you'll get a picture eventually. Maybe.

That's kind of how this last week or so has been going in general, and it's making me grumpy. Or at least I thought that's what was making me grumpy. Then I looked at the calendar, and it all became clear.

I won't bore you again with my antipathy for Valentine's Day; I've written about it it often enough in the past. Instead, I will offer you, Dear Reader, a Valentine, generated for free from the website of the Washington Post. Feel free to follow the link and make your own!

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As long as we're talking about hearts and stuff, I thought I'd mention Medicare. And, what the heck, Social Security, too.

This past week, President Biden kind of pulled a fast one on the Republicans in Congress. He made a big deal during his State of the Union speech about how some of them plan to cut Social Security and Medicare. That is absolutely true, and the White House issued a fact sheet to back him up -- naming names, even. But of course, the Republicans weren't going to admit it in front of 27 million people on live television. So they joined their fellow members of Congress on the Democratic side of the aisle by standing and cheering when Biden said, "we all apparently agree" that Social Security and Medicare will not be cut -- and if a bill containing such cuts does somehow get to his desk, he'll veto it.

It made for great political theater. But we all know how politics works -- or we should by now. The GOP will try to cut the programs anyway; they just won't admit that's what they're doing. They'll call it something else.

One cut/not-a-cut that's been done in the past is to increase the age at which people can collect their full Social Security benefits. My father retired in the mid 1980s at the age of 65. That was full retirement age for everybody back then. But in 1983, saying Social Security was running out of money, Congress began rolling back full retirement age. My full retirement age is 66 and a half; I won't get there 'til next summer. Folks younger than me face a full retirement age of 67. 

The idea was to "save Social Security" by encouraging people to work longer. But it hasn't worked. CNBC has a great analysis of why it has failed. In a nutshell: Congress thought 401(k) plans, which were brand new at the time, would fund a bigger chunk of retirees' income. But not everybody has access to a 401(k) plan at work, and not everybody who has access to one is as diligent as they should be about paying into it. The result? The vast majority of retirees still rely on Social Security for most of their income. (In fact, according to the CNBC article, lower-paid workers are taking Social Security early to supplement their income. When they can't work anymore, their income drops. That's one reason why the poverty rate among seniors is rising.)

Keep that in mind the next time you hear somebody suggest that Social Security should be privatized; that's what 401(k) plans were supposed to do, and it hasn't worked. (Ditto for Medicare Advantage plans, which are supposed to save Medicare but instead are rife with fraud and abuse. I railed against that here not long ago.)

Congress in '83 also thought, somewhat giddily, that American workers would be healthy enough to work longer. While that's true for well-educated White folks with office jobs, it's not universally true. In fact, it discriminates against minorities and those who aren't as well educated. (Even having a cushy office job doesn't guarantee a long life; I watched for years as secretaries I worked with at the BigLaw firm retired, then died just a few years later. Turns out being sedentary is bad for longevity. Who knew?)

Regardless, the Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives has drawn up a budget that would once again "save Social Security" by rolling back full retirement age some more, phasing in the rollback until folks born in 1978 or later would not reach full retirement age until age 70. 

You know what this would do, right? It would kick the can down the road, just like in '83. As Alicia Munnell, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, says in that CNBC article, there are only two ways to fix Social Security: "You can have less money go out or more money come in." And Republicans won't raise taxes. The only solution they'll entertain is to cut benefits -- and as Munnell says, "increasing the retirement age is a benefit cut." Twenty years from now, or sooner, we'll be right back where we are now. 

I suppose eventually, Congress could raise the full retirement age so high that most folks would die before they could collect anything. That'll save Social Security, all right.

***

Now I'm getting grumpy again. I'm going to go knit. Happy Valentine's Day.

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These moments of grumpy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Don't try to encourage me -- just give me the candy.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day -- that day when retailers' seasonal aisles are awash in only-okay chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, and florists beg you to send someone a bouquet. (Talk about inflation: Have you ever priced a dozen roses during Valentine's season?)

Not everybody's a fan of the holiday. I'm not. And this year, the people who make Sweethearts candy -- you know, those little conversation hearts that taste kind of like chalk -- are trying hard to include people like me. Or so they think.

The original candies say stuff like TRUE LOVE and BE MINE. A few years ago, the manufacturer tried to be more appealing to the kids by adding sayings like TEXT ME. You'd think nothing would be more pathetic than a stodgy old candymaker trying to catch the zeitgeist of the youth market, wouldn't you? 

You might think so, but you would be wrong. You would be oh so very wrong.

This year, according to the Washington Post, Spangler Candy has decided to add another bunch of sayings. They're calling them "words of encouragement": things like DON'T QUIT and GO 4 IT and CRUSH IT. (There's a short video here that shows the new messages.)

I think I speak for the vast majority of Americans when I say: Spangler, could you not?

Christine Emba, who wrote the WaPo op-ed piece I linked to above, calls this toxic positivity. I think she nailed it. Here we are, on the cusp of year three of a global pandemic. We've been working from home or risking our lives at an in-person job or being laid off, coping with kids' fluctuating school schedules, and simultaneously fielding endless arguments over whether the vaccines are safe and effective (THEY ARE) or whether masks work (THEY DO). We're tired. I'm tired, and I'm retired*. And you want me to CRUSH IT?

A couple of weeks ago, as I sat in meditation, I heard someone ask me, "What do you want to do this year?" But in my mind's eye, I saw a big tree beside a meandering creek, and all I wanted to do was sit under that tree, close my eyes, and not move for a while. I might get bored pretty fast, I thought, but I'll take that chance.

The Sweethearts manufacturer says the idea is to give these new hearts to the "difference-makers" in our lives -- the people who have helped us become the best that we can be. Great idea! I'll get right on that. But first, that tree beside the creek is beckoning.

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About that asterisk next to "retired": The New Mexico state legislature has begun the final week of this year's regular session, and I'll be working up until the end. We're at the point when things get really crazy; for example, the House of Representatives' Friday night session ended at six o'clock Saturday morning. I'm on day shift so I didn't have to pull an all-nighter, but day shift's hours did get extended this weekend so the night shift could get some sleep. 

I'm really looking forward to the hard stop at noon on Thursday.

Gee, maybe that's why napping under that tree seems so appealing right now...

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These moments of encouraging blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Here's my Valentine's Day message to you: GET VAXXED!

Happy Black Sunday.

We're all friends here, right? So I'll be frank: I don't have a lot of use for Valentine's Day.

I'm in my sixth decade on this planet. For the first ten years or so, I could count on Valentines from my parents and my classmates (except for the year my teacher ruined Valentine's Day); for another ten years, I was married, and could count on something from the husband. For the remaining three-plus decades, I've been in Valentine limbo -- either wondering whether I'd have a reason to celebrate, or simply waiting for the day after, when Valentine candy would be fifty percent off.

Why do we celebrate this day, anyway? To start with, it was the feast day of a Catholic saint. St. Valentine of Terni, Wikipedia tells me, was a Roman who was martyred on this date in the third century. Or maybe it was two different guys, both named Valentine and martyred in different years. I guess the church records were a little sketchy in those days. In any case, the Catholic church didn't establish February 14th as the feast day of St. Valentine until 496 -- and then the church sort of demoted him in 1969. He's still a saint, but local churches don't have to observe his feast day.

Traditionally, St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeeping, epilepsy, and bubonic plague. Romantic, no?

It was Geoffrey Chaucer who first connected St. Valentine to romance in his Parliament of Foules. People in the Middle Ages believed that birds paired off in mid-February, according to the Julian calendar; St. Valentine's feast day was the 14th; hey presto, we've got a holiday for love and romance. Some scholars over the centuries since have argued that Valentine celebrations were invented by the church to supersede and replace the pagan celebration of Lupercalia, but that has pretty much been debunked.

Anyway, within the past hundred years or so, Valentine's Day has been commercialized like almost every other holiday -- and like many other holidays, that has led to...oh, let's not beat around the bush here: if you don't have a date on Valentine's weekend, popular culture considers you to be something of a failure.

That's a lot of hooey. There are all sorts of reasons why people might not be paired off on a random day in mid-February. And some people who are paired off likely wish they weren't.

My only suggestion for getting through Valentine's weekend is that we all try to lower our expectations. If you have a date, great. If not, hey, it's one day. Stay away from romantic movies, and ads for flowers and jewelry. It'll all be over tomorrow.

So to those of you who are happily paired off today, happy Valentine's Day. To the rest of you, I'll see you at the drugstore tomorrow for half-price chocolate.

***
Here's one bit of cheerful holiday news: I Heard It on the Radio is just 99 cents through next weekend. This anthology has something for everyone -- including a story by me. Consider it our Valentine to you, Dear Reader.

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These moments of black-hearted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Black Friday tidings (contest alert!).

Image credit: alisafoytik / 123RF Stock Photo

I hate Valentine's Day.

This is not a recent development. When I was in the second grade, my teacher's name was Mrs. Dunkelberger. She wore her iron-gray hair in a bun and ran our classroom with an iron fist. In the run-up to Valentine's Day, she was insistent that everyone not only bring enough valentines for every kid in the class, but that we had to sign the backs of all the cards we were handing out. On the appointed day, after valentines were passed out, another student complained about receiving an unsigned card. Mrs. Dunkelberger's solution was to call a halt to the whole thing. The details are fuzzy -- we may have been required to reclaim all the valentines we'd brought -- but in any case, we had to go back to our regular work instead of having a party.

Granted, it was a long time ago. But that sort of injustice sticks with a person.

Since then, I've come to view Valentine's Day as not just an excuse for florists to triple their prices, but as a sly way to make unattached people feel inadequate. You can always tell the unattached. We're the ones in line at the drugstore on February 15th, buying ourselves the heart-shaped box of chocolates we didn't receive the day before. On the upside, they're half price. On the downside...yeah.

This feeling may or may not have influenced me when I wrote the ending of Fissured. As you may know, that's the book in which Joseph goes walkabout on Valentine's Day without a word of explanation to Naomi. (Seriously, Joseph? If you forgot to get her flowers, there are better ways to handle it.)

Interestingly (according to Wikipedia), St. Valentine didn't start out being the patron saint of lovers. He was originally considered to be the first saint of spring. Slovenians believed that on his day, birds chose their mates and flowers began to grow. In 1382, Chaucer took the charming folk tradition about the birds and worked it into a poem honoring the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. So we have him to blame for starting all this lace-edged nonsense.

Anyway, for this Black Friday, I decided to lighten my own mood by giving some books away. Three signed copies of Crosswind are up for grabs at Goodreads. Feel free to enter (US and Canada only, sorry) by clicking either this link or the one in the box on the left. The contest runs through the 22nd.

And in addition, especially for readers of my blog, the most pathetic Valentine's Day story posted here in the comments gets a Land, Sea, Sky mini-bookmark signed by Yours Truly. Go on -- spill it. It'll make me feel better.

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On top of all that, the trailer for Crosswind is featured today at Indies Unlimited. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, stop by.

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These moments of bloggy love (ahem) have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.