The four worst words in the English language are, "I told you so."

[Another Jackalope]

This not a good day to be a cynical, despairing pessimist with a reasonable grasp of the unreason of humanity.

In the closing days of COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 I abandoned all hope. I have seen nothing to resuscitate it since then. And 11 years later, here we are.

GliderGuider

[CrispyQ]

1. "No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up." Lily Tomlin

[Random Boomer]

2. It helps to back up to a larger perspective on it all

Despite our hubris and self-preening pride at being an exceptional species, we really are just animals pursuing and gratifying our emotional needs. Too often, our intellect is used mainly to justify whatever we do to get what we want, to embellish our motivations. This is the best that we can be; that it's not "good enough" is a subjective judgment, built on expectations for standards we can see but are too limited to reach. Blame really doesn't fit into that picture.

We are in the exceptional position of being witnesses to an unfolding mass extinction event and recognizing what it is on a conceptual level. It's harrowing to observe first-hand, so I often have to take a deep breath and remember that unbelievably horrible changes have happened over and over again on this planet. In between these points of dissolution and destruction, however, have been vast stretches of time that were calmer. Worlds in which Cambrian life flourished or placoderms dominated the earth or dinosaurs walked over Kansas.

History is folding us into the timeline.

[NNadir]

3. Well, I spent the last 11 years thinking about what might be done.

I have convinced myself that the carbon cycle can be closed, and didn't spend it worrying if it would be closed.

It is enough to know what is possible.

It would have been easy to sit in a corner, shake my head at "the fools," with an air of superciliousness.

"Hope," my friend, is a lazy and frankly useless word if it is divorced from imagination. One has no right to hope if one has no imagination, imagination for good, not for bad.

Nice to see you again though. You haven't changed at all. I think that's a little sad, because I believe one should stop changing when one dies and not before.

I'll stop changing when I die, but on the way out the door, life's door, I've had the great pleasure of sharing my ideas with my son, a fine engineer and scientist, welding alloys right now while being pushed, by his Dad, to the heat equation and equations of state for supercritical fluids.

Yesterday I woke up and started thinking how wonderful zirconium tetrafluoride is. These kinds of things make life worth living.

I'll be gone soon enough from the world, but I think the coming generation will be a great generation, if only because their challenges will be so great.

The world is so beautiful it must be saved from itself and cynicism and schadenfreude are a cause, not a result.

[Another Jackalope]

4. There's no reason to change if there's no reason to change.

As far as I can tell, this aspect of human nature (ever, always more and more) is as immutable as gravity. It's not a political opinion. There's no reason for me to change my belief in gravity either.

[NNadir]

6. That's probably one of the silliest analogies I've ever heard.

Gravity? Really? Human nature is like gravity?

You have made a moral choice based not on fact, but on belief, an opinion, not supported by history, of a vague concept of "human nature," one which I personally would never embrace because I care.

It is not the case that every human being other than you is a Philistine coming out of the cave to wipe out Mastadons.

Much damage has been done, but my feeling is that the rising generation will make our generation of effete cynics look ridiculous. I've seen it with my own eyes. Something can be done, if and only if, those out of Teddy Roosevelt's area get out of the way.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

"Citizenship in a Republic"

Note that I am taking this quote out of context, but that said, some great thoughts, in fact like my sig line below, are better out of context than in it.

I will die soon enough, but I refuse to do so whining.

[Another Jackalope]

7. Oh, in that example I'm a Philistine too.

But I'm pretty sure they didn't live in caves or extirpate the Mastodons.

Try again.

[NNadir]

8. You're "pretty sure" of a lot of things.

I know lots of people who are pretty sure of themselves who I think should read more.

A dictionary would be a good place to start:

Philistine (Oxford)

Much of what we know about real Philistines - i.e. "Philistine" people as an ethnic group as opposed to a metaphor - comes from texts written by semi-nomadic herding people, artifacts of whom are, in fact, found in physical caves. Who exactly these people were, and the extent to which they were in fact, "real" seems to be uncertain.

However the ancient texts of dubious historical accuracy have in fact, led, via the intermediacy of culture found their way into language.

However I may have erred in considering whether I'm addressing a narrow or a broad viewpoint.

Living in a cave also has a connotative as well denotive meaning.

I would include the more connotative meaning as including people who crawl out every once in a while to declare that the rest of the world is clearly not good enough for him to spend too much time outside of the cave.

Caves have an oft discussed long history in the philosophy of human thought of course, and there are instances, certainly metaphoric, in philosophy evoking those who live in caves and look only at shadows while making pronouncements about reality with a sense of certainty.

The tone is mildly mocking in these famous discourses, appropriately so.

For me, if not for those geniuses announcing with a tone of supercilious Schadenfreude, "I always knew I was right, and I'm sure you want me to tell you I have always been right!" are probably looking at shadows of their own making, but then again, I'm not that smart, since I lazily use connotative language.

I believe, though, that I may hold a higher view of humanity, because, stated admittedly with some dismissive arrogance, I work rather than whine.

In my life I have generated an opinion so as to find that often those who consider themselves above humanity are exhibiting the most human of flaws, intellectual laziness.

One may ask such a person if, with all their declared magnificent exalted perspicaciousness, they have done anything to make the world better.

It's a question I ask myself everyday, and every day I try to answer it.

Oh, and as for Mastadons in the Levant, the issue has been discussed with some level of seriousness: Cultural and Biological Transformations in the Middle Pleistocene Levant: A View from Qesem Cave, Israel

Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant

Elephant species originated in Africa, rather like the appalling great ape that some people stand above. Thus they had to pass through the Levant.

Often people are nowhere near as sharp as they think they are.

[Another Jackalope]

9. You really like to "win", don't you?

Don't forget to have fun as you do it.