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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

By Jean-Louis Turcot and Emily Spence

10/7/07

One of the authors of this piece once read that, based on size and weight, ants proportionally consume more than humans. And the current number of ants present in the world, according to E. O. Wilson’s judgment, is between ten to the sixteenth and ten to the seventeenth (roughly 100,000,000,000,000,000) in totality [1].

These facts raise a question: Should we reduce their population since there are so many of them and they use up so much?

To further consider this question, let’s examine what the ants do for a living. They work in a colony and perform specific tasks, the most important of which is to obtain nourishment since nothing else is possible unless they can eat and drink as a precondition of survival. Therefore, they consume, rest at night and go out the next day to forage for more provisions.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

“Although they didn’t, single handedly, destroy Jim Crow and other segregationist laws, Michael Schwerner, Andy Goodman and James Chaney provided impetus for others to fight all the harder for change rather than have their deaths serve to promote cowardice to act and fear.”

By Emily Spence

8/19/07

Two dialectically opposed, prevailing theories are that large scale events (such as wars, famines, plagues, and so on) shape the course of history and, counterpoised, singular beings (like Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, Mohandas Gandhi, etc.) do so. This of course is like arguing over which came first — the chicken or the egg, as happenings mold people and people can largely direct outcomes. Anyone doubting the interplay need only consider the experiences (including the ones involved in the teaching of parental values) that influenced the life defining choices of Hugo Chávez and George Bush, Jr.

In this vein the options that individuals elect to take, in an irrevocable fashion, change the way that the future unfolds. Nothing would quite be the same without each and every one of us contributing whatever we foist into the world at large, regardless of whether these affect offspring or create change on some larger scale, as did the decision made by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., when he gave the order to release Little Boy from the bowels of Enola Gay.

All the same, people often cannot calculate in advance the effects of their actions. Indeed, they sometimes never even hear of the results. Nonetheless, their endeavors can sometimes monumentally change a life or add momentum to a cause that, in the end, forces meaningful transformations into place.

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