With a fifty percent reduction in the number of household members, things get quite slow here during the holidays. However, I do have close relatives nearby, so there is always some activity. I haven't felt much like reading but will be starting again shortly; I recently gave up on another book. I've been watching a free MasterClass presentation by Jane Goodall. I like her and mostly agree with her, but I already know almost everything that she's saying. I was mainly interested in her early life, and found that an extremely fortuitous sequence of events led to her career success. If she hadn't made her way to Africa in 1957 and accidentally met Louis Leakey, you may never have heard of her. I was surprised that there was practically no research on chimpanzees at that time, and she was probably the first person to notice that chimpanzees are essentially the same as humans socially. This, along with genetic studies, eventually led to a vast improvement in our understanding of human evolution, though she is an ethologist and isn't particularly interested in that line of research. The origin of the divergence between chimpanzees and humans seems to have been that our ancestors were more environmentally stressed and began to occupy savannahs, whereas chimpanzees remained in forests. When this occurred, hominids developed bipedal gait. Because of their increased mobility and stresses, they became more cooperative and developed language. Although she is slightly New Agey, Goodall's views are very similar to those of other naturalists, such as E.O. Wilson. It is also quite clear that she despises much of contemporary life because of its environmental destruction and mass consumption. Though she doesn't quite say it, she doesn't approve of the American lifestyle at all. She grew up in England during World War II and became accustomed to rationing, and you can see it in her a simmering hatred of corporate greed and consumer waste. We need many more people like her who dedicate their later lives to saving the planet. She doesn't put it this way, but if aliens were to visit Earth today, they would conclude that it has a toxic infestation of humans. I still have several more segments left to watch, which are mainly about environmental activism.
I have also been watching news coverage of the Jimmy Carter legacy, and he was quite different from subsequent presidents, mostly in a positive way. He didn't do well in office, but that was mainly due to bad luck. He inherited high inflation from the Republicans: when I bought my first house in 1980, the mortgage rate was thirteen percent! He also had geopolitical problems with Iran. However, he did a very good job negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel. Overall, it didn't help him that he was a complete outsider in Washington, and his staff was referred to as the "Georgia Mafia." Nevertheless, his Christian values, intelligence and work ethic, I think, made him a better person than any of his successors. It also helped that he had a supportive wife from his hometown. Who would want to be married to Nancy Reagan or Melania Trump? Although I'm an atheist, I've always noticed that people who adopt actual Christian values usually are better than other Americans. One of the greatest social problems of today is that self-identified Christians in the U.S. don't seem to see that Donald Trump is completely lacking in Christian values, and if it wasn't for Trump's glaring stupidity, it would be tempting to call him the leader of a satanic cult. As a thought experiment, try imagining him volunteering for Habitat for Humanity after he leaves office: picture Donald and Melania holding hammers and building houses for poor people. Dream on.
At the moment I don't have any house issues, which up to now occupied much of my time. Yesterday I added a clothesline to the back porch in case I need it. If everything keeps going smoothly, I may have to recruit some mice to start another mouse infestation just to keep busy. I have a little more to do on weekdays. I am following the stock market and am currently invested in AI and quantum computing. It would be nice if there were another meme stock rally, but that seems unlikely under the current conditions.