Third Day of the Icon, 4th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): It's raining again. Fifth or sixth straight day (I've lost count). Haven't got my walk in since May 23. It's forecast to rain tomorrow, too, although they say it will finally clear up on Saturday. 

It may have rained this much at this time last year, but I was only walking about four or five miles each time back then and only needed a two-hour or less window of non-raining weather to complete my route. Now I'm shooting for at least twice that length and need at least twice that time and just haven't been able to get out and walk. I'm now in much better shape physically than I was back then, thanks in no small part to the walking, but this current idleness is affecting me psychologically. Cabin fever. 

I find that I feel far better mentally when I stick to a routine, and that routine since last August has been alternating days of walking and sitting. I've been keeping up with the sitting (meditation) half but I've found that I really miss the other half. A routine is not a routine if it's not complete. My routines have become ritual, and my rituals have come to feel sacred. 

Tropical Storm Alvin, the first named storm of 2025, has formed in the Eastern Pacific. Alvin likely poses little or no threat to North America, but it's significant as being the first of the season.

But enough about the weather. Today, the New York Times ran a fawning puff piece about Elon Musk complete with flattering quotes like Jamie Dimon's "The guy is our Einstein.” The article, under the  subheading "Ideas," tries to portray Musk as a heavyweight, forward-thinking intellectual and opens with a snippet from a Fox New interview, making the bias of the article apparent from the very start. The article refers to Musk as "the man whose rockets can gracefully return to earth standing tall on their launchpads," which ignores that his last three launches exploded on takeoff, and that Blue Origin's rockets land vertically as well.     

Musk, they argue, devotes his energies to grand engineering projects with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. “The sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need to be a multiplanetary civilization because earth will be incinerated,” he's quoted, although he does acknowledge that it won't happen for several hundred million years.

Cool. But here's a news flash for Musk and the New York Times: the human race will be extinct in several hundred million years. Homo sapiens won't be around to see the sun explode. Our species only emerged about 300,000 years ago, and even without a not-unlikely cataclysmic apocalypse, by any projection of species evolution we'll have been replaced by some other sentient hominid, probably several times over. 

The argument can be made that those future hominids are still our descendants and deserve our efforts to perpetuate both our own and future species, but evolution has a funny way of branching off in parallel developments, with some branches petering out and others moving on. In other words, the future sentient hominids dominating the planet may not be descended from H. sapiens but from orangutans or bonobos. If we're concerned about perpetuating intelligent life on Earth, we should put equal effort into protecting the habitat of all the great apes and ensuring their survival. To take it a step further, the dominant life form in several hundred million years may not even be hominid, so out of an abundance of caution, we should protect all species, all life of Earth, from octopi to ravens, from the whales to the spiders. 

But I don't see Dimon's Einstein of our time doing a goddamn thing about the environment. Perhaps the Einstein of our time will turn out to be Greta Thunberg, not some South African incel nepo baby.