Witches, Satanic Cults in the 80's, & Accelerating Toyotas

After government review of crash data, it's turning out that the runaway Toyota threat to America was just another mass delusion, one in long line of collective freak outs. The individual cases of unchecked acceleration are appearing to be cases of people stepping on the gas instead of the brakes. These type of accidents are not uncommon, and can result in tragic losses of life, but what i find interesting is our reaction to these events. It became an accepted truth. It permeated our culture. There were Congressional hearings. Fines were assessed. Lawsuits filed, and for what? Because some people regrettably stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake? It just points to how subjective our reality can really be. Our belief that the runaway Toyota meme was real in some respects made it real. The billions of dollars spent by Toyota in recalls, and fines were certainly real. Whether the belief that your vehicle could suddenly rocket out of control actually resulted in a higher likelihood that you might accidentally step on the wrong pedal, i don't think anyone could say, but the heightened media attention caused any accident of this sort among the thousands of motor vehicle accidents happening daily to be reported on at a national level thereby providing real accidents as evidence for the belief. It's classic confirmation bias.
This isn't a new trend. Our national history, as I'm sure any people's history, is littered with embarrassing events where we all collectively believed something that was completely false, and acted on that falsehood, sometimes quite brutally. We've hanged people and crushed them with stones during the Salem witch trials, because we were sure as a community that people were being hexed by witches. In 1984 a trial in California began that lasted seven years and ended up costing $15 million due to a runaway fear in the community that satanist were abusing children in a preschool. In 1993 three teenagers were tried and convicted absent any evidence for the murder of three boys in Arkansas, based on the fervent belief of the community that the murderers were satanists who had killed the children in a satanic ritual. In all these cases we believed something absent any credible evidence, and acted on it with sometimes horrific results.
I like to think that we live in a world where we predominately make rational decisions based on knowledge, and these events where we let our beliefs be the sole arbiter are few and far between, but I recognize that it's a matter of progression, that we're learning. I guess at this point Akio Toyoda should be somewhat relieved that he wasn't crushed to death beneath rocks for the possessed Toyotas.

I think the cats domesticated us

Let's just say cats and dogs are at war. Cats and dogs have always been at war. A war for survival, a war for a place in the world. This battle raged for 20 million years before humankind began to walk upright, and it will follow us to distant stars.

Ten thousand years ago, the battle was at a bloody stalemate as both sides had perfected their survival strategies. The dogs mainly relying on social structures, packs, to keep fed, stay protected, and stay alive. It's a brute force style approach; if there is a problem, just apply more canines. Large elk? Add dogs. Marauding bear heading this way? More dogs. The cats primarily went in another direction and hunted alone, but relied on more specialized adaptations, and exploited specific environments. Their retractable claws allow them to climb and exploit heights. The structure of their eyes gives them excellent night vision. They found an ecological niche, and exploited it. Cats and dogs were at an impasse, though. When humans began to dominate the earth, both sides saw an opportunity to end the stalemate.

Dogs made the jump first. Dogs were the first animal domesticated, and still to this day are performing many of the same functions that made them such a valuable piece of human technology. Our ancestors and our dog's ancestors probably met while hunting. A human hunter wounds, but doesn't kill it's prey which flees. A pack of canines chase down the prey and take it down. The humans catch up and chase away or kill the dogs. At one point one or both of the species realized it was more beneficial to work together, and dogs became another weapon in the human arsenal. Another job of the dog became apparent when they began to hang around camps, perhaps scrounging for food or following hunters home from a hunt. Night would fall, and humans would become easy prey for large cats and other hunters prowling the dark. They would silently stalk their prey, wait for someone to break away from the group, and then pounce, killing their meal and dragging it back into the jungle. A dog at the perimeter of the fire barked, acting as an alarm, whenever it sensed a threat reducing the number of lives lost to large nocturnal predators. The packs of humans and dogs merged. Dogs took their skills at living in social structures and applied them to their new relationships with people forging a bond. This mutually beneficial relationship between people and dogs persisted and endures. Dogs to this day, hunt with their people and protect their homes, still fulfilling their half of a deal struck over ten thousand years ago.

This was the time of the Agricultural Revolution, when the domestication of food grains irrevocably changed the planet and created a whole new way of life for people. For the first time, your career choices weren't limited to being either a hunter who does a little gathering, or a gatherer that hunts a bit. Instead you could be a farmer. I know it sounds pretty lame now, but back then it was like wanting to be a rock star or an astronaut, your parents would plead for you to reconsider hunting, maybe do some gathering as a back up plan, but you stand firm. "No," you'd say. "I'm going to farm." It changed the world; instead of constantly traveling so you can feed a population without exhausting the ecosystem, humans could grow food at one location, and stop all that walking from here to there and just live next to a field and grow row after row of food. It seemed crazy. Your mom would give you an atlatl when you went to visit them in the forest. "Just in case", she'd say. "You kids and your farming; it won't last." It did last, and with agriculture came the world we inhabit today. The agricultural revolution brought pollution, environmental degradation, and outbreaks of disease. It brought homes, towns, commerce, and it brought cats into our lives.

Last we saw of cats in this story, they were skulking around campfires, snatching us up and eating our meaty parts, but these are different cats. These were small jungle cats, who lived in the underbrush and fed on small rodents. When people began to stockpile all the grain from their fields mice and other rodents flocked to them, and where their prey went these cats followed. The first cats to live with people were probably barn cats. They moved in. We were happy to see a reduction in the pests eating the stored grain, and we tolerated them. At this point the relationship could have stalled. There are many animals that have adapted to live alongside humans, but are not domesticated.
Cat's had waited, as is their nature, until the perfect environment specially suited to a specific set of adaptations appeared. The jungle cats that became the domesticated cat we know today, are small efficient rodent hunters that filled a niche in agrarian life. They also came ready with a few special adaptations with which to manipulate their unsuspecting humans. Domestic cats have large eyes in relation to their heads, people almost instinctively find this trait cute in animals, due to it triggering a nurturing instinct. Cats can mimic our infants with their meow, which shares the same frequency as a human baby's cry, again playing on our instincts to care for our young. These physical traits gave a cats a psychological head start in the process of domesticating humans, or in being domesticated, depending on your perspective. In addition to these tools to manipulate our psyches, cats came with a basic skill set that suited urban life. They fed themselves on pests, so didn't subtract from the food supply. They were small, compact, clean, and relatively unobtrusive; they were pretty good roommates. So to the consternation of the dogs, cats made the jump indoors.

A new stalemate was reached, a new equilibrium. New battles were fought in new places, backyards and living rooms. When you look over and see the cat sitting on the windowsill staring outside at the dog looking balefully in, maybe you're seeing an ongoing skirmish in a larger conflict that stretches back thousands of years, or maybe it's raining and the dog just wants in.

**As of the time of this writing, two recent developments bear mentioning. The dogs recent initiative Project: Tea Cup, has been success in increasing the numbers of dogs indoors as well as completely dominating the purse ecosystem, which cats have yet make an appearance in. The most recent whispering from the feline side are troubling, after centuries of work developing a sixth toe they have as of yet been unable to transition to the next step and develop a working thumb, despite that Operation: Can Opener is slated to continue.**