Remember the story of Jonah and the whale? The leviathan swallowed him whole, but coughed him up. Is there an analog for us? There might be, but since all analogies limp, the analog has this difference. Whereas Jonah was a separate being from the leviathan, we appear to be an integral part of our whale’s makeup.
 
There is a monster in the land. It wasn’t always here, as it arrived just over two centuries ago. But it found its niche, a perfect ecology in which to dwell. It can protect itself, and in doing so, can protect you, also. But as a monster, it does monster things, and it’s big, very big. And growing. There’s little anyone can do to stop its growth though slowing that growth seems feasible still.  
 
As members of enormous national and world societies, we all fall under some rules and protections provided by governments, from local school boards to international courts. Each of us hands over to collective power some of our individualism. Maybe we can say as much for units of governance as small as families and tribes, as well. Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, argues for an overriding government with as close to absolute authority as Earthlings can get because limiting a sovereignty in power would mean imposing another sovereignty over it, and another over that one, and another ad infinitum. Hobbes says that the sovereign power is the “mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence [sic.].” The power vested in the Leviathan has to be absolute. Historically, we know from the centuries of injustices, wars, and even genocides, that placing in the hands of one or a few such power is more often dangerous than it is beneficial for individuals within the population under control.
 
In opposition to Hobbes stands John Locke, who argues that the protection afforded by a sovereign power can expose the individual to an attack by a “lion.” Locke asks who would be “so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”
 
Here we are centuries later still asking ourselves about the extent of power we allow the leviathan of government to hold over us. In the United States government is about as large as governments can be proportional to their populations. More than 20 million people work for government from local to the Federal level. And if all of them are in sync with dictates of the three Federal Branches and the Constitution, then the American government is truly a leviathan capable of swallowing any constituent individual. Americans don’t have one king in control of a monarchy that defines the leviathan of Hobbes’s times, but rather a collective of bureaucratic kings.
 
Hobbes’s Leviathan has a frontispiece that shows a large king overlooking a walled town with a central cathedral. The king holds a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other. He wears a crown, but his body, upon close inspection, is composed of the images of hundreds of individuals. If you are subject to such a leviathan, you are a small part of the very power that lords over you. And that brings me to two questions: What’s your role? What power do you have to effect change?
 
We’re all Jonahs swallowed by the leviathan of our own making, aren’t we? 

Went to a local sandwich/hoagie/pizza restaurant last week. The subs are big, about the size of the U.S.S. Nautilus. So, two of us split one. Maybe in my youth I might have eaten a whole sub by myself, but, well, we all reach limitations, one imposed by material substance and another imposed by immaterial guilt. Do I want to be seen as a gourmand or a gourmet?
 
And then I got to thinking. Everyone knows that portions in restaurants are larger than they used to be; bagels are larger, too. Yeah. People in an affluent society eat a lot. TV reporters have even used the size of portions as filler stories (pun intended). But are we the first to gorge ourselves? Is gorging—relatively speaking, of course, because I’ve seen tiny people eat tiny amounts to my eye and say, “I’m stuffed”—part of the human psyche? If the evidence from old poop is correct, yes; we’ve always been gorgers.  
 
Apparently, some hunter-gatherer living in the Lower Pecos region at the junction of the Pecos and Rio Grande ate an entire snake, maybe a rattlesnake. * One of the fangs passed through the individual and was left behind in a coprolite. I can hear the conversation.
 
“Hey, you gonna eat that whole snake?”
 
“Yep.”
 
“Aren’t you goin’ to rip out them fangs first?”
 
“Nope.”
 
Not a long conversation, but then how long are our conversations about choosing a whole sub over a half sub in a local restaurant? Eating the whole thing isn’t new, so who cares? What are you going to say? “Are you going to eat the hot peppers, too?”
 
Anything to be learned here? I can think of one. From our origins through our evolution as humans, we really haven’t changed as much as we would like to believe. There’s a primitive snake-eater hiding in each of us.
 
Online you can find many comparisons of restaurant portions served over the past half century, all of which point out the trend toward increasing sizes—of the food and of us in general. I suppose the only difference between us and our gourmand ancestors is the size of the snake. By comparison with that meal on a rattlesnake, our meals are pythons. Yes, we’re eating bigger and bigger snakes in restaurants. And we wash them down with a sweet tea or soda with more dissolved sugar than a small inlet has salt. Well, at least we finish off the meal of snake and sugar with a healthful green tea—a Venti Tazo Green Tea Frappuccino with only 560 calories (or, in winter, a hot Venti White Chocolate Mocha with 620 calories).
 
In those same fifty years by contrast, we appear to be gorging ourselves on a diet of smaller and smaller books, thinking smaller and smaller philosophies, and having smaller and smaller attention spans. Not all of course, but many of us—and I humbly include myself—tend to seek shortcuts to knowledge and wisdom. Mentally, we’re consuming smaller snakes—though we might argue that we consume many more of them in a world that throws information from everywhere in the snake pit of collective media. Such a diet gives us a wide range of knowledge equal to that of a Jeopardy champion.
 
Small snakes might be easier to consume than big snakes, but they can be poisonous. Pay attention not only to the size of the information you consume, but also to its nature. A large mental snake might be better for you than a small one. It depends on the nature of the snake.
 
You might find that in the restaurant of life, wisdom comes by mentally consuming a large portion of the same thought. Sometimes it's better to choose a whole sub over a half sub, hot peppers and all.​

​*Yirka, Bob. Evidence found of early hunter-gatherer eating an entire venomous snake. Phys.org. April 24, 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-04-evidence-early-hunter-gatherer-entire-venomous.html   Accessed April 27, 2019.  The researchers, Elanor Sopnderman, Crystal Dozier, and Morgan Smith say that they also found someone had eaten an entire rat. The snake might have been eaten as part of a ritual. 

The bad news is that Russia recently announced that it had a new submarine-based weapon system. The good news is that no weapon system ever invented failed to engender a counter weapon system. And there will be one to counter the Russian system. But there’s more bad news, sorry to say. And that is that for every defense, some bad guy (I’m guessing the Russians would say this is an unfair assessment, that they aren’t “bad guys,” but rather a people just ensuring their existence under the threat of a violent, imperialist USA seeking world domination) finds a new offense, just as football teams work on strategies and counter strategies, new offenses to counter new defenses.
 
But there really is some bad news about defensive and offensive systems, something we can learn from cassava plants and their enemies. Devang Mehta and other researchers tried altering the genes of cassava to make it resistant to the African cassava mosaic virus, a plant-pathogenic DNA virus of the family Geminiviridae. Mehata’s group tried to make a “transgenic” cassava that was immune to the virus, and ended up with a variant virus that was resistant to their efforts. * In short, the Geminiviridae virus adapted faster than the scientists could develop a defense against it. It seems that the very process of making cassava more resistant made it less so because of the counter development of the virus.
 
Here I thought that the ingenuity of car thieves and the persistence of hackers were simply problems with simple solutions. In fact, the solutions at times breed more problems. The defense engenders a new offense, in nature, in football, in technology, and in war. Such, for example, was the fate of the Maginot Line. Such is the fate of illegal drug police and the TSA at airports. Such is the fate of all of us at times.
 
So, what can we learn from the cassava and its virus? There’s always some sort of “bad guy” working to circumvent the defense of some “good guy.” The newest and most clever defense always has a weakness. That’s a bit of bad news, but knowing it keeps thinking “good guys” alert, even when they are weary. Stay alert and inventive.
 
* Mehta, Devang, Alessandra Stürchler, Ravi B. Anjanappa, Syed Shan-e-Ali Zaidi, Matthias Hirsch-Hoffmann, Wilhelm Gruissem and Hervé Vanderschuren. Linking CRISPR-Cas9 interference in cassava to the evolution of editing-resistant geminiviruses. Open Access. Genonme Biology 2019, 20:80. Published 25 April 2019. Online at https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1678-3   Accessed on April 27, 2019. The researchers used CRISPR-Cas9 in their gene-editing experiments in an isolated greenhouse. Imagine, however, that some gene-editor experiments with an organism in an effort to add a defense only to make a new offense that escapes outside the confines of a lab. Or imagine that a “bad guy” purposefully releases a virus that wipes out an entire crop. Think Irish potato famine.

Have you ever gone through a week without hearing someone say something about the weather? What about going through a week without hearing a complaint about a weather forecast? What about the accuracy of weather forecasters?
 
Let’s eliminate from our reasons for complaints the fact of human limitation. We all make mistakes. The problem with weather forecasters isn’t that they aren’t right more than about a little over 50% of the time—except in regions like hot and cold deserts, Death Valley, say, or the Atacama. The problem is that forecasters give us a per cent, a likelihood of certain weather phenomena, and they give that per cent for periods deep into the future, like 10 days. What can we do with that percentage? A 30% chance of rain makes rain unlikely, but still possible; a 70% makes it likely, but not necessarily so for your location.
 
Now, there are certain circumstances that make weather more or less uniform over a “relatively” long time, say as much as a couple of weeks. These are the weather “controls,” like a dominating High pressure system, one that has descending, warming air parked over a region. Sinking air warms as it sinks, so evaporation increases just as it does beneath a hand-dryer, making for cloudless days. Then, of course, there are the circumstances of season: One doesn’t expect frost in North Carolina’s lowlands during August. And you can think of other circumstances that influence weather phenomena, such as altitude, ocean currents, the proximity to large lakes and the ocean, semi-permanent wind systems, and the biggest overall control: Latitude. Some of these offset the others, however. Quito, Ecuador, lies on the Equator, but it also sits atop the Andes at almost two miles above sea level. So, there’s the interplay of seasons, latitude, and altitude in Quito’s weather. I won’t even mention—oops! I’m mentioning it—the effects of giant volcanic eruptions, such as those that lowered world temperatures during the Year without a Summer in the early nineteenth century.
 
Anyway, back to forecasts. I came across an online analysis of BBC weather service forecasts. The author of Slimyhorror.com
( https://weather.slimyhorror.com/ ) analyzed, using his own criteria, the accuracy of those forecasts. Turns out that the BBC is right only a bit over 50% of the time for a one-day forecast. Take it out to a week, and the forecasts are correct only a quarter to a third of the time. Doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?
 
The need for forecasts probably has some deep-seated relationship to our need for safety, maybe something in our brains that is also in the brains of squirrels, the something that says, “You better get out there to collect walnuts for burial while the walnuts are falling from the trees.” The well-stocked walnut closet wards off starvation in the cold months.
 
We’re always in the business of forecasting. In youth and in transitional stages (as during times between jobs or at the outset of retirement) we rely on forecasts for reaching goals. The very act of going to college or trade school is one motivated by a forecast. And marriage or moving-in are also based on forecasts of long-term “social weather,” forecasts that recognize a climate that overrides the daily vicissitudes of weather. Climate, after all, is weather averaged over decades. Within the context of climate there’s a range of variability.
 
In those long-term “social weather” forecasts, there’s also a range of variability governed by the analogs of natural weather controls like semi-permanent Highs and Lows of feelings, location, and the occasional unexpected and outside influences like eruptions of one kind or another, including the disruptions of setbacks and tragic personal losses.
 
If you assessed the accuracy of your past forecasts, what would you find? Were you as accurate as the BBC weather forecasters were? Did you hit the mark on 50% of your forecasts? How many of your forecasts were altered by unexpected events or encounters?
 
Can you make a forecast for your life one day out? One week out? One month? A year? And will that forecast be a mere mental exercise or a plan over which you have control or are the control the way latitude, altitude, and semi-permanent pressure systems are controls on the daily weather? Maybe you’re one of those hot or cold desert dwellers who knows that without some unexpected phenomenon like a volcanic eruption, tomorrow’s weather will be the same as today’s, almost year-round. As for me, I’ve learned to accept the unexpected vicissitudes in the climate of my life that alter my daily forecasts and make me adapt in the moment.
 
Apparently, being wrong about the future half the time doesn’t discourage us from making more forecasts just like the weather forecasters. We keep going to the weather services for forecasts even though we know by experience (and statistics) that they get things right only half the time or less. And we keep making forecasts for our own lives.
 
Are we just naïve, plain stupid, or hopeful? Are we driven to know the future to make reaching it easier by reducing anxiety about its coming?  

So, now the Russian government has announced a new, “unstoppable” submarine-launched weapon system that is capable of mass destruction. Nice. Nothing like humanity’s need to destroy itself for…
 
And that’s just it. For what?
 
What could be gained by poisoning the air of the Northern Hemisphere with a cloud of radioactive fallout, where the Russians, if they haven’t noticed, live? And if, by chance, the weapon systems of the United States—the announcement of the new weapon mentions the USA as a target—survive, what havoc would Russia wreak on itself by attacking a powerful country with similar ability? Folly. Surely, folly.
 
That humans have sought to destroy one another since their beginnings seems to be an undeniable history. That shelter has always meant not just protection from nature’s dangers—from lightning to bears to poisonous critters—but also protection from other humans, has always been part of our species’ mindset. From rock shelters to fortresses and modern houses with security systems, we choose our dwellings on the basis of relative safety from the dangers imposed by one another.
 
We can look back on the destruction wrought by ancient wars. We can look at the destruction wrought by two world wars, but we have to wait to look back on the potential destruction of our current societies. That’s too bad, but that’s the way of the world. The potential for another big war exists simply because we put in the hands of a few the destinies of many.
 
That such a potential for destruction has grown by a new Russian weapon system gives each of us—even the Russian inventors—another reason to act on my fundamental principle: This is not your practice life. All those previous carpe-diem bits of advice generations have tried to pass on to ensuing generations still apply. Seize this day because there is always someone out there who wants to take it away from you. 

“Is your identity definable?” Mr. Inquisitive asks.
 
“Sure,” you say. “I can identify by a number of categories like ‘child-teen-adult-senior,’ ‘couch-potato-jogger-fine-tuned-athlete,’ ‘introvert-extrovert,’ ‘male-female-other,’ ‘black-white-brown-yellow-red-turquoise,’ ‘educated-uneducated,’ ‘elite-ordinary,’ ‘believer-atheist,’ and ‘inquisitive-dull.’ Given a few more minutes, I might be able to list more categories by which one could define an identity. Just thought of another related two: ‘political-apolitical,’ and ‘leftist-rightist.’ Wait! I’m also thinking of economic, behavioral, and vocational…”
 
“Okay, okay. I get it. You think that there is an interminable list of identifying categories. I assume that some are physical and others not-so-physical. I’ll also assume that all those categories you list overlap, that in ‘identity’ there is no mutual exclusivity. Also, that time can be irrelevant, that no sequential set of identities has to limit your ability to ‘self-identify.’ So, maybe, one of those enduring themes in literature takes us down the wrong path of understanding. I’m just thinking aloud here, but aren’t many literary works—and that includes scripts for films—based on a search for identity. ‘Who am I?’ is a question asked by fictional characters too numerous to mention. To answer requires a search. But in all those stories, the character discovers an identity; there's an end to the search because otherwise, the story would never end.”
 
“Try me,” you say. “Just name a few search-for-identity characters so I get the idea. But keep it short and simple.”
 
“Luke Skywalker, for one. Holden Caulfield, for another. Jing-Mei Woo, too. Talk about interminable lists. Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor would be proud. Seems there are as many stories centered on the search for identity as there are fractions between two whole numbers. Certainly the number seems to be infinite, or, at least, indefinite. Many characters go off in search of who they are; many, like Oedipus, upon finding out, are disappointed by what they find.”
 
“Why are you stuck on this topic today, Mr. Inquisitive?” you ask.
 
“Well, it occurs to me that if I adopt a list of inclusive categories—like your list—the search can never end, that each of us spends a lifetime in the search for identity and that no final resolution, no final, definitive identity is assignable to any of us, unless we accept that those who stop searching because it wears them down can say definitively, ‘This is what I am; I’m happy to be this, or, at least, I’m satisfied with the identity I choose to end the search.’ Take Georg Cantor. Violinist, great student, mathematician, founder of a society, professor, husband, father, center of controversy over his set theory, part-time philosopher and Shakespeare/Bacon scholar, and frequently depressed individual, so depressed at times as to be committed to a sanitarium, dying in one after years more filled with searching than with finding. Talk about sets of overlapping identities!”
 
“Now you have me wondering about my own identity. Or, should I say identities? Thanks. I started the day knowing who I was. Now I have to go off in search of…. Oh! I get it. I'm a character in a never ending story.”

We’re really in a bind. Understanding the Cosmos and our place in it seems to be impossible. We’ve been throwing around the same ideas for 2,500 years without reaching an agreement. What is this place we inhabit? Why do we keep reiterating the philosophies of ancient Greeks and casting them in neologisms and new imagery?
 
Heraclitus, if I understand him correctly, thought that all that we see is a manifestation of some eternal fire, some “mind of God,” the Logos that is also the Pyr Aeizoon. This Eternal Fire is somehow responsible for the world as it is for us and is at the same time part of the world we know. It is the elementary substance from which The All comes and goes in a cycle. And, because fire constantly changes, the world undergoes constant change within the context of that cycle driven by Logos (or Eternal Fire). Strangely, this philosopher of Fire-as-the-primary-element is best known for his “you can’t put your foot in the same river twice” fragment. Oh! Well! why not mix the metaphors in a topic too difficult for humans to understand, a topic fraught with contradictions and mystery?
 
Like the mystery of space. Within half a century of Heraclitus’ birth, Zeno entered the world from another direction: Lack of change, the not-the-cycling-Pyr, but rather from the Unchanging One that his teacher, Parmenides and other Eleatics taught was responsible for this Illusory World of Motion. Zeno, in his famous tale of Achilles and the tortoise, demonstrated the impossibility of motion by dividing space into ever-smaller units. And now where are we with the Mysteries of Origin and the Makeup of the Cosmos thousands of years after Zeno and more than a century of Einstein’s unifying spacetime? We’re back wondering whether or not space isn’t smooth, but is, rather, divisible into units on some sub-quantum level smaller than the Planck Length.
 
And the origin of the universe? All those ancients struggled to name a Source, a primary substance so basic that everything derived from it, Heraclitus’ Fire, for example, or Thales’ Water, both of which are members of a class of four basic “elements,” the others being Earth and Air. Now, that is, today, we have an origin of All in the Vacuum, where a quantum foam of virtual particles comes into and goes out of existence without the aid of some Nous—an overarching Mind. What’s next in our attempt to understand the Cosmos? Will we go back to Empedocles to suggest that the coming into and going out of existence is the work first of Love and then of Strife, the ancient philosopher’s ideas that seem to parallel what we call gravity, Dark Energy, and quantum foam?
 
Is Whatever-makes-the-world part of the world it makes as Heraclitus proposed for the Eternal Fire in the sixth century BC? Is the recipe an ingredient? Apparently, those in the Hawking School think so. Or is there a corollary in the world of Christianity that puts theology on a footing equal to philosophy and physics, whose proponents reject the idea of a Creator or a Nous in favor of a “natural process”? Is it possible that what we believe to be modern, sophisticated and intellectually superior concepts are mere reworkings of ancient thought and parallels of theological concepts backed by a mathematics of convenience? Sure, our experiments in colliders work, but we don’t understand why they work, why, for example, the fundamental forces have the strengths they have or why particles like quarks come in threes.
 
At Easter and regardless of one’s level of belief or disbelief, a process of rethinking those ancient intellectual struggles might serve us well as we reconsider our place in Place. The Cosmos, after all, is a Place. Is that Place quantized on the level of the Planck distance or even smaller to the delight of Zeno? Does the Cosmos originate from a Nous, a Mind that is also the Logos, the Word?
 
If you read the beginning of St. John’s Gospel, you see another take on the Logos and the Source of the Cosmos, not as the concept of the Eternal Fire alone, but rather more like a combination of Heraclitean thought and the Eleatic School’s Unchanging Being: In some ways the same and yet different. Here’s one version of what John wrote: “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made” (King James version).
 
You know that “made in the Image of God” thing people say? For St. Augustine of Hippo, the brilliant once-Zoroastrian-turned-Neoplatonist-Church-Father, what John wrote suggests that everything in the Cosmos is a manifestation of the Image of God because “nothing was made that was not made through the Word.” So, we’re back to the mystery, again.
 
Are we the Image of the Vacuum as the Hawking School would have us believe? And is that Vacuum much different from the Void of Genesis, the Nothing from which the Cosmos originated? Is there, instead, some Primary Element of a Greek philosopher that, without Mind, generates a Cosmos? Or is there some Nous, some Mind behind the change Heraclitus recognized and Zeno denied? And if we choose to accept the Nous or the Word, do we then accept that it is somehow part of its creation? Is the Vacuum of Space where the quantum foam comes into and goes out of existence part of the Cosmos it creates? Have the modern-day philosophers of physics made the equivalent of Heraclitus’ Eternal Fire, somehow both Creator and Creation? Somehow responsible for the origin of It All, and yet locked into its continued existence? And if our modern-day physics/philosophers are correct, are they really much different from John and Augustine who saw the Word as Incarnate? The recipe becoming an ingredient?
 
As I said above, Easter is a good time to reassess where we stand on the matter of Place, on the role of Love as synthesizer and Strife as separator. Quantum foam coming into and going out of existence? Isn’t that much like the war between Empedocles’ Love and Strife?
 
Those who profess a theological explanation of the Cosmos might find themselves the objects of elitist derision among their philosophical counterparts. But if one looks at the incipient beliefs built into modern physical hypotheses and theories, one might find numerous parallels. Condescension is as common among scientists as condemnation is among believers. Both need to look closely at one another’s explanations of why the Cosmos is as it is, how it continues to be as it does, and what its components demonstrate about its relationship to its recipe.

I'll reiterate: Easter seems to be a fitting time for that closer look.    

In Greek mythology, Heracles (Hercules) killed the Nemean lion and used its skin as a cloak. I don’t know whether or not that “lion” was a lion; it had claws sharp enough to cut armor and an impenetrable skin. And it was big. That Heracles guy must have been pretty strong. Certainly, that’s the enduring impression we have of him because of the story about the Nemean lion. Of course, we know the story was just a story, but think of how long that story has endured and how it has influenced drama, poetry, literature, and film—and through them, us.
 
If a reporter labels some critter a “lion,” it becomes a lion.
 
An online story published by France24 * has this title: “Researchers find ancient giant ‘lion’ in Kenya.” Now, I’ll give the reporter(s) credit for the use of quotation marks around lion. But think. In your extraordinarily busy day of tasks, concerns, and clicks by the hundreds, are you going to read much more than that title? I don’t think so. The ancient Miocene creature Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, belonged to the subfamily of carnivorous animals called Hyainailourinae. The critter in question was big, about as big as a Volkswagen Beetle, about 3,000 lbs.
 
But it was not a lion in the same way that lions are lions. Lions belong to the subfamily Pantherinae (-inae is the suffix for subfamilies; -idea, for families). ** And, apparently, not even the Nemean lion was a “lion” as we know them.
 
Back to what I was saying. In today’s busy world, the first read becomes the only read. We’re a bit too occupied to do further research on details. Besides, how many people are interested in vertebrate paleontology beyond an occasional visit to a museum to show children the bones of T-Rex or the giant sloth? Certainly, not many are going to read a scientific journal article that argues the species designation on the basis of some teeth. So, Simbakubwa kutokaafrika becomes a ‘lion’ forever in the minds of the cursory reader.
 
And that’s where the power of the reporter(s) occurs. In just a word of reporting on anything—medicine, technology, discovery, politics, society, or entertainment—reporters can lionize anything or anyone. And they can destroy or build a reputation in a word. Who reads beyond the headline nowadays? Who delves into details? And who questions relentlessly?
 
How many times have you accepted a headline as a complete story? Think. Not every lion reported to be a Nemean lion is a Nemean lion.
 
*No idea. Some kind of a news service, I assume. I was too lazy to look it up, just too many clicks, I figured. Anyway, it’s there, online, at https://www.france24.com/en/20190418-researchers-discover-ancient-giant-lion-kenya-0 for you to read. Accessed on April 18, 2019.
The original from which the reporter(s) inferred “lion” was an article published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology:
Borths, Matthew R. and Nancy J. Stevens. Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, gen. etg sp. nov. (Hyainailourinae, Hyaenodonta, ‘Creodonta,’ Mmamalia), a gigantic carnivore from the earliest Miocene of Kenya. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Published online April 17, 2019 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2019.1570222 Accessed April 18, 2019. The original article has a good diagram of the carnassial families to which Simbakubwa kutokaafrika belongs and a timeline of their relationships.
 
**Lion: Animal with a spine (Chordata); mammal, carnivore, Order Feliformia, Family Felidae, Subfamily Pantherinae, Genus, Panthera, Species, leo. Simbakubwa kutokaafrika belonged to Family Hyainailoluridae, not Felidae.

In times of stress and conflict, we hear people say that we’re all connected; we’re all human. “Trite,” the haughty one says, “and mind pablum.”
 
But we can’t get by more than a few days without seeing subtle signs of connection, and I don’t mean connection with close friends or loved ones. I’m talking strangers who remain strangers. Ever hold the door open for someone you don’t know? Ever let another driver go first at a four-way stop sign? Drive a Jeep Wrangler? Note you wave to a passing driver in another Wrangler. Motorcyclists? Why are those left hands out in a stationary “wave” as they pass each other? Or this: The batter steps into the box, performs a little ritual, while the pitcher waits—somehow they cooperate with the umpire and catcher and everyone else on the field to determine the time of the pitch without anyone’s saying a word. You can probably think of other examples of subtle connections, minds strange to each other somehow cooperating in a common or altruistic behavior.
 
Sure, there are ostensibly more significant connections, like those among loved ones or business partners, those between diplomats, and those in medical emergencies. The big connections are rather obvious and are sometimes even historical, such as the downing of the Twin Towers in New York or the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, both incidents somehow connecting people without a word spoken. But it’s those little connections, the subtle ones, that daily demonstrate what we share as humans.
 
So, the next time someone entering a building or an elevator ahead of you holds the door, recognize that connection you have as strangers with a common mind.

Anytime you fear another, recognize that all are human, and humans have a common weakness. The ancient historian Herodotus, reporting on the call for assistance from the Greeks at Thermopylae, put it this way. Facing the threat posed by the massive Persian army, they instructed their envoys to go to the Locrians and Phocians for additional troops, saying,
 
            “There was no cause why they should fear, for after all the invader was not a god but a man; and there never had been, and never would be, a man who was not…. [susceptible to] misfortune from the very day of his birth, and those misfortunes greater in proportion to his own greatness. The assailant therefore, being only a mortal, must needs fall from his glory.” (30) *
 
When Colonel Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteer Infantry in 1861 he had already had combat experience in the Mexican War. Yet, as he led his volunteers on their first mission, he was concerned, maybe even apprehensive.  Colonel Thomas Harris had moved his Confederate troops into northern Missouri near the town of Florida. Grant was sent to engage Harris. When his infantry reached the encampment of the secessionists, he found they had retreated rather than face him and his men. Grant later wrote about what he learned at the moment he saw the empty encampment: Harris had been just as apprehensive—or even more so—about engaging him as he had been about engaging Harris in a fight.
 
Do I need to say more? Fear not, reader; fear not. In the amusement park of life, all ride the wheel of fortune.
 
*Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Trans. by George Rawlinson. In Selections from Greek and Roman Historians, Ed. By C. A. Robinson, Jr. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1957.