The Tyranny of Big Numbers

Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw. 

I can see the day coming when even your home garden

 is gonna be against the law.

-Bob Dylan-

______________

The problem with living on a planet with 7 billion other people is that the tiniest of things become consequential.  Something that costs me less money than I would be willing to bend down to pick up translates to obscenely vast amounts of money and resources just because there are so many humans infesting our world who might just reach for that penny too..

The things we hear from environmentalists may make them seem like out of control Luddites and haters of technology, but in the kind of crazy way the flap of a butterfly wing may cause hurricanes, plugging your cell phone into a charger in your car is the equivalent of burning almost a billion pounds of coal. Or so we're told by credible sources. How then can we justify having hot water in our homes or eating toast for breakfast or refrigerating our food?  How soon before we live in the dark and cold and eat raw potatoes just to keep life from going extinct?

The need to save energy seems like it's going to choke the life out of us and bring civilization to the point of collapse if you read the warnings, and a Kategorischer Imperativ hangs over our heads like a sword. Costs a penny to make a slice of toast? What ef everyone did it -- the world would go dark and trillions and trillions of Watts would be used and mountains of coal would burn and the sky would turn black as night.  Light a candle against the dark and you destroy the world by adding umpteen gazillions of pounds of Carbon Dioxide to the air. Don't ring the doorbell which uses a microwatt second -- just knock.  Make a pot of coffee and some island sinks beneath the waves. Stand away from that car, the dome light alone would use megawatts per second if everyone did it.

7 billion people!  If we all face West and fart, the planet will stop turning.  We need to ban beans but how soon before it's 10 billion -- 20 billion people?  Kind of suggests that the "lets produce food like we did 200 years ago"  people may become food for the starving billions and all the "save the planet" schemes and products will fade away with the power mower when we start to eat our lawns because there's no more agriculture.

But of course you're environmentally conscious and so you didn't read this because it would take enough power to move Everest to Idaho if you all did and so you'll just go ahead and act like you're not the planet-killing consumer you are and you will just go on making phone calls and flushing the toilet and eating a hot breakfast until it all blows up.  Me?  I don't give a damn so batten your hatches and stock up on bottled water. My phone needs charging and I'm gonna plug it into my great big V8 automobile and do it right now!

Whites Only -- Like When America Was Great.

The myth of past greatness has been part of western culture for thousands of years in the fantasy of Eden and it's handmaiden myths of a messiah who will restore past bliss -- or worse, past glory.

But some kind of glorious America of the past is found in most political rhetoric today and particularly that of the Right and it can't help but to remind me of  the speeches of Mussolini and Hitler and previous would-be Roman Emperors seeking to restore a totalitarian empire.  I do have to wonder what grand utopia the Republicans want to restore us to.  Every rightist I've talked to or heard from gets evasive when questioned but I suspect it was some magical time before the Emancipation Proclamation if not before the establishment of the United States itself.

For those of us who would rather not return to the glory days of the Civil War, yet who continue to espouse the fundamentals of the Confederacy it must be difficult to be specific.  I'd love to ask Texas Governor Abbott if he sees a difference between having 50 semi-independent States and a United States with the sort of constitution he proposes to replace the existing one where any state is able to ignore any laws or court rulings they please.  Is he proposing that Texas revert to an independent Republic?  OK by me, but apparently not with the mainstream GOP. I doubt enough of the rest of the country will go along with it, but perhaps he'd like to nullify the requirements  before the liberty to do so is voted down, or perhaps he envisions another Fort Sumter or armed uprising of beer-bellied good old boys led by Ted Nugent.

Others are more honest about the ideal America, one where everyone is of Western European ancestry and preferably of the blonde "Aryan" variety. Jared Taylor, editor of the supremacist magazine American Renaissance has been annoying Iowans with robo-calls in support of Donald Trump by saying:

 “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture,”  

Now there's a statement that assumes that such people are of the same mind as mindless racists like him.  Smart and Educated are a couple of terms that seem a bit out of place to say the least.  And of course the phrase "our culture" is evidently a rather personal and racist one as well as ignorant since many European whites are  Muslim.  One suspects that Mr. Taylor would have problems with White European Jews or even Catholics as well, but I don't want to deprive him of the opportunity to tell us who might be eligible to remain after Donald Trump is elected.

Taylor's party calls itself the American Freedom Party, predictable when you notice how much people out to replace the United States with a racist confederacy of  race and religion based political entities tend to use the term "freedom." And also, of course the epithet "Patriot" which is usually defined as someone with a lot of guns, but getting back to getting back to when "America was great" which is Donald Trump's stated ambition and one he shares with the Nazis and other radical nitwits:  is anyone stupid enough not to see the agenda?  Is Trump's idea of  past greatness remotely similar to ours?  Is it the same Eden as advocated by Lester Maddox, George Wallace or any of the unreconstructed, die-hard rebels and secessionists waiting for the South to rise again?

Why aren't the media asking?  Why aren't we taking time out from the squabbling about gun shows and police brutality and calling ourselves racists -- why can't we put aside the petty witch hunts and ask if a vote for Trump or Cruz a vote for Jefferson Davis, is a vote for racism, anarchy and a Second Civil War?

I'm afraid not.  I'm afraid our narcissistic self-righteousness will prevail and we son't vote and we'll hand our future over to the ugly past because we think Hillary's e-mails were, like Benghazi and Whitewater and Hot Lips Lewinsky, much more important.

The Last Shall be First

It's a distinctive phenomenon of our century that the morons always have the last word. Were God to descend on a cloud and give us all the answers, you can be sure there would be live blogging and a Twitter crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Is there some greater meaning to the fact that advances in technology have made it possible to add new elements to the periodic table?  One can infer that science is still marching on in our ability to see existence as it is while the twits twitter about their superstitions about nature, but reading comments on the announcement that the 7th row of the table is now complete, it seems that the sort of people who love to lecture us on the power of crystals and mysterious energies and what the "universe" is telling them about our personal relationships feel that it's an indication of how imperfect science is when compared to ignorance.  Of course they don't call it ignorance.They call it "alternative" or "new age" but what the game is, is to assert that because science does not have all the answers, ignorance is an equivalent. Conjecture is as valid as science and fallacy can be sufficient support for any conclusion.

"I love this sort of thing as yet again science has to be changed. They love to claim that science is so exact and accurate and teach the periodic table as if that's it, there's no more and oh, whoops yes there is. 

It makes those scientists who claim certain things are totally impossible and then proved wrong to be the big headed fools they are"

writes someone on Facebook in response to the addition of 4 new trans-Uranium elements, which of course don't occur in the narrow segment of nature we can observe with our senses, but in massive particle accelerators and only for nanoseconds. One might consider them as phenomena rather than things one can use as a heavy paperweight or something heavy to throw at the posturing idiots who write such things.  Of course he has no idea what science is or what scientists say or do and sadly, he's not alone.. I hear people compare science to common sense, to conjecture, to imagination and to closed-mindedness in the same way Church men vilify the infidel.  

The reverse is true:  adding things to the body of knowledge that can be experimentally and repeatedly confirmed illustrates that science continues to be useful. 

I have to wonder about people who are desperate to show that scientists are blind, stubborn defenders of outmoded ideas. Are they blind stubborn defenders of fakery, shamanism, superstition and the empty mysticism that makes up popular religion?  Certainly people who sell bogus health and nutrition products tend to misrepresent and denounce any process that would require them to prove that copper bracelets tuned to "natural frequencies" do anything but make them wealthy. But people, many of them pretenders to Liberal thought, are less scientifically literate than can be attributed to lack of education. There's something more to the people who will ignore overwhelming contradictory evidence yet will believe something without any evidence at all because they read it in an advertisement or on a website.

the faith of people who believe vaccines don't work, Neil Armstrong never went to the moon, the Boston Marathon Bombing didn't happen, Aluminum pots cause Alzheimers, pyramids sharpen razors and a measureless array of fraud, hoax, scam and baseless rumor is almost always unshakable. So of course, science is laughable because some putz thinks Element 113 was right there on the lab bench and nobody noticed or that some guy in a white coat insisted there were no elements past Lawrencium.

It's not ignorance, it's madness -- one of those communicable mental conditions that infest our culture. That culture is filled with belief systems that strengthen the ignorant in their convictions, that flatter and sooth the people who fall into the trap. Anything that makes the left-behind, the unfit refuse of progress feel good about what they are is bound to succeed in an age where knowledge is rapidly expanding. I see it as something filling the niches abandoned by the shrinkage in traditional religions -- a kind of pure land transcendentalism promising transport to a "natural," spiritual and pure existence where believing is seeing and we don't need to show you no stinking science.

Terrorism?

One of the results of the degradation of language and of journalistic laziness in America is the inability to find words that accurately describe things, and consequently conversation tends to become trapped in the struggle to describe what's going on with a limited choice of words rather than to discuss what to do about it.

"What do we call this" asks the Press.  Is the armed occupation of a Federal building by a group attempting to force the Federal Government to give in to their wishes and to stop due process at gunpoint "terrorism?"  It's hard to answer the question -- as hard as it is to find it relevant.  The question of whether anyone in the isolated and vacant building, or indeed in Washington feels a sense of terror is moot.  The question of whether it's armed insurrection cries out for an answer even if all the journalists lack the vocabulary to give one.

Are these "good guys with guns" "protesting"  unfair actions and policies of the Government or are they an ad hoc and illegitimate militia staging an armed attack on the United States?  The story may be too complex for simple minds, but it includes misappropriation of public resources, arson and destruction of evidence,  and although no shots have as yet been  fired: Rebellion.  We've seen it before: the Whisky Rebellion, Shay's rebellion, the Wilmington Rebellion of 1898 and others are blemishes on the face of democracy and constitutional government, some of which were factors in the drafting of the Second Amendment. Was the attack on Fort Sumter an act of domestic terrorism or an act of war?  Did it suggest the use of policemen or of the Military?

All the rifle rattling of recent years, promoted and praised by various right-wing movements and their lackeys in Congress and the Press has allowed enemies of  civilization to hide behind a screen of misleading rhetoric as the Klansmen hide behind sheets while bypassing law and order for personal gain.  The idea has been promoted that continual rebellion is progress and that revolution, as Mao Zedong told us, speaks from the muzzle of a gun.  "We don't like the results of that election, so warm up the Winchester Bubba, we're gonna take over the courthouse." That's just the kind of patriotism the Founding Fathers had in mind, say the guys in camouflage while the ghosts of the Bolsheviks smile down in Hell.

There's a word for this when the guns are in the hands of a foreign entity:  War.  There are words for it when "sovereign" citizens confront our government with force of arms: Rebellion, Treason, Insurrection, revolution. Choose one, choose them all, but none of them are patriotic. All are enemies of the basic premises of  our government. All of it assumes that the laws that ensure our freedom are the enemies of freedom and that only the armed are free.  It's time to face facts, to stop whimpering, to identify the enemy and deal with him harshly.

So is the new Like

So I've been trying to get attention with my observation that younger Americans are beginning their sentences with the word "So" ad nauseam.  So no one wants to hear it.  So we have a new year now and so perhaps with the release of the annual  "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use,Over-Use or General Uselessness" by Lake Superior State University in Michigan, my readers will stop ignoring me.   "So" is at the top of the list.

LSSU has been issuing the list since 1976 and although it usually makes me smile in agreement and makes me feel validated as a curmudgeon of worth, nothing really changes.  Americans are so infatuated with baby-talk and with sounding like the other illiterates trying to seem hip or educated or even oneness with the masses  they're not easily persuaded that working "selfie" or cray-cray into every line is just plain stupid or that it's time to stop demanding that we "have a conversation" as a euphemism for "shut up and listen."

Of course these little infatuations do fade eventually.  Starting a sentence with so will go the way of starting a sentence with "say" and fewer sentences will be larded with "like" as they were in the 1990's. But you cant be sure. Both affect and effect are gone forever it seems, and no one sends invitations any more.  It's nearly certain however, that words that sound similar will continue to undergo a kind of syncretism. Our grandchildren will tell us to "annunciate" our words and to assault our ears with other false congnates while English Teachers nod approvingly and the American vocabulary will continue to swell like cheap sausage with inert ingredients and other stuffing. It's just Cray-Cray.

But not all of us will go gently into that confused darkness. LSSU and I, like Quixote and Panza will go on as America hashtags and twerks itself into an epic fail.

It's a Wonderful Lie

Christmas seems to bring out the worst in Americans, particularly the ones who still think "hippies" are burning flags to protest a war that most Americans don't remember.  You know, those Bully Boys who walk around with a chip on their shoulders daring you to say anything that allows them to pick a fight with the "politically correct" or those who have read history.

This thing has been making the rounds today and judging by the comments, not too many people realize that the "founding Fathers" version of that propaganda aimed at school children was written in 1892, not 1776.  When Eisenhower was pressured by godmongers to change it in 1954, during the height of the cold war, it wasn't mentioned that it had been written by a Socialist -- surprising in an era where that other relic, inseparable from the holiday, It's a Wonderful Life was seen as containing secret Communist messages to corrupt the young mind and was investigated by HUAC. After all it does criticize the Sacred Banks and other institutions of Capitalist  greed.  The original pledge called it "My" flag after all, suggesting that it belongs to all of us, not just to some Armed Patriot's Sovereign Citizen Christian Militia of God, Guns and Guts.

Am I suggesting that these penis-waving patriots are possessed of disordered personalities as well as a fair amount of ignorance and dishonesty? Well yes I am, thank you very much and thanks to them for another Fuck You Christmas.

I suppose the dark days of the late 1940's and the 1950's are that

great golden age these Trumpish idiots would return to: forgetting all the while about those 90% marginal tax brackets and dramatically higher poverty levels.  The middle class was doing pretty well after all with all that commie stuff like a 5 day work week -- and Socialist Security didn't bankrupt the wealthy after all. With all the bitching and moaning at the time, we still remember it as a wonderful life with the same hubris we talk about Christmas as a time of peace while making it into a Jesus Jihad against Liberals, atheists and Mooslims who once had the audacity to see the sacred flag and this sacred soil as theirs.

Yes, Christmas, that Holiday Christians have denounced and promoted in equal measure since the Romans invented it is nothing but a billboard, a soap box on which meanness, anger, aggression and greed are proclaimed throughout the land. To say Merry Christmas has become too much like that debauched and sordid "pledge" wherein the oppressed abused, exploited and downtrodden are forced to acknowledged the gods of greed and to pretend that the USA is a place of "liberty and justice for all."  It's a wonderful lie, once again.

SEAsons Greetings from (O)CT(O)PUS

No well-wishers left behind:

Rocky

Shaw

Captain Fog

Rational Nation

Jono

Flying Junior

okjimm

The Anger Games

"Like all of you, I'm angry"

That's a bit presumptuous actually, but of course Carly was speaking to Republicans, and they've been the party of recreational anger for quite a while.  I listen to Republicans all the time and can see how much they enjoy Obama bashing and displaying the anger that makes them feel relevant: anger which only requires a tiny bit of processed information to justify it and some little and dubious story to draw attention away from an ocean of enormities.

At a Christmas party on Saturday night, someone told me that because of the way that Obama was prosecuting "whistle blowers" we were becoming just like Putin's Russia.  "Are we talking about Snowden?" I asked and she nodded.  Puzzling, of course since  Putin's Russia is sheltering him and the Republicans as I recall saw the man as a traitor, but I can't speak for them when they can't get their own stories straight in the first place.

They get the anger straight though, even if it's as crooked as their policies and based on fiction. Anger is the bait. Anger is the chum they cast overboard to attract the fish and that sort of fishing has been going on forever, stirring up the rabble and intellectual refuse as well as the rich and greedy. Every demagogue and tyrant and every oppressor has mastered it.  Victims are very easy to control and so many are willing to see themselves as victims and willing to see the scapegoats provided as targets of hate and outrage.

Of course there's humor in these "debates" since they are anything but.  There's humor in these assemblages of the least qualified-for-office actors one could possible find outside of prison. There's even some fulsome humor in the way the media pay attention to them as though there were anything respectable in the enterprise, angry people being the sort of people who watch their endless harangues.

But no, I resist playing the anger games.  I try to remember that the best revenge is in the ballot box and that having 30% of  the support of  a minority party is not terribly threatening.  Matching Trump or Cruz or  Rubio against  even  Berrnie Sanders can't make them feel too confident.  If it did, their tactics would be more rational and less racist.  They have only the angry mob while we have the votes if we will stop fighting with ourselves over terminology and doctrine and a host of matters that seem rather small when viewed alongside the potential horror of another Republican madman in office.

Stop Intrusive Internet Advertising: Boycott!

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Has anyone noticed an invasion of intrusive advertising taking over Cyberspace?  Some pop-up ads have held my browser captive and literally took over my computer.

At the Huffington Post, an Ebay advertisement blackened my computer screen and held my browser captive for eight seconds.  No big deal, you say?  Not on my computer, not in my home -- if you value your life!

If you click on videotaped reports at the CNN website, you will be forced to watch a 30 second commercial.  Canceling the commercial message returns you to the headline menu: If you are unwilling to endure the message, no news report.  

At the weblog of our friend and colleague, Rational Nation, a message from the Advertising Council disabled the comment function.  Even after several attempts, I was forced to give up.

In many instances, advertisers have made Internet sites inaccessible and useless.

For my part, I intend to boycott those advertisers that encroach upon freedoms I formerly took for granted.  I will boycott Ebay, boycott CNN, boycott the Advertising Council, and boycott any web site that capriciously mistreats its readers.   

Send the f*ckers a message.  May the BACKLASH begin!

LET'S GO VIRAL!

For Bart, 1944 - 1995

Café de Flore, and reading Kerouac for the first time ever and lingering over coffee and the heat is building because it's late morning and it’s August -- and because we're young and reading Kerouac, it's time to leave like everyone else. Flogging the Fiat down to Juan-les-Pins, and we do it non-stop except for coffee and gasoline in stations where you're invited to Mettez un Tigre dans votre Moteur as though it would help.  Cars and dust and white cups at metal tables.

Arid August hills and distant ruins,

winding roads descend

in complicated turns

Driving too fast for the car,

we skitter,

revving a bit too high

and suddenly

in the V of the hills 

a blue-white glimpse of sea

and the road screamed YES

as we came down.

And all those mornings. My sandals and my woven mat; coffee in a bathing suit and all those Paris girls down for the summer.