Watch the things you gave your life to, broken. Stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.
Courtesy of Lokis Revenge Blog. These are links.
National Soil Erosion Rates on Track to Repeat Dust Bowl-era Losses Eight Times Over ( UCS 2020 )
Expect more mega-droughts ( ScienceDaily 2020 )
1 million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction ( Nat Geo 2019 )
97% of great fresh water species gone since 1970 ( Guardian 2019 )
96% of mammals are livestock and human ( Ecowatch 2018 )
96% of tigers gone in 100 years ( IFL Science 2019 )
90% of elephants gone in 100 years ( Hurriet 2019 )
90% of lions gone in 100 years ( African Impact 2019 )
90% of Leatherback sea turtles gone since 1980 ( Earth Watch undated )
90% of Monarch Butterflies gone in 20 years ( Inhabitat 2014 )
80% of Antarctic Krill gone in 30 years ( Research Gate 2005 )
77% of Eastern lowland gorillas gone since 1996 ( Treehugger 2020 )
60% of world’s wildlife has been wiped out since 1970 ( CBC 2018 )
50% of Marine vertebrates gone since 1970 ( WWF 2015 )
50% of Great Barrier Reef gone since 1985 ( Live Science 2012 )
40% of Giraffes gone since 1990 ( NRDC 2019 )
40% less insects in next 30 years ( PNAS 2019 )
4% of mammals are wildlife ( Vegan News 2020 )
700 Marine Species Might Go Extinct Because of Plastic ( Green Planet 2019 )
500 vertebrate species of less than 1,000 individuals ( PNAS 2020 )
500 species of animal have gone extinct since 1900( RD 2019 )
Friday September 10th,
Are you going to say no to the digital driver's license when it gives you a discount as you use it as an ID in a business? I did not think so. Technology is a shiny object to you. And you are a slave to it. As soon as it is socially sanctioned, your ability to resist is gone. Do you say no to free money? Are you capable of doing so? I did not think so.
You will like the convenience. Technique is everything. A code is scanned on your phone, then everything about you is available to the scanner. The perfect master slave scanner scanee relationship. It only takes an instant when things work. Power and private property, inequality and want, all locked in a blockchain forever. It is the coming thing. You will not say no. You will not oppose this. You do not have it in you to fight. You are the technology animal. Like the killer whale is the king of the sea. It is what you were bred to be. You cannot say no. You are fine with it.
Meta-technology could see the danger and make digital identification illegal. But you will say such madness is an infringement of your rights and freedoms. We certainly can't have that! Freedom and technology twist together in your brain the same way pictures of feet and the penis of Quentin Tarantino twist together. A twisted analogy and fine enough for Quentin. But I will keep my socks on. Without movies, pushing a perversion on others would go too far. Sensibilities are offended and reason would intervene. But using technology to do it for you makes it all OK. Reason does not intervene. What else is technology for but to make things OK? Thank you Eadweard Muybridge. You had more influence than Hitler on our world. And nobody reading this even knows who you are 
!
Not using technology for the free expression of perversion of all kinds is censorship. As you know! All bases are covered in our technology game. Technology always wins, and you can't say no to it. So Jason Bermas, you are wasting your breath. Nobody cares.
I wish it could be different. I really do. In another time and place, for a while, a little while, thing could be different. Humanity might endure. But not in our life, not in this time. Nothing came first to slow us down, and we don't have a superman to save us. Our civilization will crash. So enjoy it while you can. It will be gone. There is too much ignorance for things to work out any other way.
At least half of all fossil fuels have been used up to build an artificial world. A technical world that was better understood by most people thirty years ago. A technical world that needs endless energy to keep wheels spinning. A world that needs more surface area to feed its exploded population than it has.
How will we eat in the future? Without fossil fuels we won't is the answer to that question. When oil goes, crop yields fall to medieval levels, if that. Medieval life had topsoil, we won't have any of it. Medieval life had animals to help too. Chihuahua dogs do not plow fields. Technology burned our topsoil away. Topsoil is half in the air as CO2, along with burned oil and coal. Drought and extreme heat reduced global grain production by a tenth in the last fifty years. How do you think bushels per acre in the next fifty years are going to work out?
A question, not to worry. Technology will save us, right? Imagine again the endless spiral of life and growth. Purge the reality of a vicious circle from your head. A vicious circle that does not make peace with things as they are. Do that, and you are a thread in the fabric of modern life. Out of sight and out of mind, the world does not exist. That is the secret of modern life.
Describing it as a long emergency is not descriptive enough. A long emergency implies a civilization which recovers. There will be no recovery. Our civilization goes the way of the Maya. The Maya starved and killed each other for leftover scraps after they changed their climate. Extended Armageddon is a more accurate description. There will be no recovery for humans. If the stars are ours, they will belong to the intelligent race of raccoons we spawn in our debris after about five million years. The stars will not belong to us.
The first intelligent species on a planet can only prepare their world for a future intelligent species, and must themselves become extinct (Hayes's Law). They do this by depleting resources that runaway technology depends on. Only a second intelligent species, constrained to slow growth in technical ability by depleted resources, can endure. A successful civilization is constrained by the guidance of meta-technology. In most solar systems, civilizations never get past rampant growth fueled by unconstrained technical abilities. Civilizations unconstrained by a meta-technology. First civilizations thus always burn and crash. This is why there are no aliens on Earth. They exist in the universe, but they are so rare we have not met any. In the time we have left, we will not likely meet any of them.
Monday September 6th,
I am so left out. Nobody shared a matchbook with me. I did not have a website Q-Code to find out where to go to get my online immunology degree. It is a shame since I know how people can become qualified quantum mechanics. 
We could have shared. And I am a Bayesian. That cat used to be Schrodinger's but Schrodinger did take his presence seriously. Always acting like he was not quite there. His friends call him fuzzy. His personality twinkles.
Being a Bayesian is a problem. Bayesian methods address pressing questions in diverse applications. Weather forecasting, health care policy, criminal justice. If a person wants to make consistent and sound decisions in the face of uncertainty, the way to do it is to use Bayesian methods. But you will be a shit-lib if you do. That is what you will be called.
Frequentist Frank, Stubborn Stu, and Bayesian Betty all visit a dollar store off the freeway. It is in a run down mini-mall. Walking out the store they pass an open purple hand with an big eyeball painted on the palm. Painted on glass it covers the whole front window of what had once been the office of a now long dead optometrist. Next to the dollar store. It is hot. The air conditioning is out and the new tenant, Claire Voyant, stands outside her door, smoking.
As chance has it Frank has been shuffling a deck of cards he paid 99 cents for five minutes ago. He is thinking about his chances of getting lucky with Betty later. Frank hopes Stu finds something better to do. Frank stops suddenly before Claire. Correctly guessing her to be the fortune-teller from the store. Claire is wearing a purple gypsy dress. Claire has so many rings on her fingers she has trouble holding her cigarette up. It trembles. Frank is not clairvoyant.
Holding a card up so only Frank, Betty and Stu can see it, Frank asks Claire what color is it. Red or black?
Claire looks at Frank. She notices Frank quickly glance at Betty. Claire studies Franks face. It tells her red. Claire sees a hint of excited tension in Frank so Claire guesses right. Then with a smooth motion of someone trying to impress, Frank holds another card up.
This one is easier for Claire. The expression on Frank's expression is more muted, less lively. So Claire says Black. That one was easier for her to do than the first one. The third card is the easiest of all. Claire noted Betty's reaction to the first and second cards. The flickering in her eyes announces the third card is red. Claire smiling, motions to the door. Frank hands Claire a dollar and the three move on.
Later Stubborn Stu who never gets lucky, says, 'A chance in a thousand she is a real psychic. And I only say that because she got three in a row right.
Frequentist Frank sees things differently. Hoping to get freaky with Betty later. Frank is thinking positive. Frank says to Stu, 'Data is everything. She got three out of three right, She clearly has psychic powers.
Frank tries to find the θ that makes him feel good. The observed data says Claire is a fortune-teller. That is part of the story but Frank made a wish as Claire was guessing so there is more to it. If she says red I'll be in bed is how it went. Something like that Frank wants Claire to be a fortune-teller. Frank needs her to be a fortune-teller. His wishes have to do with Betty.
This is a fancy way of saying that the chances of Claire guessing right three times in a row if she is psychic; is 100 percent. And the chances of Claire guessing right three times with no psychic powers at all is 12.5 percent. One chance in eight. Frank can't make a guess about Claire not being a psychic. His maximum-likelihood thinking does not let him. Frank sees two choices, nothing in between. He picks what suits him.
Betty thinks Stu and Frank are both extreme. Both men are making her weary. Stu pulls her down and she can feel Franks energy. It stresses her out and makes her feel icky. She does not want to be his tool. This is how Betty thinks.
Betty starts with a prior belief. Then Betty lets new data change her mind. At the end her belief is 'posterior' and in Bayesian lingo, is called as such.
Looking out the car window Betty thinks. 'I will start by agreeing with Stu. A chance in a thousand Claire is psychic. But based on what I saw, what are the chances Claire is psychic? Or:
Betty knows all these things. On the top the probability of Claire being right if she is psychic is 1. For 100%. That is multiplied by the prior chance she is psychic. Zero point 1%, or a chance in a thousand. Where Claire started from. Her data from Stu. Stu, who does not know what to do.
Betty reads the divisor to herself. The probability of Claire being right if she is psychic, plus the probability of Claire being right if she is not psychic. Covers all data possibilities. The probability of Claire being a psychic becomes 0.8% at the end of Betty's calculations. Not much of a chance, but with the data. More than Stu thought.
At the end of the day extreme thinking did not give a reasonable answer. Betty explained this to Claire in the evening at the end of their date together. When Claire motioned to the door early that day a message was passed between them in the gesture. A sign another sister would know. Claire and Betty are both lesbians.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it the next time you think about Joe Rogan taking horse medicine to cure his COVID. Maybe it did but he was taking that other stuff that you can't afford at $3000 a pop too. The southern State Governor medicine. They all take it when they get the Rona. So how would you know? The therapy that you can't get pollutes the happy subscriber-getting, taxpayer funded message.
Both Betty and Claire have the vax. They talked about both having it on the phone after Betty got rid of Stu and Frank.
Friday September 3rd,
Today the author and skipper of the charter boat Deep State makes veiled threats on his Friday fishing expedition. Suggesting Biden and retroactive abortion is a concept. For shame! The FBI should immediately arrest this man for treason. Lock him up instead of paying him to reel-in dissidents to flop around and reveal themselves in the hot sun of the homeland security surveillance deck. Like guarding an empty warehouse it is pointless, does not work, and only spends money. It would make sense if sense ever matters to shut the money sucker down. Shut the shebang down. Something about doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same result comes to mind.
The interview Amos had with Dr. Yair Argon was restored on You-Tube. I suppose anyone who has never experienced the anal rape of censorship might take this to mean the system works. The appeal apparently succeeded. Amos read it to me. He wrote it very well. The machinery of the war on terror re-purposed to fight COVID-19. Who coulda knowd!? Our secret Pentagon Army of 60,000 busy keeping us safe. Tax dollars that would have been spent anyway, all put to good use. Truly a star-spangled delight!
Having been a target I disagree. Authoritarian states are not big in the critical thinking department. Or so I have been told. Suppressing dissident in any way locks down change in a big way. That I have seen with my own eyes, so what I have been told is true. I am of the crowd that says change would be a really good idea. Unfortunately that means tolerating some nonsense.
XR in the UK has been havingintelligent an volksfest all week. I guess enough people in the UK have had Covid-19 to make gatherings of herds safe. I had that impression watching the live festival coverage in the middle of the night where I am. I had a different reaction watching video of the graduating class of Harvard get their diplomas. I need a disclaimer here, and I learned today that the cases per million in the UK is exceeded by America only today.
I had OBS open on my computer screen. I am teaching myself how to use it with reasonable skill before I inflict my online presence on you. The Uphill Media show is different. Amos controls the stream feed there so I don't have to worry so much. I just have to be ready to respond and glow with the flow of the show. OBS, Open Broadcaster Software is free software. Software used for video recording and live streaming. Many people with channels on You-Tube use it. I will use it when I stream. A You-Tube played through OBS while I was doing other things. Pausing or changing the video would have been many clicks. The Harvard graduation ritual began to play on its own in the background. I searched for other things in my browser. I was busy and let it play.
Masks for the event were optional. About twenty % of the class wore masks. I could be off on that but it was way less than half. A small minority of the privileged class caring about other people. Their efforts negated by others. Can you imagine such a thing?
People who don't take precautions make pointless the precautions taken by others. That is a maxim and fact. At least the people at the London XR sommerfest make a calculation that saving civilization is worth a compromise of public health considerations. The Harvard calcul Dr. Argon has with others as hard as they are scanning the tubes. Following established medical practice and the stupid rules that tromp and stomp all over your star-spangled freedoms is a start. Good practice for when you become the government terrorist too. If you ever do. It is not a hard thing to do and you may surprise yourself.
A sponsoring bloom of ignorance has renewed COVID-19 for a new season. New actors with the occasional appearance of Fauci. Ignorance continues to thrive. Those with more like it that way. For some profits are huge. Confusion justifies many things. People become distracted.
Have you noticed nobody who gets a jab ever regrets it? The Gates Microchip in the vaccine takes full control of the mind right away. Regrets are impossible. Technology can't get any shinier than that!
Monday August 30th,
An author on the net, a real one, not a poser like me. An author, with real published books, runs an ongoing psy-op for the 'deep state'. Deliberate obnoxious and racist attitudes authored by military operatives under his articles twice a week. Reliably stupid rants against Joe Biden with hundreds of comments, written below the articles every week. With the uncertainties of modern life, the rants are a sure thing. But they do not comfort like a sure thing can. Diseased minds agreeing with Joe Biden becoming president by election fraud does not refresh. The comments are not meant to. The point of the comments written below the articles are not to express points of view. The point of the comments and article are to induce people withand others real opinions to respond to the hate they see. So they can be identified and put on lists.
Experience revealed that hiding a tracker showing website traffic behind a hidden link, a hidden link on the psy-ops' own blog page was not a good idea. It should have been password protected. All the traffic was there for anyone to see. It was there for me to find when I looked at the page source and I found it. It was behind the tiniest of links in the lower left corner. I started watching the list makers at work. I knew the military bases they used. It was quite a score. I was looking for info that could identify the mystery of an obnoxious troll, and I found it. My suspicions were confirmed with hard evidence. Hard evidence would become personal and unpleasant later. The Department of Defense network has been paying the asshole author writing the bait articles for a biweekly fishing expedition. It was rumored back to me in the process of my harassment, $600 K a year for a decade and a half of public deception. Good work if you can get it for sure.
Comments below the articles have a particular racist and outrageous flavor. It is all planned. Article comments exist to make people respond. No other reason than that. The purpose is fishing. A fishing expedition paid for by tax dollars to identify people to put them on lists. It is what the FBI does. They make lists of people to get paid. Crypto-miners need 'proof of work' to get paid. Making lists in the FBI is 'proof of work' you have been investigating. Lists made so you can get paid. Being on a list pays nothing.
From the bureau's inception in the early 20th century lists created then to stamp out American socialism, through to the ongoing fight on terrorism now. The FBI makes lists. Before he was director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover conducted secret intelligence operations on U.S. citizens who he suspected were anarchists, radical leftists, or communists. The cross-dressing freak is long gone now. Not before environmentalists became FBI targets, though. His institution continues to suck money from the lower classes who slave to pay taxes. Billions a year.
I'm not going to identify who I am writing about. He can have his groupfunkcountry. I learned through the years', nobody cares if dissidents are followed and harassed in America. I learned the hard way by being one of the followed. 'Operational Security' is a thing, but people get pissed if you tell them this is not a free country. So I keep mostly quiet.
Naming names sinks me to the level of the Judas goat I describe. And that is something I don't want to do today. Part of the reason is in the harassment and aftermath of writing about what I found on the website where I found it, I learned nobody cares. Exploitation of others is our national religion. People are OK with state control. As long as they have stuff and they can do what they want. You can't tell Americans what to do. They don't listen even when you try to warn them of danger. Who is the Sturgeon General?
The usual hatred of brown people is expressed in the writings of the Judas goat today. Specifically, Mexicans were shat on. The same people who make the dinner salads this author eats with ranch dressing. From the farms where lettuce grows, all the way to the kitchens Mexicans work in. Illegal people.
If any of this is of interest to you, I allude to my experience on Saturdays' NoJoke show. Amos had a show censored. Dr. Malone will do that to you. Amos is understandably upset. Finding out America does institutional fascism, learning our government runs troll farms. It is hard to accept when you thought the American system worked at any level.
Talk of censorship on Saturdays show caused me to say why I started this website. You really can't have free speech if someone else owns where you write. So, I'm prompted to write about my experience of doing a Toto and looking behind the curtain. To watch the Department of Defense do its Wizard of Oz thing. I'll be writing more about it, I am sure. When men (and one woman) in jet black suits and china white shirts follow you around. To have emails returned to you shredded with sentences rearranged. When your phone goes satanic. When it is all to scare the shit out of you. It is not something you forget. Even after a decade.
It freaks you out, you adjust. But you don't forget. It is life changing.
Writing about the evils of the deep state when you have the deep state paying your bills. Good work if you can get it for sure. The irony is not lost on me.
Friday August 27th,
Two entries for Friday. I was going to pick up a car I was having repaired today when I began getting txt messages from Amos. He was upset. The first time you get censored, it is very upsetting. I remember. I have had my website for a long time. I know about censorship. That is why I am not on a blogspot or anything else. I rent server space for this website by myself. There is no middleman. I know where the buck stops this way. The dead bones of a blogspot might direct you here, I can't remember. After a decade of censorship, I am used to it. Like a fish, I don't think about water every day. But the first time censorship happens, it is an assault. Amos is upset because he had a show taken down at You-Tube. It turns out Uphill Media also lists shows on Odysee which is where I grabbed it. I downloaded and watched it. Then I posted it here.
It is very good and nuanced. An intelligent discussion with Dr. Yair Argon, professor of the Dept. of Pathology and Lab Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. 
Dr. Yair Argon, Ph.D.
I understand people are getting upset over censorship. I am not, I know what is going on. It is nothing new, and I adjusted to it a decade ago. That is when I found out dissident voices are being suppressed as collateral damage in the 'war on terror'. In general, America is only beginning to know the score. Nobody cared before COVID came along and put it in everybody's face. Dissident voices have been suppressed for a long time. Nobody cared.
Through the years from when I learned what was behind the curtain that Toto pulled away, my ideas of censorship refined. The irony now is, I do not disapprove of the suppression of demonstrable pseudoscience and deliberate misinformation. Not everyone thinks in America. People are different. We have all kinds. Some people become accomplished musicians, and I respect their skill. Some become so accomplished they can't help but eventually compose their own music. But not everyone rolls that way. Some people become skilled musicians and never play an original note. Everything these musicians play is written by others. They are disposed to copy. Their skill deserves respect. Not all of us can copy well.
Society has all types of people. Some compulsively create and some compulsively follow. We all follow more than we think we do. In the name of public good, suppressing COVID misinformation is not a bad thing if it saves lives. Screaming fire in a crowded theater for those who remember theaters is comparable. We are in a public health emergency. Now, policy should be decided by responsible people. Professors from schools of medicine are appropriate examples. People deserve protection.
The government as we know it should not do censorship. The will of the people is not served. When our government does censorship, only the elite are served.
Obama implemented heavy insidious and quiet censorship. Biden helped. Eight years in office, and the Obama Justice Department spearheaded eight Espionage Act prosecutions. Practicer me and others, Fascism Lite has fewer consequences than regular fascism does. Digital suppression is effective enough. Minor leaks are inconsequential when media is controlled, so Fascism Lite has fewer calories. But it has the same ass kicking taste of oppression.
Bonus material: In his You-Tube suppressed video, Amos plays a tape of Dr. Robert Malone discussing bioethics.
Enjoy.
The infection rate of COVID among vaccinated people age 60 and over, the virus reproduction rate. It began falling steadily around Aug. 13 and has dipped below 1. Each infected person is transmitting the virus to fewer than one other person. It the dip becomes a drop, the DELTA variant dies out. So reports the Daily Star in Lebannon of occupied Jerusalem. The Delta variant hammered Israel hard. The evidence there shows the R number gets back to less than one with a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNtech. This is good to know. I will hook myself up ASAP.
Since Delta's surge, Israel reimposed indoor mask wearing, limited gatherings, and ramped up rapid testing. More to it than a jab. Good to know.
Biden never believed it was up to the U.S.’s to build a functioning state in Afghanistan. To Biden, the job was to spend money to keep the war machine alive. What else could it be? Fuck if people die. "Nixon, and Kissinger got away with it" Biden said to Obama. This is the story.
Special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan to Barack Obama, Richard Holbrooke, a distinguished diplomat with a brain. Warned of consequences of a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Richard reminded Obama of his responsibility to Afghans who trusted the United States. Biden hissed back, "Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did that in Vietnam, Nixon, and Kissinger got away with it."
The bombings in Kabul, that killed dozens yesterday, make things a little harder for Biden now. Blow-back from Biden's burp of hot air years ago. Thirteen Americans 3 Brits, and dozens of others died in the twin blasts. Two suicide Bombers.
Too many cooks spoil a stew, and Kabul has plenty of crazy cooks. Zealots cooking anger into subservience to fundamentalist beliefs. Beliefs not unlike those held by Americans when America was first settled.
Freedom shouldAmericans mainstream news makes the point that the Taliban are not involved. ISIS-K did it, the story goes. The five eyes say they knew what was going to happen before it happened. American mainstream propaganda names ISIS-K as the perpetrating organization. I'm suspicious. How could any of this be known with such fine detail only an hour after the blast. I say nowhere in the real world. Not that it matters. An ignorant person blames others for misfortune. To blame oneself is progress, but the wise man knows blame is without point. So let them lie. The soul they corrupt is their own.
Too many cooks and the cooler thinking among the Taliban can't be approving of the blasts. The war is won. America is at the airport doing the modern equivalent to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. A few weeks and Americans are gone with their bloody baggage. Letting them go makes the most sense. But not to a fundamentalist zealot polished to a radical edge by Saudi money and training.
Religious freedom in early America held the Bible, rather than an established hierarchy, is the final authority. Every man has direct access to the word of God. The puritans did not mention women, neither do the Taliban now. It is a good thing explosive vests were not a thing when the Puritans were around. Europeans at the time had enough worries. The Puritans had as many rules as the Taliban do.
So what is the difference? The Bible then, the Koran now. I do not see a difference. Both are taken literally by diseased brains. But there is a difference. Suicide vests were not used by Puritans because they could leave England and be left alone. London was not in fear of a tiny country thousands of miles away jacking them up then. A woman in America might just as well have been wearing a Burqa when America was settled. But we have a national holiday that celebrates the repression as part of our history. History which is taught to children.
The Kabul bombings are a tragedy. Let cool heads prevail and hope a new tragedy does not pile on top of the old. Someone please remind Biden of his responsibility to Afghans who trusted the United States. Someone let the Taliban know they had better do a better job at keeping the peace. Let the American failure not be more tragic than it already is. Somebody, please send me a magic wand. I will wave it.
The climate catastrophe continues. I did not know that 17 inches of rain was possible, but Tennessee disagrees. That much rain had to come from fresh moisture rich air blowing in where altitude change or something forces rain to fall. With fresh wet air blowing in, any amount of rain in one spot could be possible. New heat makes more wet air. A 17 inch rain can't happen over a large area. Locally, the atmosphere will deplete itself. But if you are in a flash flood, you don't see a difference.
Monday August 23rd,
The train wreck of the Afghanistan pullout screeches on. Trust in the American government has not been this low since the days of Trump. The human tragedy of the twenty year fiasco makes me sick. Media, which exists to influence, not to report news, spins the story every way it can spin. For their own reasons.
Reporting News, spinning the story. Hopefully, towards truth. I remember I am a guppy in this pond. I am on a news show. The episode Saturday has over a hundred views and it is early Monday. The number itself is not much but the change from last week is significant. I generated a small controversy. I watched the show afterwards as a spectator. It was a good show and basically I agree with everything I said.
I like is I said I was a science guy. Bill Nye in a bow tie, or the science brother, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. They have nothing on me. If I met either of them we would talk for hours. This is not an admission for polite conversation. Being into science is sort of like being gay. Not everyone approves. But it is good to be out of the closet about it.
I don't trust regular media. America is fed a daily diet of misinformation by regular news sources. Media does not have the best of intentions. When Mrs. Dog had vaccinations scheduled for us I was happy to be poked. It had been a few weeks since COVID vaccines were available. Vaccinated people were not dropping dead in the streets. I figured potential side effects from the vaccine is inversely proportional to time. The chemistry is not so exotic to make you to grow extra arms or eyeballs in five years. Virus particles are always with us. They inject foreign DNA and RNA into cells all the time. Yet we still live. I made my own calculation. The first in line for a poke had weeks to drop dead before I got poked and damn few of them did. I needed to see that with my own eyes. I was not going to take medias' word for it. By the time I got poked I knew it was safe.
Emotions and deep-rooted beliefs grounding vaccine opposition are here. Here since Edward Jenner first introduced vaccination. Not everyone respects science. Opposing science is popular with some.
Edward Jenner showed he could protect children from smallpox. Jenner inoculated them using lymph from a cowpox blister. Jenner’s ideas were novel for his time. Jenner faced immediate criticism. Sanitary religious scientific political. Objections of all kind. Despite obvious proof vaccination is one of the top achievements of public health. People bred like rabbits because disease stopped the family cull. Likely the human race has now bred itself into an extinction scenario. The success of vaccines have much to do with this. Death was curbed. Obvious proof.
Modern medicine uses science and science tests vaccines. The middleman of capitalism gets in the way. But medical professionals take responsibilities seriously. They spend too much time going to school and building reputations to do otherwise.
Science people know physics is the king of science and mathematics is the queen, and if mama is not happy, nobody is. Fighting a pandemic is getting infection rate down. Math, a number, the R number. The effective reproduction number, R. An R value of 1 is the crucial threshold. With an R number less than one, the virus dies out. With an R number greater than one, a virus breeds variants. Causing people to die.
The delta variant has a high R number. It gave the pandemic new life. Existing precautions did not bring the R number down far enough so practice precautions. Wear a mask of any quality and become vaccinated. The lower the R number of COVID becomes, the fewer die. It depends on what we do.
Vaccines remain the best defense despite the delta variant. Science sez so. Vaccination is the best tool but not the only tool. We must use them all to bring the R number down.
Vaccine | Efficacy at preventing disease: ancestral & Alpha | Efficacy at preventing infection: ancestral & Alpha | Efficacy at preventing disease: Beta, Gamma, Delta | Efficacy at preventing infection: Beta, Gamma, Delta |
Pfizer/BioNTech | 92% | 86% | 90% | 78% |
Moderna | 94% | 89% | 93% | 80% |
AstraZeneca | 85% | 52% | 83% | 57% |
Johnson & Johnson | 86% | 72% | 85% | 56% |
Sputnik-V | 92% | 81% | 80% | 70% |
Novavax | 89% |
79% | 79% | 69% |
CoronaVac | 50% | 44% | 43% | 38% |
Sinopharm | 73% | 65% | 63% | 56% |
Tianjin CanSino | 66% | 58% | 57% | 50% |
| Covaxin | 78% | 69% | 68% | 60% |
Other mRNA vaccines | 91% | 86% | 89% | 78% |
All other vaccines | 75% | 66% | 65% | 57% |
Efficacy at preventing symptomatic disease is operationalized as reduction in hospitalization and death. Efficacy at preventing infection is operationalized as reduction in susceptibility.
Exercising freedom by not masking is costing a lot of money. It also shows a poor understanding of freedom.
Not masking sets an example that can kill. Even if a scofflaw does not catch COVID and murder through negligence. They may inspire others to so do.
Friday August 20th,
Effective October 1st, 2021. Dr. Valentine will no longer see patients that are not vaccinated against COVID-19.
Any Questions?
Why yes, I do have one. Why wait? The info has been out for any reasonable person to see for a long time. Vaccines give protection. New COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations Among Adults, by Vaccination Status. Waiting is NOT a good way to deal with the unreasonable!
Modern medicine keeps people alive. Modern medicine does not care if the virus came from a bat, a rat, or a Wuhan Lab. All modern medicine knows is that if you take a COVID vaccine you are protecting other people from getting COVID and dying. As a side effect you get to live too. Live if you are in a place where people are vaccinated. If you are in a horrible accident today the hospital you go to will have room to treat you when you get there if people are vaccinated. If you are in a southern state, dumb-asses who did not get the vaccine, have taken the room you need. Try and not bleed to death why you wait for admission.
Concerning yourself with the latent effects of 'those jabs' is overthinking. You would do better to concern yourself with getting a vax if you are not poked already.
No more Mr. Nice guy, too long have the brain dead been in charge of things. And while we with two cells to rub together may not be able to alter this sad situation; silence is no longer an option. Lives are at stake.
Jason's answer to those with a 'why' is icing on the cake. "COVID is a miserable way to die and I can't watch you die like that."
The other day, in Mississippi, next door to Alabama, there were no free ICU beds in the entire state. Not one for a heart attack or traffic accident. It takes days for someone to die of COVID. I'll take Dr. Jason's word for it. With the pathetic number vaccinated and with the transmissible COVID-D. It was inevitable.
Dr. Valentine accepts Medicare-approved amount as payment in full.
The days of leeches and bleeding is gone. Science began to drive medicine a long time ago. Math is even used, but the word has been slow to get out. Dr. Valentine has 20 years experience. Educated at the University of South Alabama, in Mobile.
I am a critic of technology. Our society lacks a metascience of technology. We do not challenge how we use technology. By default, people consider technology to be the supreme shiny object. Something by nature good. Accepted without question concerning effects on people or the planet. The propensity to ignore the effects of technology is natural. Ignoring technical consequences which do not cause immediate harm, has survival value. It keeps over-thinking in check. If that were the end of the story it would all be good. It is not.
Perverse incentives do not prevent over-thinking and under-thinking is socially rewarded. Civilization amplifies the natural propensity to ignore consequences of technology to our peril.
To be clear being a critic is not the same thing as being against technology. The truth is I am a science nerd.
Confusion over COVID strikes the American tone. America is confused. Confused about everything. Confusion about Afghanistan means the Taliban take-over has not produced consequences in Investistan yet. At least so far. Confusion gives time before America goes poor. Poor because America needs a new war.
Boeing has not been able to make a safe commercial jet since bean-counters started making engineering decisions. With the Afghanistan gravy-train gone their defense business is in jeopardy.
$10,000 of Boeing stock purchased in 2001 would be worth $107,588 today. $10,000 of Raytheon stock purchased in 2001 would be worth $43,167 today. $10,000 of Lockeed Martin stock purchased in 2001 would be worth $133,559 today. $10,000 of General Dynamics stock purchased in 2001 would be worth $72,516 today, and $10,000 of Northrop Grumman stock purchased in 2001 would be worth $129,645 today. We have a winner.
For its' twenty year run the Afghan war spent $300,000,000 dollars a day of American tax money. A buck a day from everyone in the country. Saving a buck a day in a coffee can for twenty years gives you a stash of $7300. As time goes by you have to trade the stash for bigger bills or it won't fit in a coffee can. The Afghan war cost over two trillion dollars. That is how much wealth the Afghan war transferred to the upper class. It is enough to make me want to join the Taliban.
I can joke about joining the Taliban because people in America don't care. Americans for the most part could not find Afghanistan on a map. Afghanistan is around the same size as Texas. I am joking about joining the Taliban. But giving the Taliban retirement portfolios made up from American defense contract stock would have kept the game going forever. Or until the oil runs out. A dollar a day to each bona fide member of the Taliban enough. A bargain. On Tuesday I did not know why America was in Afghanistan. Now I do.
The software problem which booted me out of Saturday No Joke Show I identified and solved. My video card locked up. Solving the problem I discovered my software install, a few years old, had more than just video driver issues. Letting the machine grind away for a solid half hour, with disk drives rattling and drive lights twittering, an up-grade to the latest release of my Linux OS finished. That was late Saturday night. I have not had my computer so busy since Homeland Security took control of it. That is the only time I have ever seen it as busy.
And the upgrade worked, except Python3 was totally broken and my screens only operated at a command line level. I restored the system from a back-up.
I backed-up my passwords and made copies of my content directories. Then I did a fresh install. Everything now is now great. I have all my old software installed and on the new video card I can use DaVinci Resolve. On Wednesday my new Video Card arrived. Everything was up to date and the new card used the same video driver. No software had to be installed. I dropped the new card into the computer and it just worked. I am now able to render a video using a video editor about six times faster than I could before. Later I will list the old video card on Ebay. It is still worth $100. If I were not wanting to do video editing it would still meet my needs. It did a good job managing my dual screen 4K setup for years. In its day it could mine bitcoin at a profit. But my new card, an NGX 3060 can render videos six times faster. Videos seem ever so slightly better on the new card. The old card, an GTX 750 Ti is a few generations older in video chip power, but it still is a capable card for most things. A good choice for the right budget-minded setup. I will toss the display port switch I had to get for my dual screen setup in my E-Bay listing as a bonus.
* This is a good card. The issue on the No Joke show last week was with my software install. Which I fixed while I still used the card. The problem had to do with broken Linux packages. If there was anything wrong with the card I would shitcan it.
Tuesday August 17th,
Heatwave fires and the delta-variant make this a hellish summer. There seems to be no good news. The rapid fall of Afghanistan shows that American occupation was doing nothing good there. Exactly what was America doing there? Afghanistan has been out of sight and out of mind for years. Americans don't know much more about Afghanistan than they do about Kyrgyzstan. News almost never reported on Afghanistan. An odd situation for a country at war, it has been.
Biden exudes no confidence. Attempting to hide his disaster behind words, Biden said today that 'Nation building was never the objective.' Saying that the goal for 20 years was to find those responsible for 9-11 and bring the terrorists to justice. I do not understand. If nation building was not the goal twenty years in, what was? Rape and pillage? Not admitting to failure, at a time when the country has nothing but bad news, only makes things worse.
Admitting to failure would have shown spine, but since Americans really don't know anything about Afghanistan, telling it like it is must be hard.
Life expectancy in Afghanistan is 50.6 for males, and 53.6 for females. The infant mortality rate is 108 per 1,000 births, the worst in the world. Afghanistan is among the poorest countries on Earth. The per capita GDP in 2017 was $2,000 US. About 54.5% of the population lives under the poverty line. After 20 years, it is safe to say the American occupation was doing no good there.
With a population of 35 million, agriculture employs most. Industry is light and unemployment high. Living standards are among the worst of the world. After 20 years, it is safe to say the American occupation was doing no good there.
Had America been doing nation building, Mr. Biden, this embarrassment would be unnecessary. What I learned about Afghanistan poverty in 5 minutes tells me the Taliban take-over was a sure thing. If you thought otherwise, Mr. Biden, that is very scary. If I could only make $2000 a year, I might think the Taliban was a better deal. As an Afghan, Americans would be more scary to me than zealots in Turbans.
My video card has driver issues. It froze during the Saturday No Joke show. Amos had to finish by himself. I have been giving my computer a fresh software install.
Friday August 13th,
I held a straight-edge to the screen to fit 20-year spans at a time. If only two lines of different slopes are used to best fit this 1960-2020 CO2 curve, they connect near the year 2000. That is where a slightly steeper line up would begin up. A breakpoint.
I postulate the year 2000 matches the year China became Americas' back room. The new American sweatshop. The pace where plastic and metal is forged into new American consumables to be shipped 12,000 miles to big box stores and fulfillment centers. An environmental disaster that is out of sight and out of mind.
CO2 Emissions from a container ship moving 70 shipping containers, motored from Hong Kong to Long Beach, CA is fifty metric tons. I think this may have something to do with the increase in the graph slope tick up about the year 2000.
An observation from the book of who cares. That is all this info is. The reaction to Covid-19 tells me nothing will be done to deal with the climate emergency and the poverty it will bring.
The number of twenty foot shipping containers moving through ports in the year 2000 was 200 million all across the world. That number increased every year except when the George Bush financial crash slowed things in 2009. George gave it to Obama. In 2017 the number of shipped containers was 750 million. But nobody cares, and nobody is going to do anything to slow the CO2 increase. The year 2000 breakpoint is only interesting and is otherwise without value. Behavior will not change. Doing something serious to slow CO2 increase means changing our ways, and that is not going to happen.
People need stuff to feel good about themselves. A century of modern advertisements made American life this way. Now we live in a world where everyone is trying to out-consume each other. The bigger your carbon footprint is, the more socially acceptable you are. Competition over consumption is the only thing that gives people pleasure, or a feeling of worth in America now.
President Biden urged OPEC and other major oil producing states to pump more oil the other day. Biden said it would help the American consumer by bringing gas prices down. Pumping more oil will be good for the economy.
The economy, when it works well, lets rich people freeload through life. I don't have to explain this, we both know life is not fair. It is an unfortunate fact the affluent are aware of this most. They talk about it the least, considering it to be an essential fabric of reality. Joe Biden, as an American politician, exists to facilitate freeloading. Freeloaders have power. In this way, Democrats and Republicans are the same. They worship the holy dollar. Republicans and Democrats alike cater to money and the rich. It is all American Politicians can understand, for money replaced god as the American religion a long time ago. So sorry Greta, Joe wants more oil from Bonesaw Salman. Deal with it and die.
Joe needs oil pumped. Joe needs to make people happy, so before your ticket will be cancelled by old age Greta, you will die. Sorry about that. The American economy demands it. Quality of life is not the measure of goodness in America. Profits are.
Perhaps to really make everyone happy, Joe Biden can talk the climate change talk on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and urge the opposite on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Sunday can be a holy day of consumption. On no day will the climate change talk be walked.
By now Joe Biden has learned his comment about OPEC, while heartfelt, was a really stupid thing to say. I'm writing about it, and while that does not matter, other people are writing about it too. Republicans have jumped all over Joe's ass. Environmentalists have. Everybody has, but nobody is serious. We all want our shit. It is the only way we can feel good about ourselves.
Republicans want unrestricted oil flow from American wells. They demand Joe respect their god-given right to exploit the world at the expense of all future generations. If Bonesaw Salman can do it, why can't they? It is a fair question.
People could not even put a piece of cloth over their face to prevent other people from dying when our pandemic began. People had to think about themselves and what they perceived freedom to be. Something to consume and buy stuff with as usual. The water is not deep. That is what freedom is to the advertisement addled brain. Freedom challenged, liberty and death became our reality. Minimalism is something that must wait for Mars.
Half the nation decided to pretend that science, which powers their phones, and medical science which allowed the world to overshoot well beyond our carrying capacity; is witch-doctor bullshit with somebody named Fauchi sacrificing babies in the middle of the night. Insanity prevailed. Insanity prevailed because the flow of money and the reaping of the percentage of flow by those who reap the percentage, was threatened.
The flow of money through the economy, and the reaping of it by those who fill no essential need, is threatened. Reification of the economy caused Trump to give us COVID-19 for life. I knew the variants would happen. If I knew, a lot of people knew. Perhaps Trump knew. Reification of the economy causes Biden to fuel the climate roller-coaster now. It is all about money. The Consumer Price Index for the last three months has been 8.1%. The purchasing power of labor, at a time when American labor is largely still not working, goes down. The drop in the CPI, steady since 2007, suddenly started dropping three times as fast as it had been. Joe Biden, not knowing what else to do, tells Saudi Arabia and Russia to pump more oil.
As soon as Russia finishes putting out the Siberian Forest Fires, they will get right on it. Pump baby pump.
The CPI has fallen about 25% since 2007.
Tuesday August 10th,
I was about to snag a graphic and post it here. The graphic is about crypto-currency and power consumption. The graphic, which looks very nice, has the phrase '120 gigawatts per second' in it. I can't use it. I can't intentionally identify myself as an idiot.
An idiot because America provides the opportunities for all of us to know better than this. There is too much identification with the idiot now as it is. Identification with the idiot no longer carries shame and has actually become fashionable. But I won't do it.
Crypto-currency and energy consumption. The graphic says crypto used more power in 2017 than the Republic of Ireland used. I searched the web to find out the Republic of Ireland used 181 Tera Watt Hours of energy in 2017. If you don't know what a Tera watt of energy is, keep reading. You will know when you finish reading this. If you don't want to learn anything, leave now. This is your last chance.
'120 gigawatts per second', as the graphic states, makes no sense. None at all. In the metric system, a unit of energy is the Joule. Lifting an apple that weighs 102 grams, one meter off the ground, takes one joule of energy.
Lifting the apple fast or slow does not change the energy used. Lifting 102 grams, one meter takes one joule if it takes you a second or a day to do. Rate of energy use is measured in Watts. Rate of use, not energy itself. To find energy used, you must multiply Watts by time.
Watts used changes by how long it takes you to lift an apple; or how long it takes you to consume the Joule of energy.
Lifting 102 grams one meter in one second consumes one Joule of energy and one watt is used. Lifting an apple in half a second uses two Watts, but only for half as long. Lifting a bushel of apples a meter in a second needs a bushel of Watts. Keeping dimensions of units straight in energy calculations is a good way to check math. The skill is dimensional analysis, as I will show.
(Per second) is the same as dividing by seconds. Watts have dimensions of; Watts = Joules / second, or Joules is divided by seconds. Joules per second are Watts. There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. A 10 Watt light-bulb left on for a year will consume (( 10 Joules / second ) * 31,557,600 seconds ) = 315,576,000 Joules of energy. The seconds cancel out.
This example is trivial. When things get more complicated, keeping track of dimensions helps a lot. The Joule equivalent of a barrel of oil is 6,117,863,200 Joules. ( 6,117,863,200 Joules / ( 315,576,000 Joules / 1 year ) = 19.386319.3863 years. That is how long a barrel of oil could light a 10 watt bulb. Nineteen years five months.
Ireland used 181 terawatt hours of electricity in 2017. A watt hour is 3600 watt seconds ( 3600 seconds / hour is another expression of dimensional analysis ). 181 Tera Watt Hours * ( 3600 seconds / hour ) = 651600 Tera Watts. The hours cancel. Giga means ten to the ninth, and tera means 10 to the 12th or 12 zeros. In 2017 Ireland used 651,600,000,000,000,000 watts. How much did bitcoin use? It could be more.
Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Argentina. This power used is described as the power it takes to mine bitcoin. This is misleading. Bitcoin transactions themselves use ridiculous amounts of energy. A single bitcoin transaction uses more than 5,000 times the energy a single Visa Credit Card transaction uses up. A bitcoin can't be used without massive energy consumption. This is obscene.
Why does bitcoin currently use 120 gigawatts every second of the year? As much electricity as a large small country uses? Computer technology has improved, is why. Otherwise, it would be more. Computers are more powerful now. If the calculations needed to support current bitcoin transactions were all done on computers with the math crunching capacity of computers built in 2009, the same year bitcoin started, bitcoin would use more power than ALL the countries in the world. As soon as technology stops advancing, bitcoin energy use goes exponential. Bitcoin is a stupid and unsustainable feat, typical of the human experience.
As time goes by, cryptocurrency requires ever more complicated calculations and ever more power. Computers get more powerful with time, but more slowly now, and people play with facts all the time to get their way. A fact that will have a lot to do with our extinction.
A claim made recently by anti-vaxxers, (homicidal idiots by another name) is to say more people are going into hospitals with Covid-19 who are unvaccinated than vaccinated. I heard such nonsense only a week ago. A statistical lie justified by cherry picking data. Info I learned last night is 90% of new hospital admissions are among the unvaccinated. The delta variant is responsible. Covid-19 prefers unvaccinated victims, no matter what people say. Anti-vaxxers will catch a disease and pass it on to you as a test of god and faith. Such people indulge in magical thinking with all the mental horsepower of screaming toddlers. They also drink and have babies. This is not good.
A crypto idiot may say computers get more efficient over time, so the power bitcoin uses will drop to almost nothing. The trick is to cite the power per calculation, which drops with time, and ignore the number of calculations which always increases with time. Selective myopia. To the crypto enthusiast, bitcoin power consumption is nothing that waving a pamphlet of the American Constitution over your head can't fix. Like other nuts.
Technology enamores people. People always think technology is good and never question it. Bitcoin is a great example because Bitcoin is not good for anything. Nothing at all. Pure technology with no reasonable purpose. All bitcoin does is fuel greed. Money already was made digital before bitcoin was invented. Since we already can make financial transactions using computers, exactly what does bitcoin get us?
Nothing at all.
There is some nonsense about bitcoin belonging to 'the people' as if that somehow makes a pointless consumption of 120 gigawatts of electricity OK. It does not. And nobody who says this can explain what they mean. The Siren Song of technology combined with human greed is showing to be an unstoppable combination. Greed mines bitcoin, and bitcoin mines greed. Mental gymnastics of Olympic caliber attempt to make it all good.
Without the dimensional analysis and getting straight to the point. Bitcoin is consuming electricity at the energy equivalent of 400 barrels of oil a second. A Dutch researcher, Sebastiaan Deetman, says an “enormous increase in hash rate” over the last year or so has likely pushed bitcoin’s global draw closer to 700 MW. If true, that is 2218 barrels of oil a second.
This does not seem like much, but a few years ago I calculated the global consumption of oil to be about the same as the oil carried by a SINGLE oil train passing you at seventy miles an hour. That also does not seem like much. One train for the whole world. It does not seem like much, but an enless train of oil burned as it passes you adds CO2 at a rate that warms the temperature of the earth a degree Celsius in decades. Bitcoin might buy the human race a tipping point. Showing that bitcoin is worth less than nothing.
I missed the Saturday 'No Joke' show because I have been upgrading the K-Dog computer. As part of getting ready to stream, I wanted to load a copy of DaVinci Resolve (software for video editing). Part of streaming is custom videos, and KDEN Live (free video editing) while great, does not support a particular video mode I want to use. So I downloaded and installed DaVinci Resolve. When it ran, the software wanted to use hardware acceleration.
My video card can do hardware acceleration. In 2014, it was a hot new card. A video card to get for crypto mining at the time. Now it is no good for crypto. Crypto mining uses computer video cards because all fancy video cards do parallel processing, which crypto calculations absolutely need. I updated my video card driver in preparation for enabling hardware acceleration. I was just about to prepare for Saturdays' No-Joke show. My computer screens suddenly went blank.
The new video driver was broken with a software dependency which was hard to figure out. Nobody online could explain what to do, but I eventually found a software package with the missing dependency on my own. Fixing a computer with blank screens is not easy to do. It has taken two days to get the video driver working, and update the Linux kernel to use video acceleration, and to get other issues that the Linux upgrade produced resolved. The Virtual Camera in OBS (that will only make sense to streamers) stopped working. Resolving that issue was hard. But I did it.
When I built the K-Dog computer, the video card I picked was out of date. I saved money by not getting a new card at the time. I put the saved money into the processor and memory. All I need for a screaming streaming computer now is a new video card. An NVIDIA RTX 3060 video card. RTX 3060 video cards (third party with the RGB tax) should sell for about $400 to $500 dollars, but they are selling for between $800 and $1100 at this time. If you can find one. Follow the link below to find out why.
NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti - Your approx. income with NiceHash is 4.24 USD / Day
I just stopped typing here for a minute to enter the daily 'shuffle' at the Newegg computer store. Now I am back. If I win, (people rarely win. I don't know anyone who has) I will have the opportunity to buy a video card at only a slightly inflated price. Bundled with another computer part, I will have to sell on eBay if it is something I don't need. The Best Buy store is out of stock on all RTX 360 video cards. Cards made in China come here where they are snapped up by crypto miners and sent right back to China where all the cheap coal-fired electricity is. So much for the wisdom of the markets. I always knew that to be a lie.
Hey, wisdom of the market. Go fuck yourself.
I picked an MSI GFORCE RTX 3060 in todays' Newegg lottery. But I expect I will be limping by with my old video card for a while. They announce the winners between noon and six and you have to buy it withing a time window if you win.
After two days of software upgrade hell my computer now has the latest release of the Linux OS I use and DaVinci Resolve actually runs with hardware acceleration. Until I moved my first video into the edit area, it ran. Then the app crashed. Looking into things, I find my old video card is not good enough for the DaVinci Resolve program. The program is a professional application with a public release, and it needs powerful hardware to run. It makes sense. Years ago, video editing needed thousands of dollars worth of computer power. All those frames and all those calculations. Thanks to bitcoin, the video card still does.
* Attention Crypto Kitty and Max Keiser. Your assertion that Bitcoin uses 'wasted energy' is so ludicrous you should both be kept away from sharp objects. And ignored.
Friday August 6th,
An international team of scientists says technology will not be able to stop the effects of fossil fuel emissions. The climate will break down. We will not stop it, and we will die from starvation.
The team of scientists did not add the starvation part, I did. The team of scientists is a collection of Academics. I'll guess them not smart enough to add the starvation part. Their advanced degrees will mute that perception and invent a reason for not adding it in. Only one of the scientists is not European. An Australian named Manfred. From an American point of view, the same thing as a European. No wonder they all think alike. They are stamped from the same culture.
Stamped from the same culture makes holding a dissenting point of view hard to do. Dogs show this. Dogs are social like we are, and puppies are born with genes that make them interact easily with humans. Concerning people, puppies are born knowing things. Human babies are no different. Puppies are cute, but they also know how to act cute.
Some people are like puppies when they start school. They become good students. They learn well, as most of us can, when we focus. Puppy-like students become straight 'A' students because they focus hard on pleasing. They want to please, like puppies do. Observing this pleasing, I have never considered straight A students as the smartest people in the room. At least those who are straight A students from an early age. I make that disclaimer because I matured into one, but that is different and a function of my own desire.
A man can go to a mobile home park and get into a verbal confrontation. Walk back to his car to get a shotgun and then blow somebodies shit away. After that, he can drive to a gas station, phone 911 to say 'I think I shot someone'. I saw that story on Netflix last night.
Really dude. Do you really think you just shot someone, or are you just saying that?
Straight A students are not always the smartest in the room. Their motivation is about fitting in and pleasing people. They deceive themselves like unintentional liars on phones at gas statins. Their success does not come from an innate advantage, and dissent comes hard to these people pleasing types. They make reality into something they can deal with like the rest of us do. Redefine reality even to be contrary to actual perceptions if needed.
The man on the pay phone confessing to a murder said: 'I think I', but no dude, you did. 'I think I' attempts to redefine reality. The first step in a process. Self-confirmation is the next step. Some people could think the man was setting up a defense as he called 911 and was deliberately deceptive with his 'I think I'. I don't think so. His mind was turning something he did and could not live and deal with into an accident. His performance was for himself, not for an audience.
People deceive themselves all the time. And perhaps if we all knew the horror of ourselves, we would all go mad. So we deceive ourselves. But not knowing the horror of ourselves is also a madness.
Science is based on dissent and test. Not dissent alone, that only describes anarchy. Pure dissent is a hole as deep and dark as pure ignorance. A scientist is no good if they can't challenge assumptions and figure out tests to see if their challenge matches reality. But how much dissent can they tolerate when they are not at work?
Only dramatic lifestyle changes with new perception and attitudes can let the human experiment continue. Technology can't save us because there are too many of us. Thinking technology can save us, betrays you listen to the siren song of your own brain deceiving you.
People are born using technology and born loving technology. People believe in technology with unquestioned faith. People are all about technology. Using technology is natural, human, and part of us. We live and breath technology, and there is natural myopia which ignores consequences of technology. Not ignoring consequences of technology interferes with human efficiency. At times, efficiency has been a matter of life and death. When chased by lions, run. Do not think about it. Deliberate ignorance of the consequences of technology is a fact of human experience. A side effect. Technology sings a Siren Song, making us blind to what is actually going on, in deference to immediate need. Technology cannot fix all things, but we act as it can. We cultivate our own ignorance.
Like Odysseus, we are tied to masts of narrow thinking. Narrow socially approved thinking. Our need for social approval makes our thinking narrow.
It is notable a group of scientists says technology can't save us. Notable like a tree falling in a forest that nobody can hear, perhaps. Notable only to the cosmic eye, but notable it is. Techno-myopia gets in the way of human eyes seeing our own limits, leading to ridiculous statements. Statements like 'we could all fit in Texas'.
Manfred, the scientist from Sydney, said, “We cannot keep temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Centigrade using technology alone. Unfortunately, this will require lifestyle changes in wealthy countries.” Really dude? Do You really think we can keep it under 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or are you just saying that?
In my right sidebar is a tally showing the yearly change in Atmospheric CO2 for the current month. I update it as soon as I can get data from Mona Loa. I have learned CO2 has been going up at over half a percent a year. The rate is consistent and there is nothing to show that the rate of increase is slowing. I have been watching this number every month for over two years. I would know if it slows the climb up. It does not slow. Even with Covid-19, it did not slow. A consistent half a percent a year with no slowdown means our demise and extinction is 'baked in the cake. So sorry Manfred, it is not going to happen, and we will die. There will be no social revolution and no mitigation. But I understand you think that humanity can rise to the occasion. You think everyone else shares your desire to please, but it is not going to happen. Not everyone does. CO2 increase will not decrease until there are fewer people around to put CO2 in the air.
Technology can't save us. To remove carbon from the atmosphere at a fast enough rate. Carbon capture from the air would need half the world’s electric generating capacity. This is according to the Manfred and his peers. Making a global transition to renewables difficult.
Really Manfred, A global transition to renewables difficult? Do you think so?
It takes resources and energy to make renewable energy, and only a fraction of current energy production is renewable. Consequently, the energy Manfred needs for CO2 extraction must come from fossil fuels. We have not yet reduced fossil fuels use at all. Population and economic growth always cancels out any gain in renewable generating capacity.
Extracting CO2 using electricity puts just as much CO2 into the air as the electricity removes. Someone knowing laws of physics knows about conservation of energy. To remove a molecule of CO2 from the air takes as much energy as that molecule released burning an atom of carbon when it was made. The equation balances. Basic conservation of energy and something all scientists should know. Did Manfred forget? Why was it on me to tell you?
Policies that reduce inequality and guarantee a living wage and policies that shorten the work week and policies which provide healthcare translate into lower carbon footprints. Our existing culture based on competition with everyone being out for themselves plunders the planet. This situation produces monumental excess and waste. It is why environmental types are always fuming about the evils of capitalism. Capitalism ignores externalities and pays no attention to maths. A revolution is culture and society could continue the human experiment. But there is too much resistance for that to happen. Business as usual is just too popular.
Monday August 2nd,
I was miserable yesterday. The heat got me. I was outside doing yard work but I came inside when the heat began to bother me. Not soon enough. I spent the rest of the day with a foggy head not able to think, drained and without energy.
I thought of skipping writing something here today, but writing on a schedule is good for me . I write better with practice. Everybody does and none of this would flow as well as it did without practice. I stay on task for the practice. I suspect nobody cares about any of this and I do it for my own reasons.
Yesterday was not our hottest day in Seattle this year. But it was the first day of heat I had real problems. And my temperature can't compare with what Europe experienced yesterday. It was 42 to 45 degrees all across southern Europe. Celcius numbers don't mean a damn thing to Americans. 42 to 45 degrees and Americans put on coats. The Celcius numbers work out to be between 108 and 113 Fahrenheit degrees. Not weather you put a coat on in.
It is tragic America never moved their temperature readings to Celsius degrees. The rest of the world uses the metric system for reading temperature and it works for them. They are fine with it. This means Americans have an unfortunate misconception about global heating. Global heating is twice as bad as Americans think it is after you convert Celsius degrees to Fahrenheit degrees.
A couple of degrees difference in Fahrenheit is not a big deal compared to a Celsius difference and it has been too easy for Americans to ignore global heating. Feeling a two degree difference in Fahrenheit is difficult. Burning coal and oil only bumped up global temperature by 1.5 degrees over the last century. That does not sound like anything at all. But this measurement is in Celsius and most of the heat increase has been over the last thirty years.
One point five degrees Celsius is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That is a temperature difference you can actually feel. A temperature difference that has started to change the Earths' weather. A temperature difference that on top of what we already have now, will change weather enough to make growing food very difficult.
The graph below shows how much water air holds as a function of temperature.
The graph is non-linear. If the graph were linear it would be a straight line sloping up. Instead the graph curves and is logarithmic. The curve is important, this is why.
At sixty degrees Fahrenheit and at 100% humidity the pressure of water in air equals 13.26 mm of Mercury. Total air pressure is 760 mm of Mercury. This works out to air holding 1.7% water.
At ninety degrees Fahrenheit the pressure of water in 100% humidity air moves up to 36.12 mm of Mercury. Atmosphere at this temperature is almost 5% water. The ratio is 2.72.
The graph shows a couple of degrees heating in Celsius is a very big deal. Four degrees of total global heating drops the number of people the world will feed to less than a billion. At four degrees Celsius we live in a world of flash floods and desert. Life as we know it becomes impossible.
Americans need four degrees Celsius translated to Fahrenheit. Four degrees Celsius is more than seven degrees Fahrenheit and we are solidly on track to get there. Rich people don't seem to care. They think they can always move to someplace nice. Like Mars and who cares if everyone else dies. Are you ok with that?
Friday July 30th,
A few years ago, a federal troll was dialoging with me about some socialist statements I posted. The troll recommended a book for me to read. I read it.
The book is about a pandemic which kills everyone who has not been recently bitten by a snake or a spider. Unlike COVID-19, the pathogen in the book is in the Black Death league. Almost everyone dies from the book pathogen. Months go by before the lead character Ish, a young man at the start of the book, finds a woman. Other people are found later.
In time Ish becomes the founder and leader of a small tribe. One of only a handful of tribes in America living among the decaying ruins of our dead civilization. The Ish tribe lives near what was once Oakland, California.
The title of the book is 'Earth Abides', and the author is George R. Stewart. Earth Abides is the only novel George ever wrote, but George wrote a very good book. A true magnum opus.
Over time the earth abides. The scars of civilization are healed over by passing time.
As the Ish tribe grows, a man named Charlie appears. Ish and Emma his wife, quickly become suspicious of Charlie. Charlie reveals in a bout of heavy drinking that he had episodes of 'cupids disease' before the pandemic erased civilization.
An inexperienced reader will become confused, Charlie is described as carrying typhus. Clarity comes with understanding that George Stewart wrote his book in 1949. Describing an episode of the tribe having to deal with a newcomer carrying venereal disease had to be done with a certain finesse in 1949. George did a fine job of it. The mention of typhus made the anecdote publishable. Adults in the room can figure it out.
Three people die from George's infection. Natural immunities from the diseases of civilization have disappeared in this new world without medicine. The young have no protection.
George was corrupting the youth of the tribe, and not like Socrates was unless you want to confuse Socrates with Charlie Manson. It could be said Charlie Manson corrupted the youth. And in no good way.
So what to do with a man who likely was a violent criminal who carries a concealed gun in a peacefull tribe? This man has some sort of venereal disease and is responsible for three deaths already. Murder in the way someone infected with COVID-19 refusing to wear a mask kills people now.
What to do? There is no apparent crime. The book can't get close to the nature of Charlie's sexual encounters, (remember this is 1949) so Charlie has some presumption of innocence. What if the first sexual encounter was consensual? Then there was no crime. What to do?
Exile is out of the question. Charlie would only come back. The youth of the tribe are smitten by Charlie. They can't understand that Charlie is a danger who will be responsible for many more deaths. Charlie wants a young attractive woman named Evie for himself. Evie is simpleminded and slow. Childlike, Evie is not able to take care of herself. The only way Evie can survive is by the tribe taking care of her. Because of Evie's mental impairment it is a tribe taboo that Evie know of sex. Evie is incapable of taking care of a child, she can't even take care of herself. So what to do. Evie can't be a mother and Charlie is not going to keep it in his pants. Sooner or later Charlie will rape Evie.
George Stewart hung Charlie. George made Ish call a meeting with the men of the tribe. It is decided Charlie must die. George Stewart wrote the death scene well. Ish knows hanging Charlie is wrong. Ish also knows hanging Charlie is for the good of the tribe, and it has to be done. Charlie dies staring at Ish with hate.
The memory of Charlie from Earth Abides haunted me this week. The bow-tied mug of a man named David Martin has been plastered all over the internet, and his bow-tied face is what stirred the memory.
David Martin is a man who has found a very clever way to make money mis-representing pseudoscience around COVID-19 as fact. David Martin is in the Plandemic movie.
David Martin's representation of truth using filed US patents and US patents applications is flawed and ignorant. I could rip all Davids arguments to shreds. But ripping David's arguments to shreds would be tedious and a waste of time. Davids disciples don't give a shit about true facts. Their trust in David is completely emotionally based, so I won't waste my time.
Patents should not be confused with science, or facts. Patents are legal instruments, sometimes of very dubious validity. They are nothing more than legal instruments. Patent documents are certainly not touchstones of truth.
David Martin will not be responsible for as many COVID-19 deaths as Donald Trump is. Trump is a hard act to follow, but David's attraction to far right supporters of Donald Trump is undeniable. David represents conservative interests of the most ignorant and self-serving kind. Conservatives prefer social chaos over democracy. A united polity challenges their grip on power. Most important to power, David keeps people divided. The kicker is, that David also has an audience of conspiracy theorists of many stripes now. With Trump gone, a few independent 'journalists' popular on tubes who describe themselves as progressive, are loving David up. Their audiences, in a perpetual search for any cause they can get behind, can't get enough of David. They need their hate fix. Such people are more about hating the word as it is, instead of wanting something different. Wanting something different in the world requires thought.
When I think of David, I think of Charlie from 'Earth Abides'. It is good not to be Ish.
According to many, and I am one of the many, resources are going to be crunched by global heating and resource depletion in the coming years. This is happening because the human population is living in overshoot. We have too many people for one planet. All our agriculture is oil based and without oil we starve. Failure of agriculture will cause unimaginable misery and death in years ahead as oil supplies deplete and the globe warms. Hard facts of life ignored by all. Overshoot happens when a population grows beyond the maximum number an environment can support.
A popular pastime of those enamored with business as usual and a pastime of those who benefit from current arrangements is to claim science and the observed facts about our climate situation are wrong.
Deniers can't claim the climate is not changing as they recently did anymore. Evidence for global heating can't be denied. The, 'it does not matter, it won't be as bad as ridiculous doomers say it will be' now echos through the land. Smoke, mirrors and revised bullshit.
When I think of COVID-19 deniers and climate. I think of Charlie from 'Earth Abides'.
It is good not to be Ish.
But if I were Ish there are too many deniers to hang. Nothing would be solved by their demise. They would only die with stares of hate and a new crop of business as usual sycophants would emerge to take their place. Collective survival continued to be ignored as ignorance would not die with the noose.
Things do not look good, but things have to look very bad for any collective road to Damascus moment. Way more bad than things are now. If and when such a moment happens it will likely be too late.
A new economics of limits has to be worked out now. But in our current atmosphere a new arrangement dealing with planetary limits can't be implemented. Deniers will prevent new arrangements. We have too much well compensated organized ignorance for sanity at the present time. The murdering throngs who scream wearing a mask takes away their 'freedom' won't have any part in what the planet has to do to survive global heating.
This sad situation of persistent ignorance will remain until things change and the externalities of technology does some serious environmental cooking. Then a test begins. Confront ignorance and make the necessary lifestyle changes or attempt to maintain our unequal society of mass disparity with decisions made by a small cadre of uninformed fools as now.
Such will be our test. A test of the survival of our species. Small cadres of fools don't do well in scenarios of depleting resources. Small cadres of fools will result in a nuclear winter and we will go the way of the Myans should that happen. When the Myans overpopulated they all killed each other. Their cities became ruins lost in jungle. The earth abided and barren depleted farmlands returned to jungle. It will happen again unless action is taken.
Monday July 26th,
Some advice says start streaming. Just do it. In general this is good advice for me and anyone else who has a tendency to overthink things.
To fight overthinking I try to make my thinking more efficient. This enhances quality rather than detracting from it. A counterintuitive result happening from putting yourself under the microscope like everything else in your universe. Then, after reacting like a deer in headlights at discovering you have faults, you gain benefits.
All you have to do is stand the horror of looking at yourself. A downside I admit, is not being able to suffer fools anymore. This is actually a good thing, but with so many fools around this is and overwhelming adjustment. Going from everyone has an opinion and even a shit one is better than none, to to some opinions are born of stupidity and cause great harm. That is a significant change in perspective.
When I start streaming I will do it with preparation. I don't want to waste people's time with a 'Stream Will Begin Shortly' message that remains way past starting time and various other production issues. I am also fortunate to work with Markus and Amos at No Joke. I have time to do things right.
I will do it right because I have a point of view I want to advocate. I am motivated. I can describe my point of view well enough but what would be the point of that? Some of you would like that. Some of you would not. The chances any of you would think you should change your life based on my perspective is small. Deep soul searching changes don't happen only because you see or hear something inspirational, no matter how good it sounds. Significant Life changes are more complicated than that. Better I show the way slowly.
The Covid-19 experience has exposed a lot of people for what we are. Ignorant. When Covid-19 began we all had deficits in knowledge. Some of us were ahead of the game by recalling being an epidemiologist is a real profession. A profession which requires education up the ying-yang. Not many of us knew what an epidemiologist was two years ago. Many people though such people watched birds. I am sure of it.
A year ago Trumpers said wearing masks was an infringement of freedom. I admit there is a modicum of truth in this. A mask can interfere with second amendment rights to mow down shopping malls full of innocent people with constitutionally protected AR15s. The ability to aim is impaired by a mask. A clear violation of the constitution.
The truth is 'they' don't want their ability to exploit infringed upon. The message is spread: Take away a single 'freedom' from the hot wing grilling masses and the whole house of cards of capitalistic exploitation comes a-tumbling-down. Sycophants, bewitched by the mere dream of money, follow blindly and amplify this message told to them by the rich. This brand of brainless will always fight progress to equity. As Chris Hedges describes it, as things fall apart sadism is embraced to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. Hence impotent men idolize the rich. The same people who exploit the weak. The dis-empowered are poisoned by ressentiment because they have no agency. They lack the power to harm those who they in their inner heart, believe have harmed them.
The chronically dissatisfied pick up the 'infringement of freedom' torch dropped by the red hat disciples of Donald Trump. They could not leave it on the ground to burn out where it belongs. It was too tempting to pick it up and now they burn their phony left fingers.
Trump gone, it remains more important to not wear as mask in public even if others die. The new Plandemic Video featuring David Martin purports to use patents as evidence that Covid-19 was developed in a lab. As someone who actually has a patent I found that particularly offensive, and it turns out that apparently most people don't understand what patents are and how and why they are written. Otherwise David Martin's game would be very transparent. David Martin is a financial analyst, self-help entrepreneur and a total charlatan who has a new cult following with our dissatisfied left. Showing some people are not what they purport to be. Progressives, real ones, understand the concepts of science and the solidarity of taking one for the team. The benefits to oneself and others of the COVID vaccines is a shout which contrasts with a whisper of their possible dangers.
People who stress about global heating don't do cryptocurrency. They take one for the team and are not out for themselves. They understand solidarity. Minimalists use cryptocurrency minimally. Posers do not understand this. They are dissatisfied and angry and pass angst off as concern.
Yesterday I participated in the Seattle M4A march. About 400 people were there. Health care is a human right. If you don't have health care I hope nothing bad happens to you. At the next health care march I want there to be more people. It looks like I will have to get involved to make that happen.
I think the extra CO2 in the air is making trees in Seattle exceptionally green this year. Our heat has been high and the rain has been low. Still the trees are a vibrant healthy green. I think the extra CO2 in the air is making the trees in Seattle green. It seems odd.
Friday July 23rd,
This week I have been teaching myself to stream. In a Zoom meeting I use a virtual camera now which buffers my regular webcam. With the virtual camera I can do all the fancy things you see other people do on the You-Tube channels you watch. I activated my You-Tube account for streaming. Now I am waiting a mandatory 24 hours to pass before You Tube enables streaming on my channel. You-Tube makes you wait for 24 hours before you can stream. It takes too many brain cells to think about why.
I'll not worry how long it takes and spend time learning the OBS program. After practice on You-Tube I will find where I can put up a stream without having to worry about censorship as much
Perhaps I will be able to use this website for a live stream? I can write a chat program for sure. Programs which allow live chat are hotboxes. That is what they are called. They are not hard to write. I have written a hotbox app before and I can do it again. Using a stream key to feed video to a website I will investigate. I suspect it has been done. I only need to find an example. Testing with You-Tube is the way to go for now. I can put the evil empire to use.
The Uphill Media No Joke Uyghur Genocide investigation Amos and I made is restricted by You Tube. Restricted from advertisement. That means algorithms will ignore the Uphill Media Uyghur Genocide video. Only a direct search can show it exists.
I can't imagine more than a few days will pass with me being able to stay on the good side of You-Tube. Since I know this already I shall try to contain myself. Lasting a few days might actually be possible if I self-censor.
Streaming is a natural progression for me, and a nice feature for my website. Live barking with the dog once a week! I hope I don't bark alone. There could be many adventures.
There will not be a 'No Joke' show this week. Amos and I are both going on M4A marches. My march is in Seattle. One PM at Westlake Center. You can see if there is one in your city by clicking this link:
Markus will likely be grilling a sausage. Germany since 1883 has the world's oldest national health insurance system. There is no need for Markus to march. Germany already knows health care is a human right.
Bezos went to space:
* It is over 24 hours I've been waiting for You-Tube to turn on streaming. I have found a NGIX server can take a RTMP stream. Now I am finding out how to do it. HTML5 made serving a stream easy. That part is already figured out. I'll continue to be my own dog.
** Very nice. I have You-Tube streaming going on. I fired it up and made a test stream. It works!! The honeymood period with You-Tube begins. I am offline today at the Seattle M4A March.
Monday July 19th,
Electronic parts. I have a lot of them. I used to have more, but a lot went to my last job. I thought it would be my last employment and I would work there until retirement. Now I hope it is not my last job and I would like to have another. I don't have the job anymore. I was working at a computer museum. It is now closed. I was more than happy to donate a tool or a part to what I thought was a good cause when I worked there. Forgetting the museum was privately owned and I am not an owner..
The founder passed, and the family wants the building used for more lucrative enterprises or sold. Oh, well. Live and learn. My last day on the job was a flurry of boxing what I could of my personal stuff and getting it back into my garage. Where the boxes sat for over a year. I did not want to deal with them. They became part of my dead past. I found an old picture of myself with the founder and other people in the museum in one of them. Now, it would be like a picture of Richard Branson posing with his Unity spacecraft flight crew and most people would consider it valuable. My picture even more valuable since the museum founder had considerably more money than Richard Branson has. Branson is only a Trump level billionaire.
That is what money does to people. It defines value. I realized the only thing that made the picture valuable was me standing next to a billionaire. A computer I did a lot of restoration work on was also shown. Something to be proud of, but I knew nobody would ever know that story, the real reason for the picture. I threw it away.
Now I am opening the boxes. And others. It is time to clean. The older boxes are more interesting than the newer. I found some old magazines. In some, people bitched about being consumed by the system. They claimed capitalism was giving almost everyone a raw deal. In others global trouble spots and conflicts are shown. I was gripped by two distinct impressions.
One impression was a change in place name in the global conflict stories bring those stories up to date. Change bitching about everybody being underpaid wage slaves to the lucky to be employed being underpaid wage slaves and the stories are modern. Surprisingly, the environment was more in the news decades ago than now. The environmental movement had only recently been defeated. There was much gloating going on. Victors were giddy. Those who would dare oppose progress had been shown up to be fools. I was struck by how little things had changed.
The other impression was about me. With the magazines, I found a folder with the transcript of coursework for my bachelors degree. I looked at the grades. I was impressed. This person worked hard. I was impressed in the same way I would be impressed by a stranger's transcript. The transcript was foreign and detached. There were books, some notebooks too, and all those electronic parts. I will save what copper I can from them. Maybe make an ingot. I think I needed the transcript to register for the GRE exam. I kept a copy when I ordered it. I am not sure. It was decades ago.
The two impressions are the world has not gotten smarter in the last thirty years, and that I have. I was able to see myself as I used to be. I am version two-point-O of the man in the boxes. But this does not make me feel good. Feeling good about my accomplishments only reminded me of current limits. If it were the other way around, I'd have no care in the world at all. If I were dim and the world happy and safe, I would smile. But it is not safe or happy, and I know everyone has a lot of the dim fool in them. Me too. Don't mistake what I write here for arrogance. We are all fools, me included. Some of us are simply more dangerous about their foolishness than others. Most people are unaware they are fools and do everything they can to cultivate their inner idiot.
Managers in the magazine stories made 100K a year. I still think $100K is a great wage if you can get it, and rumor has it managers make even more. Like the owner's club, membership in the manager's club is closed. I will never know. Membership in the employed club in general is sketchy now. Owners make bank and short of a revolution they can't lose their jobs. Everyone else can at a whim. CEOs make 299 times more than their average workers. Two months at that rate would give them maximum social security if they were in the plan. Their plan is better.
Managers must have moved up with owners. Nobody else moved up. The poor have lost ground. CEOs with fifty times the earnings of their average worker made people angry in old magazines. Dissenting opinion remains about the same now. The difference is the volume is turned down. Anger at capitalism remains, but since history is written, and culture defined by victors, this anger is not talked about much.
The magazines tell me that decades ago beauty was helpful to a woman, but only up to a certain point. Beauty remains helpful to women up to a certain point. Decades ago, everybody was born to consume and die. This is still true, only with less to consume and death is much closer now. The belief then was you could drop out of the system if you wished. The knowledge now is that the system will allow no such thing.
Should you attempt to drop out, the system will follow you and hunt you down. The system takes no prisoners and murders the indigenous. This is known now. Julian Assange and Chris "Commander X" Doyon make this clear. Anonymous and the feds do not forget. Feds still remember me, and some wish I had committed a crime. Fortunately, information in the public domain is not protected. If it were protected, then there would have been a crime. All they can do is put me on a list, mess with my website, and do the smoke and mirrors thing to me, like they do with other targets.
There is a lot of listing going on. In the days of my old magazines, somebody like me would have to find a hand delivered rag of a community newspaper around a college campus to be heard and then forgotten by a few hundred people. A small newspaper hungry for content and willing to publish anything that represented a serious effort or which was pornographic; they would take. This was not very dangerous to the system. Now fools like me can publish themselves like I am here and be seen by a dozen people. But old print newspapers could not publish themselves, and something popular could only be passed around. Now there is a chance in hell I could go viral. A chance right up there with the odds of a killer asteroid this year.
In the days of the old newspapers the public depended on newspapers and TV networks to hallucinate their reality, Now with the odds of a fool going viral causing apprehension, safeguards must be in place. Modern hallucinations are as divorced from reality now as they were in my old boxes. The narrative machine is more electronic than ink and paper, and the truth remains elusive. Nothing has really changed and lies must be protected.
Rest in peace Stuart Scott. You fought to the end. Facing Future won't be the same without you.
Friday July 16th,
The wheel of misfortune. The world spins. Somewhere in the world there is good news, but I do not know where. Riots in South Africa. The delta variant. Misery and heat. Lots of heat.
Moscow was hit with a heat wave at the end of June. Temperatures reached a 120-year record. I don't have details, so I can't explain the 120 years. But Russia could see its hottest summer since records began being kept 130 years ago.
This is according to Russia's meteorological service. So far, the average temperature in the European part of Russia is the highest since records began being kept. Western Siberia has swathes of cold. Temperature differences between northern and southern Russia, driven by climate heating, is shifting atmospheric circulation patterns. Anticyclones are becoming more common.
The American west is running out of water, while Texas floods. Reservoirs are at historic lows all over the west. Unrelenting drought and record heat will shut down hydro-electric plants. Lake Mead has reduced power generation 25%. The Edward Hyatt power plant in California will close down. Water levels in all of California reservoirs are at precipitous lows.
Rains wash away Germany as 60 wildfires rage across ten US states. Climate reporting concerning the recent record-breaking heat wave across the Pacific Northwest and Canada. A heat wave, that left hundreds dead, was bumped from CNN by billionaire space news. Richard 'Bransons' weightless joyride, considered to be more important.
The heat event in the Pacific Northwest was reported as a once in a millennium event. Generosity of former days and the need for perpetual optimism would credit this claim as having a statistical accuracy, ignoring shoddy science. Necessity of present circumstances now call this fabrication of math a lie. A lie because the world has changed, and new climate rules apply.
One degree of warming we have, and two degrees is coming our way. Two degrees can't be avoided. What about three or four degrees? That is a temperature we can only speculate about. We could not be around to find out. The number of people who can be alive in a 4 °C-warmer world is less than half a billion. The biosphere will support no more.
A 4 °C-warmed world has a wide belt of high humidity around the equator. Heat and humidity that will make most of tropical Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas uninhabitable much of the year. North and south of the killer equatorial torrid zone are vast expanses of desert. Most of the low and mid-latitudes become uninhabitable. Current temperate zones, now grass and forest, become desert lands of sand dune, barren rock, and howling wind.
The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005 because of more greenhouse gas. Oceans trap the extra heat and ocean temperature measurements confirm the NASA observation that "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The climate emergency becomes more apparent with each passing day.
Or at least the climate emergency becomes harder to ignore and sometimes propaganda is challenged. The claim that the Pacific Northwest heat dome was a once in a millennium event is now proven false. The link from heat dome event to human caused climate change confirmed. It took nine days.
This is the story of how it happened. There was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 which killed at least 30,000 people. It was hotter than anything previously recorded. Scientists were able to determine the intensity of the heat was linked to climate change, but the statistical analysis to reach the conclusion took more than a year before it was published. To be of interest to more than scientists, the time to do the analysis had to be shortened. A discipline of 'extreme event attribution' was worked out to do this. The methods used to tell if an event is statistically linked to anthropogenic climate change (shit people do) were perfected. A positive link was confirmed quickly.
'Extreme Event Attribution' can be compared with the speed with which COVID-19 vaccines are tested. Activities are run in parallel instead of sequentially, the normal way, greatly reducing time. Extreme Event Attribution (EEA) intersects statistics, atmospheric dynamics and human sciences. The aim is to characterize the probability of an event depending on climate change.
The endless search for profit has eaten the world and is destroying our climate. Our climate needed to grow our food. If you can't grow food, you starve. Since 1990 the rate of carbon emissions went up 60%. Capitalism, efficiency, and profit at all cost, has made agriculture depend on fossil fuels.
Going to a 4 °C-warmer world means six billion people will die through starvation or war.
Is capitalism worth it?
Monday July 12th,
People are up having coffee, it is Monday morning. Some Monday morning coffee is drunk with a web page up on a screen. Maybe this webpage, but the odds on that are very very long. It has been a while since I did something to bring in a lot of hits at once. For me, a dozen is a lot. People do not wake up with a K-Dog habit. Searches don't generally bring me up.
Across the land, articles are read. Somewhere, a blog is telling readership Trump is their rightful president. The same blog is likely referring to Biden as senile. The blog used to say Biden was hiding in a basement. Elsewhere, another blog demands the orange slug is brought to justice to pay for his incompetence. Make his kids pay too. Trump can't be hung too high for some.
In both places, an author is trying to sell what they write to an audience. They give their audience what their audience wants to hear. That is the easy way to get the writing done. Blogs demonizing 'the other side', blogs that viciously attack opponents. These blogs are easy to write. But I try not to write them myself. I try a more difficult road. I try to write something honest with a message and this is different from a fixed formula used to please a particular audience. A formula makes writing easy. Dragging things into the gutter passes for wisdom among fools. Words which glitter with gold hide thoughts which are as common as brass. Whatever pays the bills, they say to themselves.
For me, having a website that does not generate income is a bit different. It forces me to set my bar higher. Hopefully, to write something worth reading. Since I don't have readership, I would only bore myself if I just cranked something out with a formula. What would be the point? No point, so I have to try to be good at this. If I had readership things might be different, then I might have a formula. As it is I have no choice but to try to type out something of quality.
In our No-Joke show this week, Amos Markus and I gave a report on sea ice retreat in the Arctic. The drought in the American West. And other things environmental concerned with global heating. A global heating which is making itself copiously known. The inability of our biosphere to respond to our new temperature regime is mentioned in the show. A mass die-off of sea creatures baked to death in the sun at a low tide on Northwest beaches was discussed.
Since Saturdays' report, I discovered heat and drought is causing die-off of trees in Seattle. A fungus, Crypotostroma corticale, causes 'sooty bark disease' and the fungus is infecting trees along Seattle streets.
In early 2020, only one location in Seattle showed symptoms. Tested samples then verified the disease. Later in the year, the disease is found at three additional sites in Seattle, and now the disease is all over the city. Increase in sooty bark disease follows hot and dry summers. The disease only occurs in these conditions.
The fungus kills trees, but it bothers humans too. Spores of the fungus are hyper-allergenic and can cause severe asthma. Breathlessness, fever, night sweats, chills and weight loss are symptoms.
Another fungus that lives on trees and in soil on Vancouver Island is cryptococcus gattii. This fungus grows in association with Eucalyptus trees originally, it comes from Australia. Cryptococcus is working its way into Washington and Oregon now. Places where cooler temperatures no longer can prevent its spread.
Human infection begins when cryptococcus gattii is inhaled. The fungus produces head-aches, night sweats, and a prolonged cough. Fever and weight loss also. Cryptococcus leads to pneumonia, meningitis, or death.
This is not good. Fungi like warmer temperatures. And the world gets warmer. Human activity spreads fungus all around the world. Where it is warm enough to grow, it does. Human health is ruined by inhaling spores.
These two fungi are more anecdotal evidence in a growing collection of evidence, that the world warms. CO2 increase in the atmosphere is double what it was in the late 1980s. Severe disruption in the biosphere now begins with the increase in temperature resulting from the increase in concentration. The need to curb fossil fuel emissions is obvious. Evidence things have gone in exactly the wrong direction, clear.
A new way must be found to make power yield. Or as a species we die.
Friday July 9th,
No chapter this week. For ten weeks, I wrote a chapter every week. I could have done it today. I had a theme, a new twist I could have started to write about. I know the twist would have gone somewhere, and I don't have a writers block. I am not making excuses. The choice not to write a chapter is deliberate. For ten weeks, I wrote a chapter for Friday mornings. I could have done it today. I had a theme, a new twist that I could have started to write about. I know it would have gone somewhere, and I don't have any writers block. I am not making excuses. The choice not to write a chapter today is deliberate.
I don't do any of this for money. There are plenty of other slugs 'chronicling collapse' and expecting to get paid for posting stuff online. Such presumptive royalty is not hard to find. It is more common than not. A few months ago I even added a money link on my sidebar. You can buy me coffee or a dog biscuit if you want to. But, I am not asking you to send me anything.
I added the link, so I would not feel like a fool. If someone wanted to donate to my internet indolence and enable this pissing of revolution in an empty void, I think they should be able to do it. I saw Kevin Sandbloom at Black Bear News get a $2000 donation once. A few of those donations and I could do this full time and stop looking for a real job. As I am doing.
I have been involved in 'collapse' for a very long time. The inevitability of mass starvation when oil depletes is a certainty that will not be avoided. I would like a mass movement to grow dedicated to prevent this. And the hard crash of civilization that results when it happens. I am not a chronicler content to watch the shitshow happen like others are. I want change. Chroniclers wind up chasing money and they are content with injustice. I have seen many examples of this common herd. A herd that lords it over 'normies' to the point of being 'normies' themselves.
My goal of dedicating myself to a discipline of releasing a chapter a week for ten weeks in an ongoing story of the future which DOES NOT USE SCIENCE FICTION, I accomplished. I realize there are likely writers in Hollywood who would like to write the same way. Realistically, in a genuine portrayal, but some marketing guy probably comes along and says you have to have zombies and magic. We can't get a sponsor and sell the show without it. Money always fucks things up.
I promised myself I would do a chapter every week for ten weeks. Nobody emailed me to say if my story was good or bad, and I accomplished my 10-week goal. Now, if the story means nothing to anyone else; I need to move on and make other use of my time. Go to the bottom of my page. There is an email address. If you want to tell me my attempt at a story was good, or you want to tell me it is a steaming pile of shit, you can do it. Nobody has.
If people like the story, I will continue. Otherwise, I will concentrate on only writing my Monday morning blog entry, sans story for a while. I will spend some time tweaking software features here. Since I am an independent website I do everything. But, the value of being a platform where only direct action by the government can censor me has already shown itself to be worth the trouble. Have I been directly censored? Yes I have.
The routine of writing a chapter a week was good. I will likely attempt fiction again, but as nobody can even tell me if my story is good or bad I will do it again when the spirit moves me. My ability at writing fiction, be it good mediocre or bad, improved by the 10 week discipline. 15,000 or so words of fiction made the process of doing it easier. Good on that.
Monday July 5th,
Various means triggered the brother. Had plans fallen through, other crazies waited in a queue ready to go. Count on it.
Ready to hear a magic word that yanks their crazy chain. How many others human bombs waited for a trigger, we don't know. We can't know. Those bombs were not needed. The Tsarnaev human bomb exploded, and that was enough. It seemed so at the time. Before the smoke cleared. There were 3 killed. But American rage against sandbox Muslims did not ignite as planned. The fuse fizzeled.
The Tsarnaev friend shot dead by the FBI in Orlando was suspicious. The 15-year-old brother does not work as Oddjob to an Auric Goldfinger of a brother who was going to change the world by blowing up a pair of garbage cans. That story is missing something.
People behind such American fireworks are the same people behind American sponsored coup d'états in foreign lands. People who live in shadows. I use the word 'people' with qualification. People with lizard blood flowing in their veins should really be called something else.
Ecuador, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Honduras, Libya, Syria, Ukraine. Ten countries who have experienced regime change since the start of the new century. Outside the US, covert action makes regime change. Inside the nation, covert action prevents regime change. Both ways covert action bolsters American predatory capitalism and the American ruling class.
Now and again. As frequently as needed. The FBI announces they’ve foiled another terrorist plot. The FBI prevents bad men from destroying American freedom, so they say. That is how the story goes. But the real intent of this theater is to keep the war on terror alive. For a few reasons.
One man, Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, born in the US, but who lived much of his life in Jordan, is the center of one of these terrorist plots. Samy was living a normal life in Milwaukee until contacted by undercover FBI agents and groomed to participated in an armed attack. Over a period of five months.
Twenty three-year-olds are suggestible. At this age, a healthy young man is trying on new ideas and experimenting with mental perspectives like a teenage girl experimenting with makeup in a shopping mall. Grooming an older man to be a human bomb is more difficult and takes more time. Samy was easy work. He was just the right age.
Starting with a plan to fly Samy to the West Bank to kill Israelis and later making the plan local is a smart move when your goal is to brainwash someone into being a patsy in the war on terror. Start with the abstract and far away. Get the young man's confidence. Get him speculating. Make it clear you like to hear what he says. Shape opinion like an animal trainer with a handful of treats. Introduce the local plan later.
According to the affidavit: Samy Hamzeh met with two undercover FBI agents. They presented him with two automatic machine guns and a silencer. Samy paid for the weapons and silencer in cash and put them in the trunk of his car. The agents then arrested him and recovered the guns and silencer.
I wonder if the FBI used E-Bay to set the prices for the guns and silencer?
When was this? It was in January 2016. Three years less a week from the day I was told that there would be 'about four people killed', in the Boston Marithon Bombing. Almost three months later when the bombs went off, only three people died. One less than the prediction. I was surprised when it happened. At the time I thought I was only being messed with. It happened like this.
'What is the matter with you, Keith. Are you naive or what?. Something is going to happen in Boston when they run. About four people will be killed. Pay attention.'
I did not think this was real. I kept the info to myself until after the Boston bombs went off. I knew it was real then but I still stay quiet about it mostly. Making people think you are crazy is not a good thing.
Why was I told? I am a nobody. It did not make any sense. But it was safe, nobody would believe me if I told the story. I understood that, but it still did not make sense. Years later it makes sense. New human bombs are needed. Not just anyone can be spun up by mass media to be a human bomb. At the time, my history could have been twisted and tattooed into the sheepskin diploma of a modern Professor Moriarity. I qualified, my internet discoveries lead to me being thoughly investigated. I was already boxed in. I think my responses to their ad-hoc interrogation kept me safe. I did not give the answers that a useful idiot would. I do not at all believe I was told about the plot to enlighten me. My use as a tool was being investigated.
Samy also did not give all the right answers. Two FBI informants goaded Samy into buying guns. Samy complied, but he refused to be part of actual violence. So all Samy can be charged with is buying guns.
'lawyers for the man charged in the plot say he adamantly refused to participate when pressed by informants'
The lawyers say the FBI had been goading their client for months.
I bring Samy into the story because why should you just believe me. Todays' rant is triggered by truth, and by the headline:
Attorney General Merrick Garland Suspends Federal Executions
'Garland's memo did not address whether the federal government would continue to seek the death penalty in criminal cases. It therefore does not change the Justice Department's position before the U.S. Supreme Court, where the government is defending the death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the convicted Boston Marathon bomber.
I don't think the young man is guilty of anything. And if you had been told about the Boston Bombing ahead of time like I was, then you would likely agree with me.
There are dozens of Samy's.
Were the war on terror to be won. A lot of people will stop getting paid. Keeping the public in passive fear is also wanted. A passive field of compliant sheep is desired. The show must go on.
I have waited for years wanting to say something on behalf of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Figuring out a way to get my info out which does not label me as a nut and dilute everything else that I want to say. I hope I did.
Friday July 2nd,
Leaving the airstrip, the Tesla cruises up Ten Mile road. Five kilometers up from where Airport Way turns onto Ten Mile Road, the Tesla turns left to reach the Doomstead Diner parking lot. The Diner lot is on the opposite side of the Diner from the Ten Mile Road side, reached by a driveway along the south wall. Coffee smells good when K walks through the door. Nods greet him. The Doomstead Diner is across the parking lot from the Church of Celestial Wonders. The Church of Wonder is not a real church. It is the name of the island recreational drug dispensary. K knew prohibition would not work. Social use of alcohol and other things is allowed. Island ration cards make excessive consumption difficult. The Diner, filled to capacity with people fresh from work in farm fields, is serving dinner. Talk fills the air.
The waitress looked at him.
'They were just saying you might bring a mechanical Fido in with you.'
'I would, but they don't have tongues to hang outside windows. I need a dog that hangs his head out the window when I go down the road.'
'Really, everybody wants to see one. Nobody here knew we had them.'
'Ahhhh, yeah. It was on the down-low because they can double as soldiers. Under the new rules, I can't bring a dog in anyway. I am only the island censor now. The dogs are managed by island defense. I'll ask them to arrange a demo since people are interested.'
'Coffee ?'
'Yes, And a facon sandwich.'
He sat down at the counter. She turned to get coffee. The Diner looked like something from the American 70s. In each of four corners, video monitors mount hanging from the ceiling. Screens are packaged to look like old style TVs. A slide show of island news plays in an endless loop. Booths have individual speakers. Audio from video plays in booths when a button is pressed down. Island temperature flashes onto screens in a weather report. Twenty-Eight degrees C shows. A balmy arctic day if you do not move too much. A hot day for those pulling farm shifts. The Diner is cooled. Finished with a day of work, those assigned farming are happy to be cooling off in the Diner. K is there for coffee, conversation, and a walk across the parking lot for some hash oil.
Unavoidable slowing of northern grain shipments to new southern desert nations start riots. China dissidents awake to find themselves nailed inside apartments. Their only consolation, knowing that failure to receive a fair share of food rations from those assigned to deliver rations to them is a death penalty to those in the delivery team. A consolation not worth much if their own death reveals a delivery problem. In India, riots rage. The curious Indian detective delivers the vaccine he obtained from the Hindu radical splinter group to the World Pandemic Authority. Analysis shows the mix is their own standard vaccine issue with an additional strand of RNA to protect against a virus membrane protein in the terrorist bio-weapon. Within hours, this strand is added to standard anti-Covid vaccine cocktails. The World Defense Authority, alerted by the Pandemic Authority, targets every city where members of the radical Hindu sect live. Nuclear weapons are armed.
On the Island, crops grow. The island council decided isolation will be suspended to take the anticipated food harvest surplus to Anchorage. There it will be sent to food banks in the city. Grain unloaded, the boat crew will return to the island immediately. There is no need to bring anything back, so contact will be kept to a minimum. The visit would be short. Helter-Skelter means keeping a low profile.
A world defense execution squad mingles in the village where the radical Hindus sect keep their bio-lab. All members of the sect in the village are killed at once as the bio-lab is seized. The stored virus is killed and the lab torched. In a nearby village, a vial of the virus kept as a backup is released by surviving members of the terrorist sect. The release is quickly detected. A test of the first victim's blood shows the released virus as soon as she is hospitalized. Local members of the Hindu sect are arrested or killed. A pandemic vaccination squad enters the village and sets up a wide perimeter stretching into the countryside. Across which nobody can cross without permission. By the time the virus release is fully extinguished, 700 people in the village district are dead. Release in a large city would have triggered a nuclear response. World defense cancels the nuclear alert.
In better parts of the world, low birth rates and natural attrition shrink population. Slowly over the years. In these areas food is scarce, but available. Population living in these better parts experience a long misery. The relationship is coincidental. In other parts of the world, food availability and soil fertility fall faster than population in the area can naturally fall.
These are lands of failed states where warlords and gangs rule. Murder and starvation is the norm in these lands. Population declines catastrophically, in sudden jumps from any increase in food stress. Soil degrades creating ever more difficulty growing food. A handful of cities high enough from the sea cling to civilization in uneasy stabilities.
A warehouse on the island has enough Formica to resurface all the Doomstead Diner tables and counter-tops every five years for the next thousand years. Facon is not in short supply, and Coffee grows well on island mountains. Society is organized to maintain equity between island citizens. Allowing all citizens to achieve full and fulfilled lives. Island citizens are able to express and cultivate talents. Education punctuates island work schedules throughout life. All citizens become skilled teachers as they practice on each other. The Island is organized to preserve the best humanity learned in the growth times. Before the world died. And before it could begin to recover.
Population has to reduce to a fraction of the mass the human tumor has been allowed to grow. A massive reduction in population numbers must happen before our biosphere can recover. The most powerful counties of the far north collaborate to keep nuclear war from happening. Pandemic response is coordinated. Most importantly, grain ships of the arctic are controlled by this cabal of nations. This is welfare on a global scale, with countries receiving grain ruled by surveillance and panoptic terror to keep populations from growing. Need for grain keeps an uneasy peace between nations. Population growth or war results in the sanction of a grain boycott.
Monday June 28th,
A once in a millennium event. The phrase does not sound to bad. But there is something rather contrived about it. Something very contrived. Reflecting on the deep thought it took to pop out this brain fart, something takes shape. A rather sinister something. Any American able to do more than stand in a corner and drool would have to think of climate change at least once before uttering such stupidity. At least once before polluting surrounding air with such putrification of speech.
Which means they lied.
Weather records have not been kept in Seattle for 1000 years. How would anyone know a weather event happening today only happens once in a thousand years? That's right, they wouldn't know and they couldn't know. A simple search would pop up any warmer days in the last thousand years, as fast as you can blink. But records don't exist. So how was it done?
A small statistics book, 'How to Lie with Statistics', the best-selling statistics book of the last 60 years could say. This book could pop out the technical answer. But technical details hide and shadow the lie. And I don't care about the technical gymnastics as much as I care about the lie. And I care about the intent behind the lie. The intent to mislead, befuddle and confuse. Talking about the technical tricks, what was cherry-picked to come up with this misleading bullshit, takes away from the lie.
I can count on one hand the number of days it has been over 37.78 degrees C in Seattle. (100 degrees Fahrenheit, I'm going metric.)
The sun is about to come up. It is 5 in the morning. I woke up from the heat. It is 23.89 degrees C or 75 degrees F. There is no early morning chill. At four PM the temperature will be over 42 degrees C. That is the same as 108 degrees F. Yesterday at 104 degrees F, it was the hottest day ever recorded in Seattle. Four degrees warmer is going to be an experience. By the end of the day I will be experienced.
I'm jazzed. Not because I just discovered American mass media misleads and plutocrats in power brainwash us. I know that already. But I am sensitive to deliberate deceptions today. A conscious decision taken to neglect global heating made the once in a millennium comment. The omission of global heating is deliberate.
Even in the face of obvious global heating elites behind the news refuse to accept that business as usual can't go on. Will the comment matter? Yes, it is another brick in the wall. One brick does not make a wall. In total the sum of tiny deceptions, the totality of bricks all together make a wall.
American propaganda has built a prison, and we are walled in.
I watched false news reports put out to hide an execution by an American death squad in Minneapolis over this week. The episode of 'No Joke' below this post has the details. To watch it and to get past the fluff about Britney Spears, start 56 minutes in.
I don't expect the Execution of Winston Smith will arouse outrage like the George Floyd situation did. It should, but the federal government is suppressing the event, and they are very good at suppressing. Many idiots approve. They are so good at it you won't even know a murder and cover up even happened.
All your racist ass will know is another black criminal was resisting arrest. And that he got what was coming to him. If you don't have a racist ass, you may know better and can calm down. Unless you are taken in by deep state propaganda. Which is possible and very likely. Naïveté makes it likely.
You could even believe Winston pulled a gun. But seriously, would you pull a gun if you suddenly were surrounded by seven police cars on top of a parking garage with nowhere to go? With a dozen guns pointed at you? I would not. But without thinking about the circumstances you will accept whatever the pretty news-anchors say. They smile so nice. You will be a good citizen and know your place.
If you do have a racist ass I hope you stay agitated all day. Fuck you. Everybody else calm down.
Violence in America is normal. The problematic killing of one young black man is easily ignored. We don't have video to perv over in this murder to keep people wound up. And we have other stuff to distract us. Joe Biden shut down Iranian websites this week. Joe airstruck some buildings supposed to have drones inside. Drones used against Americans occupying foreign soil. Joe did this last night. Seven people killed. Nobody cares. If Iran responds creatively enough to the assault, people might care. Iran has not responded yet.
Racist America continues to pray in vain for the return of Trump. Trump is gone, Trumptopia remains. Republicans continue their elite and sclerotic administration of our republic. Keeping change mired in molasses. Everything Biden tries to do is blocked. Not that Biden tries to do much.
Fanboys will disagree about Biden, but inequity and rule by plutocratic elites from both big American parties will be the death of us. Both parties are fully controlled by rich elites. America must go the way of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing towers of St. Louis soon. The St. Louis story is going to be repeated. The Pruitt-Igoe housing towers were occupied by black tenants. Racist politicians refused to spend money to keep the Pruitt-Igoe buildings in good condition. Residents were blamed for building disrepair as all the infrastructure failed. The buildings had to be torn down. America seems to be going the same way. Tearing itself down.
Friday June 25th,
Marvin Gaye finished playing. Roger Waters started streaming. "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" played over the car speakers. Climbing a small hill, the road curved as the Tesla Model S slowed to take a sharp left onto Ten-Mile road. A few hundred yards south on Ten Mile road, then a right turn onto Airport way. A bamboo stand across a drainage ditch on the right side of the road shimmers in a breeze. The stand of bamboo is framed by eucalyptus trees. White flecks of gold sunlight flash sparks from the last morning dew left over from an early morning fog. A fog now all burned away.
Sparks of white fire flash a message back in the sparks of sunlight. But what is the message? The breeze bends the bamboo over. But no eyes can know the bent tops point in the wrong direction for things to be good. The sparks of light warn of danger.
Fifty years earlier, the bamboo stand had been thick with green Arctic grass. The grass pointed in a different direction when the wind blew. The new bamboo was too young for the direction of bend to show its preference. Seeds for the eucalyptus trees came from thousands of miles away. Nobody paused to think which way a bamboo stand along Ten Mile road should bend in the wind. The bend shows air is being sucked into Siberia. A huge high pressure cap of air is being fed there. A zone of stagnate air will hang over Siberia for days. It will be warmed by the late summer sun until it is hot. Then it will move south and west and get hotter.
Cement was being exposed when he arrived at the airport. Four foundations for holding cable spools and attached mechanical doghouses were already exposed. Work on digging up a fifth was well under way. Landscaping had buried concrete foundations under dirt mounds before Helter Skelter. The mounds of earth looked like raised flower beds. Cement foundations were poured with concrete for the runway. The foundations only needed to be dug up with dirt from the raised beds spread out over the surrounding ground. Plastic flowers in the raised beds had already been taken away. The flowers would be turned into diesel fuel later. When all the cable spools were working.
One of the men working a shovel paused as he drove up. Stepping out of the Model S he heard,
Hey, look it is Mr K. The video star. Should we get his autograph?
The others chuckled.
If you want it you have to have something to write with. I did not bring anything with me.
More chuckling.
How did you guys get so much done so fast?
Another of the four-man crew spoke.
We talked last night. We figured you might show up and want to dig, and we wanted to get all the digging done before it gets too hot. We did not want you getting in the way. The weather gods say it is supposed to be a hot afternoon.
The comment about getting in the way was said with a smile. The crew was in good spirits. The weather god was an island joke. An array of sensors across the island provided detailed weather data to Island Central computers. An AI monitored the sensors. As time went by, the AI learned how to make better and better predictions of island weather. The process was automatic, and a pair of virtual reality newscasters gave a continuous streaming forecast of island weather over a dedicated channel on the island broadband network. The smiling newscasters never slept or needed to eat, and they were perfect renditions of beautiful people. Consequently, their constant virtual cheer was quickly found to be irritating and within days the pair was nicknamed the weather gods. The nickname made the cheer bearable.
Besides, we want to get the work done. We think this is kind of important.
He replied,
Yes, but as long as the United States exists, not so much. We put up the fancy stuff now because if the country divides, borders will be unstable. That is when we could have trouble. He paused saying,
So what is next?
The team leader, who had been first to speak, replied.
After we dig up and wash this pad down, we are going to mount the first five spool cans. Then we test the mechanical dogs.
Good, I want to see a dog in action. I have only seen one in a demo when I visited the factory where they were made. I have not seen one pull on a cable. Now, if you don't have an extra shovel, you can give me yours.
The group chuckled.
There is an extra in the truck.
After twenty minutes of digging, the concrete pad was ready to be hosed down with discarded dirt spread out and raked into nearby grass. Washed down, the first five spool pads were ready to be used.
It was late in the afternoon before all five concrete pads had their spool cans and doghouses bolted down. Tomorrow, five more cans would be installed by a different crew. Five days would be needed to install all the spools. Exposing as much of the Island Defense Team as possible to the system was a good idea. That is why every day used different people. Everybody doing the work was on the Island Defense Team.
People began to show up for the demo about 15:00 in the afternoon, but it was almost 16:20 in the afternoon before power was wired to all the spools. About fifty people stood on the north end of the runway, looking south at the line of newly mounted spool cans on the right side. The first can was about twenty feet away and the last looked small and very far away. The three cans in between stepped in size from large to small as the perspective of distance shrank them down.
A line of five bright blue lights flashed along the other side of the runway. The lights rose on thick steel poles as thick as tree trunks from the ground. On the side of the poles facing the runway thick steel hooks are mounted open side up.
Doghouse doors opened in unison. Out of each door, a pair of mechanical dogs stepped. One dog stood motionless, while the dogs closest to spool cans walked over to stand by their cans. Ends of cable bent over to make loops popped out of the side of the spool cans. Each dog slipped their mechanical head through a loop. Then the dogs walked across the runway all at the same time. Each pair together with one dog pulling cable. Reaching the hooks, the dogs pulling cable rubbed their heads against the steel hooks and with a quick fluid motion of the front paws the cable was on the hook. Then the poles rose higher and the runway was blocked by thick cables ready to slice any airplane trying to land in half. The dogs returned to their doghouses and backed in. The doors closed.
A minute went by and the doors opened. This time one dog jumped out of each doghouse and, without pause, ran across the runway to the poles hooking cables on the other side. Jumping up on hind legs, the dogs unhooked cables and ran back to their doghouses. As the dogs backed into their doghouses, spools began to wind up cable. In a minute, the runway was cleared for landings until the next test of the system.
In a week, all the cables will be mounted. The Island will be able to prevent airplanes from landing and regular defensive drills will start. By then, the mass of stagnant air over Siberia will be slowly moving. The mass of high pressure will blow through and around the mountains of Afghanistan for a final push to bake over India.
By this time a Hindu detective in India, suspicious of the eagerness members an extremist group had for being vaccinated, acquired some vaccine the group is fond of taking. The detective's commitment to the principles of ahimsa is firm and his desire to stop extreme authoritarian and cruel expressions of karma, where he can, is strong. Before the day was over, the vaccine was in a diplomatic pouch on the way to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. If there is anything unusual about the vaccine, the detective knew the Wuhan virology lab is the place with the best talent to find out if anything strange is going on.
Monday June 21st,
Trump is gone, but Covid-19, facilitated by Trump's lawless cowboy no-rule capitalism, killed more than 600,000 Americans. America is tired, weary and exhausted.
Juneteenth is a thing. Racists hate our new holiday. They wonder why the 4th of July gets competition. The ink on the Juneteenth proclamation is hardly dry, but the murder of an unarmed black activist, Winston Smith, by out of control federal marshals with perverted agenda, is ignored from sea to sea.
Lost and apathetic America is. I am outraged there is no outrage over the murder of Winston Smith. Trump set up racist surveillance of Minneapolis black people after George Floyd was murdered. Federal agents fused with local law enforcement to become a new American Stazi. A Stazi in Minneapolis. Created from a toolbox of electric toys and staffed by idiots. Implemented on Trump's watch. But the Winston Smith execution two weeks ago happened on Biden's watch. It has been more than 100 days. Electronic toys and idiots remain.
As a concept, I don't like the idea of systemic racism. The pervasive reality of it I won't ignore. But as a concept it lacks morality. Individuals own racism. It is a personal fault that people as individuals own.
I seriously think that someone who really understands systemic racism as a concept more useful than sliced bread; must themselves be racist. How else not to understand the personal responsibility? Racism is something some people, not all people, own. Some Americans actually find racism disgusting. A disgust which at times is lonely. But blessed are the meek, they will have the earth in the end.
Those with a jones for ice cream and righteousness will get a double scoop. Blessed are the chill and the laid back, for mellow times will follow them all the days of their lives. Blessed are those who can stay real in this arcade of meaningless and dissapative temptation. Such people exist. All lives matter and thou shall not kill. All that stuff. If it gets you through the day, that is OK.
But if wishes were horses, fools would ride. Instead, they drive. Some fly. I am outraged that there is no outrage. The line at the Pearly Gates will be long. Find out what St. Peter likes if you think you might be in that queue. The dude might be in a bad mood when he gets to you. There will be a lot of explaining going on in the line ahead of you. If you find out how to apply for the St. Peter retirement community online, do it.
On it goes, systemic violence. Expecting Biden to change the game is vain hope. Exhausted America is, and dissolute and beaten we are. If white vans begin to take people away in the middle of the night, Americans will not notice or care. The 'they must have done something to deserve this' meme will bore through brains from one ear to the other like an ear bug from hell.
So tired are we any excuse will do. Billionaires double fortunes and the rest of America locks down. Obscene systemic injustice beats America down. And there is no feeling it can change. Instead, we have unfocused desire. A cynic defeatism makes an plague of national stupidity that puts COVID-19 to shame. And, 'It Came From a Lab' is a collective prayer that fantasy be real. But reality not fantasy is coming our way and it is not going to be fun. The future will be best be avoided if you can manage it. If suspended animation were a thing, a lot of people would opt for a nap.
Under the American constitution, American people can have almost anything they want. But our constitution can't tell American people to want something. It seems Americans don’t want anything except more lies.
Mass media rains bullshit down on us every day. It has become a deluge of lies. But people find lies comfortable. No demands will be made. By making no demands power will concede nothing. American politicians think they exist to get paid. Everybody in America wants to get paid. All people think about is money here. Profit is more important than human life and if you look in my sidebar and want to buy me a biscuit that would be fine.
Exceptions show the rule. Some people want change. Something better and something different, I am not alone. There is a large progressive movement in America. People who are serious about change. There have to be at least two thousand progressive people in America now. That is a lot of people don't you think? If the number grows, there will be even more. And Juneteenth is a thing now too.
Energy flowing in the presence of rules creates complexity. I was delighted when I first learned this. Understanding this is the source of complexity, where complexity comes from, explains many things that are hard to figure out. A math toy called 'The Game of Life' shows how this works. Applied to real life an energy flow (COVID-19) in the presences of the rule (wearing a mask takes my freedoms away) created a COMPLICATED disaster (our world now). That is a real life example and not a mathematical toy. If I have my rules and energy switched in the example that is OK. My example is to show the concept.
A starting arrangement leading to a game of life that never stops.
'The Game of Life' was invented by the British mathematician John Horton Conway. The game shows how energy flow in the presence of rules creates complexity. John died of COVID-19 last year. A lot of people have studied John's game since it first appeared in Scientific American in 1970. One of the things learned is predicting what will be a stable arrangement from initial game conditions can't yet be done. Most starting arrangements in the game lead to dead ends where the game stops. Some arrangements lead to a game which goes on forever. Predicting a starting arrangement that leads to a game going on forever is a mystery.
The game of life goes a long way to help understand what the condition our condition is in. The nation state (national complexity) is generated by cowboy capitalism (American rules) driven by human greed (a copious energy flow).
Given the situation America is in now, oerpopulated, ignorant, devoid of resources. Bleak, made toxic by greed following the national religion of it is all about me. Get all you can for yourself. Things cannot end well. Our situation will lead to a game which, were we squares in Conway's actual game of life, ends.
Republican, Democrat, Anarchist, Socialist or fucking commie. Whatever you choose for rules, remember a game of life that keeps on going is your goal. Not a game that stops and not rules you choose from your canned ideology of choice are what is important.
Understanding how energy flowing in the presence of rules works gives you focus and answers. Richard Wolff, a host of 'Democracy At Work', points out capitalism is an arrangement, a set of rules. Rules which causes the American game of life to blow up on a periodic and regular basis. Pain and misery results when that happens and is a feature of capitalist rules. These rules are not appropriate to the arrangement we now have. Collapse will result.
Friday June 18th,
Sunlight streamed through the open door when M walked in. Her hair glowed red in the morning light. The flash of red caught his eye and he waved. Closing the door behind her, she turned, walked down the isle, and sat down across the table from him, smiling she said,
Good morning.
It is always a good morning when I see you, he replied.
The egg knew how she liked her coffee.
It came to the table. No order was necessary.
Looking straight into his eyes, she said,
What are you going to do today?
I am going up to the airport and have a look around. See what needs to be done.
We don't have flights in or out anymore, and all the planes are in hangars. What is there to do?
I want to make sure we can respond to visitors. We could have guests. Somebody might get the idea of moving in. Our airport is a way onto the island, so we have equipment to run cable across runways, making them impossible to use.
This cable can cut semi-trucks trying to crash through military gates in half. We stretch our cables across our runways, in a dozen places. So runways can't be used in an invasion. It only takes a couple of minutes to wind cable in or out across runways. But cable equipment is not yet in place. Spools holding cable are in a warehouse at the airport ready to be put up along runways.
Spools mount along both runways. Twenty-four poles rise out of the ground. One for each cable. Twelve on each runway. The poles make fences with spools on the other side which wind out cable when receiving poles rise up. Cable hangs between pole and spool like the cables holding up nets on tennis courts. Poles for the spools are installed and working. They are in the ground and ready to rise up when a cable is attached.
I'm confused, why are poles working but not the spools? When were poles put in?
Each spool is seven feet tall and three feet wide. I did not want anybody to know how I was going to lock down the island before Helter Skelter happened, and spool housings will be noticed. I did not want to make a puzzle to figure out. Spool housings do not sink into the ground when cable is wound up like poles do. They are too big. Poles are invisible when they are sunk in the ground. They resemble landing lights.
Each spool has a doghouse next to it. Each doghouse has a pair of mechanical hounds inside. Each hound can pull a cable across the runway from a spool to a pole while it unwinds, to hook the cable onto the pole. The hound can also unhook a cable from a pole when the cable winds up. One hound is a spare. The poles were installed two years ago. Hydraulics are tested every month to make sure they lift.
Finishing coffee and breakfast, they talked about her house project. A new house was going to be built each year. It was a way to keep islanders skilled in building trades. The first house was being planned. M was planning the kitchen. He asked her what she was going to do next, and she asked him if he could come to her house and help her move a chair. Which she could have moved herself. And which did not need any moving. An hour later, he left her house for the Airport.
The drive from the town to the airport only takes a few minutes. Marvin Gaye played on the car stereo.
'Mercy, mercy
Things ain't what they used to be, no no
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east'
As he drove, new vaccinations began in Gujarat India. Members of a particular fringe Hindu sect stand first in line. They wait for vaccination centers to open. Religious tensions in India are stretched thin and tight. New dangerous fringe elements have emerged. Hindu and Muslim do not trust each other and are at war. Chronic hunger aggravates tensions. Hindu and Muslim take vaccinations separately. They only mix with their own kind. Each side fears being poisoned by the other. The separation in supply chains allowed one side to change the vaccine profile their own people get inoculated with. Annual bat virus boosters started after pandemics were unleashed when flora and fauna tried, and failed, to adjust to the methane bomb. Now the vaccine delivery system is perverted from a noble and humane goal, hijacked by madmen.
A system to vaccinate everyone on the planet was set up after the explosion in pandemics caused by climates marching relentlessly north. Controls make sure vaccines are not adulterated, but a way to switch the entire supply of Hindu vaccines to India at the source was found by homicidal fringe elements. Anti-tampering controls can not account for an entire supply being changed. The new Hindu supply is the same as the old Hindu supply, but with an addition to the recipe. The new supply protects from all seven known COVID viruses and their many variants. Plus the new vaccine protects from a new and previously unknown, novel, and very deadly virus. A virus which exists only in a lab managed by the same homicidal fringe Hindu sect whose members are first in line to get new bat virus boosters.
Monday June 14th,
I watched the TV series 'Wayward Pines' last week. The series was made half a decade ago by FOX. Two seasons with 20 total episodes. Looking around at my page, it is not hard to figure out why I would not know about a Sci-Fi series made by 'FOX'. I do not traffic in bullshit state-based propaganda and Fox is bullshit state-based propaganda. 'Wayward Pines' is on HULU now. Mrs. Dog got a month of HULU free. We binged watched the two seasons in two days.
We watched Wayward Pines before I wrote chapter seven and now my circadian rhythm is all messed up. After the first few episodes I feared the series was telling the same story I am writing here. A cold chill went up my spine. It whispered I was a fool and I should stop writing my story. Nobody cares and the story is already written. But my fear was temporary. A dependence on a zombie meme was quickly revealed. The series degenerated into an action movie.
I enjoyed it, in places the episodes are insightful. But the story depends on fantasy like the rest of Sci-Fi. Too bad, since we live in a world which has become stranger than fiction. Wayward Pine 'Abbies' reduced the series to pure entertainment. They disconnected the show from reality. Like the rest of Hollywood Sci-Fi does. But maybe that is the score. Let me explain.
Kilgore Trout did not know diddly about science. I remember reading that about him. Being ignorant of science is not my situation. As a science fiction writer familiar with science, I am sure to suck. Kilgore became famous knowing nothing. But I do not have the benefit of ignorance. So maybe I should give up? Spending time on a paid gig in my profession might be a better idea? But since I can't get one I will write ten chapters. I promised myself to write at least ten chapters.
The lab origin of RONA has become super popular. A lab origin is easy to believe in. The lab origin is sexy and does not attack hubris. It is clearly too easy to believe in as evidenced by the number of people who believe the hypothesis. Without evidence of any kind.
Did I type hypothesis? Pardon me, I made a mistake. I call it a hypothesis since without a test the conjecture has zero credibility. Not that anyone else cares. I call it a hypothesis, perhaps you call it fact. Which one of us is right?
I am. The RNA of the virus has been examined all over the world. The RNA has been examined by hundreds of PHDs and some of these men and women are competent. Evidence of Gain of Function has not been found. If it exists it would have been found by now.
If I was doing my part to serve the Biden agenda I'd be popping off with 'It came from a Lab' all the time. I'd be doing my part to poison international relations with China like everyone else is doing, and I'd be turning my brain off like everyone else doing.
The Plague by Albert Camus tells of a town named Oran who experiences the plague. Camus asserts that people of Oran considered themselves modern. Even with people dying all around the attitude was, 'It can't happen to me'.
'It can't happen to me' and 'It came from a lab' are both statements of denial. The lab hypothesis requires evidence and the only evidence that exists is the RNA looking to be natural. 100% natural. No alterations.
This is a strike against the lab hypothesis. A strike that believers ignore. A desire to 'fit in' means someone unnamed, put out the word that evidence exists. People believe it because it feels good. No other reason. And it does feel good. Despite their being no evidence.
'It came from a lab' lets you hold on to the vain belief that you are the center of the universe.
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.-- Albert Camus
A close mach to RONA-19 has been found in bats at a wildlife sanctuary in Thailand. Researchers are confident that coronaviruses "with a high degree of genetic relatedness to Sars-CoV-2 are widely present in bats across Asia". None of these bats are in a lab.
Related viruses are found in the wild. The law of parsimony states "entities should not be multiplied without necessity". Putting the Wuhan Virology Lab between wild bats and people is an unnecessary complication. It is a complication without supporting evidence of any kind.
The law of parsimony is also known as Occam's razor. William of Ockham was born in 1287 and he died in 1347. Seven hundred years ago. If William were alive today he would be too smart to be taken in by the unproven Wuhan Lab Conspiracy. He would be too smart to be so foolish.
If you believe in the lab escape, I hope it is ok with you that a guy 700 years ago is smarter than you are.
Friday June 11th,
Thousands of miles of sea kept him from the pain of the dying world. Life on his time capsule was good. After his Helter Skelter speech he established a routine. In the morning he woke early before the sun. By sunrise he would have an general idea if he was going to call a morning meeting.
The world was dying. Fuel to move goods an overpopulated society needs to live on had run out. No longer could everyone eat. Arctic and Antarctic farms had compensated as the tropics moved north. For more than a decade food grown at the poles shipped south. But farms had not had to grow energy. Only food. Now they would have to grow both. Across the globe riots raged. He feared a nuclear winter. That would ruin island crops. That would bring trouble home.
Dim blue light filled the air. The sky would glow in the east soon. Dark outlines of forest trees would show themselves below the red glow of the rising sun. The report from Island Central only contained bad news. Typical news for a world adjusting to food shortage. Good news was impossible. Farms could now only support a fraction of existing population. 58 degree C heat along the west coast of India fueled violence at night. Domestic chaos kept international tensions at bay as local pain dominated attention. With each passing day a night of crime made the number of people to feed fewer. Misery had not resulted in wars yet, and nothing in the news feed suggested a war would start today. Death spread across the globe evenly. Misery continued to be local and contained. The though of breakfast in town came to mind.
Driving into town the vague line of pale sky became solid. The buildings threw unequal reflections of the sun at him as he drove closer. Bright shards of brilliance from high windows caught the sun. Lower windows held onto shadows of night. In places an electric light pierced the shadows. In places someone else was beginning their day.
The Tesla parked in front of the 'Good Egg'. He was the Eggs' first customer of the morning. Orange clouds reflected in the window glass as he walked to the door. Suspended in the motionless morning air, the clouds soaked up the rising sun.
Hash-browns toast and coffee with a side of facon (fake bacon) was going to be good. Everything in a Good Egg breakfast was island grown. Before Helter Skelter the staff had all been students at the Vegan Institute. Specialists in nutritious plant based gourmet foods. He liked having the Good Egg staffed by island labor instead of foreign students now. Distracted and serious students. Most of the time music was off when the students worked. With Island staff things had changed.
'Rock Your Baby' played in the background. The atmosphere was warm and inviting. Island staff knew part of the job was to communicate with people and see what they needed besides food.
Asking how people are doing is as important as serving breakfast. Working at the Egg is a nice work assignment to have. The job is not to teach people how to eat like the former staff of students had naively assumed and been told. Perceptive students pondered how people on the island seemed to know as much about meat substitutes as they did. People who seemed, they thought, not to have any connection with the Vegan Institute at all.
The Vegan Institute, now without foreign students is the Island Culinary School. The Institute is folded into the Island Cooperative. All Island residents work for and own the Island Co-Op. It is equivalent to citizenship. Giving over island ownership to the Island Cooperative was part of Helter Skelter. The Vegan Institute was administered separately under the owner corporate umbrella before Helter Skelter stopped travel to the island. The Vegan Institute is part of the outside world. There still is virtual connection to the outside world where civilization remains. Island central has green screen studios and emails to the Vegan Institute are answered.
The Vegan Institute is reduced to a single office. An office managed by the security staff of the Island Co-Op. Ten years after the emails stopped the office was re-purposed. Emails had become a thing of the past by then. But that was yet to come.
Grabbing the 'Island Daily' by the door he sat down. The Island Daily is printed most days of the week and has been since Helter Skelter was called. Days off are always announced ahead of time and there are never more than two days with no publication of the Daily at once. Sometimes news happens slow on the island. Collecting island news for the large single page of hand pressed newsprint can take more than a day.
Currently the Daily misses no days. International wires are still active. The world does not yet know that no new communication satellites will launch for at least 100 years. Empty space on the Daily can still be filled with headlines like and stories about - '500.000 dead in Brazil' -. He noted the headlines were about two hours old this morning. The last headline he saw before leaving home announced Brazil deaths at over a million. A thermogeddon event had killed them. The wet-bulb temperature had been above 34 degrees C for four days in a row and the electrical grid failed from the heat. Only generators could power air conditioning. Before anyone without a generator became incapacitated, gunfire disputed generator ownership. Near the Arctic where the Daily is read the tropical climate is pleasant and not wet-bulb deadly.
Further down the Daily page local news begins. A lumber display is being put up at the Island Store. The first island lumber harvest is finished and processed. Due to small tree size the largest piece of lumber offered is a 2x4 eight feet long. Later years will bring full size lumber. The trees cut for this lumber are temperate forest trees and were the first to grow in the subarctic grass. They sheltered tropical trees that need a canopy to get started growing. The tropical trees will grow better on their own now. Selective logging produced a small harvest which was dried and cut. The only way to find out about the lumber display at the store without going to the store, is to read the Daily.
Two people came through the door together. He recognized her as Felicity, a nurse at the hospital. The man with her was part of the Squid crew. his name was Andy. An expert in martial arts among other things. He smiled at the pair. He did not care if they were a thing or not. He knew Felicity but only casually. She smiled back at him. Andy, suddenly realizing who he was reacted as if something loud had fallen over. For a moment he froze. Felicity noticed Andy's reaction and chuckled, 'Relax baby it is all good'. Embarrassed, Andy feigned like nothing happened. A return chuckle might have been a better response, but it did not matter.
Andy slid into the first booth across from the door next to Felicity. Soon the Egg filled with customers anxious for society and some coffee. Before heading off to work assignments.
Pretending to read a book in the corner booth he soaked up the atmosphere. As copies of the Daily were picked up he noticed where attention went first. Local news exclusive to the Daily in the lower half of the page, or did eyes start at the top looking at international news? The page is big enough to tell. As weeks passed he noticed interest in the outside world fell off. This was a good thing. Preserving the past would work out better if the pain of the dying world was kept at a distance. The Island Security Force and the Government Council is aware of what is happening in the rest of the world. This is enough. Just about every way you can find out about international news is faster than reading the Daily. The paper is hand pressed on an 18th century printing press on one huge sheet. The moveable type is hand set. Two people pull the screw to print a page. Everything is at least two hours old in the Daily when it reaches the Egg. Current headlines are only a swipe away on an island phone.
A look at the top of the Daily Sheet first is normal for everyone. Pausing at the top to check headlines more than a brief moment shows a reader suffering from fear. The path of a relaxed eye travels to content exclusive to the Daily quickly. That is where island news is.
Nobody knew why he laid out the Daily the way he did. The layout had been his idea and it was a good layout. Nothing to question and there is no reason to change. Changing the page layout to be less conducive to his experiment was possible. He is no longer the owner of the island. But going against the wishes of the Island Censor is a bad idea. Not dangerous in itself as the Censor is a nice well balanced guy. But changing the layout would be embarrassingly clueless.
Monday June 7th,
JPMorgan Chase earned $14.3 billion in net income reflecting strong underlying performance across Chase businesses. Partially driven by a rapidly improving economy. So said Jamie Dimon of CEO of JPMorgan Chase talking about first quarter 2021 profits. Jamie Diamond scarfed up $12 billion in public bailout money. He is personally worth more than 10000 times what an average American is worth. Jamie wants Joe Biden to itemize what will be done with any money collected by increasing corporate taxes.
An architect of the 2008 financial disaster Jamie is concerned that Joe Biden spend money wisely calling Biden's tax hike plans a "little crazy". I don't think Joe should do it. I don't think Joe should listen to Jamie at all. Jamie is under a delusion he should have a say in how taxpayers dollars are spent. A pathological attitude which must no doubt be a perverse consequence of receiving too-big-to-fail corporate welfare. Children have a similar attitude when spoiled.
Those who benefit from current arrangements, Jamie Diamond being one, do not want change. It is not a matter of having a different perspective or not understanding that Americans are in need. It is a matter of winning and getting more, always wanting more and never getting enough. It is being comfortable with extreme inequality and unearned riches, and lying to get more. Being insensitive to get more. It is ignorance of limits.
Trump reduced corporate taxes from 35% to 21%, but many large profitable corporations pay no taxes at all. Biden wants to roll corporate taxes back to a whopping 25%, possibly 28%. The rich white contingent likes the Trump cuts as they are, and the poor white contingent likes to think they will be rich and white someday. They are halfway there, this is true, and that makes them get the stupids and ape the rich. Despite low taxes working against them, poor white Americans believe in corporate welfare. They like Trump tax cuts and buy the bullshit of 'job creators' (after jobs were shipped overseas), and anything else a suit says who has power over them.
Coffee prices are up 25% so far this year from a Brazilian drought. Drought has also come to the American west. Three-quarters of the American west is in severe drought. Very severe draught. Water supply shortages and wildfires will be a feature of the west this summer. Triple-digit temperatures hit Nevada, California, and Washington State last week.
Global heating is on target, this was predicted.
Trumptards continue to think Trump won the election and love to talk about Wuhan Lab escapes. Lab speculations dominating conversation means nothing else can be talked about. Deciding the agenda of conversation is an unappreciated means of control. To victims of this manipulation it is invisible. Management of content is not obvious. Perpetrators are not going to give up the secret and victims don't want to admit they are fooled.
Nothing is talked about which could rock the boat, lead to change, or sabotage efforts to get the White House back into little tax-cutting hands. Some people like it that way. Those who are rich or a fool.
The Trump era is in our rearview mirror but the Trump dog still chases our car. Dismissal of info as 'Fake News' be news true or false, that did not matter. Calling truth fake was a feature of Trumptopia. It is still with us. Trump acolytes remain bewitched with border-line conspiracy theory stories. Flawed perceptions of reality continue to be rampant among the deceived.
The smartest thing I read recently is, "I don't care where it came from. Just get the jab."
A whole lot of people, despite knowing a lots of other vaccinated people who have had no ill effects, continue to fear being vaccinated. Which sort of makes sense since believing in UFOs is normalized now. But it does not ring with being your brothers keeper. This dog has had his shots. I am still barking. What are you waiting for?
Friday June 4th,
Coffee was brought to the table. Left to grow on their own, island coffee bean bushes would be among the tallest trees on Alutia when this coffee was brewed. Instead, coffee trees were trimmed short for easy harvest. The first trees were planted shortly after the methane bomb warmed things up. It was in the second year without snow that the first plantation trees were planted. Coffee independence was achieved. Two separate plantations grew coffee in the island mountains. It was roasted at the Cliff House.
The owner sipped coffee, satisfied. It was exactly right. Not too hot. This put a smile on his dial. The owner masqueraded as an employee in his company town. A citizen of Alutia the owner accepted work assignments. Working a day a week as a barista had put him on the coffee planning committee in a previous job rotation. The CPC worked on getting temperature right. Guests survey of Cliff House visitors showed visitors wanted training to get serving temperature right. The owner wanted to get a classless society right. Part of Helter Skelter was an abandonment of royalty in his new deal. Only island surgeons are excused from shifts of manual labor. Preserving surgeon hands is considered very important.
Alutia is no town of Pullman. Before Helter Skelter replaced paychecks by citizenship, any comparison with George Pullman's two square miles of wage-slave plantation on Lake Calumet was frivolous. They have nothing in common. People who had left the island before Helter Skelter were always well compensated. Before Helter Skelter there was no such thing as rent. Money could only be saved for use in the outside world. After Helter Skelter money had no meaning.
One hundred and fifty years ago give or take a few years, back in 1880. George Mortimer Pullman built a town next to a new rail car factory he owned. The town had housing, shopping areas, a church, theaters, and parks for wage slaves in his factory. The hotel in Pullman's town was off limits to his employees. They could not eat in the restaurant. Alcohol was served to hotel guests in the bar and Pullman was a feudal lord who knew nondrinkers made better and cheaper employees. Making the church he built in his town rent-free to attract a congregation would have been a smart way to promote non-drinking. Keeping the church empty by charging rent for the space, like rent charged for the other 1300 buildings in his town, seemed smarter to George. The church steeple gave good show and the automatic assumption the space would be used someday was the first impression in anyones' mind on first seeing it. But a 19th century clergy uncontrolled might criticize inequity. The town was built to separate workers from ideas of dissent and dampen ideas of labor unrest. Better to charge rent and keep the church empty if you are a feudal lord.
Pullman's town was a way to control slaves. A place for a man to attempt royalty and a money making enterprise at the same time. Alutia is nothing like that. The Island was a moneymaker only when the modular Thorium nuclear reactor, now mothballed, was being built. Alutia is built as a living time capsule. Reactor profits filled and built many island warehouses. But that was a happy accident. Enough money gathered in one place always finds a way to grow. But the expectation was the island would never produce profit. Building Alutia was a money sink. Profit from the island was reinvested on the island. American military bases, the few that remained while America still remained. All had working Thorium reactors, exactly like what Alutia keeps in mothballs.
When George Pullman died, his body was buried underneath a meter of concrete and steel. This was done to prevent a desecration of Pullman's body. Pullman was hated that much. Lying at rest in a lead lined mahogany casket, plate tectonics will eventually desecrate George Pullman and snap his bones. His enemies will be long gone when that happens. They already are. Yet the joke is on George. The socialists who actually wanted to desecrate George Pullman's body were only a figment of his own guilt. His own imagination. Socialists usually have better things to do than desecrate bodies.
Witnesses said concrete was poured to keep George Pullman from coming back from the dead. Poured by his own family.
Money exploits. Money is exchanged using rules. Rules in the presence of flowing energy will generate complexity. The universe works this way. Desire to acquire money is an energy. Greed is a stove burner of an energy flow with the knob turned on high. A red-hot energy flow that can start a fire. Doing what it takes to survive. Responding to hot, cold, and hunger, is another energy flow that makes money move. A simmering energy flow. A stove burner set low. But set to high or low, something is cooked.
The money to build the island had grown itself into billions long ago. Generational money, which by a quirk of fate and an accidental plane crash had unexpectedly put billions of dollars of money in very capable and free hands. At a reasonably young, but mature age a torch was passed. But billions of dollars by itself was not enough to build the island.
It was enough money to build a new complicated structure that kept the money pile of billions growing automatically. At the center of the new structure was a machine which found government contracts involving new technology. This machine managed industries which exploited these government contracts. Obscene profits were generated.
By the time the federal contract machine was growing money faster than hail dropping in a hailstorm, the owner was dropping out of sight. Living far from the public eye, he could hike the Appalachian trail for a new perspective. The same time would bring his FCM Inc. profits of hundreds of millions of dollars.
More than enough money to build sand foothills near Alutias' airport to feed the beaches of a rising sea. All the north and west of the island is sheer cliff. Seabirds live on the cliffs and seals lounge unmolested on rocky beaches beneath. Beaches below cliffs are short and steep. In places cliffs dive directly into sea. Rising sea buried the beach were cliff meets sea.
The lagoon beach and sandy shores of the south and east sides of Alutia are for human use. The motel at the beach ending ten mile road rises on jackscrews when new sand is added to the beach. Behind sand beaches hills rise to a plateau which keeps the island dry. Rising seas will not bury Alutia. The Island was picked for its ability to resist sea level rise.
The ocean rose, but most of that was yet to be when the TI Africa docked at Banks island with a light load of oil. Siberian and Banks Island grain shipments would start to slow a month after she delivered her cargo 20% short and 12 days late. Silos along the Aulavik River filled with seed while India and Pakistan began to starve when shipments slowed. Not enough oil could be found to grow and ship Arctic grain. There was little easy access oil left in the world.
In the sands of new southern deserts, almost nothing grows. In the now barren and hungry south, war was not far away. India and Pakistan began to squabble over slowed grain shipments. Each claimed the other side was getting more than their fair share. A Russian grain ship blew up. Grain shipments to both countries were stopped. All this happened a year after Helter Skelter locked Alutia down. Grain shipments to India and Pakistan did not start again until there was a cease fire. Hundreds of millions of people in India had already starved to death by then. In Alutia the time of long seclusion began.
Monday May 31st,
People say the damnedest things. A poll says 23% of Republicans believe back door activities that decide what we should see, feel, think and do are controlled by Satan Worshipping pedophiles. I'm not a Satan worship pedophile or a Republican, but if I were taking that poll I'd check the box just to fuck with anyone that would ask such a stupid question in the first place. So I don't think the 23% is real. 73% of Republicans blame left-wing protesters for the January riot at the US Capitol. I don't feel the need to tell you it was on the 6th like everyone else does. I'll let that cheap thrill of indignation go by.
I'm not liking the wisdom I seem to have picked up. I liked it better when I was ignorant. I know people lie. I know you have been lying since you were a small child. I can type that and I don't even know you. I have lied too, since I was a small child. If I said I never enjoyed telling a lie. That would be a lie. But the truth is I really don't get off on lying. For me, it has always been a way to get out of a jam and I feel dirty lying. Why would you lie if you did not have to?
I don't think pedophiles are super common. They exist. I saw one a few years ago riding my bicycle past a park along Lake Washington. Kids were swimming. A perve was parked in a car watching them with a sick leer across the road. I stopped and started walking at his car, taking a safe angle so not to get run over. I dropped the bike in the grass along the side of the road on the other side. Walking at his car door, I pointed left with a jab of my finger using my right hand. It was the hard fast motion of 'get your ass out of here asshole' in sign language. I don't think there was a leer on my face. Whatever was on it let the perv know if he did not get moving he was going to get hurt. He started his car and he was gone as fast as I could blink. And that is almost the truth. I blink fast.
Liars and pedophiles exist. No doubt about it. But I suspect that whatever sick puppet-strings are pulled which give a pedophile his jollies, don't translate to success in normal adult life. The kind of life you need to pull the kind of puppet strings which control the world. Satan is a nice flourish to the story, but we are adults and know that he is a special effect.
Satan is manifest by stupidity and selfishness far more commonly that a sick desire to inflict pain on people and get off on their suffering like it is a piece of candy. More people understand this than not. There are freaks. Pedophiles exist as do other freaks. One kind of freak believes there is a fifty-foot tall white blonde haired guy dressed in a white toga sitting on a golden chair out in space where Musk launched his car.
Staring straight ahead this guy on the golden chair rarely speaks. Odd considering this guy knows nearly everything, and no matter what he says it is impossible for you not to understand what is said. Anything he says you hear in your own language. Seems to me there should be all kinds of talking going on in that situation. But it is not my story and the vacuum of space can't transmit sound. Freaks believing in the golden chair guy also believe in a red guy with horns who is busy running around causing pain and suffering because he enjoys doing it. Having to live forever with unimaginable power with horns on your head apparently puts you in a bad permanent mood. It turns you into a strange and boring one trick pony. Nobody can agree on what the horns look like. Cartoonists all draw them different.
Getting back to the 23% and me not liking the wisdom I have picked up.
Can 23% of Republicans really be this kind of freak? Adults who are so suggestible, so far out of touch with reality that they should in a world actually governed by laws of physics as described by Issac Newton, be totally unable to function?
What gives?
People adopt whatever truth they want which justifies what they are doing. Issac Newton is somebody to hear about in school and forget about ASAP. Reality be dammed, truth be dammed. A package of Fig Newtons has far more meaning.
I wish I did not know this. People live inside stories not caring if they are real or not. But if they like the story they are living they will say the damnedest things to keep their story the same. They might even kill to keep it the same. Under the right circumstances kill for a package of Fig Newtons. They certainly will lie. People use their intelligence to rationalize whatever they want to do after immediate concern for safety is appeased. Little brain sugar is burned fuguring out what should be done and why. Selfish concerns come first and selfish concern generates as much fantasy as necessary to get its way.
Horrible technical issues in this one.
Friday May 28th,
The dust storm stopped them from going further. A sudden flash of wind hid the river bank under a blanket of sand and soot. Overhead lights down the center isle turned on. They had to wait the storm out a while. A dust storm blocked out the sun and the boat could not go on.
A sensor on the roof mistaking day for night controlled the overhead lights. A small green light which had started out as the power-on indicator on a computer desktop speaker 100 years ago lit up on the pilot dashboard.
Félix Vásquez reached down. With a flick of a switch he turned the overhead lights and green indicator off. Another flick of a switch released the bow anchor. The screws had already been stopped from turning. Sliding chain could be heard and vibrations felt as the bow anchor plunked and plunged into river muck. Félix expected the storm to last all afternoon. The start was always the worst, and it had just started. Soon the air would clear enough, so Félix could see the baked grass along the riverbank. Pull up anchor and get going again.
Every year was like this now. Rains would make grasses grow a few years and then a summer drought would kill it all off. Fires would rage across dead Amazon grasslands in firestorms so large weather would change, creating wind and storm. Howling winds tumbled dust and smoke across barren land for hundreds of kilometers. Every year grew a new patch of grass ready to burn. Other spots slowly recovered from already being burned. The Amazon was not what it used to be.
This was the bad part of the river. Nobody had been able to live here for years. Where people could grow a few crops in headwaters far upstream, trees were able to grow along the riverbank. Here burning grass burned any new trees away. In the headwaters mountains to the west kept things from getting as dry.
The riverboat was named the Granma. Félix did not know why. It had been built half a world away in an Aleutian warehouse of the world museum. In the far north. Dashboard instruments were set in Pernambuco hardwood. The lumber in the dash and the wood paneling of the walls and ceiling had been grown and harvested on Aleutia. Second generation wood grown from cuttings taken near the exact spot where the Granma lay at anchor.
Wood cuttings had been taken to Alutia a century ago when the owner created the museum. All that is known now is that the wood harvested for the Granma had originally come from cuttings taken in Brazil. But nobody knew exactly where in Brazil the cuttings had come from. Along its home river for hundreds of kilometers, Pernambuco is extinct.
The original Granma had started a revolution and the hope was this Granma would start one too. People upstream needed one and this revolution could give them more land. Biomes across the world were in sorry shape. Feeding a world population of half a billion was difficult even in years when weather cooperated.
So little topsoil remained. Natural areas were collections of invasive species and strange monocultures as one species after another rose to dominate environments scoured of competition and predators by global heating.
Humans had begun extinctions. But changed weather and fractured biomes wipe out more species than humans do now. A tipping point was crossed. Once the idea to leave nature alone was sacred and introduced species were considered a bad thing. But that was when there had been intact biomes to ruin. With so much global heating, legacy species are the species who do not belong now. In most places plants and animals are strangers in their own land. Better suited for parts of the world where climate has changed to match the original home environment.
The Granma carried seed. The grass on the plains around the Granma should not die every few years. The grass died because it was not adapted to the environment the Amazon had changed into. Native grass was not the right kind for the changed Amazon. Local grass did not have deep roots. It grew sickly on the new dirt plain. Native grass could not tolerate drought. None of the plants which had grown here were the right kind for the new Amazon environment.
The Granma carried grasses native to the Great Pains of North America and the African Savanna. Grasses which have a better chance to grow. The Squid, the only submarine ever made to carry cargo, brought the grass to what had once been Brazil. The Squid was a one of a kind vessel. It is the way people from Alutia travel the world. Built to swim beneath pirates in lawless seas. Its stainless hull does not betray its age and keeping the nuclear reactor charged with fresh fuel rods is what Alutian people do.
Félix had been born in what had once been the Ecuadorian Amazon. He was educated in Alutia. His mother is Alutian and his father is from Quito. A specialist in biodiversity, Félix's father had met his mother when the Squid had visited Guayaquil on the Pacific coast, looking for amphibians to take back to Alutia. Alutia was a tropical paradise now with canopies of rain forest. But efforts to increase biodiversity on the island never stopped. The fight against extinction never ended and Amphibians on Alutia had a bad habit of dying out.
Civilization survived in the Andes. City people died off quickly when the methane bomb went off. This took pressure off the Ecuadorian countryside which was able to feed itself. Other parts of the world had not been so fortunate and devastation was complete in both city and country. In the Andes mountains geography trapped people in cities to starve. Now generations later cities empty of people are being resettled by a growing population from the country. Shipyards in New Guayaquil are building sailing ships. Ships to carry sugar, coffee, and cocoa to a world that has forgotten such delights. Guayaquil was vacant for many decades.
The methane bomb did not leave the west coast of South America alone. Die-off and devastation was huge. But micro-climates in mountain valleys and on mountain slopes kept remnants of rain forest and other biomes alive. Devastated areas are seeded with life appropriate to the new climate with plants taken from the mountain sanctuaries now. With help from humans flora and fauna climbed with heat and is taken to where it can grow. Now with more human help this life will be spread across the world to bring back some lost biodiversity. Finding plants that would survive in a particular climate is a new science.
Carrying grass seed across the Andes is easy. There are more than enough donkeys to carry bags of seed. Animal power is common in South America again. Other parts of the world have yet to breed enough beasts of burden to free women from bondage. The return trip is the problem. The Granma unlike a donkey is built to carry tropical plants and critters unharmed. The Granma is Félix's arc. His traveling zoo. If asked what he was doing he would say: 'Call me Noah, I sail the arc.'
The Granma is equipped to carry plants and critters in climate controlled cages without killing them. Something donkeys are less able to do. Solar panels cover the long roof of the Granma from stem to stern. As long as two buses, but as wide as only one, the Granma is made to travel the Amazon. Traveling along the river she looks like a long thin bus with a pointed bow. If danger threatens and speed is needed a diesel engine will boost electric power for high speed cruising.
Félix likes to know he can go fast if needed. But there is little to fear. The diesel is not used. Where dust storms rage, the river can not keep a pirate alive. There was not a human being or other large mammal for a hundred kilometers in any direction of the Granma when she was stopped for the blackout. In the river monster fish lurked oblivious to the storm above. Fishermen had not worked those waters for decades.
Félix was moving again. Dust and smoke had cleared enough to see the riverbank. Solar panels gave power to push the boat forward. The trip to Tena would take many days. Then seed farms around Tena would multiply the seed. In a few years cultivated seed from those farms would allow the barren ground now around the Granma to grow a proper savanna. A savanna with grass suited to a dry season. In time that new grass could restore the hydrologic cycle enough for the climate to be stable from year to year.
Stable enough for farms and a few trees and new kinds of grasses. But that was a long way away. Progress on the other end would also be slow. After the Squid meets the Grandma when it comes back down the river packed with rain forest plant and animal treasures the squid will travel to new hardwood forests in Maine. Forests that are, for the time being, devoid of life and in desperate need of critters.
Monday May 24th,
So what is news these days? Today Bob Dylan celebrates his 80th birthday. Some people consider that important. It is not. If Bob feels differently I understand.
I suppose it means the Century Of The Self is at least 80 years old. But I know better. The Century Of The Self is a full 100 years old and a bit more. One of the poster boys had a birthday. That is all.
So what is news these days? What am I ranting about. Dylan is the icon of a generation which frankly did not do shit to secure our future. (not that others have) It seems we are 'Forever Young'. Dylan's generation is a heartbeat and a half ahead of mine. In the economic lottery Dylan's generation is the generation that made out big. First at the neocolonial/neoliberal trough. Class mobility in America is nill, but Dylan's generation owns a lot of shit. The world was their oyster and still is. Making them forever young.
Youth vitality, the idealism, the purity. Good things to be young about. Dylan sings about that. But youth can also be ignorant and shallow and 'all about me'. In ways America is young.
Dylan had good words in his songs. Words to try and live by. Not a bad thing to do. So, smoke em if you got em. Good work if you can get it. It is easier to hear Bobs words than to live them. It is easier said than done.
Bad things in our culture make meat robots compartmentalize. Dylan becomes entertainment and the band plays on. Pain and suffering is not eased. But new creative ways are found to deny it exists. New ways all the time. We have technology to do it with.
The century of the self is a whole century. Dylan's generation only a wave on a beach of other crashing waves. A wave of bubbling foam on sand and gone. It hisses as it fades away becoming memory.
So what is news these days? What am I ranting about. In Texas Gov. Abbott prohibits counties, public schools, health authorities, and government officials from mandating masks. The century of the self is far from over. Money (the economy) is more important than lives. Again. Kim Reynolds, Gov. of Iowa did the same thing. Elsewhere in the world, the right to defend oneself is being conflated as a right to murder. Again. Inequity climbs to an all time high. Again.
So what is news these days? Relax, I won't ask again. My initial reaction to todays' news is that it is all banal shit. But if I just type that out it gives exactly the wrong idea. What I mean to say is our news media tries very hard to make important and disturbing things seem trivial. Pigs get lipstick. Things are explained away. News is not reported. Facts occurring in the world are spun into whatever personal agenda or story power wants people to believe. It is what the public gets. Our news is not really news at all. We get sanitized stories. Nothing else. If I call our news banal, now you understand. I wish we had public officials interested in public safety and welfare. But that reality is another universe.
The news is everyone is being distracted and diverted to trivial pursuits. Exactly as power desires. Their mission is accomplished. And you are their bitch. Again.
Friday May 21st,
The owner pulled the roadster out of the driveway and turned left onto Ten Mile Road. Miles away security drones rising from rooftop hangers began scanning the ground around the Diamond Hardware store. Claire is on duty. Responding to an alert from the drone control software she clicks her screen letting the drone software know she was ready. If surveillance drones see anything unusual an alert will be sent. Claire will be quick to take a look. At Claire's click, an amber light on the roadster dash glowed. When surveillance drones finish looking around the hardware store the amber light will turn green if things look good.
The road curves gently back and forth between low hills for a kilometer. Then it is arrow straight for five kilometers. Ten Mile Road is a bit more than 17 Kilometers long measured carefully. Ten Mile Road is the name. Distance on the island is measured in kilometers. Street signs in the island town are international. The owner decided distances would seem bigger using kilometers. On Ten Mile Road and only on Ten Mile Road, speed limit digits denote miles per hour. The signs say 'Speed Limit' on the top with two large digits below. Kilometers and miles are not mentioned. The model S speedometer reads kilometers per hour. But if cold metal can have feelings, classic gas guzzlers in the island garage feel right at home when they are taken out for exercise. When classic sheet metal was stamped, kilometers were not part of the American language.
The roadster passed a sign marked 'Speed Limit 50'. The road straighened out. From here the speed limit signs go up steady to ninety-nine and then as the long straightaway approaches the opposite end. Numbers drop again to fifty. Ninety-nine is a special sign. It really means one hundred. But one hundred needs an extra digit. Other speed limit signs end in zero or five, not nine. Speed limits change in five mile an hour steps. When the roadster passed the second 'Speed Limit 60' sign it was already going a hundred miles an hour. The sky was blue the clouds were white. Any moisture from the morning dew cooked away by the sun. As the only car on Ten Mile Road for miles, the speed was safe.
The owner slowed down. Even at sixty the trip could only take ten minutes from start to finish. If there were no urgency at all sixty miles an hour would be fast enough. Here the island was flat for miles and beautiful. Around the plain the land rises up on all sides, into hills which again rise to mountains in the northwest and drop to the sea beyond the east ridge hills. Geography made this part of the island seem like land from the mainland. Even without the mix of forest and farm which now make it their home blocking any possible view. From this wide low valley sea could not be seen nor heard.
Music pulsed on the radio. Call it what you want. It was in a car so to the owner it was a radio. AC/DC played a song. The owner, familiar with the music jammed to the lyrics.
No stop signs - Speed limit - Nobody's gonna slow me down
Like a wheel - Gonna spin it - Nobody's gonna mess me around
Hey, Satan - Payin' my dues - Playin' in a rockin' band
Hey, mama - Look at me - I'm on the way to the promised land
I'm on the highway to hell - Highway to hell
I'm on the highway to hell - Highway to hell
Don't stop me
The owner slowed. An alarm beeped, sensors along the road had detected animals moving. By the time the model 3 slowed to sixty, three deer could be seen crossing the road in the distance. Far ahead. By the time the roadster passed the deer were lost in the woods. The AC/DC tune faded into commercial. A Boy Band sang:
'Diamond is the place with the wonderful hardware person'
A female voice began to talk:
'This week with Armageddon approaching get a head start on prepping with seasonal seeds. Direct from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault we have some wonderful new exotics that ache to be grown. So come do your part and help them out. Seeds will be distributed on a first come first serve basis. But if you miss these special sweet surprises remember we have standard offerings as well.'
The message was not hype, it was true. Significantly the message was crafted by software which could have said the same thing using different words. The message sent did not contain any code words, meaning the parking lot at Diamond Hardware is determined safe by security drones. The owner needs paint, sandpaper, and steel wool. One of the warehouses the owner passes on the way to Diamond Hardware has an entire upper story jammed with old furniture waiting to be refurbished. Furniture as far as an eye can see. Another floor in the warehouse has crates, shelves and pallets full of refinishing supplies to restore the old and antique furniture. Todays visit to the Hardware store will trigger a work order so warehouse stock will replace items taken from the hardware store.
Restoring furniture takes skill and it is one of the things the owner figured to be good if done responsibly. Restoring furniture is one of the many skill teaching arts practiced on the island. It also provides furniture to the island while exotic hardwood forests grow in mountain valleys.
The Roman philosopher Seneca said. 'Growth is slow, the road to ruin is fast.' Hardwood forests had been planted before the world stopped moving. But the island wood shops would practice on stored logs for a long time before an island harvest could be made. Forests grow slow. The island was Arctic only decades before. The tallest tropical trees on the island are only forty feet tall.
Picking up steel wool, sandpaper, paint and a couple of Svalbard seed packets at Diamond Hardware the owner drove into town. The seeds he picked were from the Mesoamerican basket. Cucamelon and Chayote seeds. Cucamelons resemble miniature watermelons the size of a grape and have a sour cucumber taste. But the owner did not know that yet. He had seen them but had never eaten one. Chayotes are an edible gourd with a mild sweet flavor. The owner knew them as Mirlitons and had eaten them in New Orleans. Remembering the Mirlitons and pleasant memories of New Orleans. The owner hoped both vines would be a success in his garden.
The sound of waves is part of opening a car door when you park at the Cliff House. The Cliff House is along Shore Drive past the Coral Reef Aquarium and Marine Center. A kilometer from town along the shore, the Cliff House is built atop a tall cliff. The cliff where the Reef Aquarium sits below the Marine Center is only three meters. The Cliff House sits nearly sixty meters above the waves. Through large picture windows large offshore rocks can be seen covered in birds.
John and Anton were already at a table. They waved him over as soon as he walked through the door. John spoke first.
'The TI Africa * is 10 days overdue. She could sail only 80% full. The first grain shipment will stall for lack of bunker fuel in about sixty days. Shipments after that will be hit and miss as refined product is stored for harvest.'
Nodding with understanding the owner replied.
'How is Helter Skelter Going?'
John answered.
'Everything is going fine.'
Turning to Anton the owner spoke.
'I am sorry your wife had to interrupt her packing and evacuate early. If none of your furniture gets here I have plenty.'
Before Anton could reply the owner spoke to them both.
'As soon as we go off grid we tell everyone what the score is and what Helter Skelter was all about. I expect things will happen quickly. The world will panic and we can't have our people in a panic at the same time everyone else is in one. Our panic has to happen now. We need to get our panic over with. But right now I need coffee.'
* The TI Africa is an oil supertanker.
Monday May 17th,
I was a co-host on 'No-Joke' again Saturday. See it below. It was a long show. I listened to it afterwards. It is hard hearing yourself talk. You hear phrases you repeat incessantly as your brain is processing and chunking away on your thoughts. Phrases you otherwise ignore and don't hear. I don't type 'you know' to fill up space. All that happens is my fingers pause. Better than having Tourette syndrome. Things could be worse.
The show caused me to look some things up. Rockets being fired against Israel seems futile. Israel has an Iron dome and rockets of their own. One not living in the Gaza can easily imagine the Gaza rockets as foolish. Firing them a self-destructive suicidal act.
But what causes groups and individuals to carry out acts of self-destruction, self-annihilation and violence. When people are trapped with life affirming social bonds destroyed, rage and despair is their reaction. Palestinians are treated like dogs. That is the answer.
Israel has a strong identity. An identity that means different things to different people. Some of these different people justify violence as the legitimate way to solve problems.
Radical elements on all sides in any serious conflict usually suffer from this disorder. They imagine their side is right and can see no other way. When the future is sketchy and violence is great, perpetrating violence and intolerance on behalf of your own tribe brings celebrity status. Perspective is lost.
Celebrities don't know who they are. They lose themselves becoming empty status seeking tools. Being empty is not the same as being unhappy, at least not all the time. An audience is satisfying. Social circuits surge and quiver with attention. As long as the attention is there, anybody can feel whole. But take the attention away and a hole of emptiness replaces the glow.
The most satisfying thing in the world is to know what the world needs and then fill the need. It is something few of us are able to figure out how to do on our own. We fill the void by imitation. Madness and carnage results. We do not understand and we make bad choices.
Rockets dance in the Mid-East sky and the world is filled with anger. This group hates that group. And every group has groups within. Everybody seems to be hating-on and upset with everybody else not in their own tiny group. It seems nobody has a nice thing to say about anybody else. Everybody is on a high horse.
This all shows people don't have a clue about what is happening in our world. It is always easier to blame someone else for your own ignorance.
Getting whatever you desire is your right, there are no limits. That is what you were told. If you pay for a self-improvement course somebody will say that exact thing to you with only minor translation.
The world is your oyster, so go get it. Be all you can be.
Sometimes society is toxic.
Possessing superficial charm. Feeling grand and self-important. Hungry for constant stimulation. Practicing skills at lying, deceiving, and manipulating others. Suppressing the capacity for remorse and guilt. Ethics of unfettered capitalism.
Not the only things you were taught. But,
These things define success in a world without limits. In a world where it is imagined that everyone is free to go their own way. To follow their own dreams. To do their own thing. Justified by the idea there is enough room and stuff for everybody. Enough stuff to go around, so I got mine. You get yours. Go get it, we all have heard this.
This is not the world we really live in. The reality is we can't all get by without cooperation like we once thought we could. As the Levant with its lack of space, water, and resources clearly shows us with perpetual pain and rocket filled skies.
In 2017 the Gaza unemployment rate was 27.9%. Gaza poverty is above 30%. Numbers vary. Restricted movement, restricted access, violent attacks, slow post-conflict reconstruction. These things define life in the Gaza Strip.
Now Bibi saves bacon by becoming a wartime president. Bibi faces corruption charges. Not long ago his political opponents were ready to unseat him as Israels' prime minister. The current trouble strengthens his position with Israels' right-wing voter base. “King Bibi” is a security strongman.
Netanyahu thrives where there is uncertainty, chaos and crisis. Today's Gaza Strip is not where I want to be.
Rabid supporters of Israeli apartheid continue to write about Dominion voting machines though they have never seen one and could not explain how they work. For those without scruples any distraction will do.
That is what Russia-Gate was for the Democrats and what Somebody-Stole-My-Election becomes for the Republicans. As if there were any real difference between a Democrat and a Republican. Republicans tend more to the short and fat side. Democrats are taller and thinner. Republicans will keep their hair into old age longer unless they are bald. Other than that, the two are the same. Both parties would start a war to stay in power. Just like in Israel.
Friday May 14th,
Anton and John parked their bicycles leaping up the stairway to main communications. Claire stood up looking away from her wall of video screens to face them. One of her screens had followed them along their ride from the marine center. As the tracking algorithm switched village cameras along the way, a speaker beeped.
Claire spoke. 'We have them in the air over Lake Lagoda along with the 'Island Crew' from the Moscow office. They are all coming in.
John Solo knew what the words 'Island Crew' meant. Nobody except members of the 'Island Crew' had worked inside communications for months. The security of code words was not necessary. But until movement finished, the right words would be used.
John spoke. 'Good news, anything else?
Claire nodded, 'Everybody coming in from Europe is meeting up in Belushya Guba. We were going to put them on one flight and bring them in over the pole. But the owner does not want all our eggs in one basket, that's what he said. Some will hop northern island airfields into Alaska. We can bring them in by boat from there if our Airports close.
Getting across the Russian polar islands would be the easy part. In the Northern islands civilization still bloomed. The Owner had financed farms on Wrangel Island after the first methane burp. Wrangel would grow more wheat and oats this year than the island had ever grown before. Wrangel farm concepts were used on Kotelny Island. The entire polar region was under military control. The owner relationship with the Russians was excellent. While the world collapsed the Arctic grew wheat.
American airspace was also under military control but unlike Russian airspace, the owner could not get permission to fly as easily. More phone calls had to be made. More strings pulled. With refugee riots putting LA and Miami under martial law, and the rest of the country in a panic. Airports could close at any time.
John had not been surprised when the owner ordered Helter Skelter. Earth had become a three ring circus of misery. For years, one crisis following another. But supply chains were breaking like they had not broken before. Transportation and shipping slowed by chronic fuel shortages. The sclerosis in global trade was causing people to starve. Food could not be shipped where it was needed at rates everyone could afford.
But things were about to get worse. Not being able to move food cheaply is bad. Having climate changed agriculture which can no longer feed the whole human population is going to be horrible. No amount of smarts can find creative ways to move food when food does not exist.
The owner's computer models showed him this is the year. Only Siberian agriculture is on the increase. For years reduced crop yields have been the trend everywhere else. Almost without exception. Large areas of the planet once fertile are now barren desert. Some places so hot and humid that heat kills everyone who can't find air conditioning. Even using last years surplus models say this years' crops will not feed the world through next winter.
Weather will have to be perfect for the models to be wrong and this is unlikely. The chance of avoiding serious disaster is only 5%. If the models are right, hundreds of millions of people will starve next year. Southern crops will not help. The majority of arable land is in the northern hemisphere, more than ever before. Cutting the Amazon destroyed the water cycle of Amazon rains. Brazil is a stubble of grassland suitable only for goats. The south of Argentina does well, but south Argentina is not large. Cutting the rain forest down had only given five years of extra agricultural land and now that land is gone.
Anton was the island food expert. As a student he had done his doctors' thesis at The Magadan Institute of Humane Technology. "Social Fragility as a Function of Food Choices". Anton carefully surveyed all the different foods that people can possibly eat. He identified where they could be grown or harvested. He identified yield issues and crop economics in great detail. Understanding all this is a monumental task. Anton developed an efficient methodology which made the job easier. Anton rated foods by local availability, comparing his theoretical availabilities to actual real world availabilities. He correlated these availabilities against various indicators of social stability.
Anton showed food availability was more a function of political and social condition than strict environmental considerations. Human conflict and war clearly jumped out as the leading cause of famine and hunger. A clear pattern over several centuries emerged. The methodical detail of Anton's work showed a pattern which was not intuitivly clear and his work greatly facilitated computer model design. Anton's work suggested any plan to go local not waste any time when a hard envelope of physics suggests collapse is on the horizon. With a hard envelope of starvation on our horizon. Human conflict can be counted on to bring it on early. The time for Helter Skelter is now.
Claire's focus was on the island. Other screens showed world news. Several screens showed smoke trails of rockets being blown up by a city defensive shield. The landscape was sandy. It was like an invisible metal dome. The owner's daily news report was being written. There was a chatter of communications between various airplanes and helicopters on other screens. Everyone wanted Helter Skelter finished before any EMP pulses started dropping planes out of the sky.
Monday May 10th,
- The United States generated 4,009 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020.
- Across all age groups, 84.6% of Americans have a driver’s license.
- Americans drive 13,474 miles per year on average.
- The American population is 331,449,281 (2020 U.S. Census).
- A Nissan Leaf uses 300 watt-Hours / mile.
From the above, Americans drove (331,449,281 x 0.86 x 13,474) miles in 2020.
Multiplying it out, that is 3.84 trillion driver-miles a year.
At 300 Watt hours a mile in an electric vehicle, the power consumed driving that far is (300 x 3.84 x 1015 Wh), or 1152 Tera-Watt-Hours.
Dividing 1152 by 4009 gives a ratio of 0.287. Converted to a percent ( x100 ) that gives 28.7 as the percent generating capacity of the United States must be increased. Increased if Joe Biden plan to get people out of gas powered cars and into Nissan Leaf equivalents works out.
Joe's plan to save the world with electric cars needs a huge increase in domestic generating capacity. Fifty percent of electricity in America comes from coal. Twenty percent comes from nuclear power. Which is about the same percentage as the natural gas contribution. Nuclear plants are shutting down because they can't compete with natural gas fired plants. Natural gas has half the CO2 emissions coal does. At only 10 percent remaining to 100%; renewable and nontraditional power sources are a small part of the mix.
Joe Biden would like to do something to reduce the rate at which we will all cook. His plan to do it by increasing the corporate welfare state is very ill-informed. It could turn up the heat even more. Capitalism got us into this mess. Capitalism is not going to get us out of it. Joe is Mr. Capitalism. Do the math.
That was my conclusion after an investigation I explain in this video.
Jump ahead to the 2:28 mark to skip the boilerplate.
Friday May 7th,
I read a disturbing report about a poll which says 52 percent of Americans say there is a climate emergency. The report is at 'The Hill' and clicking on the smoking Earth takes you there. A reader here knows my bias. I consider global heating to be a matter of scientific fact. The 48% claiming otherwise to possibly be as dumb as rocks. But only possibly and there could be other explanations.
Partisan bias should have nothing to do with fact based evidence in an informed world. The report at the Hill says it does. Showing the world we live in to be very uninformed. But could there be more than ignorance going on?
I am neither Republican nor Democrat, but if I were a Republican there would be a 70% chance I would not believe in a climate emergency. A 70% chance of being a knuckle dragging idiot or an accomplished liar. One or the other, possibly both.
The common view is to consider only the uniformed ignorant perspective as being responsible for the mental distortion. All that is needed is an appeal to reason the imagined knee-jerk cure. The problem with this view is that an elitist can't be reached with reason. And they are accomplished liars. But accepting the perspective that Republicans are informed and lie like rugs is confrontational and upsetting. Considering them ignorant is easy, passive, and makes people feel smart. This means nothing will change in America and civilization will collapse.
Democrats only have a 26% chance of claiming they know nothing about a climate emergency. Sadly the 74% claiming wondrous enlightenment merely plan to game a Green Revolution, a Green New Deal, a New Green What-Ever, to their favor. They imagine corporate America taking the lead and growing their investments.
Expecting corporate America to lead shows Democrats to be every bit as stupid and duplicitous as any Republican. Capitalism can't fix this problem. To solve global heating money must not be allowed to make the required decisions or wrong decisions will be made. The structure of society must change or people go extinct. This is hard to imagine, but true.
Since society has no desire to change, and since money won't let society change anyway. Our demise is baked in the cake. Life as we know it will end.
So:
John Solo exhaled into his regulator. Air bubbled to the top of the dome over the coral gardens surrounding him an all sides. Reaching the clear Lucite dome the rising bubbles curved sideways and up to where the curved dome joined to a high wall. There machinery lets air bubbles out into the surrounding sea where they continue up to meet the surging waves and the shore.
This wall, the side of an enormous undersea aquarium, is as long as a football field. A half arch of clear Lucite panels built into a frame connects to the top of the wall. From the wall the dome curves to meet the sea floor. It resembles a huge greenhouse sunk below the sea. An early concept drawing of the idea was nicknamed Captain Nemo's Crystal Palace. The frame of the dome window panels lets large marine mammals and fish know there is something to avoid. The dome is on a frame to deter big critters from bumping into the windows and getting at fish inside. If critters try and poke through windows, the windows are thick enough to stop them.
Above the Lucite dome the brick of the aquarium wall becomes a natural rock cliff. It rises twenty feet out of the sea to become part of the island shore. The wall is part of the island. Halfway up the wall and inside the dome, a square opening frames a sunken cube. The square is larger on a side than a man is tall. Inside the cube a stainless steel ladder goes up a wall through a round hole in the cube ceiling into an airlock.
The owner likes tropical fish and has a soft intervienespot for the vanishing coal reefs of the southern seas. Torrid zones seas at the equator have water too acid for coral to grow in now. Local seas are no better. But life under the aquarium dome lives in clear and clean water. Dome water has the chemistry of a tropical ocean typical of the year 1860. It is not too acidic to grow coral. The wall has grates through which water pumps in from the aquarium and back out after treatment. There is no need for heat. The waters around the island are warm enough to grow coral. Coral would be growing there now if the water were not too acidic.
Anton, John's diving buddy snapped his camera at coral clone # 3428. This finished their days work. Pointing at his clipboard giving John a thumbs up, Anton gestured in the direction of the airlock. They started swimming to the ladder. John and Anton were good friends, and it had been a nice dive.
In the airlock they dressed and stowed away their dive gear away with a quiet and purposeful intensity. The sooner they could get finished and into the decompression lounge. The faster the 20-minute ride to the surface could begin. Then the communications center was then only a short bike trip away. The decompression lounge did not move or ride anywhere. The decompression chamber is part of the shore offices. It is a very nice room at the end of a long staircase up to the surface from the airlock. The room stays in one place. The ride consists of waiting for the decompression cycle to finish. Bringing the room to sea level pressure. Then Anton and John can walk right out the front door and bicycle into town. Divers on the island take turns at aquarium duty. John and Anton had dove because it was their turn to dive. Despite a world in chaos, life on the island tried to go on as things were normal.
Being away from the communication center with so much going on was distressing. The problems of the outside world were gone when John and Anton were swimming with the fish.
But world problems returned the moment they climbed up the ladder into the pressurized air of the airlock. Before the dive the Moscow office told Anton everything was being done to get through to St. Petersburg. Anton wanted to get back to the communications center to know if there was news. In his head John was already back as the island chief of security. The dive forgotten.
Anton had not been able to contact his family in St.Petersburg since the closing of the city borders. Closing the borders had shut the city off from the rest of the world two days ago. Anton worried. Reminding himself that everything that could be done. Was being done. But that did not help. He knew that St. Petersburg, besieged by climate refugees, would soon be without food. Anton had been working in the St. Petersburg office until a month ago. He had come to the island ahead of his family.
A few hours before the dive Johns' phone lit up glaring at him with two words. The owner had typed 'Helter Skelter' to John. Seeing these words John wasted no time sending out several texts of his own. Helter Skelter was code that launched a plan. The time for closing the island off from the rest of the world had come.
In St. Peterburg a helicopter was taking off. Natalia, Anton's wife and Sergy his son were on the helicopter. Plans were to bring them both to the island soon; but Helter Skelter had moved up plans. Everyone scheduled for final assignment to the island was on their way in. Anyone working a contract job was being flown off to Anchorage. After nine time zones the helicopter would bring Anton's family to the island. Then the helicopter would be parked, shut away in a hangar, and mothballed. Not part of the islands regular air fleet, the helicopter would not fly unless another helicopter crashed. Today no helicopters were being parked for the last time. The island airstrip had not been so busy since the island buildings were first built. There would be many comings and goings across the owner's properties while Helter Skelter was carried out.
Building on the island finished three years ago. Some of the colonists were already living on the island. They ran essential services and kept lights on while the island waited for the world to end. Over the next few days. Island population would double. Like the island itself, which more resembled paradise than an American overseas possession, island population was atypical. The world would be losing over three billion people in the next two years. World population was already in sharp decline. Once everyone arrived, the island population would be stable for centuries.
Twelve hundred people worked for the owner on various projects and in all his businesses. Three hundred of them would soon be living on the island with their families. The rest of the owner's employees were going off to other owner properties if they desired. All owner properties were set up as survival centers. Considering the alternative, these properties were excellent places to be while famine consumed the world. But the other properties were run-of-the-mill billionaire bunkers. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except for an inner circle most employees thought one owner property was as good as another. Most owner employees did not know the island was set up with the sophistication and planning of a Martian city or a Moon base. You had to work for the owner a long time and show you were worth trust before you found out what the island was all about. The island is a living museum. A museum able to keep the best of civilization alive while the earth heals. Heals from a mindless human infestation. An infestation that had plagued the Earth since it was born, in Italy, in 1472.
Good videos. Terribly optimistic. Some minor pontifications at the end of one. They both are from You-Tube Channels. The Borg sort of owns them I think. (I'm kidding) A serendipitous coincidence or some behind the scenes algorithmic skullduggery. I won't complain. I found these videos after I posted my story. They also posted today and I subscribe to Second Thought. No mystery but serendipitous. It is still Friday, so I pop them in at the end real easy. Without changing the date. You have wondered what 1472 was referring to long enough.
Monday May 3rd,
I could take the easy way out. Pick a side and join up. Then spend all my time saying how everyone else not my ally has been colluding with Russians. And that they have done embarrassing things when they are horny.
The first 100 days? American foreign policy is still fucked up. Reality continues to be misunderstood. Satan would have been an improvement. So good job Joe. Stolen election or not. I had to type that.
If the other guy had won we would have WWF wrestling on the House and Senate floor by now. Ivanka would be giving out winning gold belts with copies of them in the gift shop. Despite no change in the minimum wage, no healthcare, obscenely low taxes on the rich, an obvious turn up in the volume of the police state, kids are still in cages. The Orange Satan would have been worse. The dog has had his shots, and I am still alive.
America could not afford to wait. Sailing the doldrums put on hold for four more years yet again. With our destruction baked in the cake this may seem a strange statement. Isn't a shit sandwitch a shit sandwich no matter how you slice it?
No, some kinds of collapse are worse than others. Some actors very much able to hasten the immediacy of the situation. The situation we deny. Trump unable to handle a simple pandemic showed himself to be an abyssimal fraud. No captain was steering the American ship. Like in Brazil now we were adrift. With Biden, I don't want to say yet. I do not yet know what evil lurks in the tenebrous months ahead. His old boss was not nice to Dogs with Blogs and I have not forgotten. I never will and Julian is not free. He needs to be.
North Dakota gets the raspberries. Karma ointervieneished Friday. A Chapter a week is challenging. The ideas I have had since Friday have been intense. Chasing any of them with so many coming at me at once, impossible.
Friday April 30th,
Right now it is all seeds and if I water it every day when the sun comes up something might grow. Maybe next year I will have a cold frame going and start with something green. This year I was able to get out for seeds. The only thing I grew last year was beans. I had beans from the year before to plant. At the far end of the picture you can see a small wooden wall of boards with two uprights in front. The uprights hold boards to make a cube and retain dirt as potatoes are hilled over. Last year I killed my potatoes by covering them over with a compost mix I had not cured enough. This year I won't do that. Seed potatoes are in the box and leaves are coming out of the ground.
I have no idea what I am doing. The strings and sticks mark seeds. So I can hopefully tell sprout from weed.
Last Monday I suggested people should explore the new narrative possibilities abrupt climate change brings to literature and entertainment. I realized just typing about the idea was passive shit shooting. I should do some of the exploring myself if I think the idea is good.
Two hundred years ago back when Alaska was Russian and Ferdinand Wrangel was governor, the harbor was frozen all winter. Now there is no sea ice in the harbor when days get short and nights long. before eight-hour days become eight-hour nights. Any whisper of snow on the island mountains peaks is long gone. Some of the more sensitive tropical plants calling the island home only need covering by straw to get through the winter. Some needed no help at all in their new home. Any snow which does fall never sticks.
When people found the Galápagos Islands they were beguiled with a mystery. How could so many creatures who could not swim have ever reached the Galápagos? But there was no mystery about this island. After the owner finagled possession of the island. While the earth exhaled methane and the earth warmed. Invading ships brought in new fauna and flora. The island had been linked to other islands nearby by flat meadows of grass when the sea was low long ago. Original critters had walked to the island then. That was thousands of years ago. Mammoths ate grass and kept trees trampled down. Mammoths pursued by hunters wanting flesh and skin.
Someone not knowing the secret to the islands bounteous florae would note an out-of-place abundance. With many formerly lush places of Earth now barren desert the abundant green was out of place. The white beach shaded by long shadows of palm trees around a blue lagoon by the motel. This beach is particularly out of place. It is at the end of Ten Mile Road. The island never had white sand before southern climates moved north. Or a motel at the end of ten miles of road. Now in the right place if you park your butt with a cool drink on the beach and look around. The ground is sand as far as you can see. It is like being thousands of miles south only decades ago.
Before shipping stopped in the seas there had been a shortage of sand for mixing cement. Taking advantage of the opportunity the owner had mined sand from Alaskan river deltas as they began to be claimed by rising sea. Alaska river sand was good for making cement. The island had a stash of it at the other end of the island under some grassy hills. But not on the beach. Under magnification the grains of motel beach sand is smooth. Cement making sand has interlocking grains and it was shipped all over the world when the world grew itself into oblivion. Buildings were built with foundations resting on dreams of a white beach. Buyers of cement sand never knew the owner's plan.
Ships never came back for sand empty even if intervienethey had to make extra stops on the trip back. The operation pretended to return sand to Alaska. Fake environmental restoration. Most of the sand intended for restoration never made it to Alaska. But the sand not replaced did very little damage. The sea was claiming river deltas anyway. The result was a nice beach built by burnt oil. A lot of burnt oil. Ships carried back smooth sand, the whitest sand the crew could find. Ships carrying away as much sand as they brought to a customer location did not bother anyone. Switched out sand was worthless for anything but making a beach. For making the island lagoon beach and the sand dune gardens nearby it was great, as long as you did not try and make a sand castle. Nara melons growing in the dunes are doing just fine. Before becoming part of an offshore artificial reef, some of the owner's sand ships had made two dozen circuits. The lagoon beach is huge.
At the edge of the beach is the motel. Most of the time it is empty. But the well-equipped party room is frequently used by the town. The owner planned things that way. Keeping the motel ready for guests (who hopefully never arrive) is an important thing to do. It is a way to control visitors without being obvious about it. Time to discover intentions. Having a social center at the motel helps that mission. The Neon M-O-T-E-L sign out front is a work of art. The 'L' is slightly crooked and blinks every five minutes on the hour. The owner wanted it that way and picked how fast it should blink. The man who bent the glass tubes for the letters teaches glassblowing at the local CC on Tuesday night.
Ten mile road bends around artificial fishponds, forest thickets, and a few pastures. Mostly it is like a road in a big city warehouse district. But very clean. Warehouses as large as football fields, some three stories high, stretch along Ten Mile Road for miles. They stretch most of the way along the road. They are climate controlled and some refrigerated. Concrete and windowless except for offices by front doors. Some of the big boxes are tagged with company logos and the warehouses are tastefully spaced apart with landscaping in between.
One big concrete box says Reliable Plumbing. Reliable Plumbing does not actually exist but if you have a key to the front door you can get into front offices. In one of the offices is a file cabinet. A folder inside that cabinet shows where enough toilet repair kits to keep every toilet on the island flushing for the next 200 years are found. There are enough supplies in the warehouses to keep classic American Life going on in the town for centuries. If the owner lives for centuries that is exactly what will happen.
Along Ten Mile Road an occasional house maintains an orchard. Some use artificial lighting in the winter months to get the exotic fruits they grow through the short winter days. A couple of small strip malls mix into the chain of big concrete blocks. You can't tell if the stores in the malls are open or closed. In places alleys behind the big warehouses link farm buildings. The alley roads see more use than Ten Mile Road does. Ten mile road is reserved for cars, and small trucks. For commuting to the farm buildings where people from the town work. Only the cafés in the malls get customers and nobody needs money there. Workers eat breakfast lunch or dinner at the cafés depending on the shifts they draw.
A customer to the 'Rare Books Live Here' store needs a key and a code for the door to open. Then there is a wait of five minutes while the door lock keeps the door closed while dry nitrogen inside is purged. There are only periodic security visits. The town has a well-equipped library. The store was not intended for customers. It is storage. The parking lots of the big box warehouses are mostly empty. The landscaping crew uses them the most.
There is a single intersection on Ten Mile road, a mile from the motel. Turning right onto it takes you onto Main Street. The town street grid begins a kilometer away. Beyond is the harbor.
From the motel, Ten Mile Road turns 90 degrees and becomes Airport way which goes to the Airstrip. Halfway to the airstrip is a driveway. The driveway goes to a project that had reduced the owner's financial drain building the island considerably. Even a billionaire with billions to spend likes to save money. Getting the most for his money had been an obsession of the owner for a long time. Personally he was generous. But when it came to building and stocking warehouses. Or manipulating financial markets. The owner had made and art of getting it done on the cheap without compromising quality.
When the government had still sponsored such things the owner acquired a lucrative DARPA contract to build a small Thorium Nuclear Reactor. The reactor gives out more than enough power to keep everything on the island going when it is turned on. When the thorium demo project was completed and shown to meet specification the plan was to have shut the reactor down. Instead the owner kept the reactor functional and modified the design so it could be turned off and on. His plan all along.
When it was still needed and there was only one American government in the lower 48, the owner was licensed to run the reactor. Currently switched off, it is kept ready to go. The reactor has two warehouses full of spare parts and plenty of onsite fuel storage. It is turned on every year to light the town Christmas lights and it drives away darkness for a week. Christmas decorations are on a different circuit than the windmill electricity. Windmill electricity is the backbone of the island power grid. At the current rate of use, thorium and uranium fuels should last a very long time. Having redundant power grids with smart switching keeps things reliable. Hydro from the only island mountain lake supplies power when wind is finicky. On very windy days charging the lake with downhill water is one way excessive power is used up.
Monday April 26th,
At the collective level Covid briefly slowed humanities march to extinction. Overpopulation will soon make up for time lost. Our race to destruction again grows to record intensity. The gyre widens and the center will not hold.
The video up top is a mashup of other videos to give you a Cliff Notes version of the Methane Bomb. The Methane Bomb for Dummies if you prefer. I added some titles to tie it together. It is an 11-minute primer which can get you up to speed quick. Videos about the methane bomb don't do well tying together raw emissions and atmospheric concentration. They concentrate on one or the other at different times. The data needs to be tied together, so here it is.
Adding 1 gigatonne of methane to the atmosphere increases atmospheric concentration of methane by 370 parts per billion (ppb). Multiply that number by 100 for a guestimate of immediate effects comparable to CO2 emissions. (The 20-year GWP value of 86 is not immediate enough.) This multiplication gives 37,000 ppb which is the same as 37 parts per million (ppm)). This about equals 10 years worth of CO2 emissions at the present CO2 emission level. You can get data for a year of CO2 emissions increase in my right sidebar. I update it every month. It only goes up. One gigatonne of methane emissions is very bad news. To find the relationship I had to find out the volume of the Earths' atmosphere at Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP). That volume is 4.2 x 10^9 kilometer^3.
How much acceleration to global heating will Arctic methane release provide? Nobody knows. It is happening. That can't be denied. With so many unknowns there are many possibilities to be explored. New stories.
New reality TV shows could be themed around life in billionaire bunkers after SHTF.
A TV series could be made around the crazy antics of a rich investment banker turned hobby farm warlord. Green Acres for a disintegrating world. The series could feature news about the rest of the world descending into chaos on a background flatscreen at a local café. Our hobby farm warlord is safe in a little private town surrounded by his private farms with all the townspeople as his employees. Everybody paid to be normal. A caricature of capitalism in a world where money has lost meaning.
The town can be classic Americana with a Main Street, shops, and a park with flowers and trees. Located on an Aleutian island with 10 miles of fake suburban sprawl two-lane and a couple of greasy spoon restaurants. It will be as warm as Kansas. A couple of strip malls with dollar stores service our bankers nostalgic shopping pleasures. All the island cars are classics. There is a bowling alley.
Along the road lie warehouses. Each warehouse is sealed and patrolled by town police. An endless march of warehouses, each packed with canned goods and assorted items for the strip-mall stores. Enough to keep the town pickled in early twenty-first century America for a thousand years. Entire hardware stores were packed up in shipping containers and shipped north when American cities fell apart. The billionaire banker had the means to stock his warehouses when it still could be done. They look like WallMarts. Enough stuff to get to the show season finale and the start of a new season.
The billionaire's desire to live like a normal American guy from old times makes him a dork. But everyone in the town benefits. Classic American life goes on while the rest of the world melts. In this story playing their character; be it town drunk or town plumber, is everyone's best option. Even though they can't spent any money they are paid to keep up their fictions.
Being trapped in the past playing a character in a classic American town is everyones' best move. The alternative is misery and life in a world of chaos beyond the island, 'out there'. Throw in a few visits by invading zombies in canoes as reminders of what is out there and this show could have something for everyone. A Gilligan's Island for the apocalypse. A Gilligan's Island where people want to stay on the island.
I look through news and see feeble attempts to deny global heating. But evidence is overwhelming. Now is a hot time to make the most of the literary and entertainment possibilities. With methane surging, arable land will soon vanish. We will need comedy. We will need stories. Watching an imaginary town where a few people continue to live banal American lives in perpetuity might be just the thing to get you through the coming horror.
Friday April 23rd,
Not so many people have seen this. The talk was given at the Royal Ontario Museum and put into a list of talks the museum had sponsored. Without any title or explanation. It was prefaced with a museum commercial intended to make museum donors happy but scare an audience away. I fixed that. With my new Dunning Kruger video editing skills I am invincible.
James sets up the background with an informative talk on global heating. Then he gives the solution. Carbon Dividends.
Wednesday April 21st,
My last post got me interested in video editing. As it was, some people at XR America figured out clips of the seasoned and committed activists in their long assed video should be separated out. I was not the only one thinking so.
But that happened not before I learned a tiny bit about video editing. As you will see if you click on the pic ↑. Enough to be dangerous. Video editing had been mysterious but now that I know the ABCs of it; things are good. If you follow the link ↑ you will find I posted the video in a new forum.
Join up if you have something to say about collapse. The forum has less than a dozen members so far and is only a few days old. The forum is a way to respond to something you see here.
Monday April 19th,
I watched an XR America Video.
XR America appears to be an experiment in capitalism of some kind. I need more study to have a real opinion about that. I hope XR America is not a Psy-Op. But that is not my point today.
People I like and respect were featured on the video is the important thing. People ignored by mainstream media. Unfortunately the XR America mother video tried to do way more than just get their message out which would have been great. The original video is close to two hours long. I am not comfortable posting the whole thing.
You will see clips from it and more, but I am having a huge amount of trouble downloading and uploading the video clips. I suspect censorship, and I am not liking the harassment. There are a few clips of the speakers made by XR which were nicely split off for me. I will be putting these clips into my video player later. But I won't be doing that without having something to say as I post.
All the speakers I'm presenting compliment each other. They all are eloquent and clear enough to be listened to on their own. The order in which you listen does not matter.
Homeland Security made what would have just been a video with a few paragraphs into a project. I am putting more thought into this than I would have otherwise. So you of the black suit and white shirt. Thank you very fucking much.
( I continue to have trouble posting the videos I want for this playlist. Being forced to move video at pre-surveillance dial up speeds is no fun. The first clip took all day. I'm Stazified! )
Kumi explains we suffer from affluenza. A pathological illness where people are led to believe a good meaningful decent life comes from having more and more and more. Stuff. Material acquisition defines us. Unless we change the unequal consumption patterns between rich and poor, we do not have a chance to find genuine climate justice. Kumi understands we must change our ways and priorities. Kumi understands civil disobedience will be essential for there to be any change.
Chris Hedges is on button one now. Sheldon Wollin, who is not on the mother tape at all (he is no longer with us), will explain inverted totalitarianism on button Two. Bots have been assigned to manage me via slow downloads and by blocking my online zooming, but they let me watch videos at full speed. A clever way to create passivity. Psychological fuckifications. Like we needed more passive people? Power likes to have an apathetic citizenry. Passive people won't demand change or question stupidity. They won't challenge brutality. Power does not like public zooming. And I have been. But enough ranting.
Claire Farrell did not get a fair shake on the original video. Claire is on another tape I'm going to merge into this list. Roger Hallam and Claire Farell now have buttons and have videos loaded up. Roger and Claire show the theme of my list is a call to revolutionary action.
The situation is dire. A call to revolutionary action is appropriate. I extracted some Mayer Hillman Dialog from a long discussion Mayer Hilman had with some British XR activists. Claire is among them. The discussion by itself was great. But all I want to present are Mayer Hillman's views. The video was long. Mayer's pessimism prompted Claire to make some concluding remarks. They are worth a listen. Her remarks are separated out under the last button.
Sunday April 11th,
I agree with Russell Brand 100%. (button 1). He gets it. Russell and I are on the same page on many things. We have a shared perspective. As the money god takes more and more control of us and the world descends into ever greater insanity, understanding better ways to live becomes vital.
Russell understands to have a world capable of responding to the challenges before us demands a commitment to equity. Equity must be a science and new religion or the end predicted by Craig Dilworth (button 2) is certain.
The ease at which people accept technology is frightening. There are many reasons for this. A primitive person could not do complicated math throwing spears at dinner. Time does not allow for it. Technical skills demand a narrow focus for high efficiency and minimum energy use to solve specific problems. Thinking consumes sugar. The demand for mental efficiency low energy use and speed. Means neglecting a bigger picture. The immediate concern has always been dinner or none of us would be here now. With so many of us now on the planet things have changed. We have other concerns over dinner than simply hunting it down now. Our technology is consuming the Earth. This demands different mental tools than what has come naturally in a sense.
In a sense naturally as we have instinctive ways to understand technology. Ways which get in the way of solving current problems. This is a depressing and dark picture which suggests extinction. But short term extinction is not absolutely certain. Existing traditions and in particular rule by elites make it certain. Existing traditions are not prepared for change or able to understand the change coming at us. Unless a metascience of technology evolves and is taken seriously; we are doomed.
Man, being the technical animal can make a science out of considering the bigger picture. Smart people have figured out how to handle the bigger picture. Yet human behavior is controlled by the societies we live in and not ideas. Voices of reason are ignored. Especially those which disturb. People running the world focus on short term concerns and themselves. This is not good. Science shows a highly stratified society is not able to deal with change. Such societies are characterized by low levels of happiness. We have the wrong kind of leaders and are in a sad situation. We need to do government differently. Stratification and inequity destroys community and increases unhappiness.
See the interview with Craig Dilworth for an explanation of the vicious circle.
Monday April 5th,
The second chapter in Scott Noble's documentary series 'The War at Home" is here. Button number two will play it. The first button will play chapter one. It's title is 'Rebellion'. Chapter two's title is 'Blacklist'. I will release other chapters when they are available. Blacklist is a timely documentary. Our cancel culture, our censorship, our ubiquitous intolerance. All rhyme with the days of the red scare.
Friday March 26th,
If you protest by planting a tree at midnight being arrested is low risk. Radical handbills and independent media could link and 'plant' the connection so your protest can matter. So as not to be mistaken as only being a good thing.
This idea could be a thing to deal with what is coming down the tracks at us. A way to live for another day. Draconian suppressions are on the way. I suggest planting trees with preparation and good research. You don't want to get caught, and we want the trees to live. Not effective you think? Too abstract? True, but there are not enough of us to be effective yet. The focus is still on making connections. We still have signals in the night. Sanitized barbarism has not taken that away yet. Beware the cameras.
Tony Santoro is a tough talking train driver. Tony pretends to be thug but driving trains is not minimum wage. I don't think Tony would rip any of your shit off unless you needed to be taught a lesson. Or if he needed your hedge trimmers.
Tony can tell you to fuck yourself and explain that Cupressus Sargentii needs serpentine soil to grow all in the same sentence. I bring Tony here because he is an expert in illegal tree planting and Roger Hallam needs his help. They may have a few things in common.
What is going on in America is one thing. It is different across the pond. In America people are hating on police as being brutal robot thugs. As evidenced by what is happening at Echo Park in LA.
A conspiracy may be at work to cultivate such hate. Done so people continue to ignore the authority (Mitch O’Farrell) behind which makes American police do what they do. But that is my opinion. That it is difficult for a man to understand something when his payMarch 6king and implementing laws which validate a racist’s perspective on many issues.
Patel's advocacy of the bill has been exceptionally divisive. Hundreds of people gathered on College Green (Bristol UK) on Friday (Today) to rally against the Government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Standing or sitting in the street near the Bridewell police station. This is the third protest about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in Bristol in a week. Not surprisingly, all this has put Roger Hallam into obvious depression.
Seeing Roger's belief in nonviolent disruption; shown to not be effective by Priti Patel, is sad. A change in tactics is appropriate. Roger should take a vacation to Oakland CA and plant some trees with Tony. Tony might give Roger some ideas about what to do next. I will go down to Oakland and visit if he does.
If we don't know what to do next is true then we do know what not to do again is also true! Use Rogers advice on nonviolent protest using the tactics of Sun Tzu. KNOW YOUR ENEMY. By thinking and assessing, a commander calculates his chances of victory.
Sunday March 21st,
| August 2021 | 414.47 ppm |
| August 2020 | 412.78 ppm |
| Annual change: | +0.41% |
Last updated: September 7, 2021
K-Dog's own globe. I write the code that spins this globe and performs the other magic tricks on this website.
Tunes of the Apocalypse
Buy Me a Coffee
The strange attractor of the liberal elite. After a revolution the liberal elite will stop ortbiting their beliefs and principles. They sell out. They will betray the people and orbit power. Only strong trustworthy leadership can prevent this.
" The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods ralionally arrived at having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new. The technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past. "
Jacques Ellul