Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Continuity With Change
Fans of the Emmy winning HBO series VEEP may recall the slogan used on Julia Louis-Dreyfus' campaign bus "Continuity with Change." In our brave new world such things tend to creep off the screen and into that other world of entertainment: politics. Was Australia's Prime Minister quoting consciously or unconsciously when he said " Continuity and Change" in an interview yesterday?
Perhpas to him it gave the feeling that he would be changing things but not too much. Who knows, but of course the phrase was selected by the show's writers for being as meaningless a statement as they could find in order to typify the state of American political rhetoric. The "most meaningless election slogan we could think of".said writer Simon Blackwell.
So far we haven't heard it from any of the clowns in America's two ring circus, but then it conveys a sort of vapid optimism rather than the furious and outraged invective more common to our politics.
Politics mirrors the art that satirizes politics. As circular as a circus ring if not as vicious.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The Midas Touch
"Everybody lies" said Hugh Laurie as House. Everything goes to shit, says the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or "entropy increases" which is the same thing without the smell.
You can't trust anything and no matter how good a thing, a quality, a group of people out to do good may be, lies and exaggerations and hyperbole creep in, things fall apart and the jerks, the zealots, the fanatics, the self righteous take over. That's how we got where we are, but never mind. As bad as it is, it's always going to get worse. Entropy increases. Religions and causes and principles become atrocities -- always -- and the best of intentions become heresy, error, treason and sin. If you're not one of us you're one of them and because we're right, nobody else can be. Truth is tribal. Some truth is more true than other truth and some truths are lies.
So it is with humanistic principles, like the sanctity of human life. If it gets in the way of a group fighting police brutality, the noblest of principle becomes heresy, becomes racism. Truth is only a tactical position. If it serves your position in some battle, it's true enough even if it isn't. If it does not it can't be true if it shows we're wrong and we can't be wrong because truth is only a tactical position , a fortification, a weapon that serves our group, our tribe. Good becomes bad, humanism becomes racism. Everything turns to shit.
Entropy increases: disorder, dispute, disrespect and thus defeat. Good intentions are self destructive. Preach peace and and start a war, preach love and engender hate, preach respect for all and it all shatters into warring states, groups, tribes, faiths, races, The end justifies the means, the rhetoric, the damage done.
Found the first secular democracy in the world to affirm that legitimacy in government comes from people not from gods and before you know it, the people are interpreting that to mean Theocracy. Freedom to persecute becomes freedom of religion. Freedom of religion becomes freedom to believe only what we tell you to believe and so any self-contradiction, any forgery, fallacy of invented fact is permissible in the fight for freedom and so freedom is slavery and vice versa.
On the Animal Farm, four legs good - two legs bad becomes Four legs good, two legs better. Preach love for one group and you offend another that's out to improve only their own lot. Numbers are never convincing enough so you tune them up, you gerrymander comparisons, add irrelevant numbers and false analogies and you add real fallacies to real data to make it all seem better and soon enough you've polarized instead of convinced and it all breaks down into insult and strife - forever.
You want to improve the atmosphere by mandating smaller cars and we wind up with huge trucks instead. We want to improve driving safety so we reduce speed limits on the safest roads and when it doesn't work, we lapse into denialism and accusation and draconian enforcement, just as we did with the Volstead act. That it doesn't do what it was supposed to do means only that someone must be blamed, not that we were wrong or naive or stubborn. You say the cause of accidents is mostly bad drivers and not bad cars? You'll be run over by righteousness, a victim of the inertia of zeal.
We want to make cars safer in collisions and we mandate one technology and ignore better technology and accuse the inventor of being against safety.
Alcohol is bad for society say the righteous. it ruins lives and spurs crime, so we ruin even more lives and create vastly more crime.
When it doesn't work, we look for scapegoats and we increase punishment. Cannibis is bad for society and that must be true since the police tell us and there's a powerful group of civic minded citizens to back them up. The war on drugs doesn't work, vastly increases crime, vastly increases incarceration, ruining lives, destroying families and communities and when it doesn't work? we try harder. We create numbers to scare people and when the numbers aren't scary enough we tune them up, we shuffle the shells, we deal from the bottom of the deck and if anyone notices or questions, we cry heresy, we call names, we polarize we feel good about it, because it's all in a good cause and the nobility of the cause justifies all tactics, sanctifies the lies, vilifies objectivity, stifles creativity and again the high minded becomes teh simple minded, becomes denialism, becomes persecution.
We want to protect children so the kid who takes a naked picture of another kid goes to jail and becomes a pariah for life and if you say "wait a minute" why, you must be a pervert too! Everything turns to shit because the notion that something must be done gets reshuffled and twisted to support any solution, any approach, any law or bill or policy and if you question, you're a spokesman for the devil, the bogeyman, the NRA, the KKK , ISIL or worse.
Everything turns to shit, because everyone lies, misrepresents, exaggerates, redacts, edits and feels good about it and why not, because good causes make for good outcomes, don't they?
You can't trust anything and no matter how good a thing, a quality, a group of people out to do good may be, lies and exaggerations and hyperbole creep in, things fall apart and the jerks, the zealots, the fanatics, the self righteous take over. That's how we got where we are, but never mind. As bad as it is, it's always going to get worse. Entropy increases. Religions and causes and principles become atrocities -- always -- and the best of intentions become heresy, error, treason and sin. If you're not one of us you're one of them and because we're right, nobody else can be. Truth is tribal. Some truth is more true than other truth and some truths are lies.
So it is with humanistic principles, like the sanctity of human life. If it gets in the way of a group fighting police brutality, the noblest of principle becomes heresy, becomes racism. Truth is only a tactical position. If it serves your position in some battle, it's true enough even if it isn't. If it does not it can't be true if it shows we're wrong and we can't be wrong because truth is only a tactical position , a fortification, a weapon that serves our group, our tribe. Good becomes bad, humanism becomes racism. Everything turns to shit.
Entropy increases: disorder, dispute, disrespect and thus defeat. Good intentions are self destructive. Preach peace and and start a war, preach love and engender hate, preach respect for all and it all shatters into warring states, groups, tribes, faiths, races, The end justifies the means, the rhetoric, the damage done.
Found the first secular democracy in the world to affirm that legitimacy in government comes from people not from gods and before you know it, the people are interpreting that to mean Theocracy. Freedom to persecute becomes freedom of religion. Freedom of religion becomes freedom to believe only what we tell you to believe and so any self-contradiction, any forgery, fallacy of invented fact is permissible in the fight for freedom and so freedom is slavery and vice versa.
On the Animal Farm, four legs good - two legs bad becomes Four legs good, two legs better. Preach love for one group and you offend another that's out to improve only their own lot. Numbers are never convincing enough so you tune them up, you gerrymander comparisons, add irrelevant numbers and false analogies and you add real fallacies to real data to make it all seem better and soon enough you've polarized instead of convinced and it all breaks down into insult and strife - forever.
You want to improve the atmosphere by mandating smaller cars and we wind up with huge trucks instead. We want to improve driving safety so we reduce speed limits on the safest roads and when it doesn't work, we lapse into denialism and accusation and draconian enforcement, just as we did with the Volstead act. That it doesn't do what it was supposed to do means only that someone must be blamed, not that we were wrong or naive or stubborn. You say the cause of accidents is mostly bad drivers and not bad cars? You'll be run over by righteousness, a victim of the inertia of zeal.
We want to make cars safer in collisions and we mandate one technology and ignore better technology and accuse the inventor of being against safety.
Alcohol is bad for society say the righteous. it ruins lives and spurs crime, so we ruin even more lives and create vastly more crime.
When it doesn't work, we look for scapegoats and we increase punishment. Cannibis is bad for society and that must be true since the police tell us and there's a powerful group of civic minded citizens to back them up. The war on drugs doesn't work, vastly increases crime, vastly increases incarceration, ruining lives, destroying families and communities and when it doesn't work? we try harder. We create numbers to scare people and when the numbers aren't scary enough we tune them up, we shuffle the shells, we deal from the bottom of the deck and if anyone notices or questions, we cry heresy, we call names, we polarize we feel good about it, because it's all in a good cause and the nobility of the cause justifies all tactics, sanctifies the lies, vilifies objectivity, stifles creativity and again the high minded becomes teh simple minded, becomes denialism, becomes persecution.
We want to protect children so the kid who takes a naked picture of another kid goes to jail and becomes a pariah for life and if you say "wait a minute" why, you must be a pervert too! Everything turns to shit because the notion that something must be done gets reshuffled and twisted to support any solution, any approach, any law or bill or policy and if you question, you're a spokesman for the devil, the bogeyman, the NRA, the KKK , ISIL or worse.
Everything turns to shit, because everyone lies, misrepresents, exaggerates, redacts, edits and feels good about it and why not, because good causes make for good outcomes, don't they?
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Beer Halls, Brown Shirts and Trump
Oh my!
I haven't lived in Chicago for a long time, but I don't think the big Windy has seen a Friday night like this one since 1968. I don't think our dear country has been as divided since the illegitimate war in Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of my generation and set the "Love it or Leave it" thugs against the rest of us. Chicago of course has a history of public violence, like the Haymarket affair in 1886 or the gruesome 'Red Summer' race riots of 1919. It's no coincidence that St Louis also erupted in violence that evening and it set me to wondering whether those folks, if they're still alive, who blamed the Chicago race riots of 1968 on Martin Luther King would now blame this affair on Donald Trump. King, of course continued to denounce such actions for as long as he lived and as far as I know without once bragging about his penis.
I'll leave the question of whether those events were part of the "great" period of American history to which our GOP would like to return us to you, but as the New York Post tells us:
Of course it's not just the Chicago riots of 1968 that come to mind, but I'm afraid the passionate rabble of today doesn't connect its tactics with the passionate rabble in the beer halls of Munich in 1923 or perhaps they don't think history repeats itself if you ignore it. Who knows, but I'm hardly optimistic about the future of our Republic even if our next president isn't one who promises to wall out minorities, close houses of worship, punish dissent with thuggery or to base our legal system on the "Body of Christ" whatever the hell that means. Indeed the party of Trump, Cruz and Rubio, the one that told us only a few years ago that America's biggest problem was pornography and freedom of the press is trying to sanctify our traditional bigotry by mumbling about Jesus and freedom of religion (for Christians only) What would the USA be like, it's Humanist and secular government based on the will of the governed be like, transformed into whatever it is that these heroes have in mind? Perhaps I'll read about it in Costa Rica.
I haven't lived in Chicago for a long time, but I don't think the big Windy has seen a Friday night like this one since 1968. I don't think our dear country has been as divided since the illegitimate war in Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of my generation and set the "Love it or Leave it" thugs against the rest of us. Chicago of course has a history of public violence, like the Haymarket affair in 1886 or the gruesome 'Red Summer' race riots of 1919. It's no coincidence that St Louis also erupted in violence that evening and it set me to wondering whether those folks, if they're still alive, who blamed the Chicago race riots of 1968 on Martin Luther King would now blame this affair on Donald Trump. King, of course continued to denounce such actions for as long as he lived and as far as I know without once bragging about his penis.
I'll leave the question of whether those events were part of the "great" period of American history to which our GOP would like to return us to you, but as the New York Post tells us:
The scandal is that a man who aspires to be leader of the United States of America and a role model to its children has behaved like a soccer hooligan, gleefully stirring up violence rather than seeking to calm it.
Of course it's not just the Chicago riots of 1968 that come to mind, but I'm afraid the passionate rabble of today doesn't connect its tactics with the passionate rabble in the beer halls of Munich in 1923 or perhaps they don't think history repeats itself if you ignore it. Who knows, but I'm hardly optimistic about the future of our Republic even if our next president isn't one who promises to wall out minorities, close houses of worship, punish dissent with thuggery or to base our legal system on the "Body of Christ" whatever the hell that means. Indeed the party of Trump, Cruz and Rubio, the one that told us only a few years ago that America's biggest problem was pornography and freedom of the press is trying to sanctify our traditional bigotry by mumbling about Jesus and freedom of religion (for Christians only) What would the USA be like, it's Humanist and secular government based on the will of the governed be like, transformed into whatever it is that these heroes have in mind? Perhaps I'll read about it in Costa Rica.
Sunday, March 06, 2016
Bad is Good, but Badder is Better
Imagine a world without one single fail, epic or otherwise, where you gave presents instead of gifting them. Wasn't it just yesterday when there wasn't a genius toaster or tennis shoe in the world? Seems like that world never existed to most Americans, their Business or Journalism diplomas framed upon the wall.
So listen here kids, I'm going to tell you about a time - a time not so long ago when a macchiado would have sounded like something you'd get from a woman in black leather, and a barista was that floozie who was always still sitting there at closing time. No, I'm not gonna tell you it was the good old days because those days were no better than these days, just different. Back then we laughed at out-of-date hipsters who still started sentences with saaaay and ended them with seeee. We giggled at people who thought things might be swell instead of cool or maybe even neat. We laughed at people who still wore fedora hats or worse those little porkpie hats like Norton from the Honeymooners and we laughed all the harder when they turned the brim up like a total loser. Wear your hat indoors? Hahahaha! Not one science fiction writer ever imagined that there would be passionate arguments about whether your backwards hat should have a flat or curved brim or should be over-sized enough to cover your ears.
Once upon a time, not everything was awesome, you see. Gilgamesh was epic, your lunch probably wasn't.
I heard some period drama recently in which a Victorian character says "the disease impacted her brain" and it was like an alarm going off. We just don't remember how different our language was, or is it that directors are afraid of confusing the tattooed multitudes by saying it affected her mind? and then there was the CNN News item about concussions impacting brains -- and said without a smile to indicate the news parrot recognizing that impacting the brain causes concussions.
No, really there was a time when people distinguished between because of and due to: a time when we waited for things and waiters waited on us. If my high school chum had talked about his selfie going viral or his tweet was trending on Twitter, he would have been sent to the school nurse, but it couldn't have negatively impacted on his record since that convoluted and pompous metaphor hadn't yet graduated from business school and shuffled toward CNN to be aired..
Sure, life has changed and so have the requirements of language. Who needed to call his Timex an analog watch back when John Cameron Swayze showed us how rugged they were and digital meant something entirely different, particularly in the doctor's office, But do we have to confuse meaning with metaphor? Do we have to accept manipulative marketing blather so eagerly? Do we have to make fools of ourselves trying to sound adolescent, to sound educated or just to sound hip? Are all of those motivations internal or are they implanted to direct and misdirect thought, stifle perspective and make us pay ten bucks for a cup of coffee? a Senator wants to refuse to do his job but keep his pay and benefits? A deserter wants to be commander in chief? All things are possible when we twist the language.
I remember a decade of hearing how history wasn't as important as "what's happening now baby" and the results of that is a population full of fake and distorted history. Are we doing the same thing to English by stressing the primacy of slang and jargon and needless complexity posing as erudition? Listen to a presidential "debate" and tell me why the barking of dogs is less meaningful. Could it be that Orwell's Newspeak is becoming a reality? Is language being stripped of precision, are words being identified with their opposites and is the function of language to sell, to indoctrinate to simplify past the point of incisive or trenchant protest?
Why do I keep hearing patriotism used as a synonym for gun ownership? Why does Liberal mean totalitarian and Conservative mean radical revolutionary and why do Family values mean intrusive Theocracy? Why is a blastula a Baby? What does Organic mean? What does Processed mean? Why is universal healthcare Fascist and Communist at the same time? Why is any war about fighting for our freedom? Why is bad good and badder better? Is it for the same reason that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance strength?
I suspect something of the sort and the fact that every English teacher I know thinks there should be no dictionaries and all that is required of them is to teach spelling and the proper use of possessive apostrophes, makes me wonder, and by "wonder" I mean I'm certain.
So listen here kids, I'm going to tell you about a time - a time not so long ago when a macchiado would have sounded like something you'd get from a woman in black leather, and a barista was that floozie who was always still sitting there at closing time. No, I'm not gonna tell you it was the good old days because those days were no better than these days, just different. Back then we laughed at out-of-date hipsters who still started sentences with saaaay and ended them with seeee. We giggled at people who thought things might be swell instead of cool or maybe even neat. We laughed at people who still wore fedora hats or worse those little porkpie hats like Norton from the Honeymooners and we laughed all the harder when they turned the brim up like a total loser. Wear your hat indoors? Hahahaha! Not one science fiction writer ever imagined that there would be passionate arguments about whether your backwards hat should have a flat or curved brim or should be over-sized enough to cover your ears.
Once upon a time, not everything was awesome, you see. Gilgamesh was epic, your lunch probably wasn't.
I heard some period drama recently in which a Victorian character says "the disease impacted her brain" and it was like an alarm going off. We just don't remember how different our language was, or is it that directors are afraid of confusing the tattooed multitudes by saying it affected her mind? and then there was the CNN News item about concussions impacting brains -- and said without a smile to indicate the news parrot recognizing that impacting the brain causes concussions.
No, really there was a time when people distinguished between because of and due to: a time when we waited for things and waiters waited on us. If my high school chum had talked about his selfie going viral or his tweet was trending on Twitter, he would have been sent to the school nurse, but it couldn't have negatively impacted on his record since that convoluted and pompous metaphor hadn't yet graduated from business school and shuffled toward CNN to be aired..
Sure, life has changed and so have the requirements of language. Who needed to call his Timex an analog watch back when John Cameron Swayze showed us how rugged they were and digital meant something entirely different, particularly in the doctor's office, But do we have to confuse meaning with metaphor? Do we have to accept manipulative marketing blather so eagerly? Do we have to make fools of ourselves trying to sound adolescent, to sound educated or just to sound hip? Are all of those motivations internal or are they implanted to direct and misdirect thought, stifle perspective and make us pay ten bucks for a cup of coffee? a Senator wants to refuse to do his job but keep his pay and benefits? A deserter wants to be commander in chief? All things are possible when we twist the language.
I remember a decade of hearing how history wasn't as important as "what's happening now baby" and the results of that is a population full of fake and distorted history. Are we doing the same thing to English by stressing the primacy of slang and jargon and needless complexity posing as erudition? Listen to a presidential "debate" and tell me why the barking of dogs is less meaningful. Could it be that Orwell's Newspeak is becoming a reality? Is language being stripped of precision, are words being identified with their opposites and is the function of language to sell, to indoctrinate to simplify past the point of incisive or trenchant protest?
Why do I keep hearing patriotism used as a synonym for gun ownership? Why does Liberal mean totalitarian and Conservative mean radical revolutionary and why do Family values mean intrusive Theocracy? Why is a blastula a Baby? What does Organic mean? What does Processed mean? Why is universal healthcare Fascist and Communist at the same time? Why is any war about fighting for our freedom? Why is bad good and badder better? Is it for the same reason that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance strength?
I suspect something of the sort and the fact that every English teacher I know thinks there should be no dictionaries and all that is required of them is to teach spelling and the proper use of possessive apostrophes, makes me wonder, and by "wonder" I mean I'm certain.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Monkey's Uncle
Religion, Politics, love and the Origin of Species.
Many Americans are convinced that human beings came into existence in a flash and appeared as they do today, except perhaps for dark-skinned people, who in a Biblical tale that might have come from Aesop, became black after Ham, was cursed for some vague reason that's been the subject of rabbinical debate for a very long time. Those of us not cursed with a religious brain blockage might speculate that some advantageous mutation allowed some ape to pass on his genes as our hairyness declined millions of years ago in sunny Africa: as we began to separate from furry arboreal apes and walked away on two legs.
The same sort of religious fugue that makes people deny our evolutionary origins as one of many sorts of apes which no longer exist makes them deny all sorts of things and like someone who is losing parts of their memory, make things up to fill in the gaps.
some of our fundamentalist presidential candidates who balk at admitting the evolutionary origin of our species might explode to find out just how much of our genetic makeup is shared with some deep sea Acorn Worms because we both descend from a common ancestor a billion or more years ago. Some 70% of our genes are shared it seems. Of course many things now alive share a large part of this wormy genetic makeup which evolved during the Cambrian period and subsequently proliferated through the many periods of extinction These worms' genes are shared with many current species from all vertebrates to octopuses. You may in fact be more than a monkey's uncle -- you're also the umpteenth cousin of a banana if the idea of common ancestry of life is correct. The Popol Vuh says we're all children of the corn. It's sort of true.
I'll delay rhapsodizing about our common heritage and the reverence for all life one might therefore feel, and get to the point: which is to say that what we are and what we look like is the product of certain building blocks and how they interact to produce an organism. Obviously the genes that many creatures of today have inherited are turned on and off differently and expressed differently and by more than one process. The ancient genetic patterns that form the legs of a lobster may form the ribs of a vertebrate. The similar structures that appear in flowers and mammalian reproductive organs aren't accidental. That's why the argument for the genetic identity of humans across gene pools falls apart. We all share the genes for melanin, but some have a mutation that limits the expression of those genes and others do not. All those with blue eyes probably descend from one person, That holds true for other features one finds in long separated gene pools. That mutation, recessive as most mutations are, will not likely appear in a population not descended from the original blue-eyed gal. You may remember reading about Gregor Mendel and the distribution of recessive characteristics, If God turned Ham black, he couldn't pass that on any more than Aesop's leopard could pass on his spots.
Such mutations may be so small: one out of billions of base pairs, that the practice of saying we are all genetically identical based on percentages of genes is one of those stories we make up to prop up a political or religious prejudice. I'm not really 98 percent Chimpanzee or only 30% different from an Acorn worm, gene percentages notwithstanding. I don't know about you and I don't know about Donald Trump, but I do know that Lamarck was wrong as was Aesop, the science of epigenetics notwithstanding.
But the entire science of genetics as it appears in our culture has been warped by normative beliefs. Opening a box of crackers yesterday I was assured by the box that no genetically modified grains were used in making them. OK, so my mother warned me if I ate any more chocolate I'd turn into a coco bean, but she was wrong. You are not what you eat and genes are not transferred from flour to the eater thereof. Relax, there is no DNA in your toast and We won't turn into a chicken if its genes have been tampered with. We already have most of its genes anyway and all the chemical components thereof.
Yes the rapidly advancing science of genetics Is transforming everything and yes, the inevitable reaction to having to change our views because of it is creating the same sort of disturbances in the farce we call culture as other new avenues in science have done, from telescope to telegraph. If we're confused and afraid of the new it's because we all have it in common, my dog and I and you. We may look radically different, dogs and cats and Canadians, but we still can feel love for each other and when we don't it's because we're a monkey's uncle and the scion of a tube worm and the love child of a lobster. I have so much in common with my dog that I love him like a child. He likes me too. How much more do we have in common with all mankind? Are we so afraid that that's still not enough that we have to hide behind mythology? Is the difference between male and female greater than between a black man and a Chinese man? The Y Chromosome that makes me a man constitutes 2% of my DNA - a greater percentage than the difference between species, yet men and women are more alike than either is with a Chimp. There is much more to what we are than gene percentages and admit that our genetic differences don't make us different enough to matter. Our true differences are manufactured, taught and learned and very often they are wrong.
Many Americans are convinced that human beings came into existence in a flash and appeared as they do today, except perhaps for dark-skinned people, who in a Biblical tale that might have come from Aesop, became black after Ham, was cursed for some vague reason that's been the subject of rabbinical debate for a very long time. Those of us not cursed with a religious brain blockage might speculate that some advantageous mutation allowed some ape to pass on his genes as our hairyness declined millions of years ago in sunny Africa: as we began to separate from furry arboreal apes and walked away on two legs.
The same sort of religious fugue that makes people deny our evolutionary origins as one of many sorts of apes which no longer exist makes them deny all sorts of things and like someone who is losing parts of their memory, make things up to fill in the gaps.
some of our fundamentalist presidential candidates who balk at admitting the evolutionary origin of our species might explode to find out just how much of our genetic makeup is shared with some deep sea Acorn Worms because we both descend from a common ancestor a billion or more years ago. Some 70% of our genes are shared it seems. Of course many things now alive share a large part of this wormy genetic makeup which evolved during the Cambrian period and subsequently proliferated through the many periods of extinction These worms' genes are shared with many current species from all vertebrates to octopuses. You may in fact be more than a monkey's uncle -- you're also the umpteenth cousin of a banana if the idea of common ancestry of life is correct. The Popol Vuh says we're all children of the corn. It's sort of true.
I'll delay rhapsodizing about our common heritage and the reverence for all life one might therefore feel, and get to the point: which is to say that what we are and what we look like is the product of certain building blocks and how they interact to produce an organism. Obviously the genes that many creatures of today have inherited are turned on and off differently and expressed differently and by more than one process. The ancient genetic patterns that form the legs of a lobster may form the ribs of a vertebrate. The similar structures that appear in flowers and mammalian reproductive organs aren't accidental. That's why the argument for the genetic identity of humans across gene pools falls apart. We all share the genes for melanin, but some have a mutation that limits the expression of those genes and others do not. All those with blue eyes probably descend from one person, That holds true for other features one finds in long separated gene pools. That mutation, recessive as most mutations are, will not likely appear in a population not descended from the original blue-eyed gal. You may remember reading about Gregor Mendel and the distribution of recessive characteristics, If God turned Ham black, he couldn't pass that on any more than Aesop's leopard could pass on his spots.
Such mutations may be so small: one out of billions of base pairs, that the practice of saying we are all genetically identical based on percentages of genes is one of those stories we make up to prop up a political or religious prejudice. I'm not really 98 percent Chimpanzee or only 30% different from an Acorn worm, gene percentages notwithstanding. I don't know about you and I don't know about Donald Trump, but I do know that Lamarck was wrong as was Aesop, the science of epigenetics notwithstanding.
But the entire science of genetics as it appears in our culture has been warped by normative beliefs. Opening a box of crackers yesterday I was assured by the box that no genetically modified grains were used in making them. OK, so my mother warned me if I ate any more chocolate I'd turn into a coco bean, but she was wrong. You are not what you eat and genes are not transferred from flour to the eater thereof. Relax, there is no DNA in your toast and We won't turn into a chicken if its genes have been tampered with. We already have most of its genes anyway and all the chemical components thereof.
Yes the rapidly advancing science of genetics Is transforming everything and yes, the inevitable reaction to having to change our views because of it is creating the same sort of disturbances in the farce we call culture as other new avenues in science have done, from telescope to telegraph. If we're confused and afraid of the new it's because we all have it in common, my dog and I and you. We may look radically different, dogs and cats and Canadians, but we still can feel love for each other and when we don't it's because we're a monkey's uncle and the scion of a tube worm and the love child of a lobster. I have so much in common with my dog that I love him like a child. He likes me too. How much more do we have in common with all mankind? Are we so afraid that that's still not enough that we have to hide behind mythology? Is the difference between male and female greater than between a black man and a Chinese man? The Y Chromosome that makes me a man constitutes 2% of my DNA - a greater percentage than the difference between species, yet men and women are more alike than either is with a Chimp. There is much more to what we are than gene percentages and admit that our genetic differences don't make us different enough to matter. Our true differences are manufactured, taught and learned and very often they are wrong.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
The eye of the cynic
“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”
-Phaedrus-
I never thought I'd be saying this, but it just may be that America needs to be more cynical. Our time is a time of crisis to crisis, calamity to calamity and outrage to outrage with no intervals in between when things aren't quite so bad and aren't getting worse. All in all, things may be better than they were for most people on most days, but how often are we prompted to contemplate it?
I wake up on a sunny morning in paradise and tuning in to get a weather report, the first thing I hear is MURDER! RAPE! ARSON! Is it real or is it manufactured? Nearly all the other 11 million people in Sunny Florida are having an ordinary morning hearing about little else but car crashes, electrocutions, inexplicable shootings and "isn't it getting worse? " Did that "double dip" recession ever happen? Did Obama take away a single gun from a single law-abiding citizen? Did the markets recover? Did that horrible scandal that would soon drive him from office materialize? Who wastes a second talking about that. Who bothers to compare racism 50, 75 years ago to what we're anguishing about today? I keep seeing figures from reliable sources telling us of a downtrend in shootings. Is that a motivation for those who need to distract us from it to keep the spotlight on some subset and make a case for its increase? Where there's motivation there's a manifestation. Sometimes only a cynic will notice.
"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact"
-Sherlock Holmes-
Our opinions, our fears and our serial episodes of righteous indignation may just be manufactured, cultivated and fed because it's not only big business, but it's an instrument of control and power. One after the other we hear clusters of stories that seem alike: Pederast priests, brutal, racist cops, shooting sprees, Innocent Black "children" being senselessly murdered. It's normal to ask whether the scenario is being arranged, tuned up, framed to fit the model. Is someone arranging or even fabricating anecdotes because he wants some law changed that really has no bearing on events? It's not completely out of the question that incidents are being assembled and connected to make the latest campaign of some group newsworthy. It's not to say there are no trends, no clusters no increases of this or that -- it's to say that it's very difficult to tell when there are serial obsessions caused by regular and sequential news blitzes where on story is told over and over for weeks and connections are made to similar stories or stories made to seem similar because if America isn't glued to the tube, revenue at Fox or CNN is going to fall short of projections and hell will have to be paid.
How long have young women and boys been abused by the Roman Catholic Church? Hard to say, but you only hear about it in outrage clusters even though it's probably been a steady thing for centuries. Is violence on the increase in America? It certainly seems so if you don't look back to those "better times" and read papers full of riots, shootings and rampant violence. It's hard to tell if someone is trying hard to generate a sense of crisis. It's hard to tell when these little campaigns, crusades and jihads are professionally stage managed and you can be swatted like a fly if you buzz too much about it. Say that human life matters and you're a racist, not that it doesn't or that you are, but for interfering with some organization's agenda of making racism seem on the increase.
"When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: Who stands to gain?”
-Vladimir Lenin-
I can only speculate, it's an experiment that would be very hard to carry out, but airing a cluster of completely fake stories - about young people jumping off bridges, for instance, might just cause young people to jump off bridges. Certainly I've read about how how some young rampage shooters have studied and taken notes about others so as to exceed their "scores." But such things are difficult to arrange although we can do research, we can talk about it. We can look a bit harder for invisible hands pulling invisible strings. Cynicism! We can peek behind the curtain and pay attention to the little man. We can ask Cui bono? -- who benefits from our outrage and is motivated to make the level of crisis high enough to meet his political purposes.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Me, Myself and Guns
A year or so ago, I was talking to someone about a fellow in a popular reality show about alligator hunters in Louisiana. We share the same name, but he lives in a homemade shack in the Bayou and lives by hunting and fishing. Someone chimed in with "isn't it great that we live in a country where you have the freedom to live that way?" In fact I think it is. Looking at the success of the dozens of "off the grid" shows and books and movies, Others probably do too. Looking at the number of "survival" shows, I think many of us wish we had the skills and the opportunity -- and the nerve.
I really have no recollection of it as I was less than a year old in 1945 after the War ended, but my Father, still a naval officer, and my young, city girl mother would take target pistols and go out to a creek and shoot at bottles in the water. There apparently was little else to do in that remote area of Northern California and since my dad grew up in Wyoming, that's the sort of thing a boy and his girl did on a sunny weekend. If you've never done it, you'd be surprised at how relaxing it is. But I was exposed to the sound of gunfire early in life and like an old gun dog. I've never been gun shy.
The quote is from Juan Thompson, the son of the famous and notorious Hunter S. Thompson; Gonzo journalist, Colorado ranch owner, Liberal Activist and aficionado of recreational shooting. One of the few ways they could endure each other's presence was while shooting or cleaning firearms.
My dad collected antiques and antique firearms for many years. He still has some of them, hanging on the wall of his den. Few if any, are operable and those which are, haven't been fired since he acquired them 50 years ago. They accompany an interest in 18th and 19th century American history which we have shared, but I'm interested in fine mechanisms in general, tools, cameras, knives. Vintage motor vehicles: I have and have had a whole lot of those things as well as some firearms, most of which are historical items.
When I dare to mention that I have perhaps 75 vintage cameras: finely made and finished metal objects by Leica, Minox, Hasselblad, Linhof, Nikon, Rollei, etc. most people think it's odd to cherish those obsolete things. My hundred or so pocket knives make me only a little bit more so, but guns? Face it, after years of demonization, after a long, steady and often virulent association with madmen and especially rampage shooters there's a stigma, attached not only to me, but to the objects themselves. I'm not a guy nostalgic about things, I'm a menace, a potential murderer and madman. It was not always so.
When I went off to summer camp and when I became a Boy Scout in the mid 1950's one of the primary lessons one was expected to learn was how to shoot safely. It was one of those "pioneer skills" one was urged to acquire. Like making fires or shelters, it was a useful survival skill and a discipline akin to archery or fly fishing. When I visited Colonial Williamsburg in those years I fell in love with the handmade flintlocks being made with antique tools and I never lost my affection. I still have a couple which have,not been fired since we sold the farm 35 years ago. It would be tough to part with them.
But the focus of life in this not-so-brave new world is Not the world where people live off the land and with nature, it's urban. Our paradigm, our standard American is urban, works in an office. Perhaps he commutes, but he's far more Bourgeois than Bayou in fact if not in appearance. He's more likely to be surrounded by huge numbers of people all the time. When he thinks of something that shoots lead and goes bang, he thinks of bloody crime and wanton destruction. He's been taught that association all his life despite endless TV and movies where guns are universally there. He has fear and all out of proportion to the risks, yet there's a titillating fascination. He's no longer the man of open spaces or endless forests and mountains for whom living as he pleases is a matter of pride and joy. We're suspicious of such men these days. Suspicious and contemptuous of his unfamiliarity with the urban slang, the street culture, the popular fears and obsessions. In the city, guns are sinister things.
Are we in greater danger of being shot in our daily lives than we once were? Probably not. But fear is in the air. Fear is in the marketing of everything from food to constitutional law. It's not the Daniel Boons, the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark we Liberals admire, it's the deliberately helpless passive vegan gluten avoider who won't own a car, is terrified of "preservatives and cooked food and is made nervous by a Swiss Army knife.. It's the guy who thinks of cars not as liberators but polluters, it's the mother who thinks of cars only in terms of crashes and their survival and safety above liberty..
How much of our changing perception of safety and civilization are really changes in us, not in circumstances? Is the fear that someone will shoot us today really on the same rational level as the fear that headache is brain cancer or that pain a heart attack or that we're likely to get diabetes or any of the things that are certain to kill us? How more likely is it that Mom in her SUV will kill me than some crazed movie theater shootist? A lot. Are we after Detroit to stop selling these things? How much gun violence is alcohol violence? I could go on, but not one person anywhere will consider his founding rears or attitudes and no one wants to leave the safety of his opinions and certainties and so we have more anger, more shouting, more malediction and denunciation and more fear. Fear that makes us line up to buy more guns and fear that makes us terrified about other people who own them. Fear that makes us dress up the story, makes us frame, makes us present things tactically rather than objectively. It's fear that will end our idealism and our love of democracy and our passion for freedom and the ability to live the way we want rather than the way some corporation wants.
I have a dream. No really I have it often and usually I'm walking on a dirt path in what looks like my old farm or crossing that ruined stone bridge . I'm always carrying a rifle, like the "boys" rifle I had a lifetime ago, or that 1873 Remington I never actually fired and I'm at peace with the world as I never am in reality. I don't have the farm or those rifles any more or the dog who sometimes appears. I'm afraid I don't have the country where those things still happen, but the dream never dies..
"I love the power of guns and the elegance and precision of the engineering, especially in the revolvers and side-by-side shotguns. The machining is so fine, the fit of the parts so precise, the movement of the parts so smooth. The gun itself can be a work of art, whatever you might think about its purpose, usefulness or danger. For an admirer of the mechanical craft, a well-made gun is a thing of beauty."
Juan F. Thompson: Stories I tell Myself
I really have no recollection of it as I was less than a year old in 1945 after the War ended, but my Father, still a naval officer, and my young, city girl mother would take target pistols and go out to a creek and shoot at bottles in the water. There apparently was little else to do in that remote area of Northern California and since my dad grew up in Wyoming, that's the sort of thing a boy and his girl did on a sunny weekend. If you've never done it, you'd be surprised at how relaxing it is. But I was exposed to the sound of gunfire early in life and like an old gun dog. I've never been gun shy.
The quote is from Juan Thompson, the son of the famous and notorious Hunter S. Thompson; Gonzo journalist, Colorado ranch owner, Liberal Activist and aficionado of recreational shooting. One of the few ways they could endure each other's presence was while shooting or cleaning firearms.
My dad collected antiques and antique firearms for many years. He still has some of them, hanging on the wall of his den. Few if any, are operable and those which are, haven't been fired since he acquired them 50 years ago. They accompany an interest in 18th and 19th century American history which we have shared, but I'm interested in fine mechanisms in general, tools, cameras, knives. Vintage motor vehicles: I have and have had a whole lot of those things as well as some firearms, most of which are historical items.
When I dare to mention that I have perhaps 75 vintage cameras: finely made and finished metal objects by Leica, Minox, Hasselblad, Linhof, Nikon, Rollei, etc. most people think it's odd to cherish those obsolete things. My hundred or so pocket knives make me only a little bit more so, but guns? Face it, after years of demonization, after a long, steady and often virulent association with madmen and especially rampage shooters there's a stigma, attached not only to me, but to the objects themselves. I'm not a guy nostalgic about things, I'm a menace, a potential murderer and madman. It was not always so.
When I went off to summer camp and when I became a Boy Scout in the mid 1950's one of the primary lessons one was expected to learn was how to shoot safely. It was one of those "pioneer skills" one was urged to acquire. Like making fires or shelters, it was a useful survival skill and a discipline akin to archery or fly fishing. When I visited Colonial Williamsburg in those years I fell in love with the handmade flintlocks being made with antique tools and I never lost my affection. I still have a couple which have,not been fired since we sold the farm 35 years ago. It would be tough to part with them.
But the focus of life in this not-so-brave new world is Not the world where people live off the land and with nature, it's urban. Our paradigm, our standard American is urban, works in an office. Perhaps he commutes, but he's far more Bourgeois than Bayou in fact if not in appearance. He's more likely to be surrounded by huge numbers of people all the time. When he thinks of something that shoots lead and goes bang, he thinks of bloody crime and wanton destruction. He's been taught that association all his life despite endless TV and movies where guns are universally there. He has fear and all out of proportion to the risks, yet there's a titillating fascination. He's no longer the man of open spaces or endless forests and mountains for whom living as he pleases is a matter of pride and joy. We're suspicious of such men these days. Suspicious and contemptuous of his unfamiliarity with the urban slang, the street culture, the popular fears and obsessions. In the city, guns are sinister things.
Are we in greater danger of being shot in our daily lives than we once were? Probably not. But fear is in the air. Fear is in the marketing of everything from food to constitutional law. It's not the Daniel Boons, the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark we Liberals admire, it's the deliberately helpless passive vegan gluten avoider who won't own a car, is terrified of "preservatives and cooked food and is made nervous by a Swiss Army knife.. It's the guy who thinks of cars not as liberators but polluters, it's the mother who thinks of cars only in terms of crashes and their survival and safety above liberty..
How much of our changing perception of safety and civilization are really changes in us, not in circumstances? Is the fear that someone will shoot us today really on the same rational level as the fear that headache is brain cancer or that pain a heart attack or that we're likely to get diabetes or any of the things that are certain to kill us? How more likely is it that Mom in her SUV will kill me than some crazed movie theater shootist? A lot. Are we after Detroit to stop selling these things? How much gun violence is alcohol violence? I could go on, but not one person anywhere will consider his founding rears or attitudes and no one wants to leave the safety of his opinions and certainties and so we have more anger, more shouting, more malediction and denunciation and more fear. Fear that makes us line up to buy more guns and fear that makes us terrified about other people who own them. Fear that makes us dress up the story, makes us frame, makes us present things tactically rather than objectively. It's fear that will end our idealism and our love of democracy and our passion for freedom and the ability to live the way we want rather than the way some corporation wants.
I have a dream. No really I have it often and usually I'm walking on a dirt path in what looks like my old farm or crossing that ruined stone bridge . I'm always carrying a rifle, like the "boys" rifle I had a lifetime ago, or that 1873 Remington I never actually fired and I'm at peace with the world as I never am in reality. I don't have the farm or those rifles any more or the dog who sometimes appears. I'm afraid I don't have the country where those things still happen, but the dream never dies..
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Brilliant! Just Brilliant.
I wonder what the world "Brilliant" means in our time. Lately I've heard it applied to people who insist we drill enthusiastically for oil in the midst of a glut which has disrupted the world economy. I've heard it applied to a mind convinced the Great Pyramid is full of wheat, to a candidate who thinks that the Constitution allows us to outlaw a religion and round up its adherents. I heard another talk about winning "for the greater glory of God." I've heard all sorts of puzzling words and I might speculate that things have become identified with their opposites, not only in our popular usage but in matters of law.
Not only does shall not mean must, but the strict interpretation of the Constitution's intent according to a prominent legal mind is to praise God and it never was intended to protect the citizen from the requirements of a religion not of his own choosing. Nor should the government grant as much freedom to those of non-established beliefs as it does to the favored faiths. I'm talking here about the brilliant legal mind of Antonin Scalia.
"I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion… We do Him [God] honor in our pledge of allegiance, in all our public ceremonies. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is in the best of American traditions, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea.o impose it on all of us through the Constitution."
He's concerned here with the argument that having an official US religious oath is legal because of a tradition from the 1950's and that those who object to acknowledging someone elses god as America's official god need to be "fought." We need, says he, to persuade people that the prohibition against the government taking a position on one religion or another, is something else -- something that favors one religion or category of religions over another according to the acceptability of its beliefs. If you have a god, you're OK, if you have something else; a philosopher, a hero, a stone tablet an idol or an ethical principle. If you have faith in the teachings of the Dharma and the Buddha to lead you to the extinction of your ego -- if you have the body of science and the blood of mathematics within you, that doesn't count. Secular views are not protected because it's not a religion unless we officially establish it. Establishment clause? Maybe you're not Brilliant!
So OK, we can't establish a religion, but we can establish its tenets, myths and superstitions because, well, it's traditional and it's all our responsibility to honor a God we may not believe in -- and honoring God is a good thing because the Constitution says so, doesn't it? So making my kids bow to your god and have an allegiance to it and perform public ceremonies honoring it is within the government's power and not within my power to prevent. Yes, indeed, the government may function as an instrument of worship, and of course that's the original intent of the Constitution, never mind what its creators said. A fine legal mind indeed. This is the incisive, sharp-edged razor that tells us so often that the United States is based on Christianity and therefore its laws must be interpreted, not by the firmly secular writers' intentions but by some ecclesiastical kind of ventriloquism where Tony's God speaks through the law. A brilliant mind indeed, if dishonest and a bit stupid.
Its a word game. It's equivocation, it's a trick. It's flim-flam. It's taking a theistic belief to be a religion and another belief to be the antithesis instead of an equal alternative. It's a deceptive way to call one belief legitimate and another not. Neither is actually constitutional. It's our right to have a government with no religious affiliation. Preaching from the bench is Judicial affiliation with a religion. It's unconstitutional.
"On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea."
Apparently some of us - people like Jefferson and Madison have invented a provision that forbids the government to say one belief, one idea, understanding or philosophical orientation is the official government one and informs our laws. No, don't look at that piece of parchment, you're not qualified to understand it because you're not an official State priest like Scalia. The government never guaranteed you freedom of anything. This is not the Bill of Rights you're looking for.
"God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools…and He has not been disappointed. Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ’s sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world. If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world."
So let's simply ignore the "sophisticated" world - God loves a foolish judge. God smiles when the Judge lies. Let's tell ourselves that error is virtue, that blindness to the truth and to the law is blessed. But sorry, God may give free passes to the fool, but the law does not. The law requires that justice be unbiased, disinterested, that Judges know the law and precedent and not be carrying a cross or a Crescent or a Torah or a book of any other laws than those of the United States of America. And how would any know what God assumes but from some other foreign code of law? In what part of our body of laws is God's law found? In what part of our law is it said that arguments need make no sense because God said Christians look like fools? And where most of all, I ask, is the job description of a Federal Judge that he in fact be a fool?
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Surfing the Universe
Well, it seems that we have experimental confirmation that cataclysmic changes in gravity ripple across space at the speed of light, just as Einstein predicted. This will cause many to feel elated but to most, it's meaningless, their universes being more circumscribed than the one cosmologists and physicists live in. Everyman's concerns for the way science can confirm or deny opinion and common sense don't run deep..
Our four dimensions are expanded or shrunk a very tiny bit as a gravitational wave passes through. A very tiny bit, a fraction of the width of a proton, which is far too small for the average person to get involved it, or to attach any importance to. But it's just one small step away from the kind of consciousness Americans want to retreat into, and I'm not only talking only about the Evangelicals with their young and small universe run by miracle and designed by a consciousness. Americans are searching for, longing for a world without harsh and rigorous scrutiny -- a world trending back to "nature" and away from technology which is somehow safer and healthier, and where things have meaning on a human scale.
The parts of our brain that run on superstition, snap judgement and frighteningly huge oversimplifications really are in charge and nearly all the time. Like "outer space" the views of reality put together piece by piece by scientific method is far away, and abstract and a little silly to most people. If the LIGO experimental confirmation of the spreading ripples in space-time from a collision between black holes billions of light years away and billions of years ago ever makes it into the public consciousness it will be to sell us gravitational wave receivers, tuned to natural frequencies which will improve your sex life and help you shed unwanted pounds. People will claim to be getting signals from the universe through gravitational waves and will help you do the same for a fee.
It's certainly been several lifetimes since we proved that Tetanus is not caused by rust and rhinoviruses not caused by drafts of air. It's been enough time for the proof that milk doesn't promote phlegm or that gluten has no negative effects on 95% of the population or that Dr. Oz's weekly miracle discoveries are worthless. But we know our inherited weaknesses never completely go away. Prayers and curses, personal rituals and lucky socks still matter to us. We still talk of mysterious toxins and desire to have our intestines flushed and something or other done with our Chi or our Chakras. Hardly one in a million will bother to question that the culture of marketing and entertainment is anything but an exploitation, using lies and deception and distraction.
So gravity is associated with a particle and particles have a wavelength and propagate at a finite speed across an infinite void and so we don't care, except possibly to cause us to ask the universe to help us with our love life and to choose a more ritually pure, vegan, paleo, gluten free diet free of "chemicals.". Science doesn't really mean shit to us and as the men who wrote Ecclesiastes told us, our entire culture and view of ourselves and the universe are just vanity.
Our four dimensions are expanded or shrunk a very tiny bit as a gravitational wave passes through. A very tiny bit, a fraction of the width of a proton, which is far too small for the average person to get involved it, or to attach any importance to. But it's just one small step away from the kind of consciousness Americans want to retreat into, and I'm not only talking only about the Evangelicals with their young and small universe run by miracle and designed by a consciousness. Americans are searching for, longing for a world without harsh and rigorous scrutiny -- a world trending back to "nature" and away from technology which is somehow safer and healthier, and where things have meaning on a human scale.
The parts of our brain that run on superstition, snap judgement and frighteningly huge oversimplifications really are in charge and nearly all the time. Like "outer space" the views of reality put together piece by piece by scientific method is far away, and abstract and a little silly to most people. If the LIGO experimental confirmation of the spreading ripples in space-time from a collision between black holes billions of light years away and billions of years ago ever makes it into the public consciousness it will be to sell us gravitational wave receivers, tuned to natural frequencies which will improve your sex life and help you shed unwanted pounds. People will claim to be getting signals from the universe through gravitational waves and will help you do the same for a fee.
It's certainly been several lifetimes since we proved that Tetanus is not caused by rust and rhinoviruses not caused by drafts of air. It's been enough time for the proof that milk doesn't promote phlegm or that gluten has no negative effects on 95% of the population or that Dr. Oz's weekly miracle discoveries are worthless. But we know our inherited weaknesses never completely go away. Prayers and curses, personal rituals and lucky socks still matter to us. We still talk of mysterious toxins and desire to have our intestines flushed and something or other done with our Chi or our Chakras. Hardly one in a million will bother to question that the culture of marketing and entertainment is anything but an exploitation, using lies and deception and distraction.
So gravity is associated with a particle and particles have a wavelength and propagate at a finite speed across an infinite void and so we don't care, except possibly to cause us to ask the universe to help us with our love life and to choose a more ritually pure, vegan, paleo, gluten free diet free of "chemicals.". Science doesn't really mean shit to us and as the men who wrote Ecclesiastes told us, our entire culture and view of ourselves and the universe are just vanity.
Friday, February 05, 2016
It's Always High Noon in Tallahassee
The Florida House has now passed a bill allowing Floridians with concealed carry permits to openly carry firearms, even on college campuses. Good guys with guns, doncha know. It's what made Deadwood such a peaceful place in the 1870's and Gene Autry rich in the 1950's. Hey come on, didn't you dream about being a Wild West cowboy when you were a kid?
Many people will of course react in horror and fear and panic and they, like most Americans, don't know that 45 states already allow it and many without any kind of permit needed. 13 states at least require some sort of license and at least Floridians who want to flaunt firearms would need to be fingerprinted and investigated and to have passed a course of instruction. Even Hoppalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger didn't have to do that back when America was great, but I can't wait for Governor Scott to sign this one. Hi Ho Silver!
Is it going to cause a bloodbath? I certainly doubt it, and in my 70 odd years I have only seen anyone carry openly while hunting or walking about their farms or in very remote areas -- except for cops, of course. That still makes me nervous. It feels a bit odd, I admit, but those who do carry concealed weapons legally can stop worrying that if the wind blows their shirt open and reveals a gun or knife they won't go to jail as the law now provides. It's not all bad.
It certainly provides a further degree of polarization however and reduces the likelihood of the vociferous phobics ever agreeing on anything, and that's not a good thing, but what after all is getting better in our culture of fear and outrage? I'm to the point where I really accept the madness and embrace the horror - or the humor - as an outside observer.
Any mention of the American Gun Problem simply accelerates gun sales. Every rampage shooting lengthens lines at the gun store and every proposal or suggestion or casual mention that something might be done does the same thing. I might do well to sell guns and buy Stock in Smith and Wesson.
No, I don't think much will actually change, except perhaps in the Florida Legislature where another bill passed will allow Florida's Senators and Representatives to bring their guns to work. As long as we can watch it on TV, I'm all for it. Legislative showdown? You ain't seen nothin' yet!
Many people will of course react in horror and fear and panic and they, like most Americans, don't know that 45 states already allow it and many without any kind of permit needed. 13 states at least require some sort of license and at least Floridians who want to flaunt firearms would need to be fingerprinted and investigated and to have passed a course of instruction. Even Hoppalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger didn't have to do that back when America was great, but I can't wait for Governor Scott to sign this one. Hi Ho Silver!
Is it going to cause a bloodbath? I certainly doubt it, and in my 70 odd years I have only seen anyone carry openly while hunting or walking about their farms or in very remote areas -- except for cops, of course. That still makes me nervous. It feels a bit odd, I admit, but those who do carry concealed weapons legally can stop worrying that if the wind blows their shirt open and reveals a gun or knife they won't go to jail as the law now provides. It's not all bad.
It certainly provides a further degree of polarization however and reduces the likelihood of the vociferous phobics ever agreeing on anything, and that's not a good thing, but what after all is getting better in our culture of fear and outrage? I'm to the point where I really accept the madness and embrace the horror - or the humor - as an outside observer.
Any mention of the American Gun Problem simply accelerates gun sales. Every rampage shooting lengthens lines at the gun store and every proposal or suggestion or casual mention that something might be done does the same thing. I might do well to sell guns and buy Stock in Smith and Wesson.
No, I don't think much will actually change, except perhaps in the Florida Legislature where another bill passed will allow Florida's Senators and Representatives to bring their guns to work. As long as we can watch it on TV, I'm all for it. Legislative showdown? You ain't seen nothin' yet!
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Sagebrush Rebellion
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but YHWH pondereth the hearts.
Proverbs 21:2
It seems a bit pretentious to call it a rebellion or to call the participants patriots for participating in an armed sit-in as we used to call it back in the day. "Highfalutin' " you might call it: rhapsodizing about sleeping under the stars and saddlin' up your horse, since one is still quite welcome to do that. Indeed I've done that myself although the horse was iron and didn't need saddling. The event that precipitated the Malheur occupation had more to do with arson of Federal Property than a camping trip or the right to enjoy the great outdoors. It has more to do with the perceived right to exploit common resources for individual profit.
LaVoy Finicum, said by his family to be a gentle and kind man was killed yesterday in an armed confrontation with FBI agents. Although I don't know the details, I'm rather certain he died in vain, defending a nostalgic idea of freedom drawn from romantic fiction but also drawn from a relic of the days of anti-Communist hysteria. Strutting around with firearms on Federal property is more like something extracted from a Zane Fray novel that a political statement. Fiction, romance, free-range nostalgia and maybe a bit of the Bible thrown it to remind us of a time before government and "every man did that which was right in his own eyes."
You might see it as paranoia, the assertion that our government must by nature abridge our freedom continuously if not wantonly, and that there is no process for addressing grievances except in the old way, the frontier way, the fantasy way of the gun and by pretending that the legitimacy of government is an individual choice and not that of the voting population. The sovereign citizen is not part of our law and never was. The idea of continuous revolution that "speaks from the muzzle of a gun" is an argument found in the little red books the Red Guard used to carry, not in our Constitution, but I'm used to seeing the words of Marx and Mao supported by people who think they're opposing Communism and seeing it everywhere.
But attaching noble purpose to the banal and even to the ridiculous is the stuff of religion and politics, from terrorists "protecting' their almighty God to the claim of immunity to the law conveyed by "belief." That noble purpose behind the Oregon occupation seems to be supported by a strange edition of the US constitution annotated by one W. Cleon Skousen, an anti-Communist crusader supported it seems by Glenn Beck which makes all kinds of claims about whom the law pertains to and what the constitution allows and doesn't. You may be old enough to remember that Cleon was one of those loonies claiming Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist agent. It's a book that's been distributed through Mormon sources and printed by the millions. It's a book carried by Cliven Bundy and others of his ilk
This madness lives on, lures people into a Quixotic epic including heroes with tin-pot helmets making suicidal attacks on the entire concept of Government. That the United states was never intended to be for anyone but Christians who live as they please and do no more than what is right in his own eyes is at the heart of this "rebellion" and I would sooner call it a fugue, a fantasy and a fraud. At heart though it's also religion and supported by a religion with separatism as it's legacy and hostility toward "gentiles" as it's heritage.
Perhaps YHWH will weigh some hearts here, perhaps not, but the law will certainly weigh actions
Friday, January 22, 2016
Right Wing and Bitter
You betcha, says a drunk and incoherent Sarah Palin to a sympathetic audience of stupid, America-hating Republican idiots. Clingin' to our guns and our religions - you betcha and Drill Baby Drill as the oil rigs go dark and the economy stumbles on the world wide glut of oil.
Obviously prices have plummeted because Obama didn't want to drill in national parks so's we'd be more dependent on his A-Rab Moooslim brothers and prices rose because of Obama even before he was elected said she and Mr. McCain.
And, y'know that wife beating alcoholic sad sack Track only pointed a rifle at his wife because Obama sent him to war even though he saw no combat. Vote For Trump - Vote for Palin all you booze hounds and psychos. Time to take us all straight to hell, you betcha!
Obviously prices have plummeted because Obama didn't want to drill in national parks so's we'd be more dependent on his A-Rab Moooslim brothers and prices rose because of Obama even before he was elected said she and Mr. McCain.
And, y'know that wife beating alcoholic sad sack Track only pointed a rifle at his wife because Obama sent him to war even though he saw no combat. Vote For Trump - Vote for Palin all you booze hounds and psychos. Time to take us all straight to hell, you betcha!
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
HEADLINES
In Principio et Nunc. . .
Now as in the beginning, the End has always been nigh. At least for Obama and Hillary. Ever since .
Nixon slithered out of office, some scandal "bigger than Watergate" has been waiting in the wings to upstage any Democratic President. Always just about to appear like Jesus and the Hidden Imam or Maitraya, the Buddha yet to come. We're still waiting or at least they are
Obama and Hillary. Those are the names the rebels have chosen for the current and would-be presidents and I'm seeing them treated in their propaganda as an entity of some sorts. In the deranged minds of the microcephalic right these are but just two faces of the apocalyptic beast featured in the continuing Republican Revelation played out every day on the web.
New Obama Scandal May Cost Hillary the White House!
That title appears in my mailbox almost every morning and has for months. Similarly dire warnings have been appearing for years under similar titles about some Obama Scandal about to break that just going to run him out of Washington on a rail,
covered with tar and feathers. Somehow this time the long awaited Obama Scandal "may just" transfer to candidate Clinton by some magic process. From experience I'm assuming that "may just" really means " in our dreams" because there is no scandal of that sort and it's never going to happen and lest you think it's exclusively about Democrats, no, I'm still waiting for Dwight Eisenhower to turn the Army over to the Communists and the Zionist conspiracy and for Kennedy to relinquish power to the Pope as well as to
the Kremlin. Faith abides and the bullshit never stops.
I'm not going to click on the link of course, as it leads to a long tedious tirade on some web site I'm just not going to visit, but of course these scandals never appear. They're just tuned up from time to time and the perpetrators know the lust for scandal is so great the intended audience will never dare question the warnings lest they have to return to the grim reality of a Democrat in the White House.
Navy SEAL Ben Smith Drops Massive Bombshell. . . Says Obama is Ready to Impose MARTIAL LAW
This appeared while my morning coffee was warm. I'm still waiting for any of the warnings that flooded the Web years ago about Bill Clinton declaring martial law and turning the armed forces and our nuclear arsenal over to UN control, But the psychotic Right has adjustable memory so that it's now Obama who is about to do this. According to America's Freedom Fighters's blog a Navy Seal
has revealed Obama's plan to -- you guessed it -- declare martial law. It's not going to happen, nor does he have any reason to do so, but paranoids, or Republicans as they're sometimes called will believe anything that feeds the fear and they'll go out and buy more fake military weapons to protect themselves against "jack booted" Obamatroopers. That's what it's really about: gun sales and revolution.
Former Seal Ben Smith appeared in a film a few years ago claiming Obama gave away information that could get Americans killed while taking sole credit for the operation that killed bin Laden, but of course the corroborating film clip was edited into the opposite of what was really said. You can look it up if you like, but I'm not going to provide a link to traitors and that's what they are.
So you can wait for that Obama scandal that will blow up Clinton's candidacy and you can read fiction designed to undermine the democratic process and destabilize a duly elected government, and in the process you'll doubtless uncover a veritable hell of lies, distortions, bogus accusations and predictions made by traitors and haters of civilization and decency.
Now as in the beginning, the End has always been nigh. At least for Obama and Hillary. Ever since .Nixon slithered out of office, some scandal "bigger than Watergate" has been waiting in the wings to upstage any Democratic President. Always just about to appear like Jesus and the Hidden Imam or Maitraya, the Buddha yet to come. We're still waiting or at least they are
Obama and Hillary. Those are the names the rebels have chosen for the current and would-be presidents and I'm seeing them treated in their propaganda as an entity of some sorts. In the deranged minds of the microcephalic right these are but just two faces of the apocalyptic beast featured in the continuing Republican Revelation played out every day on the web.New Obama Scandal May Cost Hillary the White House!
That title appears in my mailbox almost every morning and has for months. Similarly dire warnings have been appearing for years under similar titles about some Obama Scandal about to break that just going to run him out of Washington on a rail,
covered with tar and feathers. Somehow this time the long awaited Obama Scandal "may just" transfer to candidate Clinton by some magic process. From experience I'm assuming that "may just" really means " in our dreams" because there is no scandal of that sort and it's never going to happen and lest you think it's exclusively about Democrats, no, I'm still waiting for Dwight Eisenhower to turn the Army over to the Communists and the Zionist conspiracy and for Kennedy to relinquish power to the Pope as well as tothe Kremlin. Faith abides and the bullshit never stops.
I'm not going to click on the link of course, as it leads to a long tedious tirade on some web site I'm just not going to visit, but of course these scandals never appear. They're just tuned up from time to time and the perpetrators know the lust for scandal is so great the intended audience will never dare question the warnings lest they have to return to the grim reality of a Democrat in the White House.
Navy SEAL Ben Smith Drops Massive Bombshell. . . Says Obama is Ready to Impose MARTIAL LAW
This appeared while my morning coffee was warm. I'm still waiting for any of the warnings that flooded the Web years ago about Bill Clinton declaring martial law and turning the armed forces and our nuclear arsenal over to UN control, But the psychotic Right has adjustable memory so that it's now Obama who is about to do this. According to America's Freedom Fighters's blog a Navy Seal
Former Seal Ben Smith appeared in a film a few years ago claiming Obama gave away information that could get Americans killed while taking sole credit for the operation that killed bin Laden, but of course the corroborating film clip was edited into the opposite of what was really said. You can look it up if you like, but I'm not going to provide a link to traitors and that's what they are.
So you can wait for that Obama scandal that will blow up Clinton's candidacy and you can read fiction designed to undermine the democratic process and destabilize a duly elected government, and in the process you'll doubtless uncover a veritable hell of lies, distortions, bogus accusations and predictions made by traitors and haters of civilization and decency.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Some Conversation on Dr. King's Socialist Vision.
One feels compelled to make note of the day and of the man himself, but the risk these days is less about the ire of the people who loathe him than the ire of those whose "conversation" demands submission. Reading this morning that 62 people own half the wealth of the world, I'm prompted to remember some of King's comments and that, like Jesus of Nazareth, he was a bit of a socialist and an economist.
I read this morning that according to an OXFAM report today, the wealthiest one percent of the world now owns more than the remaining 99% and that 62 individuals own more than the poorest half of the world's population. That number was 388 only five years ago. Unless you think that's a good thing, you might want to reconsider the blind worship of laissz faire Capitalism which seems intertwined with the kind of Patriotism we dare not question.
Of course it can be argued that if the poorest half is somehow sufficiently well-off to free us of concern, there really is no problem in this best of all Pareto efficient Capitalist worlds, but money is power and great wealth is great power. In our kind of Republic, economic power must take political power away from the less wealthy and depart ever more from Democratic principle. There certainly are those who recognize that great wealth and power confer -- indeed demand great responsibility, but fewer are those who want that responsibility to be legally required, so that great power is so often used primarily to protect itself and the way of life it feels entitled to. Can there be anyone who does not recognize the connection between wealth and political, moral and military power? Certainly Jesus did, and as a Christian, so did Doctor King.
Indeed we do. Do we understand the need of power to terrify and brutalize minorities as racism or do we recognize the need to keep them out of participation and away from political power? Keeping poor whites afraid of poor blacks diverts attention from the rich whites who want to get richer. I'm just asking. Is racism just the legacy of slavery or does it serve some purpose in a greater scheme?
Sure Black Lives Matter, but recognizing that or shouting it in the street does not deal with the causes or offer hope for improvement. In a way, racism makes economic sense if preservation of wealth and power is the goal, and we don't fight it without recognizing that.
Capitalism alone will not create or maintain a society in which political power is not dominated by the rich, nor will more than an enlightened few philanthropic individuals be motivated to want a society where they can allow more than a minimum of political power and control to the 99%. Racism, I think King would agree is not a temporary thing or reserved for one race only, it's an economic requirement needed to limit political/economic power . When it's successful in doing so, it proliferates. Perhaps that's where King and I vary from the scripted conversation. If the need and ability to maintain the weakness of the public is thwarted, so is racism and of course, even if most of the wealth is at the very top, those many rungs down on the ladder want equally as much to preserve their standing and keep the lower ranks down.
How we do that is the question. King was no friend of Communism, but in today's America fear of Marxism is always with us and almost always irrational. We fear reform of any kind and we fear having to pay for it even if it benefits us and repays our cost with a profit. To that one percent, it's tempting, if not inevitable to think of the lower orders as the enemy. I can offer no magic solution and certainly those who have done so have led us into one disaster or another. I see no solution in the most vocal and demanding zealots today. I'm staying away from that "conversation" as being narrow and naive and divisive. I'm only trying to call attention to what I think King believed: that racism, tribalism, greed and lust for power are as intertwined and inextricable from each other as Mass and energy and all these things must be considered as part of the equation if we want a better, kinder gentler world.
______________________
*–Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.
**- Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
I read this morning that according to an OXFAM report today, the wealthiest one percent of the world now owns more than the remaining 99% and that 62 individuals own more than the poorest half of the world's population. That number was 388 only five years ago. Unless you think that's a good thing, you might want to reconsider the blind worship of laissz faire Capitalism which seems intertwined with the kind of Patriotism we dare not question.
Of course it can be argued that if the poorest half is somehow sufficiently well-off to free us of concern, there really is no problem in this best of all Pareto efficient Capitalist worlds, but money is power and great wealth is great power. In our kind of Republic, economic power must take political power away from the less wealthy and depart ever more from Democratic principle. There certainly are those who recognize that great wealth and power confer -- indeed demand great responsibility, but fewer are those who want that responsibility to be legally required, so that great power is so often used primarily to protect itself and the way of life it feels entitled to. Can there be anyone who does not recognize the connection between wealth and political, moral and military power? Certainly Jesus did, and as a Christian, so did Doctor King.
“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…” *
Indeed we do. Do we understand the need of power to terrify and brutalize minorities as racism or do we recognize the need to keep them out of participation and away from political power? Keeping poor whites afraid of poor blacks diverts attention from the rich whites who want to get richer. I'm just asking. Is racism just the legacy of slavery or does it serve some purpose in a greater scheme?
Sure Black Lives Matter, but recognizing that or shouting it in the street does not deal with the causes or offer hope for improvement. In a way, racism makes economic sense if preservation of wealth and power is the goal, and we don't fight it without recognizing that.
Capitalism alone will not create or maintain a society in which political power is not dominated by the rich, nor will more than an enlightened few philanthropic individuals be motivated to want a society where they can allow more than a minimum of political power and control to the 99%. Racism, I think King would agree is not a temporary thing or reserved for one race only, it's an economic requirement needed to limit political/economic power . When it's successful in doing so, it proliferates. Perhaps that's where King and I vary from the scripted conversation. If the need and ability to maintain the weakness of the public is thwarted, so is racism and of course, even if most of the wealth is at the very top, those many rungs down on the ladder want equally as much to preserve their standing and keep the lower ranks down.
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”**
How we do that is the question. King was no friend of Communism, but in today's America fear of Marxism is always with us and almost always irrational. We fear reform of any kind and we fear having to pay for it even if it benefits us and repays our cost with a profit. To that one percent, it's tempting, if not inevitable to think of the lower orders as the enemy. I can offer no magic solution and certainly those who have done so have led us into one disaster or another. I see no solution in the most vocal and demanding zealots today. I'm staying away from that "conversation" as being narrow and naive and divisive. I'm only trying to call attention to what I think King believed: that racism, tribalism, greed and lust for power are as intertwined and inextricable from each other as Mass and energy and all these things must be considered as part of the equation if we want a better, kinder gentler world.
______________________
*–Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.
**- Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Self driving cars but Piloted space fighters?
Yes, I'm one of those people. You don't want to watch Science Fiction or movies set in the 1950's or 60's with me because I'm going to ruin it for you with my comments and criticisms about inaccuracy. Even TV commercials can set me off. Take the Geico ad I saw this morning where the lizard is driving along in an MGA 1600 (you can clearly recognize the dashboard and the air scoop on the fender) but when he gets our of the car, it becomes an MG Midget, bug-eye headlights and all. How can you buy from a company so careless about details? It's so typical these days when last week is ancient history and everybody was born yesterday.
Needless to say, I can't watch Sci-Fi movies of the Space Opera type, a type which includes any of the Star Wars Genre based on WWII Sea Battle scenarios or those WWII bomber movies people of my age grew up on. Don't even raise the subject with me. You'll hear me rattle on about how such things are already so obsolete as to be laughable today and how much more would it be in an age where faster-than-light travel is possible. Manually controlled machine gun blisters are already antique and close-in dog fighting under pilot control with fighters making turns that aren't possible in a vacuum are so stupid as to be beyond laughter. Did you know the Millennium falcon cockpit is taken from the B29? Let's not even get into relativity. A hundred years later, and Hollywood is just discovering it but still getting it wrong, just as it gets Newtonian Physics wrong.
An interstellar craft travelling at unimaginable speeds is not going to have some sea-captain sitting in a chair issuing orders to the engine room or directing weapons control. Think about it. Nobody is going to be "plotting courses" as though they were on a planetary surface or two dimensional space. Computers are going to be better in a few thousand years and they're already doing these things for us. Handsome young heroes just aren't going to be going hand to hand with machines in combat when decisions must be made in femtoseconds.
I won't get started on bipedal humanoid aliens or alien civilizations that mimic our own at various historical periods, It's just more of the uninformed, unimaginative extrapolation from the past that I loathe. Will 25th century spacecraft have human crews at all? Planets with big, blue women on them? Really?
Real science is so much weirder and so much more fascinating because it deals with things we never would have imagined in our backwards looking human minds, but if you don't want to hear all about it, don't watch TV, don't go to the movies with me, just stay away.
Needless to say, I can't watch Sci-Fi movies of the Space Opera type, a type which includes any of the Star Wars Genre based on WWII Sea Battle scenarios or those WWII bomber movies people of my age grew up on. Don't even raise the subject with me. You'll hear me rattle on about how such things are already so obsolete as to be laughable today and how much more would it be in an age where faster-than-light travel is possible. Manually controlled machine gun blisters are already antique and close-in dog fighting under pilot control with fighters making turns that aren't possible in a vacuum are so stupid as to be beyond laughter. Did you know the Millennium falcon cockpit is taken from the B29? Let's not even get into relativity. A hundred years later, and Hollywood is just discovering it but still getting it wrong, just as it gets Newtonian Physics wrong.
An interstellar craft travelling at unimaginable speeds is not going to have some sea-captain sitting in a chair issuing orders to the engine room or directing weapons control. Think about it. Nobody is going to be "plotting courses" as though they were on a planetary surface or two dimensional space. Computers are going to be better in a few thousand years and they're already doing these things for us. Handsome young heroes just aren't going to be going hand to hand with machines in combat when decisions must be made in femtoseconds.
I won't get started on bipedal humanoid aliens or alien civilizations that mimic our own at various historical periods, It's just more of the uninformed, unimaginative extrapolation from the past that I loathe. Will 25th century spacecraft have human crews at all? Planets with big, blue women on them? Really?
Real science is so much weirder and so much more fascinating because it deals with things we never would have imagined in our backwards looking human minds, but if you don't want to hear all about it, don't watch TV, don't go to the movies with me, just stay away.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Safety First
There are so many innocuous-sounding rationalizations for tyranny, and I fear "safety First" is fast becoming another one. The prevalence of the "even if one life is saved" hyperbole is a bit of evidence that more freedom is being set up for abridgment and the most tenuous risks are the likely target of the safety above all movement. Obviously at least one life would be saved if we banned alcohol and cars and kitchen knives and instituted curfews and many would be saved if we simply locked up males between the ages of 15 and 50, but anyone who envisions that is probably paranoid. Anyone like me who has been following the attitudes of the self-righteous safety nerds since the days of Ralph Nader and the anti-car movement, of movie censorship and the Comics Code, has cause to worry.
The current golden age of American cars has, it seems spurred the development of self driving cars, starting with cars that automatically apply the brakes when the on board computer gets spooked. For skilled and vigorous drivers the fear is that the Safety Software will decide to jam on the binders just as you hit the apex of a decreasing radius downhill turn and kill you. We have motorcycles advertised to prevent you from doing a wheelstand or banking over too far or locking up a wheel and besides the fear of some gadget taking over the controls, the elimination of the need to learn (and take pride in) skills is horrifying, but with the ever increasing desire for absolute safety it won't stop there. It seems obvious that the goal is to eliminate driver-controlled cars. There's talk of pilotless airplanes. Safety First. It's better to have a helpless, dependent population than to risk injury. Lets just assume we're all irredeemably incompetent invalids and confine us to wheelchairs -- self driving wheelchairs of course.
I wonder how much of this fear contributes to the boom in TV shows about surviving in the wilderness or to living off the grid. How much of the boom in gun sales is related to the sense of forced helplessness from having our safety and welfare the exclusive provenance of the State. Rational fear or not, people are being pushed toward fear of being monitored, restricted and limited to having all life's adventures only in Virtual Reality where you can be charged a fee to pretend you're free.
Perhaps it is irrational to fear that not only will I have to drive a vintage car to be able to have a manual transmission, but to have a car that allows me to drive at all, but humans are not rational creatures and as long as we have to listen to the constant litany of dangers that can be avoided by submitting to shoes that don't let us walk too fast and cars that drive themselves at the posted speed limits and refrigerators that order our food for us based on someone's idea of an ideal diet, we're going to see the Matrix as not just another cheesy Sci-Fi cliche' but as the pit at the end of that slippery slope.
You'll have to pry the steering wheel and the handlebars from my cold dead fingers along with the salt shaker or the bag of French Fries and you can keep your robot hands off my freedom!
The current golden age of American cars has, it seems spurred the development of self driving cars, starting with cars that automatically apply the brakes when the on board computer gets spooked. For skilled and vigorous drivers the fear is that the Safety Software will decide to jam on the binders just as you hit the apex of a decreasing radius downhill turn and kill you. We have motorcycles advertised to prevent you from doing a wheelstand or banking over too far or locking up a wheel and besides the fear of some gadget taking over the controls, the elimination of the need to learn (and take pride in) skills is horrifying, but with the ever increasing desire for absolute safety it won't stop there. It seems obvious that the goal is to eliminate driver-controlled cars. There's talk of pilotless airplanes. Safety First. It's better to have a helpless, dependent population than to risk injury. Lets just assume we're all irredeemably incompetent invalids and confine us to wheelchairs -- self driving wheelchairs of course.
I wonder how much of this fear contributes to the boom in TV shows about surviving in the wilderness or to living off the grid. How much of the boom in gun sales is related to the sense of forced helplessness from having our safety and welfare the exclusive provenance of the State. Rational fear or not, people are being pushed toward fear of being monitored, restricted and limited to having all life's adventures only in Virtual Reality where you can be charged a fee to pretend you're free.
Perhaps it is irrational to fear that not only will I have to drive a vintage car to be able to have a manual transmission, but to have a car that allows me to drive at all, but humans are not rational creatures and as long as we have to listen to the constant litany of dangers that can be avoided by submitting to shoes that don't let us walk too fast and cars that drive themselves at the posted speed limits and refrigerators that order our food for us based on someone's idea of an ideal diet, we're going to see the Matrix as not just another cheesy Sci-Fi cliche' but as the pit at the end of that slippery slope.
You'll have to pry the steering wheel and the handlebars from my cold dead fingers along with the salt shaker or the bag of French Fries and you can keep your robot hands off my freedom!
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
The tyranny of big numbers
Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw.
I can see the day coming when even your home garden
is gonna be against the law.
-Bob Dylan-
______________
The things we hear from environmentalists may make them seem like out of control Luddites and haters of technology, but in the kind of crazy way the flap of a butterfly wing may cause hurricanes, plugging your cell phone into a charger in your car is the equivalent of burning almost a billion pounds of coal. Or so we're told by credible sources. How then can we justify having hot water in our homes or eating toast for breakfast or refrigerating our food? How soon before we live in the dark and cold and eat raw potatoes just to keep life from going extinct?
The need to save energy seems like it's going to choke the life out of us and bring civilization to the point of collapse if you read the warnings, and a Kategorischer Imperativ hangs over our heads like a sword. Costs a penny to make a slice of toast? What ef everyone did it -- the world would go dark and trillions and trillions of Watts would be used and mountains of coal would burn and the sky would turn black as night. Light a candle against the dark and you destroy the world by adding umpteen gazillions of pounds of Carbon Dioxide to the air. Don't ring the doorbell which uses a microwatt second -- just knock. Make a pot of coffee and some island sinks beneath the waves. Stand away from that car, the dome light alone would use megawatts per second if everyone did it.
7 billion people! If we all face West and fart, the planet will stop turning. We need to ban beans but how soon before it's 10 billion -- 20 billion people? Kind of suggests that the "lets produce food like we did 200 years ago" people may become food for the starving billions and all the "save the planet" schemes and products will fade away with the power mower when we start to eat our lawns because there's no more agriculture.
But of course you're environmentally conscious and so you didn't read this because it would take enough power to move Everest to Idaho if you all did and so you'll just go ahead and act like you're not the planet-killing consumer you are and you will just go on making phone calls and flushing the toilet and eating a hot breakfast until it all blows up. Me? I don't give a damn so batten your hatches and stock up on bottled water. My phone needs charging and I'm gonna plug it into my great big V8 automobile and do it right now!
Monday, January 04, 2016
7 minutes in Shanghai
Yikes, a seven minute tumble in the Chinese markets sends out gravity waves that shake the world.with the worst opening to a new year in at least 30 years. The Dow is down over 400 points as I write this. The complexities of our time and our interconnected world seem impossible to unravel and the immediate future impossible to predict with any kind of confidence.
So who does America look to for guidance in a world full of insoluble turmoil, inescapable change, and irresistible forces?
My God! Obama's modest proposals to extend background checks are making gun sales explode., making Trump's fortunes rise. Armed militias are occupying government buildings. We may be looking at another war in the Middle East involving an ally with whom we have treaties. Russia is beefing up it's nuclear defenses. Another recession looms.
Who ya gonna call? Donald Trump? Ted Cruz? Ben "dumber than a first grader" Carson? Shut down the government, defund everything, throw out he Mexicans, ban the Muslims and buy more guns -- that'll fix everything. Never mind what the foreigners do.
Once again, America looks to the dumb brute, the ignorant blowhard, while the rational few cry
America - why has thou forsaken me?
So who does America look to for guidance in a world full of insoluble turmoil, inescapable change, and irresistible forces?
My God! Obama's modest proposals to extend background checks are making gun sales explode., making Trump's fortunes rise. Armed militias are occupying government buildings. We may be looking at another war in the Middle East involving an ally with whom we have treaties. Russia is beefing up it's nuclear defenses. Another recession looms.
Who ya gonna call? Donald Trump? Ted Cruz? Ben "dumber than a first grader" Carson? Shut down the government, defund everything, throw out he Mexicans, ban the Muslims and buy more guns -- that'll fix everything. Never mind what the foreigners do.
Once again, America looks to the dumb brute, the ignorant blowhard, while the rational few cry
America - why has thou forsaken me?
Sunday, January 03, 2016
Terrorism?
One of the results of the degradation of language and of journalistic laziness in America is the inability to find words that accurately describe things, and consequently conversation tends to become trapped in the struggle to describe what's going on with a limited choice of words rather than to discuss what to do about it.
"What do we call this" asks the Press. Is the armed occupation of a Federal building by a group attempting to force the Federal Government to give in to their wishes and to stop due process at gunpoint "terrorism?" It's hard to answer the question -- as hard as it is to find it relevant. The question of whether anyone in the isolated and vacant building, or indeed in Washington feels a sense of terror is moot. The question of whether it's armed insurrection cries out for an answer even if all the journalists lack the vocabulary to give one.
Are these "good guys with guns" "protesting" unfair actions and policies of the Government or are they an ad hoc and illegitimate militia staging an armed attack on the United States? The story may be too complex for simple minds, but it includes misappropriation of public resources, arson and destruction of evidence, and although no shots have as yet been fired: Rebellion. We've seen it before: the Whisky Rebellion, Shay's rebellion, the Wilmington Rebellion of 1898 and others are blemishes on the face of democracy and constitutional government, some of which were factors in the drafting of the Second Amendment. Was the attack on Fort Sumter an act of domestic terrorism or an act of war? Did it suggest the use of policemen or of the Military?
All the rifle rattling of recent years, promoted and praised by various right-wing movements and their lackeys in Congress and the Press has allowed enemies of civilization to hide behind a screen of misleading rhetoric as the Klansmen hide behind sheets while bypassing law and order for personal gain. The idea has been promoted that continual rebellion is progress and that revolution, as Mao Zedong told us, speaks from the muzzle of a gun. "We don't like the results of that election, so warm up the Winchester Bubba, we're gonna take over the courthouse." That's just the kind of patriotism the Founding Fathers had in mind, say the guys in camouflage while the ghosts of the Bolsheviks smile down in Hell.
There's a word for this when the guns are in the hands of a foreign entity: War. There are words for it when "sovereign" citizens confront our government with force of arms: Rebellion, Treason, Insurrection, revolution. Choose one, choose them all, but none of them are patriotic. All are enemies of the basic premises of our government. All of it assumes that the laws that ensure our freedom are the enemies of freedom and that only the armed are free. It's time to face facts, to stop whimpering, to identify the enemy and deal with him harshly.
"What do we call this" asks the Press. Is the armed occupation of a Federal building by a group attempting to force the Federal Government to give in to their wishes and to stop due process at gunpoint "terrorism?" It's hard to answer the question -- as hard as it is to find it relevant. The question of whether anyone in the isolated and vacant building, or indeed in Washington feels a sense of terror is moot. The question of whether it's armed insurrection cries out for an answer even if all the journalists lack the vocabulary to give one.
Are these "good guys with guns" "protesting" unfair actions and policies of the Government or are they an ad hoc and illegitimate militia staging an armed attack on the United States? The story may be too complex for simple minds, but it includes misappropriation of public resources, arson and destruction of evidence, and although no shots have as yet been fired: Rebellion. We've seen it before: the Whisky Rebellion, Shay's rebellion, the Wilmington Rebellion of 1898 and others are blemishes on the face of democracy and constitutional government, some of which were factors in the drafting of the Second Amendment. Was the attack on Fort Sumter an act of domestic terrorism or an act of war? Did it suggest the use of policemen or of the Military?
All the rifle rattling of recent years, promoted and praised by various right-wing movements and their lackeys in Congress and the Press has allowed enemies of civilization to hide behind a screen of misleading rhetoric as the Klansmen hide behind sheets while bypassing law and order for personal gain. The idea has been promoted that continual rebellion is progress and that revolution, as Mao Zedong told us, speaks from the muzzle of a gun. "We don't like the results of that election, so warm up the Winchester Bubba, we're gonna take over the courthouse." That's just the kind of patriotism the Founding Fathers had in mind, say the guys in camouflage while the ghosts of the Bolsheviks smile down in Hell.
There's a word for this when the guns are in the hands of a foreign entity: War. There are words for it when "sovereign" citizens confront our government with force of arms: Rebellion, Treason, Insurrection, revolution. Choose one, choose them all, but none of them are patriotic. All are enemies of the basic premises of our government. All of it assumes that the laws that ensure our freedom are the enemies of freedom and that only the armed are free. It's time to face facts, to stop whimpering, to identify the enemy and deal with him harshly.
Saturday, January 02, 2016
So is the new Like
So I've been trying to get attention with my observation that younger Americans are beginning their sentences with the word "So" ad nauseam. So no one wants to hear it. So we have a new year now and so perhaps with the release of the annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use,Over-Use or General Uselessness" by Lake Superior State University in Michigan, my readers will stop ignoring me. "So" is at the top of the list.
LSSU has been issuing the list since 1976 and although it usually makes me smile in agreement and makes me feel validated as a curmudgeon of worth, nothing really changes. Americans are so infatuated with baby-talk and with sounding like the other illiterates trying to seem hip or educated or even oneness with the masses they're not easily persuaded that working "selfie" or cray-cray into every line is just plain stupid or that it's time to stop demanding that we "have a conversation" as a euphemism for "shut up and listen."
Of course these little infatuations do fade eventually. Starting a sentence with so will go the way of starting a sentence with "say" and fewer sentences will be larded with "like" as they were in the 1990's. But you cant be sure. Both affect and effect are gone forever it seems, and no one sends invitations any more. It's nearly certain however, that words that sound similar will continue to undergo a kind of syncretism. Our grandchildren will tell us to "annunciate" our words and to assault our ears with other false congnates while English Teachers nod approvingly and the American vocabulary will continue to swell like cheap sausage with inert ingredients and other stuffing. It's just Cray-Cray.
LSSU has been issuing the list since 1976 and although it usually makes me smile in agreement and makes me feel validated as a curmudgeon of worth, nothing really changes. Americans are so infatuated with baby-talk and with sounding like the other illiterates trying to seem hip or educated or even oneness with the masses they're not easily persuaded that working "selfie" or cray-cray into every line is just plain stupid or that it's time to stop demanding that we "have a conversation" as a euphemism for "shut up and listen."
Of course these little infatuations do fade eventually. Starting a sentence with so will go the way of starting a sentence with "say" and fewer sentences will be larded with "like" as they were in the 1990's. But you cant be sure. Both affect and effect are gone forever it seems, and no one sends invitations any more. It's nearly certain however, that words that sound similar will continue to undergo a kind of syncretism. Our grandchildren will tell us to "annunciate" our words and to assault our ears with other false congnates while English Teachers nod approvingly and the American vocabulary will continue to swell like cheap sausage with inert ingredients and other stuffing. It's just Cray-Cray.
But not all of us will go gently into that confused darkness. LSSU and I, like Quixote and Panza will go on as America hashtags and twerks itself into an epic fail.
Friday, December 25, 2015
It's a Wonderful Lie
Christmas seems to bring out the worst in Americans, particularly the ones who still think "hippies" are burning flags to protest a war that most Americans don't remember. You know, those Bully Boys who walk around with a chip on their shoulders daring you to say anything that allows them to pick a fight with the "politically correct" or those who have read history. This thing has been making the rounds today and judging by the comments, not too many people realize that the "founding Fathers" version of that propaganda aimed at school children was written in 1892, not 1776. When Eisenhower was pressured by godmongers to change it in 1954, during the height of the cold war, it wasn't mentioned that it had been written by a Socialist -- surprising in an era where that other relic, inseparable from the holiday, It's a Wonderful Life was seen as containing secret Communist messages to corrupt the young mind and was investigated by HUAC. After all it does criticize the Sacred Banks and other institutions of Capitalist greed. The original pledge called it "My" flag after all, suggesting that it belongs to all of us, not just to some Armed Patriot's Sovereign Citizen Christian Militia of God, Guns and Guts.
Am I suggesting that these penis-waving patriots are possessed of disordered personalities as well as a fair amount of ignorance and dishonesty? Well yes I am, thank you very much and thanks to them for another Fuck You Christmas.
I suppose the dark days of the late 1940's and the 1950's are that
Yes, Christmas, that Holiday Christians have denounced and promoted in equal measure since the Romans invented it is nothing but a billboard, a soap box on which meanness, anger, aggression and greed are proclaimed throughout the land. To say Merry Christmas has become too much like that debauched and sordid "pledge" wherein the oppressed abused, exploited and downtrodden are forced to acknowledged the gods of greed and to pretend that the USA is a place of "liberty and justice for all." It's a wonderful lie, once again.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Alan 1948 - 1988
We both shipped our paddles
Without a word,
Leaning forward
As the rain burdened our backs,
Turning the river white,
Closing the world around us,
And hissing
Like all the stars raining down.
It's small: the step
From there to nothing.Sunday, December 13, 2015
For Bart. 1944 - 1995
Café de Flore, and reading Kerouac for the first time ever
and lingering over coffee and the heat is building because it's late morning
and it’s August -- and because we're young and reading Kerouac, it's time to leave like everyone else.
Flogging the Fiat down to Juan-les-Pins, and we do it non-stop except for
coffee and gasoline in stations where you're invited to Mettez un Tigre dans
votre Moteur as though it would help. Cars and dust and white cups at
metal tables.
Arid August hills and distant ruins,
winding roads descend
in complicated turns
Driving too fast for the car,
we skitter,
revving a bit too high
and suddenly
in the V of the hills
a blue-white glimpse of sea
and the road screamed YES
as we came down.
And all those mornings. My sandals and my woven mat; coffee
in a bathing suit and all those Paris girls down for the summer.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Night of the Living Jesus.
It's been interesting to observe the progress of Zombies in popular culture in America, from the brain damaged product of some Voodoo poisoner to the brain eating corpse from Night of the Living Dead to the complex creatures with many characteristics and features we see in The Walking Dead. There are versions of course, but the Zombie of Hollywood fame has evolved. We know you have to shoot one in the head, that Zombies don't climb, that they transmit the condition by biting their victims, that they don't die even if they don't eat and if they rot away to almost nothing. Those beliefs have been added in the last half century, but like the things that stick to folk heroes and mythological creatures over the centuries, we see them as always having been the way they are now.
It's sort of the same with Jesus. History tells us nothing about him, Nobody who ever saw him wrote a word about it. What we get from the selected texts is contradictory and loaded with bits of earlier myths, but the Jesus today: the personal investment adviser/Lord of the Universe has become very complex and diverse, with every generation, each age adding or removing features and characteristics. We even know just what he looks like. He looks a lot like Albrecht Duerer in fact and that's a lot different from images found in early churches. But human creations, passed from generation to generation evolve much as Darwin suggested that living things evolve.
So why not a Zombie Jesus? Nothing is more mutable than that which never existed outside of fiction and myth, yet nothing is subject to more Denialism, rage and aggression when change is proposed. Just ask the Dixons of Cincinati, Ohio who set up a Zombie Nativity scene on their front lawn, thereby raising Holy Hell.
But where's the beef? Isn't Jesus risen from the dead? Isn't he still around? Well one thing never evolves and that's eternal self -righteousness and humorless zealotry. The idea that religious tolerance means protection from insult adds a bit of sweetness to this confection, coming as it does from a religion famous for defaming and persecuting any and all other religions and even variations of the same one. All beliefs, all religions deserve equal protection under the law -- and praise be: a tax exemption.
The Dixons are getting resistance from Zoning boards and neighbors who know just how and where Jesus was born and to whom and what he looked like. They know all about his parents and their sex life and everything they know is the accretion of thousands of years of speculation and unwarranted assertion - and of course invention. Look, it's a free country and no matter how much you hate the idea, Zombie Jesus is risen. He lives forever. He gives eternal life and destroys sinners when he brings the apocalypse, and like religion in general he eats your brain. It's been foretold and the Church of Jesus Christ, Zombie is here to take your donations.
It's sort of the same with Jesus. History tells us nothing about him, Nobody who ever saw him wrote a word about it. What we get from the selected texts is contradictory and loaded with bits of earlier myths, but the Jesus today: the personal investment adviser/Lord of the Universe has become very complex and diverse, with every generation, each age adding or removing features and characteristics. We even know just what he looks like. He looks a lot like Albrecht Duerer in fact and that's a lot different from images found in early churches. But human creations, passed from generation to generation evolve much as Darwin suggested that living things evolve.
So why not a Zombie Jesus? Nothing is more mutable than that which never existed outside of fiction and myth, yet nothing is subject to more Denialism, rage and aggression when change is proposed. Just ask the Dixons of Cincinati, Ohio who set up a Zombie Nativity scene on their front lawn, thereby raising Holy Hell.
But where's the beef? Isn't Jesus risen from the dead? Isn't he still around? Well one thing never evolves and that's eternal self -righteousness and humorless zealotry. The idea that religious tolerance means protection from insult adds a bit of sweetness to this confection, coming as it does from a religion famous for defaming and persecuting any and all other religions and even variations of the same one. All beliefs, all religions deserve equal protection under the law -- and praise be: a tax exemption.
The Dixons are getting resistance from Zoning boards and neighbors who know just how and where Jesus was born and to whom and what he looked like. They know all about his parents and their sex life and everything they know is the accretion of thousands of years of speculation and unwarranted assertion - and of course invention. Look, it's a free country and no matter how much you hate the idea, Zombie Jesus is risen. He lives forever. He gives eternal life and destroys sinners when he brings the apocalypse, and like religion in general he eats your brain. It's been foretold and the Church of Jesus Christ, Zombie is here to take your donations.
Monday, December 07, 2015
Ultra high Power Weapons of the Apocalypse!
So all you impassioned millions know all about "assault Rifles" right? We just want some sensible legislation to make them go away before more people are killed. Those Gun nuts only want them for killing people and that's what they're designed for -- Military use, right. And of course we all recognize them -- right?
These of course are identical weapons, except for the plastic stock and the pistol grip. Neither is a machine gun nor can be converted into one. The only important difference is that the lower "tactical" version has a larger magazine, but suggest -- and I often do -- that we restrict magazines and forget about the stock and I'm dismissed as a gun nut patsy for the NRA. Meanwhile Smith and Wesson stock is through the roof and they can't make them fast enough. Gun makers love anti-gun activists.
This is why there will never be a solution to our gun problem and why there will never be a rational discussion or even a compromise. No one wants one. No one will question any of their beliefs or examine the real risks or even consider how well previous bans have done to reduce those risks. It's a religion, not a cause. No one wants a description of the previous AW ban because it actually didn't ban them or their magazines and had no effect except to raise prices and raise demand. Of course you don't believe me and won't even listen. You wouldn't be holier than me if you did.
There's a real fear of facts in the loudest ranks of the chorus. Tell them that printable receivers for your AK are ridiculous since you can make one out of sheet metal for free using a hand drill, and can buy one already made for $29.95. Any small machine shop can make guns and the process is so automated all you do is load the software. Tell them that no, you're not going to shoot down an airliner with a .50 caliber single shot rifle and you'll be called a liar. Minds must not be changed or the zealot will have to admit error and can no longer be a zealot and wear the cape and tights.
So Mr. know-it-all, what would I do to reduce the number of weapons you can use to clear a room? Well you can try to ban those 100 round drum magazines that in fact do exist to kill people. That actually doesn't run afoul of the Second Amendment or require Farmer Brown to trade his ranch rifle for a fly swatter. But who's going to listen? Minds have long since been made up. Actually handguns do a very fine job in close quarters and the constitution doesn't protect your right to own one. But no, we're not gonna back down on our words - dad's hunting rifle is a weapon of war that "sprays bullets" and we don't care who laughs at us because we're not trying to convince anyone who's not already convinced.
Fact is, many hunters in the frigid north who feed their families with modern, plastic stock firearms use these "assault rifles' because they are light and very durable -- but a 5 or ten round magazine would work quite well, but as I said, we can't have this discussion because the game is played from the fringes, the margins and after all it's not whether you win or lose it's how righteous you are.
This is why there will never be a solution to our gun problem and why there will never be a rational discussion or even a compromise. No one wants one. No one will question any of their beliefs or examine the real risks or even consider how well previous bans have done to reduce those risks. It's a religion, not a cause. No one wants a description of the previous AW ban because it actually didn't ban them or their magazines and had no effect except to raise prices and raise demand. Of course you don't believe me and won't even listen. You wouldn't be holier than me if you did.
There's a real fear of facts in the loudest ranks of the chorus. Tell them that printable receivers for your AK are ridiculous since you can make one out of sheet metal for free using a hand drill, and can buy one already made for $29.95. Any small machine shop can make guns and the process is so automated all you do is load the software. Tell them that no, you're not going to shoot down an airliner with a .50 caliber single shot rifle and you'll be called a liar. Minds must not be changed or the zealot will have to admit error and can no longer be a zealot and wear the cape and tights.
So Mr. know-it-all, what would I do to reduce the number of weapons you can use to clear a room? Well you can try to ban those 100 round drum magazines that in fact do exist to kill people. That actually doesn't run afoul of the Second Amendment or require Farmer Brown to trade his ranch rifle for a fly swatter. But who's going to listen? Minds have long since been made up. Actually handguns do a very fine job in close quarters and the constitution doesn't protect your right to own one. But no, we're not gonna back down on our words - dad's hunting rifle is a weapon of war that "sprays bullets" and we don't care who laughs at us because we're not trying to convince anyone who's not already convinced.
Fact is, many hunters in the frigid north who feed their families with modern, plastic stock firearms use these "assault rifles' because they are light and very durable -- but a 5 or ten round magazine would work quite well, but as I said, we can't have this discussion because the game is played from the fringes, the margins and after all it's not whether you win or lose it's how righteous you are.
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
Through a Glass Darkly
Almost eerie this afternoon, reading American Rifleman magazine at Bob's barber shop: decorated to look like an old west sort of a place with old nostalgic gun and ammunition posters and antique guns displayed on hooks. I had been attracted by a picture of a beautifully engraved Benelli shotgun on the cover. I have little interest in owning one at twenty five hundred bucks, but it would be nice to hold and maybe shoot a few clays with such a piece of fine Italian craftsmanship, but I don't have the time or the venue these days.
But then there were the editorials by people such as Wayne LaPierre: mad dog drooling rage about gun grabbers and how gun control is there just to penalize good people for the sins of others. I don't know what that means, but it's Wayne LaPierre. He and the Magazine of the NRA have no other purpose than to outrage, infuriate, inflame and incite and everything seen through the filter of his insanity has the same purpose and one unifying creed: Life is better with guns and owning guns is the one and only measure of freedom. Anything and everything he writes contains the same carefully arranged sequences of inflammatory code words, honed and perfected to manipulate his flock as skillfully as any Preacher on Sunday morning TV, to achieve a transcendental ecstasy of anti-government, anti-Liberal, Anti-Obama paranoia.
Coming home on this stiflingly hot and humid December afternoon, I felt the need of a shower but not because of the weather. I turned on the news and of course there was our latest shooting -- our uninterrupted, obsessive flood of words searching for relevance, desperate to package and reissue those code words to express and stimulate the sentiments of their constituency: high power, high caliber, military style, assault weapon, semi-automatic yada, yada and all the rest. That real modern assault weapons are small caliber and lower power than hunting rifles doesn't matter since the words are not there to inform but to frighten, to enlist and to frame reality to further the mission of each and every disparate group of activists. We'll hear all about checks and shows and magazine size and even "style" before we know who did what to whom why and with which. It can wait until we're done preaching.
Who are the shooters and how many are there and why did they do it? Is there really an increase in gun violence or is there a concentration of focus? What kind of gun control would have helped if these are Jihadis? is a group of three likely to have the same modus and motives as the disturbed and suicidal teenager? We don't know anything as of the time I'm writing it, but we know what to say: gun grabber, gun nut, high caliber, high velocity, armed citizen, gun control, military style, armor piercing waiting period gun show background check registration full metal jacket. It doesn't matter except to Pavlov..
I heard a young woman on TV the other night yelling about the police. "They've got sniper guns! They're using sniper guns.!" They were tear gas launchers, in fact but it doesn't matter, Neither side is talking to anyone but themselves and in a language of their own and no substantive dialog is possible, nor is there even a common language.
And meantime people are dead and bleeding and we don't know who or why or how many.. Meantime the salesmen on all sides are offering their packaged wares. Want facts? have suggestions? Want to know what's happening? Hell no, you gun nut, gun grabber, freedom hater, murderer!
But then there were the editorials by people such as Wayne LaPierre: mad dog drooling rage about gun grabbers and how gun control is there just to penalize good people for the sins of others. I don't know what that means, but it's Wayne LaPierre. He and the Magazine of the NRA have no other purpose than to outrage, infuriate, inflame and incite and everything seen through the filter of his insanity has the same purpose and one unifying creed: Life is better with guns and owning guns is the one and only measure of freedom. Anything and everything he writes contains the same carefully arranged sequences of inflammatory code words, honed and perfected to manipulate his flock as skillfully as any Preacher on Sunday morning TV, to achieve a transcendental ecstasy of anti-government, anti-Liberal, Anti-Obama paranoia.
Coming home on this stiflingly hot and humid December afternoon, I felt the need of a shower but not because of the weather. I turned on the news and of course there was our latest shooting -- our uninterrupted, obsessive flood of words searching for relevance, desperate to package and reissue those code words to express and stimulate the sentiments of their constituency: high power, high caliber, military style, assault weapon, semi-automatic yada, yada and all the rest. That real modern assault weapons are small caliber and lower power than hunting rifles doesn't matter since the words are not there to inform but to frighten, to enlist and to frame reality to further the mission of each and every disparate group of activists. We'll hear all about checks and shows and magazine size and even "style" before we know who did what to whom why and with which. It can wait until we're done preaching.
Who are the shooters and how many are there and why did they do it? Is there really an increase in gun violence or is there a concentration of focus? What kind of gun control would have helped if these are Jihadis? is a group of three likely to have the same modus and motives as the disturbed and suicidal teenager? We don't know anything as of the time I'm writing it, but we know what to say: gun grabber, gun nut, high caliber, high velocity, armed citizen, gun control, military style, armor piercing waiting period gun show background check registration full metal jacket. It doesn't matter except to Pavlov..
I heard a young woman on TV the other night yelling about the police. "They've got sniper guns! They're using sniper guns.!" They were tear gas launchers, in fact but it doesn't matter, Neither side is talking to anyone but themselves and in a language of their own and no substantive dialog is possible, nor is there even a common language.
And meantime people are dead and bleeding and we don't know who or why or how many.. Meantime the salesmen on all sides are offering their packaged wares. Want facts? have suggestions? Want to know what's happening? Hell no, you gun nut, gun grabber, freedom hater, murderer!
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