boscohorowitz
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A) “the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules”
b) Yeah, sure.
Electrons manifest the retained energy in spin. When a spinning electron collides with another electron, the ‘victim’ gets more energy while the ‘perp’ loses some. Molecules don’t get warmer via collisions. Molecules get warmer because radiation comes along and smacks some electrons and makes them go faster.”
The author is right. Heat is molecules bouncing into other molecules. The energy that causes heat is another matter. Try rubbing your finger on an emery board for five minutes. Or take it up with Richard Feynman:
“Now imagine this great drop of water with all of these jiggling particles stuck together and tagging along with each other. The water keeps its volume; it does not fall apart, because of the attraction of the molecules for each other. If the drop is on a slope, where it can move from one place to another, the water will flow, but it does not just disappear—things do not just fly apart—because of the molecular attraction. Now the jiggling motion is what we represent as heat: when we increase the temperature, we increase the motion. If we heat the water, the jiggling increases and the volume between the atoms increases, and if the heating continues there comes a time when the pull between the molecules is not enough to hold them together and they do fly apart and become separated from one another. Of course, this is how we manufacture steam out of water—by increasing the temperature; the particles fly apart because of the increased motion.”
The energy that CAUSES heat is not the heat irt causes.
“Which gets to my core question about this CO2 “debate”: what’s the point?”
Is an excellent question. Climate skeptics mostly focus on the green swindle, both to express outrage and make calls to arms; climate believers have agendas ranging from paid troll pay rates to really believing we can somehow stop the energy consumption juggernaut, this big bag of fossil IV blood draining into the arm of a nonetheless dying vampire.
Me, I’m in it to watch as a sociologist and a possible neighborhood military recruiter/strategist, to watch the different ways people learn different views on a thing, to learn about things climatological, and especially to watch and study our respective egos, doing so much in the light of that Bucky Fuller quote TAE just shared.
Bonus is that all this done decided me to begin reading my Goodwill copy of Azimov’s Understanding Physics
Credit there goes to Bishko, who did the unique thing of writing his own words from his own understanding, doing so with an obvious love for language and the majesty of physics as well as spirit (even if that’s a false dichotomy). Inspired me:
I think Bishko is correct to state he’s an academically trained (I assume) chemist using his degree to earn his living. Not crucial but, imo, helpful: it lets me know where he’s coming from.
Re: climate change: when the War on Terror’s value as a flag-waver faded around the era of Obama’s election, climate change began becoming, like Serious Business. Put America Back to Work Building Green.
Well, I have to admit the hills of the Inland Northwest Pacific did wear white windmills awfully well. Mighty fine pinwheels. Purty. Hardly anyone hard about the nuts’n’bolts long-term cycles of those things much less an honest EROEI. One reason for this is because everyone was too busy bitching at each other about the weather.
Meanwhile, this showed up on my mini-neighborhood’s email grapevine:
I got my gutters cleaned yesterday and found a pair of jeans on my roof. I used gloves to check the pockets and inside was a phone, phone wallet with a bank card, OR trail card, $8 and change, a needle, pacifier, small hand sanitizer bottle, but I don’t think it’s hand sanitizer in it and pickle flavored sunflower seeds. I called the police and they aren’t interested. They checked the name and it’s not a missing person and he apparently had a rap sheet that made them say that this does not seem unusual for him*. There were also two receipts from nearby stores dated around the time that I thought I heard something on my roof and the dog was barking. I’m happy to return the items with a promise to stay off my roof and away from my property.
Update: I was able to find this person’s family, who is grateful to have information as he’s been missing since he walked off a job site in Lake Oswego a little over a week ago. His mother will be coming over this evening to collect his belongings.
* stripping nekkid on people’s roofs then walking away sans wallet and cyberlink. Sounds like a paraschizo who thinks he has ET’s home phone #. I remember seeing a guy conduct the weather in the middle of our street for a good half an hour. Big fat roiling changing troubled weather, and he had the score and was conducting a masterpiece.
Hail Atlantis.
The problem with letting the market do its thing is that part of its thing has always included the urge to corner the market. The very increase in wealth that healthy unregulated markets produce provides the surplus that mentally unhealthy scoundrels hoard and then use to fleece us and boss us.
It’s another one of those Who Will Bell the Cat? things.
I was not really trying to refute Bishko when my research to find the numbers where CO2 extinction happens per Bishko’s remarks; I was just doing due diligence to make sure I wasn’t right when I was really wrong or vice-versa. I stumbled upon this:
which came from a quora question that lined up with my google query: At what concentration does the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere become light saturated, so that adding more will not increase infrared absorption, and stop heating up the lower atmosphere?
This was also cited by quora dude: Undertsanding Atmospheric Radiation and the Greenhouse Effect from the nicely titled The Science of Doom. It’s for those who like to see the math in some form. Lotsa graphs too!
Anyway, it raises questions about this extinction/saturation thing, and I cannot in good faith — both to myself or anyone foolish enough to invest in me — yet concede that I am incorrect in having believed for most of my adult life that greenhouse gas emissions warranted serious consideration as a possible major global problem with universal effects.
But a guy as wrong as often as I am is surely still wrong about being wrong. Am I
rightwrong yet?“What is another word for Multitask? juggle”
Driving Miss Daisy, Being John Malkovich, Juggling Joe Biden (screenplay by Trump’s combover which is obviously an alien “rider”)
“A new survival tactic”
It is impossible not to love zerosum. It is often impossible for me to understand much of his contributions, but that’s fine. What I do understand provides ample nuggets of online nourishment.
Not only lol, but I’m reminded of why slacker culture evolved: to improve its members chances of surviving or at least living lives worth enduring.
My 26 year old son tells me that one reason most 30-unders stay buried in their handroids is cuz they know they’re fucked even though they might not be sure why. Think of ‘quiet-quitting’ as 21st century’s version of the 60s ‘turn on-tune in-drop out’. Think of it also as a way of hearing these old lyrics: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Prophecy!
“Military leaders tried a number of methods to build up their ranks this year, such as increasing enlistment bonuses, dropping high school diploma requirements, and lowering physical standards. However the AP noted that many potential recruits are drawn to private industry in what is a tight labor market.
“Corporations such as McDonald’s have also begun introducing perks such as tuition benefits, similar to those used by the military to attract recruits for years.
“The issue is exacerbated by the fact that only 23% of young people meet the military’s requirements, with many ineligible due to medical issues including obesity, drug use and criminal records.”
They just don’t make cannon fodder like they used to.
Consummate, taut, hilarious, and absolutely convincing (imo):
The Big Man fetish is alive in most of us, and all of us were taught to believe in and worship the Big Man, but virtually all Big Men on the global stage have proven tiny except in terms of greed, lust, and general depravity.
Putin doesn’t. His actions walk a different course than every Big Man I know of including Xi and his other allies.
But he’s allowing Russians to be killed off en masse by kovid vakzinazions.
Being a Big Man fetishist myself (hey, I believe in Jesus! Hard to have a bigger hard-on for Fearless Leader than that, eh?) I revere Putin, warts and all, including what I see is some degree of psychopathic affect. His maneuvers on the global stage are consistently brilliant to my eye, especially the ones that often appear weak and foolish at first. (He’s good at appearing weak when he’s strong et vice-versa.)
But he’s killing off his fellow Rus, knowingly or unknowingly, both alternatives equally bad.I don’t want to lose my Big Man comfort blanket teddy bear. An ardent Putin apologist, I’ve wrangled a scenario I can believe in and live with: Russia will obviously prevail and become the epicenter of the new multipolar reality that will emerge (even if only from nuclear rubble). If it prevails well enough (no nuclear rubble), it will be the new King of the World. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. USA post-WWII turned into the nicest little buncha Nazified “good Germans” you’d ever want to see.
Putin has set it up, sez my wet dream vision of Putin’s ruthlessly moral 10-D chess, so that only not just the strongest (Russia today) prevails but that the smartest, wisest, most honest and mutually nurturing people predominate overwhelmingly against the mainstream poshlosti.
Russia would, by this scenario, absorb the best and brightest of the rest of the world while culling the worst of its own.
I can live with this vision. Call me loony and I’ll love it, seeing as we’re all stuck in an insane asylum called post-modern culture. But maybe it will make sense to some of you if I add that I believe that the reason Jeebus let His Own Bad Self be crucified by a mere Roman sock puppet is because He knew that He was beginning to experience spiritual narcissism: “The belief that your spiritual wisdom makes you more special than others is also known as spiritual narcissism. It can be used to shield yourself from criticism, to impress others, or to enhance your-self-esteem and feel good about yourself.”
Since we perceive the historical Jesus as KNOWING He was “more special than others” (and I’m sure He often felt like a mutant freak growing up, which trauma would fuel adult-onset spiritual narcissism), He had no choice but to feel superior. This way madness lies in all of us. It is also very lonely if it’s true that One is enlightened beyond all one’s peers.
And so, I believe, He let Himself be offed before he went down the road that Mohammed did, legitimizing divinity by the sword, shedding His Own Blood rather than leading His followers to shed blood in His Name (a very bad sin indeed).
Putin is no Jesus but he’s the best I got. And, fwiw, if there is something to the antichrist prophecies, I’m sure that we’ll leave it up to USA to produce one come the next election or torchlit pitchforking. A Bill Graham hologram-from-the-grave, maybe…
Putin as Jesus:
Like Lennon sang, “Whatever gets you through the night.” After all, whether what one believes is true or not is not as important as what you do with your perception of reality. Looking oblivion in the face as I and many among us have done for many decades (since ’74 for me), we need something to believe in, something to keep our hearts turning over:
P.S. Really really lovely poetic but technically articulate response to Susmarie. You made my shabbat even before it started.
“…a shaman.”
You certainly resemble that remark. I love it when I find things like this (re: sonoluminescence):
“The mechanism of the light emission remains uncertain, but some of the current theories, which are categorized under either thermal or electrical processes, are Bremsstrahlung radiation, argon rectification hypothesis,[2] and hot spot.”
Graci.
Can’t poke any big holes in Bishko’s application of atmospheric extinction vis a vis CO2 except this, and he can probably explain that I’m wrong about this as well: “Then more ink would make it opaque again. CO2 in our atmosphere has reached “extinction” a very long time ago, long before life arrived.”
This doesn’t account for how much of how many other gasses/particulates were in the atmosphere, something which has a major effect on the photonic absorption/re-emission cascade factor. In the pool analogy, the right kind of absorptive particulate might absorb ink into themselves and create “holes for additional light to come through.
Per Bishko, at some point (that we’re already long past), increasing CO2 emissions won’t make the climate warming effect part of ACC (anthropogenic climate change) worse just by increasing CO2 emissions. I don’t see that this relates to the concept that lessening CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) output now will result in reduced CO2 levels down the road. That involves many other cycles. <<Not that I necessarily assume that lessening them in 50 or 100 or whatever years is automatically better, or that this would make a sufficient change in CO2 to go below the atmospheric extinction level and produce genuine lessening of energy from solar infrared radiation.>>
But it does appear true to my manic mind that there’s a maximum setting on the atmospheric warming throttle of Terran CO2 greenhouse gas warming. We can’t make it warmer faster just by pumping more CO2 into the air once we’re past that level.I’ll also note that there is significant debate among people researching paleometeorology about how much CO2 was in the air aeons ago, or so I read. It doesn’t appear to be all that settled a topic. I might better gauge how seriously I should take this aspect if you’d tell us what that maximum extinction level for CO2 is.. I’ve been proven wrong about believing I’ve been proven wrong maybe as much as just plain proven wrong. 😉
I remember when the term was greenhouse gases not carbon emissions? I would guess that the move from greenhouse gases to CO2 as the kleptocrat’s climate logo moves in symmetry with the emphasis on natural gas that began ? probably when the 80s domestic oil boom began fading? With the PR people recognizing that greenhouse and green energy made conflicting semiotics in the public talkstream?
Thanx mucho: this was very stimulating and enlightening. Mongo learn something new every day whether him remember or not.***
Meanwhile, entirely irrelevant to my remarks to Bishko: It’s a form of food fight, really. and much easier to clean up. Is it a global warming joke or a joke about the joys of internet discourse, or both? It adds at least to meanings to the expression ‘hot chili’.
Bishko: I think you did very well. I think I learned something. I will be reading some basic text on concepts like spectral absorption extinction to make sure that I’m not misinterpreting you, and also to make sure that you’re not miscommunicating — being confusing despite your best efforts or blowing smoke up someone’s ass, on purpose or unwittingly.Not that I have any reason to mistrust you or doubt your competence, but I want to be at least a little bit scientific in my approach to your text.
In the spirit of complete disclosure, I’ll gleefully add that my driving motivation is to somehow prove you wrong because, while I maintain a diligently open mind on climate theories (and just about anything I mentally encounter), my early bias regarding climate theories was inclined to believe at least the primary facets of greenhouse warming effect models etc. etc.
I will even more gleefully admit if it is I who am proven wrong. I’m pretty sure I am, but who am I to direct my ego? (As if I or any but the very enlightened few — or so say the major holy writs of the world — can direct our egos any more than Hunter Biden on viagracoke can sexually restrain himself…) Considering that it is my ego that disapproves of the intractably impulsive nature of my ego, the sound of one hand clapping is for me that of me surrendering to my ego and appeasing it with the discipline that a long-ago mentor said was “the discipline of allowing yourself to do what you really want, especially what you think is right(eous)”. This works better since both I’n’I are constantly sucking up to each other and admitting how brilliantly superior the other is — which is what they wanted all along since the day they were born and first learned to squawl and kick for attention.
I’ve been and will surely continue to be wrong much of my life and have learned to enjoy it.
Surreally relevant (with an uneasy sneer at Elon Musk’s AI Day) to my infant reference is what was the best section for me as a teenager from Stanislaw Lem’s book, Solaris,:
“I regained height and continued to fly above the fog, the machine almost touching it, until I discovered another clearing, much larger than the previous one. 80 While I was still some distance away, I noticed a pale, almost white, object floating on the surface. My first thought was that it was Fechner’s flying-suit, especially as it looked vaguely human in form. I brought the aircraft round sharply, afraid of losing my way and being unable to find the same spot again. The shape, the body, was moving; sometimes it seemed to be standing upright in the trough of the waves. I accelerated and went down so low that the machine bounced gently. I must have hit the crest of a huge wave I was overflying. The body—yes, it was a human body, not an atmosphere-suit—the body was moving.
QUESTION: Did you see its face?
BERTON: Yes.
QUESTION: Who was it?
BERTON: A child.
QUESTION: What child? Did you recognize it?
BERTON: No. At any rate, I don’t remember having seen it before. Besides, when I got closer—when I was forty yards away, or even sooner—I realized that it was no ordi- nary child.
QUESTION: What do you mean?
BERTON: I’ll explain. At first, I couldn’t understand what worried me about it; it was only after a minute or two that I realized: this child was extraordinarily large. Enormous, in fact. Stretched out horizontally, its body rose twelve feet above the surface of the ocean, I swear. I remembered that when I touched the wave, its face was a little higher than mine, even though my cockpit must have been at least ten feet above the ocean.
QUESTION: If it was as big as that, what makes you say it was a child?
BERTON: Because it was a tiny child.
QUESTION: Do you realize, Berton, that your answer doesn’t make sense?
BERTON: On the contrary. I could see its face, and it was a very young child. Besides, its proportions corresponded exactly to the proportions of a child’s body. It was a . . . babe in arms. No, I exaggerate. It was probably two or three years old. It had black hair and blue eyes—enormous blue eyes! It was naked—completely naked—like a new-born baby. It was wet, or I should say glossy; its skin was shiny. I was shattered. I no longer thought it was a mirage. I could see this child so distinctly. It rose and fell with the waves; but apart from this general motion, it was making other movements, and they were horrible!
QUESTION: Why? What was it doing?
BERTON: It was more like a doll in a museum, only a living doll. It opened and closed its mouth, it made vari ous gestures, horrible gestures.
QUESTION: What do you mean?
BERTON: I was watching it from about twenty yards away —I don’t suppose I went any closer. But, as I’ve already told you, it was enormous. I could see very clearly. Its eyes sparkled and you really would have thought it was a living child, if it hadn’t been for the movements, the gestures, as though someone was trying … It was as though some one else was responsible for the gestures . . .
QUESTION: Try to be more explicit.
BERTON: It’s difficult. I’m talking of an impression, more of an intuition. I didn’t analyze it, but I knew that those gestures weren’t natural.
QUESTION: Do you mean, for example, that the hands didn’t move as human hands would move, because the joints were not sufficiently supple?
BERTON: No, not at all. But . . . these movements had no meaning. Each of our movements means something, more or less, serves some purpose . . .
QUESTION: Do you think so? The movements of an infant don’t have much meaning!
BERTON: I know. But an infant’s movements are confused, random, uncoordinated. The movements I saw were . . . er . . . yes, that’s it, they were methodical movements. They were performed one after another, like a series of exercises; as though someone had wanted to make a study of what this child was capable of doing with its hands, its torso, its mouth. The face was more horrifying than the rest, because the human face has an expression, and this face … I don’t know how to describe it. It was alive, yes, but it wasn’t human. Or rather, the features as a whole, the eyes, the complexion, were, but the expression, the movements of the face, were certainly not.
QUESTION: Were they grimaces? Do you know what happens to a person’s face during an epileptic fit?
BERTON: Yes. I’ve watched an epileptic fit. I know what you mean. No, it was something quite different. Epilepsy provokes spasms, convulsions. The movements I’m talk ing about were fluid, continuous, graceful . . . melodious, if one can say that of a movement. It’s the nearest definition I can think of. But this face … a face can’t divide itself into two—one half gay, the other sad, one half scowling and the other amiable, one half frightened and the other triumphant. But that’s how it was with this child’s face. In addition to that, all these movements and changes of ex pression succeeded one another with unbelievable rapidity. I stayed down there a very short time, perhaps ten seconds, perhaps less.”“stop pretending mastery quite so aggressively and foolishly ”
However, I’d remove “foolishly”, at least from my perspective. From what I’ve observed so far, both of you employ folly in your discursive aims. Why, if you put your follies together you might scrape up enough to sound as foolish as me!
***
Also, “So snap out of it!” is as aggressive and, if ye like, foolish as AFKTT’s more strident remarks.
***
Also-so: Also: Witness ‘It’s willingness to be superficially ‘
***
Early, purt near proto-ur recorded pop music:
Turn Off Your Light Mister Moon Man-Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes
Before microphones allowed crooning to be heard by large audiences.
Russia is doing an excellent job of following a major strategic part of its plan: present itself as a genuinely “good cop” versus USNATO’s “bad cop”. DOing so has required it to use its decidedly larger military stick with what Sam Gutman in The Maltese Falcon called “nice judgment”.
It’s willingness to be superficially humiliated by USNATO so that the damage caused by USNATO’s collapse won’t hurt any more people than can be prevented by having a much Bigger Stick all around and using it with nice judgment.
Sadly, Russia is killing its own people with kovid vakzines, but so is everyone else, so: yippee! More room in Russia to which savvy kind-yet-ruthless people can immigrate! My kids aren’t as stupid as their old man, so they may make it there yet!
Ah, that good Russian vodka and kombinat kokaine… it’s what 20th Century rock musicians crave…
How Two Narratives Function in Online Debate:
It’s similar to TPTB’s fave distraction method: fling poo then blame it on the flung upon.
It is, indeed, distracting. Even a little annoying. But that’s all.
Efforts like this, however, merit (imo) not flung poo but a nice slice of cake, served not flung:
“So it is with compassion that I propose that AFKTT (and many others) go back and re-assess from scratch his climate-change beliefs, and stop pretending mastery quite so aggressively and foolishly — which subverts his credibility in other domains.”
Anyway, it pleases me.
Me, I’ll quote Robert Frost:
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”“It is generally believed (not by everyone) that the loss is due to dissolution into the waters of the world. This makes sense and research can be performed. ”
I remember discussing this issue with a mentor back in ’82-’83.
It was originally never assumed that raising CO2 emissions would completely translate into atmospheric increase. They were doing science back then.
How much impact CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions would have on the climate was far from an assumed given.
But before everyone weighs in on it being just politics that drove the greenie agenda, I’ll note that success is its own reward in academia; if you generate a decent buzz with your hypothesis (and the basics of what we now call “global warming theory” had a good beat that was easy to dance to: major implications, global scope, gobs and gobs of data to acquire and analyze with all the groovy new tools and techs and countless universities popping up like psilocybin in a Sasquatch wet dream.
P.S. Dmitry Orlov says we need to watch this:
I agree but I’ve also come to enjoy throwing fresh chum into the Who Is Most Right shark tank.
A bit of Golden Modern Era American exceptionalist melting pot ‘vital american’ American history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Seldes
And two songs from that apogee of our culture, when the American Dream wasn’t just a drugged video hallucination:
Only for you, mein herrs:
It amuses me that we periodically go through sociomoral reformation campaigns to make TAE more “civil”. Oh, it’s good of itself, I suppose. All good clean well-intentioned fun. But part of what holds the TAE talk tribe together is the evolved pairs of mutually contemptuous personalities.This is a good thing. Such loyal oppositions are a driving force of survival competition within a tribe. Not so much in who wins or loses those contests: they are not necessarily about winning or losing any more than post-modern partisan politics are necessarily about winning or losing; they are for taking turns at good cop/bad cop dynamics and for a) bonding people together through juicy gossip camps and mutual enhancement groups (good old boy clubs), and b) if a tribe is lucky, bringing out of the background some quiet Big Man who’s had enough and busts both their chops to kingdom come.
If the Big Man has a Conscience as big as the rest of him, and enough genius to strategically succeed, this is good for the tribe. If he’s just Big, or Big with a Conscience but poor strategy, it tends to be bad for the tribe.
Seems that, the bigger the tribe (say, for funzies, gauged by orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar Number: 150, 1,500, 15,000, 150,000…), the more likely it is that it will be the latter: Big psychopath or Big but too nice as in those guys who tend to finish last.
We await our Messiah with barbed critiques, earnest entreaties, lusting contempt and kind devotion.Meanwhile, the times being what they are, we shoot up our medicines, oral being way too soft for hardcore medical security junkies like today’s pomo 21st century omnischizoid metaneurotics. And, a far cry from clunky brittle 78rpms on windup Victrolae, we snort a line of nanochips for our weekly music “feed”.
O de times dem is a-changin:
Oy:
“some older hipster in a flannel shirt”
(ahem) That is a bathrobe, and I am not old, I am ancient beyond reckoning.
***
“Sometimes I post, and it goes through. Other times, a robot says I’m spam. It asks me to add two numbers together, but stumps me by showing me only one.”
Log out and log back in. Save a copy of your post, add some additional text, preferably nonsensical so it isn’t confused with your intended message, past it in the comment window after logging back in, and submit.That usually works.
***
Re: WW3 definitions: let’s split hairs over what is or isn’t a world war, shall we? The entire planet is reeling from the economic shock waves of this conflict( global inflation)
Actual military conflict is currently limited to Ukraine (and the usual colonial flash-points). I doubt very much that it will remain confined to Ukraine. But have no fear: proving, in fora like TAE, that one is right and the other is wrong will save us from the outcomes of wars and such.
***
Meanwhile, perching on a ledge high above the “peanut gallery” while tossing one’s very own private reserve meshuganuts on said gallery far far far below one’s personal sphere of immaculately conceived self-worship is obviously not an expression of personal vainglorious egocentricity. Oh no. Placing oneself above others is certainly not an expression of personal ego. It is obviously just a manifestation of one’s impeccable humility, not a self-protecting delusion based on personal insecurity relative to others.
Optical Illusions of the Wounded Ego
I wouldn’t mind it except that, along with being annoyingly hostile and blatantly false, it is goddam.fucking.boring. I know that such activity indicates deep suffering by the actor, but as is so often the case, the actor would rather settle for an illusion of superiority than ask to be loved and embraced as a soul in need. Typically, they don’t feel deserving of help and project that feeling of unworthiness onto others.
What can you do? It’s 5am, a woman in my apartment complex has been battered but won’t accept my offer of refuge because a stranger can’t possibly want to help a 40-something broad clean from meth for 45 days. (Probably has underlying menial health issues; I’d guess mild paraschizophrenia?) She’ll probably be using before the day is over, I’m thinking but what do I know. I ask God what to do and I always get the same answer: “Do your best.”
“That’s not very good,” I reply.
“Tell me something I don’t know?” God replies. “But it’s all you’ve got.”
“some older hipster in a flannel shirt”
(ahem) That is a bathrobe, and I am not old, I am ancient beyond reckoning.
***
“Sometimes I post, and it goes through. Other times, a robot says I’m spam. It asks me to add two numbers together, but stumps me by showing me only one.”
Log out and log back in. Save a copy of your post, add some additional text, preferably nonsensical so it isn’t confused with your intended message, past it in the comment window after logging back in, and submit.That usually works.
***
Re: WW3 definitions: let’s split hairs over what is or isn’t a world war, shall we? The entire planet is reeling from the economic shock waves of this conflict( global inflation)
Actual military conflict is currently limited to Ukraine (and the usual colonial flash-points). I doubt very much that it will remain confined to Ukraine. But have no fear: proving, in fora like TAE, that one is right and the other is wrong will save us from the outcomes of wars and such.
***
Meanwhile, perching on a ledge high above the “peanut gallery” while tossing one’s very own private reserve meshuganuts on said gallery far far far below one’s personal sphere of immaculately conceived self-worship is obviously not an expression of personal vainglorious egocentricity. Oh no. Placing oneself above others is certainly not an expression of personal ego. It is obviously just a manifestation of one’s impeccable humility, not a self-protecting delusion based on personal insecurity relative to others.
Optical Illusions of the Wo0unded Ego
I wouldn’t mind it except that, along with being annoyingly hostile and blatantly false, it is goddam.fucking.boring. I know that such activity indicates deep suffering by the actor, but as is so often the case, the actor would rather settle for an illusion of superiority than ask to be loved and embraced as a soul in need. Typically, they don’t feel deserving of help and project that feeling of unworthiness onto others.
What can you do? It’s 5am, a woman in my apartment complex has been battered but won’t accept my offer of refuge because a stranger can’t possibly want to help a 40-something broad clean from meth for 45 days. (Probably has underlying menial health issues; I’d guess mild paraschizophrenia?) She’ll probably be using before the day is over, I’m thinking but what do I know. I ask God what to do and I always get the same answer: “Do your best.”
“That’s not very good,” I reply.
“Tell me something I don’t know?” God replies. “But it’s all you’ve got.”
re: Ricky Gervais clip:
“Global climate etc. grew from a small thing started by M Naggie Thatcher”
Just to clarify ere I run off and play with my favorite non-human, Junebug:
By ‘global climate etc.’ I mean global warming as a meme in the public media mainstream, not the findings and hypotheses on which anthropogenic global climate change are based.
Junebug the Dog and her housemate, Booger the Bird Ballroom Dancing
“Denial reduces cognitive dissonance, but does not deal with the urgencies of reality.”
““Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”” James Baldwin
“In 1998 global warming stopped, showing that the warming was a correlation and NOT causation.”
Christ on a crackerjack. That statement is SO unprovable, just as the statement that global warming is happening is unprovable. There are way too many variable to measure.
I know, off the top of my head, two facts about global climate whatever that I feel are unassailable:
1) increased ‘greenhouse gases’ mean increased absorption of infrared. THat’s uncontestable. It’s based on reliable essential chemistry
2) the weather is currently hostile to a species who thinks that (for example)Phoenix, AZ is a smart place to live.
One can neither prove nor disprove global hoogaboo. One can easily prove that we’re running out of those same fossil fuels so demonized by greenies.
No wonder we appear to be down-sizing as a species, using our exalted leaders to do it for us one way or another but mostly many many ways at once. It doesn’t matter if half the world is too hot for us to live without cooling AC, or too cold for us to live without heating AC: both require vast amounts of physically affordable fossil fuels to maintain the population we have with the weather just the way it is now.
P.S. IMO, y’all fling poo like a girl.
“The Guinness World Book of Records says the fastest pitch ever thrown by a female player was 69 m.p.h. (111 km/h).Sep 9, 2020”
“On September 24, 2010, former Cincinnati Reds pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who hails from Cuba, delivered a 105.1-mph fastball, measured by Statcast, in a game against the San Diego Padres, which is recognized as the Guinness World Record for fastest pitch ever. Jul 25, 2022”
“IAN has release food galore for every living thing – from termites, black mold, ants, rats, to gators.”
It has also released toxins galore. Gas containers from huge underground gas station reservoirs to 2-gallon jerry cans, for example. All kinds of industrial ick that normally are safely stored in one place are now spreading far and wide via nature’s favorite fluid solvent, water.
Not to mention lots of drowned dead critters.
A friend of mine lives in the main Ian impact zone but off the shoreline (she’s not nuts). Her livestock was terrified except for the turkeys, who just hunkered down and stayed calm. Turkeys are tough. Just ask Ben Franklin.
I ask, btw, what good is it for any of us to take victory laps over (allegedly) winning some bone of contention. No one’s mind is changed, no problems are solved, and the ego remains in charge of its personal insane asylum: the human personality complex.
The green swindle will continue until it no longer can. Whether the global climate is acting unusual or just being its typical erratic self between Ice Age cycles, we currently have too many people dependent on too many things that erratic weather too often destroys. We’re seeing a lot of that right now (witness Pakistan). Right now, today, erratic weather is hammering tens of millions of people directly and hundreds of millions indirectly, and billions of people overall, but all that we seem able to do is fling poo. Flung poo makes excellent fertilizer where it lands, but hardly enough to replace fertilizer made via the Haber process.
As for the exhilarating thrill of hurling epithets at others, I know that thrill. My ego has no problem with me saying that I believe that my skills at the ancient martial art of Flung Poo are as good as anyone’s.
Regarding various contentions like global climate yadi ya: I believe that our underlying sense of existential dread likes to fixate on single issues. It gives us something to blame and something about which we can “do something”. You know: ‘We’ve got to DO something about it!’ The overall picture is just too big for us to handle.
Global climate etc. grew from a small thing started by
MNaggie Thatcher to demonize striking UK coal miners as carbon demons. It took over from “environmentalism” once politicians realized it was a vote-gainer and a money-maker. Once politicians enter the scene, things go badly.But what politicians have done to scam money and votes via climate scares has little honest relation with the actual “science” (now available in handy 6-packs at Wal-Mart: Science, it’s what modern secular humanists crave) concerning climate this-and-that.
Global this-and-that is also handy for TPTB as a dividing wedge, keeping us engaged in feces ballistics rather than doing useful things. 120 years ago it would be temperance unions versus, um, the Irish?? 😉
We could be like this but we’d all have to admit how little we know, how little control we have over ourselves or this thing called human civilization and, worst but best of all, how we all deserve to love ourselves and each other despite being irrationally competitive fools.
After all, everyone is better than me, including me.
“I’m convinced that people (including me) post comments here as a way of trying to feel better somehow.”
I’d say that’s true of 99.9% of all human’s actions, even masochism.
“it is hard to accurately quantify the exact size of the emissions”
SHould be a piece of cake: pipeline x miles long, x centimeters wide, filled with methane at x pressure.
Sipshits galore in today’s academia and such.
FROM THE ABOVE HEADLINE’S KEY TALKING POINTS:
“Climate scientists acknowledged that it is hard to accurately quantify the exact size of the emissions and say the leaks are a “wee bubble in the ocean” compared to the massive amounts of methane emitted around the world every day.
Nonetheless, environmental campaigners argue the incident reaffirms that the risk of sabotage or an accident makes fossil infrastructure a “ticking time bomb.”
Denmark’s Energy Agency said emissions from the gas leaks correspond to about one-third of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.”There is science, and there is scientism, and then there is mere Russian pipeline leaks spark climate fears as huge volumes of methane spew into the atmosphere
Today is AI Day.
Oy vey.
“A new ‘man-made’ disaster had to be invented : Climate Change.”
No, you’re wrong. The initial science was about climate change caused by atmospheric warming, and many models predicted wild weather oscillations, both cooling and heating, as a result of increased infrared absorption by increased CO2.
Let us try to distinguish popular scientism (” a religion and the followers believe ANY prediction without the need for any proof “) from genuine scientific endeavor. Genuine scientific endeavor requires one to reach one’s own conclusions with or without recourse to prevailing academic consensus on what has been scientifically proven or not, and what is ‘scientific’ or not.
Science is thinking for yourself and separating one’s interpretations of said data from what the datas appears to suggest. It’s something done by individuals (often in teams). It’s not a thing. It’s an action.
