boscohorowitz
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“So now they’ve gotten BillyBob to look around and consider getting up on your ass. And he hasn’t even yet. This is what I say when I point out they can crush you with their old Big Mac wrappers from the back seat. ”
Gotta love that line.
Sadly, BillyBob tends to crush himself in the process. Still, my money is on BillyBob to be the last man standing. Yeah, a nice bit of thinking aloud/ en write, Doc D.
“Thanks for your kind words, I consider myself annoying and ungenerous. Barely literate and mostly stupid — so slow to catch on and still too trusting. But I read a lot, remember a lot, and type real fast.”
As perhaps your most ardent critic, I applaud this. Humility is the necessary foundation of audacity. Your self-assessment is only half-true, because you’re also and equally endearing and generous, hyper-literate and intellectually brilliant, quick to catch on and very skeptical.
Here’s to us:
China accidentally sparks ‘doomsday prepper’ frenzy after telling residents to stockpile food
The global village is destroying itself to save itself, using the media as napalm.
“For every 20 pounds of weight, you need to be a whole class better fighter. That’s what makes all the movie-time women bad-ass tropes so laughable. Okay, you’re better, yes! We get that. You’re 5x better. You’re faster, better trained, more fit. …But Joe Rogan – for a very normal-size, mid-range example – is only half as good as you are and weighs 100lbs more. That’s an guaranteed win.”
Playing a silly-ass faux-fighting sport with rules of engagement designed to determine who’s a little faster, smarter, and more physically endurance among more-or-less physical equals, yes, this is true.
On the street, no.
I saw a 5’6″-ish tiny little gnome of a flaming queen faggot kick all holy fuckall out of a mountain of a man. (Little faggot was a ballet dancer, btw.)
I’m about average build, and the last time anyone fucked with me was in ’83 when some mountain of a man (like 6’2″ and a zillion pounds) thought he could big dog me cuz his lonely wife wanted to talk to the cute young man reading a book in the corner of a bar. He decided he wanted to live after all and let me be.
Reality ignores the confines of our culturally/politically/scholastically/religiously indoctrinated constructs of what reality “is”. Reality does as it will. As is happening now. Obviously, some of TPTB suffer megalomaniacal delusions that they can own/control the world, when all they can do is get rich for awhile by destroying said world (“world” meaning the aspects of reality we need in order to continue surviving as a large-population tech-based civilization) including the part of it they foolishly believe they own.
Welcome to the end of Modern Civilization: some rich cabal will “own” everything and be miserable, yea, even unto death.
The Police’s first album is more promise than fulfillment, imo, a promise fulfilled by their subsequent albums, but the lyrics speak to me. LIke most young bands, they were better live, if this video is adequate witness:
fwiw, the fact that citizen x remembered this fact goes along with his presumed bot-hood. Bots have all the data saved on their resident hard drive/main frame. Botizen x naturally added that data into his post, which probably took it all of ten seconds to compose?
It’s so exciting! *swoon* When I was a kid, I read sci-fi and dreamed of talking robots! Now they follow me around and call me names! Ity’s SOooooo cyberpunk.
Also, this seems apt:
Oh, I shared my address here publicly last time I took a vacation from TAE.
I mised you too, John Day.
Wes, the writing majorly stalled for awhile as I dealt with my sorry-ass fucked-up self in my typical sorry-ass fucked-up way. But I’m back on the game, along with what looks like skin cancer to give me a little boost. Pray to God for motivation from crioppling depression, and God delivers whatever it takes. Maybe the threat of skin cancer will make a man of me yet.
Thanx for asking.
Bot trolls don’t crave attention; they crave data via interaction. They’re no threat to this forum, and dealing with their existence is good exercise for adapting to a global culture that has become one vast troll.
In this case, the only data the trolls get from me is that they suck at their job.
Opposition to HPV wasn’t about it’s safety as vaccine, dear def-bot.
Opposition in the United States
See also: Vaccine controversy
The idea that the HPV vaccine is linked to increased sexual behavior is not supported by scientific evidence. A review of nearly 1,400 adolescent girls found no difference in teen pregnancy, incidence of sexually transmitted infection, or contraceptive counseling regardless of whether they received the HPV vaccine.[203] Thousands of Americans die each year from cancers preventable by the vaccine.[203]Insurance companies
There has been significant opposition from health insurance companies to covering the cost of the vaccine ($360).[204][205][206]Religious and conservative groups
Opposition due to the safety of the vaccine has been addressed through studies, leaving opposition focused on the sexual implications of the vaccine to remain. Conservative[207][who?] groups in the U.S. have opposed the concept of making HPV vaccination mandatory for pre-adolescent girls, asserting that making the vaccine mandatory is a violation of parental rights. They also say that it will give a false sense of immunity to sexually transmitted disease, leading to early sexual activity. (See Peltzman effect) Both the Family Research Council and the group Focus on the Family support widespread (universal) availability of HPV vaccines but oppose mandatory HPV vaccinations for entry to public school.[208][209][210][211] Parents also express confusion over recent mandates for entry to public school pointing out that HPV is transmitted through sexual contact, not through attending school with other children.[212]Conservative groups are concerned children will see the vaccine as a safeguard against STDs and will have sex sooner than they would without the vaccine while failing to use contraceptives.[212] However, the American Academy of Pediatrics disagreed with the argument that the vaccine increases sexual activity among teens.[213] Christine Peterson, director of the University of Virginia’s Gynecology Clinic, said “The presence of seat belts in cars doesn’t cause people to drive less safely. The presence of a vaccine in a person’s body doesn’t cause them to engage in risk-taking behavior they would not otherwise engage in.”[214][215]
Parental opposition
Many parents opposed to providing the HPV vaccine to their pre-teens agree the vaccine is safe and effective, but find talking to their children about sex uncomfortable. Elizabeth Lange, of Waterman Pediatrics in Providence, RI, addresses this concern by emphasizing what the vaccine is doing for the child. Lange suggests parents should focus on the cancer prevention aspect without being distracted by words like ‘sexually transmitted’. Everyone wants cancer prevention, yet here parents are denying their children a form of protection due to the nature of the cancer—Lange suggests that this much controversy would not surround a breast cancer or colon cancer vaccine. The HPV vaccine is suggested for 11-year-olds because it should be administered before possible exposure to HPV, but also because the immune system has the highest response for creating antibodies around this age. Lange also emphasized the studies showing that the HPV vaccine does not cause children to be more promiscuous than they would be without the vaccine.[212]Controversy over the HPV vaccine remains present in the media. Parents in Rhode Island have created a Facebook group called “Rhode Islanders Against Mandated HPV Vaccinations” in response to Rhode Island’s mandate that males and females entering the 7th grade, as of September 2015, be vaccinated for HPV before attending public school.[84][212]
Physician impact
The effectiveness of a physician’s recommendation for the HPV vaccine also contributes to low vaccination rates and controversy surrounding the vaccine. A 2015 study of national physician communication and support for the HPV vaccine found physicians routinely recommend HPV vaccines less strongly than they recommend Tdap or meningitis vaccines, find the discussion about HPV to be long and burdensome, and discuss the HPV vaccine last, after all other vaccines. Researchers suggest these factors discourage patients and parents from setting up timely HPV vaccines. In order to increase vaccination rates, this issue must be addressed and physicians should be better trained to handle discussing the importance of the HPV vaccine with patients and their families.[216]Ethics
HPV vaccination has been controversial. Some researchers have compared the need for adolescent HPV vaccination to that of other childhood diseases such as chicken pox, measles, and mumps. This is because vaccination before infection decreases the risk of a number of forms of cancer.[217][218]Public consensus typically agrees with the need to vaccinate; with some of the controversy around the rollout and distribution of the vaccine. Countries have taken different routes based on economics and social climate leading to issues of forced vaccination and marginalization of segments of the population in some cases.[219]
The rollout of a country’s vaccination program is more divisive, compared to the act of providing vaccination against HPV. In more affluent countries, arguments have been made for publicly funded programs aimed at vaccinated all adolescents voluntarily. These arguments are supported by World Health Organization (WHO) surveys showing the effectiveness of cervical cancer prevention with HPV vaccination.[219]
In developing countries, cost of the vaccine, dosing schedule, and other factors have led to suboptimal levels of vaccination. Future research is focused on low-cost generics and single-dose vaccination in efforts to make the vaccine more accessible.
You’re not just mixing apples with oranges, you’re confusing vegetables with fruits.
“What if citizen-x and deflationista are the same person, just bipolar?”
That’s what I believe, except that at this point I truly believe it’s a bot. One plays Good Cop, the other plays Bad Cop. But if they’re human, they’re both welcome to swing by my place and get some personal disrespect. I’ll look into renting a gorilla suit for the occasion.
Oh, I doubt it, Mr. R. That much talk usually means little action. But he can always come to my house and try starting something. I suck at finishing novels but am uncommonly good at finishing the troubles others start with me.
The trick to saying kiss my ass… is having an ass to kiss in the first place. This is difficult for a robot, but a real cyborg might be able to pull it off. (‘Pull it off.’ Ha! And remember: to reconnect your faux butt to your chassis, align the buttocks properly, making sure it’s NOT upside down, take a screwdriver [phillips] to your bellybutton and screw your ersatz ass back in place.)
And remember: righty-tighty!
” ‘rare pleasure’ ”
What a lovely little nugget! More and more, the musical composers who rely or lean heavily on sampling and looping have shown to me the validity of an art form I once deemed cold and robotic. (Much of it is, altho that kind of reflects the time, so I suppose it’s valid in that sense as well.)
They’re less architecturally built constructions — like written sheet music — or spontaneous employments of music theory — such as jazz — and more like little museums of dreams woven together in surreal fragments. Composition via musical deconstruction.
Done well (like ‘rare pleasure’), and the effect is like a slowly melting hall of mirrors. 🙂
I’ve probably shared this before. I’m reaching the early senilic stages of unwitting repetition. But it’s my fave sample-based music:
***
Mr Roboto: perfect proofreading fits your profile as I’ve experienced you and you’ve described yourself. Def’s doesn’t match his. He comes across as an impulsive intuitive hothead like me (Robin bows), and we all know my proofreading scarcely exists.
Nah, he’s a robot. Can I prove it? Almost certainly not. Is my opinion a refutable hypothesis? Perhaps but only under special circumstances. Do I care if my assertion is right or wrong? Noope. Rhymes with poope. Some call this stoop(e)ing to conquer, but it’s worse than that: it’s me stooping down to get another whiff of that odd odor def emits, just so I can go “Ewwwww…..”
***
https://yournews.com/2021/10/02/2231096/ai-powered-dod-data-analysis-program-named-project-salus-shatters-official/ is mistitled. Should read: Facebook Shuts Down AI System After Bots Create Language Humans Can’t Understand***
“Fuck you- you scumbag pos….You are one mentally ill f’d up pos- scurry away assclown.”By being so mean to me, you’re getting that much closer to truly impersonating a human being, for sure. That is so awesome for a robot! Keep at it!
For a human being, it would be too pathetic to even be pathetic, more of a flaccid pointlessness, like a mosquito with a loud buzz but no stinger.
But for a robot, it’s really impressive.If it makes you “feel” better, you managed to make me sad despite being a robot. Again: winning!!!! I recommend that you double-down on the contemptuous invective, come back at me twice as hard in the same obviously limited and formulaic way. That will surely convince us that you’re a real human being not a robot. Trust me! *smooch*
Point:
The Singing Capon… as S.J. Perelman deswcribed Nelson Eddy: “Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald (or, as Perelman dubbed them, the Singing Capon and the Iron Butterfly)”
Counterpoint: One of the Butt sisters
Synthesis: Something Like That
Statistics galore, their context’s a bore, don’t bother me until someone dies next door. Alfred E Newman
” “Uranian”. I had to look that up. Robin, is that you?”
Not I, sir. I only flirted with an alias for a) experiment and b) to make a point. Both completed, I am indeed Robin Morrison aka Bosco Horowitz.
But it was great fun being madamski, and she was great for my fiction-writing.
***
Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Amazing Content — What Does That Mean For Humans?
So. Very. Formulaic.
Also, you will notice the total absence of typos and spelling errors. Maybe deflationista can insert some ‘random error’ algorithm into its code?
It’s not that def doesn’t sometimes raise some valid points. It’s that those points are always filtered through a singular focus: mistrust of vakzines is So. Fucking. Stupid.
Everyone has a bias. Circumventing that bias is always a challenge for persons seeking to retain an open rational logical mind. Trolls, human, robotic, or cyborgian, ignore that challenge in themselves while obnoxiously foisting it upon others.
If you’ve met one argubot, you’ve met them all.
deflationista must be Latin for ‘escapist denial by ad hominem jive’. It would be fun to watch except I feel sorry for deflationista — or, as I feel is most likely the true case for d’s identity, I feel sorry for the ‘bot writing under that name.
“Getting chilly now, but working is easier in the cool weather and the air is fresh and beautiful this time of year.”
Thanx for the snapshot, sumac. As a yopung drifter, I picked a lot of fruit in the Yakima Valley. Orchards were like a second home to me. Hobo’s paradise.
Whoa. How’d I get here, he asked himself? 😉
At this point, it appears almost inevitable that we will hit a grand slam: revolution, collapse, a genuine plague (the vakzine disaster kinda reminds me of how Stalin is believed to have deliberately salted Ukrainian farmland to starve the Ukes into submission), and an increasingly likely WWIII.
Much calamity, jah. Caesar will not be spared, I think. I suspect we’ll see a renaissance of crucifiction as a politically torturous art form.
In other news: why is Zuckerberg changing the name of FB to Meta? Putting aside the obvious delusions of world domination that these financialized zombie-bots entertain, there is also the mundane fact that “Facebook Sucks” has become a universaly expression?
Some musicology:
Anecdote: the other day, some youngblood in Fred Meyer walked about defiantly maskless. Eye contact with him inspired a fierce paranoiac defiance in his eyes: he was being as brave as he knew how. On a good day, I’d’ve demasked and bowed, but I was feeling poorly, and just winked.
Later that same day, I had to return to the store. I’d forgotten my mask. It was fun walking about bare-faced. (I’ve done it before but mostly don’t cuz it makes people nervous and won’t change a thing at this point. The agitprop opportunity has passed.) Nobody said or did anything about my masklessness. Hardly even a curious look. But then, I was smiling radiantly, and all people could do upon seeing me was smile back.
We like smiles, we dooz.
Daughter VERY sick with covid. Unvaxxed because other health conditions exempt her medically. Her landlord is an old school cowboy and has offered her Ivermectin (he keeps horses). Don’t know if she’s taken any yet; she and I are deeply estranged so I get news 2nd-hand from my darling wife, the former Mrs. ex-Colonel Sherburn’s wife, known in reality as Diana Morrison, Queen of Me.
Xmas appears to be the pimple-popper that will upset this insane mass hypnosis applecart, what someone here referred to (in desperation) as “the Stockholm syndrome writ large”.
As contrarian as ever, I ask us how we expected to reduce our overgrown population other than some dire catastrophe? We surely wouldn’t do it rationally, gradually, civilly. That’s now how humanity rolls. Something had to give. How much of the covid pandemic/vakzination quagmire is deliberate culling, and how much is just our usual willingness to make ourselves rich at others’ expense? Who knows?
But the planet would surely appreciate it if we did it via a plague rather than nuclear bombast.
So, in a kinky sense, I’m rooting for both covid and the vakzines: we might get humbled fast enough by population loss to be unable to start a nuclear exchange. But then, I’m an optimist, albeit a gloom’ndoomish one. 😉
“Once a few celebrities and congress critters start taking dirt naps, then it’ll begin to dawn on people. ”
Agreed. Das sheeples are hungry for a new media message messiah. The old one is looking ridiculous at best and nasty at worst
I just cited when the word and the concept called socialism first came into parlance, R, to point out that capitalism(s) has/have been dominant longer than socialism(s) have been around. That’s all. What do you expect from a 15 year old girl anyway?
Me, I like socialism, whatever the fuck it supposedly is. I like the emphasis on ‘social’, which is the primary substance of any political system. I understand there’s a spectrum of not-entirely-capitalist economies, and that some of those non-entirely-capitalist approaches are loosely labeled ‘socialist’.
I also understand that none of these systems — cap, soc, com — have stood the test of enduring historical time and are all virtually in collapse because none of them adequately divorced themselves from virulent capitalism. Hence the vaccine metaphor. You do know the difference between a metaphor and a comprehensive definition?
It’s one thing to put words in a man’s mouth. That’s bad enough if sadly common. It’s another to put words in another man’s mouth and say he doesn’t even know what they mean. First you step in it, then you put your foot in your mouth. Why do you do that?
The problem with passive-aggression is that it ends in aggression. Me, I’m aggressive-passive. You can figure out the rest. Nothing personal my ass.
I’ll give my money away locally from now on and stick to reading Charles Hugh Smith.
The study concerns households and larger cloistered environments like schools, which few appear to be seriously considering reopening. The words ‘public’ and ‘outdoor’ appear zilch in the article.
Households/schools are contagion environments almost impossible to control, which is why nursing homes and hospitals are notorious places to catch a wicked bug, and why PPE is so adamantly demanded in healthcare facilities these days.
(My wife works in medical admin. Local major hospital sent letter explaing that further practitioner privileges in said hospital depended on passing a $25 test to ensure practitioners had masks and they passed some kind of proper fit test. Three days later, another letter said, Cancel that. Most likely because the insurance comapnies, who probably instigated the first letter, discovered that there are no guarantees with this stuff, and the legal wrecking ball could swing both ways in subsequent litigation. In such cases, bureaucracies prefer to stick with silence than stick their neck out. The requirement was reduced to ‘wear a mask’ and follow pre-established guidelines for dealing with previous bad bugs like MRSA, requirement my wife’s practitioners were also familiar with and performed often.)
The article is rife with statements like this: “Most studies were underpowered because of limited sample size, and some studies also reported suboptimal adherence in the face mask group.”
This I agree with: “Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids (36). There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”
I wear the nice home-sewn face masks, made by my wife, in public more to make everyone feel safe. As the numbers rise, I am switching to my own sockmask design, which actually fits snugly and doesn’t pressurise at critical junctures creating vent jets like all other masks do except some high-techs made with modern form-fitting materials (and are probably uncomfortable).
“We did not consider the use of respirators in the community.”
Respirators, while uncomfortable, work far better than a loose-fitting mask like 99% of the people wear. If we had a disease prevention program instead of Fauci’s Farce, we’d have a zillion of ’em pre-made and arrangements to convert factories overnight to produce a gazillion bazillion more in short order. THat issue is separate from What Is Known to Work and What Isn’t or Doesn’t.
“In this review, we did not find evidence to support a protective effect of personal protective measures or environmental measures in reducing influenza transmission.”
Neither did I find in this review a basis to conclude that PPE Doesn’t Work.
Someday, maybe, we’ll be able to distinguish politics from epidemiology, although the similarity from harmful pandemical pathogens, and electoral republican democracy is rather striking.
Certain fetishist and probably many Islamically raised males should like this:
As for capitalism vs socialism, etc.: since I’ve compared pathogens to politics, I’ll note that capitalism is a slow-moving virus that very gradually infects the whole populace asymptomatically relative to nasty pathogens like Ebola, they produce in time more total devastation than any other system outside of despotic tyranny.
Which is what capitalism has turned into long before socialism as even coined as a word (early 1800s).
“Socialism emerged as a response to the expanding capitalist system. It presented an alternative, aimed at improving the lot of the working class and creating a more egalitarian society. In its emphasis on public ownership of the means of production, socialism contrasted sharply with capitalism, which is based around a free market system and private ownership.”
Socialism and communism are failed vaccine attempts to curb the destructive and impoverishing tendencies of capitalism, a cancer that is the other opiate of the masses, and feels good until it doesn’t, whereupon it then feels very bad.
My son the skater lives in downtown Seattle. I sent him this letter just now:
BLM made you want to help. Here’s a way to help: a large part of the Capitol Hill thing population was homeless people who enjoyed a space where cops didn’t hassle them and good food was reliably available.
Now that the cops have chased BLM out, the homeless are most likely taking the worst of it. The cops will surely use this as an excuse to harass them elsewhere. Not too far, just away from the de-re-militarized zone 😉 .
You could make up a buncha sandwiches, including lettuce, toms, etc. — these people rarely get fresh veggies/fruit, and hand them out. Also, sani-wipes. Tampons for the ladies. $30 and an afternoon’s skating around the area would make a lot of outcast people surprisingly happy, although the expressions of gratitude you’ll receive will range from tearful thanx to shove-off grunts. People living exposed like that to both the elements and the sordid social facts of our culture, tend to become emotionally calloused.
Media/culture tells us it has to be big to make a difference. This is, imo, partly because that makes easier targets for them to manipulate or even destroy. LIfe is composed of little things. The personal and singular is powerful, very powerful. It’s where all the real action happens.
Best to bring a buddy with you. The homeless are mostly harmless and mostly good if fractured people. But sometimes there’s a serious paraschizo, someone like that, and they are hell to deal with alone.
And of course, skateboards make great weapons/shields.
But that’s just precaution. The biggest danger from the homeless are fleas and disease.
One wonders: bug out to where?
Any survival primer that tells me to not help others reminds me of why I don’t read survival primers. I get the rationale, particularly regarding mob midst-dom (that portmanteau went too far, jah?). But death already has my number, one day is as good a day to die as another, and our selfish genes steadily conquer our humanity by this divide’n’survive thing that got us into this mess in the first place. I submit that, in such times, there is more worth dying for than living for. I don’t mean as in suicidal escape but as rreasons to continue living, period.
Genetically, it sucks. The most cooperative and caring typically get taken out first while the more selfish and callous win the spoils. But genes are mindless drones. The will to survive foremost is, for this bleeding heart, where the currency of life experiences moral deflation.
Reminds me of the ending to William Gibson’ short story, Dogfight:
“A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate. To get drunk or stoned and talk it up, going over the victory time and again, contradicting himself, making up details, laughing and bragging. A starry old night like this called for big talk.
“But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to.
“Nobody at all.”
Invest in burkha futures now! Get in on the ground floor!
I think BLM is neither a sack of shit nor a sack of gold. It is the usual mixture of both. SOme brave bright kind people in BLM and some other types including chickenshit pedantic callous people.
Like any group. Like any church I’ve seen. LIke any town council meeting I’ve attended. Like high school. KIndergarten.
Like my old man said, “You get that many dogs together there’s bound to be a son of a boitch in there.”
BLM is a label. The thing it labels is manifold, various, overt, and covert.
“In this particular sense, there’s no fundamental difference between someone like Julian Assange and someone like Eckhart Tolle. You might object that one of these men is in prison and the other is enjoying what appears to be a fairly cushy and unmolested life, but there’s a reason for that: our rulers don’t understand just how threatening the expansion of inner consciousness is to their empire. If they did, old Eckhart would be rotting in a prison cell just like Julian.
“Sociopaths don’t understand the inner dimensions. They don’t really have the cognitive software for it. They have an acute understanding of how to manipulate language and information in order to get what they want, but the notion of honest introspection with the goal of truth for truth’s sake is wholly alien for them. Someone who sees the world as a field of potential assets to be exploited will never think to look inside themselves and consider how they might be misinterpreting reality, but they will see attempts to interfere with their toxic agendas in the world as direct threats to their ability to get what they want. Which is why Julian Assange is in prison and Eckhart Tolle is not.”
I love Caitlin.
An example of how inept our USA society/system has become:
Mr. Bean should do a riff on this.
Remember this guy? Now, he was competent. Competent tends to look extreme to us anymore:
SIlly naive hopeful me (I still smoke hope) wonders if this will produce some cross-spectrum solidarity between left and right activists.
Hope for what? Not for some kind of revolution leading to a Better Way. I guess just hope for a moment of group quasi-sanity.
I’m experiencing hope inflation: so much hope, so little left to hope for. For me, it’s no longer the thing hoped for so much as the exercise of hope itself.
GHive this man the Fukuyama Award:
“Following Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the United States’ subsequent inconclusive wars in Afghanistan (2001–present) and Iraq (2003–2011), initiated by US President George W. Bush, Professor Gary Weaver and his co-author Adam Mendelson, writing in 2008, cited a survey of 109 historians, 99% of whom rated Bush a “failure” as president, two-thirds rating him the “worst ever”. Weaver and Mendelson wrote that the United States had been in its “childhood” before 1898; in its “adolescence”, 1898–1945; in “young adulthood”, 1945–1991; in “adulthood”, 1991–2001. Weaver and Mendelson, from their 2008 perspective, anticipated that the traumas of the George W. Bush presidency would “season [the United States] with new strength, wisdom and maturity”, enabling it to move forward from this political midlife crisis.[7][page needed]”
New strength, wisdom, and maturity. Uh-huh.
It’s like a chart for the essentials of what we’re watching and fearing:
I wonder how this might fit, metaphorically speaking, today’s general culture:
“Possible mechanisms for this behavior include Hamilton’s selfish herd theory, neighbor copying, or the byproduct of communication by social animals or runaway positive feedback.
Characteristics of escape panic include:
Individuals attempt to move faster than normal.
Interactions between individuals become physical.
Exits become arched and clogged.
Escape is slowed by fallen individuals serving as obstacles.
Individuals display a tendency towards mass or copied behavior.
Alternative or less used exits are overlooked.[4][6]”I think zerosum wrote that wiki. 😉
PLus ca change:
“W. R. Anderson in his column Round About Radio, published in London 1945, where he wrote: The simple truth is that you can get away with anything, in government. That covers almost all the evils of the time. Once in, nobody, apparently, can turn you out. The People, as ever (I spell it “Sheeple”), will stand anything.[19]”
from wiki article on etymology of sheeple
I’m a hermit. Scheduled auto maintenance made me leave the house. Alone. Without my wife. Very dangerous for everyone. Oh, I can drive. But I’m the social equivalent of a coyote in a suburban cul de sac trying to find its way out.
Wise-cracking with the service tech about our masks and other quarantinoid artifacts, he soon displayed a savvy perspective on the basic covid situation. He knew the numbers were going through the roof, that we’d blown our shot at preventing a pandemic, that our leadership, local, federal, and global, had failed us miserably.
Walked outside. Old town Beaverton. Old school bar, surprisingly unyuppified unti you look close and realize that the neo-yuppy Mills and Genzers were getting pretty good at convincing retro decor. Including genuine old school lonely sots drinking beer alone at 10am.
Everywhere else, people wore masks.
Not inside the bar. I saw 4 people. No masks. Alcohol apparently does kill brain cells. Still, a tiny transgressive part of me cheered, because bars have always been zones of rebellion, and rebellion is my favorite conformity.
While the Portland and Seattle metro areas seem to have begun their covid cycles with a milder version than, say, NYC, we also had (iirc) the first reported USA case of a young healthy person dying of covid.
It rains alla time here. Oh, it’s nice, sun comes out every few hours, the rain is mostly gentle, the temperatures mild.
But we don’t get much sunlight vitamin D. I think that when covid really get its roll on here, we’ll see a lot more people getting really sick who are not compromised by other malign conditions.
“soldiers… are also becoming less-than-peasants”
As opposed to their former mere peasant status, that is. Anyone who works for Pharaoh gets the shaft unless they can ingratiate themselves to the inner circle.
“The paradox exists, observes Perelman, because of the circular logic of capitalism. Economists argue that farmworkers earn low wages because they are not highly “productive”; that is, collectively, they generate low profit per worker. But that’s because everyday food sells cheap, and it’s cheap largely because many of those who produce it earn near-starvation wages.”
Food grows in supermarkets. I pick food there all the time. Thew wages are so bad I have to pay them to let me pick food.
Underneath all this is the fact that, ever since humanity learned to create reliable food surplus, organized violence, gang warfare, has been the most “profotable” human activity: steal the other guy’s surplus through coercion or the threat thereof.
The people who produce this surplus are less-than-peasants.
Now that science has produced a reliable surplus of advanced kill-tech, soldiers (except mercenaries, who market themselves at high prices to exploit opportunities/fill troop shortages critical to moving violence-based profits forward) are also becoming less-than-peasants:
“The butterfly swarm of American flags spawned from the ruins of 911 has since metamorphosed backwards into the larvae of yellow Support Our Troops ribbon magnets. By 2010 they will rehatch into homeless veterans holding Anything Helps-God Bless signs, but today, May 19th, 2004, USA flags made in China are still prominent in tiny Beaujolais Flatts, flapping like applause for the pretty ladies who, smiling in the face of an aggressive paparazzi wind like Marilynn Monroe, struggle to hold down their light summer dresses frisking naughtily like unruly puppies jumping to be picked up.”
from this damn novel that is somehow being completed despite my wastrel ways.
JohnD: I just hum along with the words. Only Zappa song whose words stay with me are those to Camarillo Brillo, that strangely rhapsodic (listen to the guitar work) ode to hippy sleaze. Oh, and some of I Am the Slime and The Torture Never Stops.
from The BIggest Myth article above
“And you’re an agricultural economy, so food prices spiral out of control. You’re trying to import food, you get hyperinflation. ”
We’re a petro-economy, and shale oil is a joke, one whose punchline went stale awhile back. We can no longer militarily coerce other nations to continue the petrodollar system that lets us afford foreign oil; so as soon as the other nations find a way to remove themselves from that system, we’ll have hyperinflation.
But yes, for now, we could print enough money for everyone to practice a nationw-wide lockdown and get this virus thing under control (in this case, ‘virus thing’ means both the covid pathogen and our out-of-control gov/corp-controlled media (yes, that’s a verbal paradox, Mr. Chesterton; now, back to your grave, sir: you dead) and not experience hyperinflation.
But we haven’t, and so we now move toward increasing poverty and its attendant civil unrest.
