boscohorowitz
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” It is ridiculously easy to gum up the works…especially for passive/aggressives such as myself.”
HA! YOu made me laugh! A solid old man wheezer! Graci. I go now to enjoy the suggested music.
Hardly known, these guys. Leader of Big Country teams up with Nashville sionger-songwriter. Sadly, Stuart Adamson, BC’s leader, hung hiumself not long after this record’s release.
With superior lyrics like these, for example:
You don’t mess around with a man in black,
You will say something wrong that you can’t take back,
You wll go for a ride in his automobile,
To a spot in the woods, just over the hill.
No, you don’t mess around with a man in black.
You don’t fool around with a woman in red,
You’ll wake up alone in a cold, barren bed
And she’ll empty your pockets and tear out your heart,
And leave you the wounds of a life torn apart.
No, you don’t fool around with a woman in red.
Oh, you never make deals with a man named Doc
Or you’ll have a gun in your hand by twelve o’clock,
‘Neath the sodium lights with your heart in your throat,
Your life won’t amount to a bottle of smoke.
No, you never make deals with a man named Doc.
Don’t bring me your tales of temptation and loss,
The rags of your dreams, your shattered cross,
You see, I’ve heard your confession, I know just who you blame
And if you had it all back you’d just lose it again.
You can’t think on redemption if you aint saved,
Don’t tell me your tales of temptation and loss;
Don’t bing me the pieces of your shattered cross.Let’s enjoy some AMericana:
The irony of donning blackface makeup to avoid wearing a mask tickles my funnybones.
JohnD: it must be hard having to do both parts of the call’n’response work song by yourself:
btw, the latter link is a terrific song. Here it is live with a top band and a sexy stretchout:
The transition from resource-rich globalization to resource-poor balkanization>tribalization is in progress. Nothing will stop this short of a miracle. Monolithic Orwellian police statism has already happened and is in major decline, it being an artifact of globalization.
Personally, if we are to ban books, I think we should ban the works of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Ayn because she was a sociopathic fruitcake, George because his dystopian vision of human society assumed Modernism’s belief in an infinite supply of energy by which Pharaoh could ever expand and tighten his control.
Ancient Egypt was a water empire. Modern Euromerica ia a fossil fuel empire. It’s been a long long time since slaves dragged bricks to the pyramid building complex. Large monolithic totalitarianisms are great fun for scaring the shit out of oneself but they are so done, so 20th century. 1984 is 36 years behind us. Slavery and oppression will have to constantly downsize with the general positively entropic flow.
Regional plantations based on feudal peasantry seem to be the first step on our voyage backward through the history of human civilization. The descent of man. A Second Fall, if you will. Before moving to Portland I spent almost 30 years in Spokane. Spokane lies NE of the Inland Northwest grain belt and Hanford Nuclear Reservation. A downwinder, I was, breathing lots of Round-Up and radioactive fumes. Makes a man tough. 😉
Just south of Spokane ends the Palouse, a plateau of ridiculously fertile soil hence the wheat fields. I watched McMansions (and 1 or 2 real mansions) get built on 10-100 acre parcels (about 7-70 football fields). Perfect size for plantations although I highly doubt any of the doctors and lawyers who bought these parcels think that way at all. They like the tax write-off, luxury views, and the notion of turning those acres into vineyards.
But those who manage to hold on to these properties will probably provide their children with the basic requirements of a plantation… if they can hold onto it when ammunition becomes a primary form of currency.
This assumes, of course, an absence of thermonuclear rain, which is always the biggest invisible elephant in the room, the one we rarely talk about.
What to do?
This desert bombshell was named Priscilla:
So was this bombshell:
I like the Taleb quote about freedom/academia.
Credentials. Here’s an example of credentials: USDA CHOICE. (for those outside USA, that is a standard of meat quality as certified by the USA Dept of Agriculture.
Thing about both Mockingbird and FInn is that they’re unique masterpieces of rare order. Both are close to plotless, especially Mockingbird. Both pull readers in effortlessly, altho Finn struggles with the transition from river-rafting to the Duke and Dauphin second half. Both books make you think without being overtly polemic.
Remember how HUck eluded capture by pretending his family was dyng of smallpox? See? Covid-relative.;)
Speaking of Edgar J, he of the lovely cashmere bustierre:
Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets
“In 1971, a group of Vietnam War protestors broke into an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents, in a heist that shocked a nation.”
Oh, I fully agree with you re: the stench of Herr Fauci. He stinks, is obviously mostly venal and narcissistic in his professional focus. He seems quite capable of being as cruelly selfish as the article describes. I know he is: I watched him tell us all not to wear face masks.
But I persistently beg us to distinguish reactionary villainy from proactive villainy. Most of the time, I see these guys being reactionary, usually to cover up previous botched bullshit. Fauci et al don’t know how to do anything in their jobs, iot seems to me, but the same old self-serving same old until it all caves in on them. One trick poodles, like my fave punk band name: The Exploding Fifis.
I have difficulty seeing them as someone surfing a self-designed wave. I see them surfing the trough between their fuckups and their ability to paper them over with big guv/big money $$. THe troughs get fatter with each self-rescue, it becomes almost a way of life for them. But the fatness is deceptive, and the troughs get riskier each time.
Fauci won’t survive this one, I feel certain. I don;t think anyone released the virus on purpose. I think they’re too busy covering the discrepacnies between what they say they’re doing (i.e., being necessary, honorable, and competent) and what they actually do, i.e., being unnecessary, dishonorable and incompetent.
WHile they appear stupid enough to try and manipulate events by introducing a weirdo flu, I don’t think they’re bold enough. They just naturally fuck things up and pretend they know what they’re doing as they try to exploit and cover up their fuck ups.
So yeah, I have no problem with the chain of data pointing to Ft Detrick, etc, I just take issue with the concept of pre-planned conspiracy in a way that could cause them major risk. These are products of post-WWII uber-rich governmental bureaucracy. THey hide behind bales of money and boilerplate, both stacked pallet high. The enemy is not so much the rats in the ship but the ship itself, functionally rudderless in real terms but so long as they can project convincing illusions on the sail canvas, they can tell themselves they have a hand on the helm. The people, being products of the same massive hive mind created by moidern culture and WWII, tend to believe the illusion with them… until they don’t.
Hmmm… one wonders if a string of high-profile assassinations won’t soon appear.
BUt I’m just laying anti-devil’s advocate here for sake of discursive rigor and data hygiene. I certainly don’t believe that mere morality would stop these creeps from doing somethiong like releasing a pathogen to further their cause. If they’ve become stupid enough to actually do such a thing, it’s because they’ve become too complacent.
Fact is, that however this virus came about, they are unable to control any aspect of it except how they pad their pockets. And that only goes so far…
I have no use for Fauci or Cuomo, but facts is facts, and there’s a whole lot more context involved in the Do Not Resuscitate thing:
EMTs have stopped taking people in cardiac arrest to coronavirus-strained hospitals
“Under the rule, “if you can’t get revived on scene, that’s it. They’re going to work on you, but if they can’t get a pulse back, they won’t transport you” to the hospital, the worker explained.”
Apparently, maybe 3-4 out of 100 people brought to the hospital dead do a Lazarus after EMTs cannot resuscitate them. The EMTs still did their 20-minute resuscitation.
Meanwhile, there’s this:
“ABC reported earlier this month that the Regional Emergency Services Council of New York was told not to transport anyone to NYC hospitals if they cannot be saved in the field, due to an overwhelming number of coronavirus patients with ambulance crews and emergency rooms struggling to keep up.
“It almost seems like it’s never stopping, people keep coming and coming and coming and there’s just no space to put them,” ER Dr. Darien Sutton told ABC.”
from this:
NY’s total deaths pass 15,000; do-not-resuscitate guideline rescinded
As for the intubation craze, this is interesting:
“We expect that during the COVID19 pandemic, physicians will be pushed to intubate and perform CPR on patients who would not want these interventions done. Not only will this cause personal harm to the patient (broken ribs are common, for instance), but it will also risk high-level exposure to those who are involved, potentially putting numerous doctors and nurses in isolation for multiple days or weeks.”
from this (March 31):
advance-care-planning-coronavirus-evan-shannon-abraar-karan
Here’s the thiong about corruption, deception, etc. It’s like dead fish. You put a dead fish in with a buncxh of anything except quicklime, and pretty soon everything smells rotten. The podcast points out that Fauci indeed is a huge bureaucratic jerk with suspicious aspects, but its connections between a b c etc… are rhetorically twisted in a non-scientific way, where I’ve looked into them.
Even when I personally sympathize with the cant of an article’s bias, I call assumptions what they are: assumptions.
That Fauci is a liar is obvious. That he is doing what he has always done: exploit a health crisis to his professional advantage, also seems to fit the evidence. That science as an institution has been deeply corrupted is also decently well known and hardly surprizing: science is the most powerful commodity to be had. Power tends to corrupt.
But, for example, Peter Duesberg fried his own ass (I read his book challenging the HIV virus ages ago, btw) without Fauci’s help. He has been less than scientific, accurate, or forthcoming in his challenges to the HIV etiology theory and responses to rebuttals.
I fgind again and again that these alternative investigative journalists lose some of their due diligence as reporters in the process of going against the grain. With some, it’s because they’re self-promoting charlatans. With others, it’s just zeal.
There is certainly something rotten in Denmark, but just cuz the stink covers the city doesn’t mean the entire city is the source of the stink.
fwiw, an interesting fact about Fauci:
“Fauci was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Stephen A. Fauci and Eugenia Abys Fauci, owners of a pharmacy.”
I have google altho I need to stop making it so easy for Big Bro to sniff my crotch:
coronavirus utah gov case-counts
sans google, the article itself p[rovided what we call “links”. LIke this:
“Fact free” is not not just untrue of the Utah article in the prosaic sense, it’s also an oxymoron. Nothing is fact-free. Even Alice in Wonderland is filled with facts, like that rabbits tend to go down burrows.
We may be unwitting drivers of extinction events, but even the hermit thrush can make beautiful noises like these:
Old headline from March 16 (Glenn Greenwald):
“How Jair Bolsonaro’s Son, Eduardo, Confirmed His Father’s Positive Coronavirus Test to Fox News, Then Lied About It”
And now, today:
“Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro ordered to wear mask in public”
The expansion ad absurdum of overall political reality appears, like the financial bubble, to be capable of expanding seemingly forever. But it’s not. One can hear the squeak of a zillion bicycle tire air pumps working to keep it from collapsing. But all that added air pressure is not just artificially maintaining the bubble’s girth, it is also steadily increasing the size of the hole in the balloon. When that hole exceeds the ability of all the king’s pumpers to maintain sustaining pressure, the collapse will be swifter, I personally fear, than anyone but a coked-out Hollywood director of disaster films can envision.
“Atlas Shrugged” my ass. Atlas collapsed under its ignorant hubris.
Trump and Bolsonaro are both standing on poitical quicksand.
“On April 19, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, climbed onto a truck outside army headquarters in Brasília to fire up protesters who were calling for a shutdown of Congress and the Supreme Court. Soon after, according to Folha de S. Paulo, he learned that federal police were investigating allegations that one of his sons, Carlos, runs an online fake-news network that may have inspired the protest.
“On April 24th Mr Bolsonaro sacked the head of the federal police. Hours later the justice minister, Sérgio Moro, resigned. He accused the president on television of “political interference” in the police to shield his family.
“Mr Moro’s resignation is the biggest political blow to Mr Bolsonaro since he became president at the beginning of 2019…. “People are starting to say: ‘I was wrong,’” says Renan Santos, the leader of the right-wing Free Brazil Movement, which organized protests against Ms Rousseff and initially supported Mr Bolsonaro but now calls for his impeachment. For the first time since 2017, Mr Bolsonaro has lost Facebook fans.”
Deepstates have to exist whenever the size of the group under governance exceeds its ability for group members to reliably know who’s doing what. Shadow government is the norm considering that virtually everything to be governed happens in shadows invisible to us.
Knowing who the major players in shadow governments rarely does any good. The shadows remain and the deposed despot is almost instantly replaced by someone more or less as bad.
It took us around 10k years, we believe, for humanity to expand from tiny tribes and tiny confederations thereof, and a population estimated to be closer to 100 million that a billion, to megapolises of 10-20 million, a global population pushing 8 billion, and the concept of tribe turned into vast useless territory labels armed with nuclear missiles.
It will take maybe 100 years to reduce that population by half or more, and shrink government to tribal-sized confederations.
‘Government itself can’t solve this problem’: Florida officials alarmed as virus rages
The headline says it all. A problem, uniquely suited to the kinds of universal global authority that only a government with monopoly on violence under rule of law, is deemed insoluble by government. Monolithic authority structures require monarchic consistency to remain monolithic and in control.
The government tells the people it can’t fix a problem of the type for which government is tolerated by the people.
My son reminded me of this little treasure.
“Is it possible to find out who “THEY” are?”
This assumes that even “they” klnow they’re “them”. The Wizard of Oz was perhaps as deluded by his side of the magic screen as the munchkins.
I wrote the following in spring/summer 2016:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Strauss_and_Neil_Howe
Here is America’s history of that 80 year cycle:
I do know for certain that Hillary does not have it in the bag. Innarestin’ observation about an 80-year cycle in American history:
Revolutionary War: economic predation by British government, economic collapse, civil unrest, a war, a president not elected (Ben Franklin’s little remembered shadow presidency while the colonies were getting their post-revolutionary act together), major major reform legislation passed afterward (starting with the Constitution and the D of I). 1773-74<> 1781-83, followed by period of prosperity and Era of Good Feelings
Civil War: economic collapse, Lincoln nominated by contested convention in a very young party, revolutionary politics (secession), a very big war, major major reform legislation passed afterward (13th Amendment), then boom after economic boom (and many busts) and the joy of finally being in accord with our Declaration of Independence and national ethos.1855-1865
WWII: economic collapse, FDR nominated by contested convention, revolutionary politics (New Deal), very, very, very big war, followed by an incredible economic boom like never seen before in history, and matching explosion of freedom, opportunity, pleasure, enlightenment… utopia was in our sights in those decades 1932-1944
Depression of 2008 (shrunk and held off for a few years by endless money printing made possible by petrodollar USA dollar strength), Bernie heading to a contested convention, revolutionary politics, endless war 2008-2016
Let’s hope that 2016 is the genuine end of American warfare abroad; because if Empire USA doesn’t back off, it will not only collapse but will get taken down by the rest of the world who think maybe it’s time we felt what it’s like to have bombs rain down on OUR cities.
Cycle rational: after 80 years, no one is alive who remembers what happened 80 years before. In between each cycle — 40 years each side — those who lived through it are getting old and their ungrateful sissy kids are taking over. (Yea, Boomers! Say it proud!) They do good for a bit. But they discard the advice of their increasingly old, ‘out of touch’ parents and grandparents, and soon it’s Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama and here we are, top dead center of the cycle again, about to elect a revolutionary president, about to start our own warring just in time to join WWIII: the Big One, for reals.
We want a wise human being at the helm when that happens.
There. My inner oracle has left the building.
<end>A wise human being unavailable in an electorally winnable fashion, we got the next best thing: a loose cannon with an uncannily strong instinct for survival. We appear to be bypassing the contested convention pattern and aimed instead at a contested election, one that can’t be papered over this time by the Supreme Court.
P.S. Quote of the Day: “Please allow me to direct your consciousness back to MIT 1972…”
Quit bogarting and pass the joint, John. 😉
“The last shred of power the elites hold is the belief of the masses that the elites are still in control. I understand the natural desire to believe somebody’s in charge: whether it’s the Deep State, the Chinese Communist Party, the Kremlin or Agenda 21 globalists, we’re primed to believe somebody somewhere is controlling events or pursuing agendas that drive global responses to events.”
(accept my edit, robot! allah wills it!)
“That’s where Wile-E-Coyote looked down. Do you think it was 2016 or 2017?”
Adding the concept of inertia to the graph John Day mentions…
… I’ll say that the food riots in Egypt in 2005, re-“colorized” as Arab Spring democracy envy, mark when the slowdown in acceleration of food supply first made itself significantly known. The flattening of the rising supply curve first made itself known here. Before then, all we complained about was pollution and the McDondsification of global culture. Food shortages still happened, but were perceived as being caused primarily by political factors.
my parents said know made a very useful venture: that enough increased homelessness will mar our voting process so much it will not be trusted by anyone… and bingo, de facto civil conflict. I’d say that the national WIley Coyote will look down then and realize that his Tesla Air Shoes aren’t holding him up, that the once refreshing wind is really increasing air passage as one descends at the terminal velocity rate of socioeconomic gravity (someone here has en economics equation that will fit the bill), and the once charming view of distant third world nations that were once groovy tourist spots where USA greenbacks held enormous purchase clout, is becoming the rapidly magnifying view of the 4th world — Euromerica in full collapse — approaching as one falls with a concrete parachute.
“Where did the rational cooperation go, which brought our species to this point? I’ll put forward that it works against the power of our elite owners for us to rationally cooperate with each other. They need us to pay tribute, follow their orders and hate each other, though mostly passively.”
Many people believe that government control, especially ‘deep’ or ‘shadow’ government control, require sophisticated concepts and advanced technology.
Only the latter is true, imo, and that advanced technology needn’t be ‘ahead of the curve’. It needn’t be mysterious ET/Tesla theremin music secret technology.
There’s little need for MKUltra CIA-mind control zombie agents. Mysteriously controlling the weather with giant antennae and aluminoid chemtrails is what Dr. Evil mad scientists do, not what bankster-funded military-industrial-corporate complex gangsters do.
They use simple means: divide&conquer. Control of money system. Control of existing media. (Notice how much they’ve sucked at using the internet. They’re NOT innovators.) Covert assassination. False flag catastrophes (which are ridiculously easy to do). Thoroughly corrupted police departments (which practically corrupt themselves, anyway; as all insufficiently monitored power centers do).
Oh, in many or maybe most cases, they use better versions of existing technology. Their surveillance bugs are probably better than Radio Shack… but probably not by much, cuz that’s actually super-simple stuff these days.
Most of all, they exploit an ancient technology: human nature. They watch everyday people, studying them with cold, clear lynx eyes of simple logic unfettered by a need to see themselves or the world as good. Superior psychopaths understand key aspects of human nature much better than the humans they manipulate.
They see most of all how we love to split up into camps of kindredness. Racism, ethnicism, nationalism, denominationalism, conservatism, socialism… many thousands of subshades in a vast spectrum… who all act the same: when challenged, or when feeling superior, one group will gather and hoot insulting or threatening noises at another group, which almost immediately responds in kind.
They see us for the primates we are precisely because they lack what we call “a heart”, that set of emotions that urges us to be more compassionate and loving but also urges us to savagely attack anyone who in anyway threatens that for which we love and feel compassion.
They manipulate that primitive primal behavior program as easy as throwing a big rock in a pond to scatter the fish.
That’s all. The rest is just nuance. We have met the enemy, and it *still* is us just as much as it is those who gladly do evil upon us.
I’m kinda happy to hear that, Raul. Maybe a wander in the mists awhile will provide a more rewarding perspective.
“To look into the glass darkly has its limitations when the present moment shines so purely.”
I really enjoy this line. Great way to start a creaky Monday morning.
The perspective of time:
“He cannot be scared into resigning. He is a money savant”
Or, another angle: ‘I’m the prez and I can start a war and you can’t stop me and if I start the right war you will be so screwed. I will too but you’ll go down with, and probably before, me.’ Donald is, after all, the world, and the world is therefore Donald, and he therefore owes no one but himself.
You have to admire the Philip K. Shakespearedickian grandeur of these times.
inspired by:
“Under the Volcano is a novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957) published in 1947.
Movie : Under the Volcano with Albert Finney and Jacqueline Bisset ( 1984 )
Against a background of war breaking out in Europe and the Mexican fiesta Day of Death, we are taken through one day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a British consul living in alcoholic disrepair and obscurity in a small southern Mexican town in 1939. The Consul’s self-destructive behaviour, perhaps a metaphor for a menaced civilization, is a source of perplexity and sadness to his nomadic, idealistic half-brother, Hugh, and his ex-wife, Yvonne, who has returned with hopes of healing Geoffrey and their broken marriage.”When he walks from the consul at sunset
Barely remembers his name
Walk is a little unsteady, sadly
But he knows most of all that he’s living beneath the volcano
Won’t be so many more days
Isn’t much time and it’s gathering darkness, my friend
He’s been going too far in his drinking
Running a little too fat
Eyelids becoming so heavy, sadly
But he tries not to sleep while he’s living beneath the volcano
Won’t be so many more days
Isn’t much time and it’s gathering darkness, my friend
Though the fireflies laugh in the dusklight
It’s the Festival of Death
Crowd is all laughter, it’s hollow, sadly
They may kill death tonight, but they still live beneath the volcano
Won’t be so many more days
Isn’t much time and it’s gathering darkness, my friend.(Edit-bot: flee.)
I haven’t implied a connection tween the two, zerosum. The ‘molecular’ Hans employs is metaphorical. It isn’t partisan and isn’t necessarily issue-driven either. I prefer the term ‘anomie’ myself.
If some twisted elitist creeps decide they can further their cause by releasing wildly uncontrollable apolitical non-ethnic unracist pathogens into the atmosphere, well, what’s another dumb little mistake?
They are that stupid, and stupidity is dangerous, yes. But focusing on the stupidity is also stupid and dangerous. Looking to entities who only know how to parasitically empty the sytem on which they depend, for insight into resolving the problems is not entirely useless but far less useful than ignoring the fuckers and aiming at the vacuum you see them creating:
The one with the ever ballooning deficit
Pharaoh wants all eyes on pharaoh. Ignore him. Like Jesus said to Saqtan, not ‘I’m-a kick yore ass, boy’, but rather, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Get a life, even. Be quiet, boy, grownups are busy.
I say: reverse Gandhi’s strategy: first they ignore then they laugh then they fight then you win. But since it’s all downhill from our end, you cut straight to the part where you ignore the fuckers and do what’s necessary.
Accept my edit!!!!!
Behold the social cohesion provided by WWII. Gubmint didn’t have to bribe ’em to write music like this. Everyone in USA was on board with WWII… like everyone in the other nations involved.
It would almost be a kindness for some nation to pick a fight with us. Maybe we could pay someone to invade us.
Obviously, if we want that kind of causus belli public support, we’ll have to goad someone big into getting nasty. Better to be conquered by oneself with someone else’s help than do it alone.
Milkman keep those bottles quiet
Can’t use that jive on my milk diet
So milkman keep those bottles quiet
Been jumpin’ on the swing shift, all night
Turnin’ out my quota, all right
Now I’m beat right down to the sod
Gotta catch myself some righteous nod
Milkman stop that grade A riot
Cut out if you can’t lullaby it
Oh, milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet
Been knocking out a fast tank, all day
Working on a bomber, okay
Boy you blast my wig with those clinks
And I got to catch my forty winks
So milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet
Now noise of the riveter rocks, don’t mind it
Cause the man with the whiskers has a lot behind it
But I can’t keep punchin’ with the victory crew,
When you’re making me punchy with that bottled moo
I want to give my all if I’m gonna give it
But I gotta get my shuteye if I’m gonna rivet
So bail out, bud, with that milk barrage
Cause it’s unpatriotic, it’s sabotage
Been knocking out a fast tank, all day
Working on a bomber, okay
Boy, you blast my wig with those clinks
And I got to catch my forty winks
So milkman, keep those bottles quiet
Oooo, milkman, keep those bottles quiet
Oooo, milkman, keep those bottles quiet
Quiet!btw, Nicole’s insistence that Raul is pro-Trump is the literal end of discussion. When someone tells you they know you beliueve X despite you repeatedly claiming otherwise, verbal communication short of leave or get hammered is over.
Oh yeah, lots of civil disruption. MOstly of the molecular variety:
I am currently reading Among the Thugs by Bill BUford. A chapter at a time. My old heart can’t take emotional pain like it used to. Amazing read.
Regarding “photoshopped” politician: I can see why you say that. YOu may just be joking but it does like pasted in. But I think it’s just an artifact of contrast.
“No use saying that I’m not, and never have been, even Nicole, bless her heart, said: yes you are!”
SInce I’ve managed to entertain, I will share the following intro to a short story collection I will probably never write:
The world went giddy on coal fumes. Visions of the future ranged wildly from quaint notions like a ‘radio musical box’ to ‘teleportation’ (coined in 1931 by Charles Fort) between Earth and Mars or even Heaven and Earth, from Thomas Edison’s anti-gravity underwear in an 1879 cartoon — possibly aimed more at erectile dysfunction than humanity’s ladder to the stars — to H.G. Wells’ more adventurous discovery of Cavorite in 1901’s The First Men in the Moon. Miracle after miracle emerged: dead men singing from gramophones; live men singing from hundreds of miles away through a radio; cinema’s silver dreams with hints of television visible through Emperor Ming’s televisor; aeroplanes in genuine flight. A cult of science was born, Scientism, a temple of patented wonders gleaming alluringly through the pages of early science fiction like teenage lust steaming through illustrated manuscripts. This changed when we atomically bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil geniuses lost their monopoly on doomsday bombs and visionary research was taken from brave if eccentric millionaires and bureaucratized into government research complexes. We trust evil geniuses more than the government, and NASA’s budgets would never have been cut if the spaceships they produced had been sleek and sexy, especially if they’d lied us to us about alien life on Mars half as much as about WMDs in Iraq. Martians would’ve made a more inspiring Cold War nemesis than a bunch of miserable Russkies yearning for American refrigerators. We live now in Modernism’s cultural hangover, too sick and weak even to give it a name other than post-Modernism. Even as the Singularity looms near, all we have left of The Breathless Era is the pulp of its fiction. You can surround yourself with steampunk artifacts and gloat over them nostalgically. You can collect every episode of The Wild Wild West where the stereotypical midget/hunchback/lunatic evil genius was born. You can huff old H.G.Wells stories raw from the test tube. You can revisit the earliest Gernsback magazines. But you cannot replicate, even with a van der Graff replicator, the belief held at that time that with Science anything was possible: invisibility rays, force fields, anti-gravity waves, sex beams. Not a wormhole in sight nor a speck of dark energy/dark matter on Professor Foreigname’s nice clean lab floor. But the Sense of Wonder is not dead only dormant. Awe seeps from fissures in the published page, and men again dare dream that science, mere science, will give them a righteous buzz if they read it on the subway to work.
<end>But I may write those stories after all. If I actually knew what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t.
And now, it is time for me to shut up again.
But I want to share this observation: here in Portland, OR, when Goodwill reopened, wife and I expected a major crowd.
Well, there was a modest line outside but nothing significant. Except at donations. The line of cars dumping off old stuff was like a Mardi Gras parade, lasted throughout the day, best we could tell, and was still pretty long just a week ago.
More people lining up to dump off old stuff than linging up to buy it.
I would love to hear Nicole analyze and explain this phenomenon. I have a gut sense of it, but se makes such good sense of such bizarre phenomena that I get a woody listening.
Years ago at a giant flea sale, I saw a WWII US war bonds poster. It’s punchline was: you’re making more money than ever, and with so few things available to buy, what excuse have you to not support the troops? Words to that effect.
We’re printing a lot of money but making less things. No, I’m not predicting a Big War, altho it’s highly possible. I’m just saying that the rich elites are drowning themselves in their own money like a gangster drowning in a pile of cocaine. THe money velocity grinds to a halt, and their wealth collapses on them. Happy jubilee, rich suckers!
I don’t think the holy books are to blame for patrimony. Larger body size, upper body strength, and aggressive tendencies are what have driven patrimony. In smaller groups, it’s no big deal. Accountability happens in small groups, period. There’s no hiding. But in the large groups that civilization conjures, the male tendency to form groups that kill members of the opposing group, warfare, aka male coalitional violence, puts men in de facto charge.
Women can manipulate men in various ways, but in any group, the only way to stop male dominance is to take a club to the fucker’s head when he doesn’t expect it. That is the language most males speak.
I like to remind people that Eve tends to get the blame but Adam was so dumb he’d do anything to keep on getting laid, including do what his woman said rather than what God told him. But somehow women were considered the weaker-minded of the sexes. YOu can’t argue with ignorance except with a baseball bat.
I don’t think the holy books are to blame for patrimony. Larger body size, upper body strength, and aggressive tendencies are what have driven patrimony. In smaller groups, it’s no big deal. Accountability happens in small groups, period. There’s no hiding. But in the large groups that civilization conjures, the male tendency to form groups that kill members of the opposing group, warfare, aka male coalitional violence, puts men in de facto charge.
Women can manipulate men in various ways, but in any group, the only way to stop male dominance is to take a club to the fucker’s head when he doesn’t expect it. That is the language most males speak.
