boscohorowitz
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There once was a man named Frank. Really. He’s dead now. He was a fine mechanic, with a special affinity for diesel engines. He knew how to use machinery. When he bought a new house in the country, he rented equipment and drilled his own well, ran the plumbing, etc. He knew how to use machinery.
This did not prevent him from thinking in stark black<>white terms. When he bought a new camera, a first generation digicam, he turned the setting all the way to bright, took a picture. It was a snowstorm in a sunny day, a white blur. He turned the setting the other way. It was a foggy twilight in the woods.
“Bah,” he said, chucking the expensive item into the trash. “This camera’s no good.” (His son retrieved it later and used it happily for many years.)
I see the same polarized reasoning in global climate debate. The world is getting warmer; the world is getting colder. Changes in global climate patterns are entirely natural; global climate changes are entirely anthropogenic. Bah! Throw the notion away!
Record early cold/snow in some regions. Record blistering summer temps happening at the end of spring elsewhere. The glaciers are a fraction of what they were (true). Glaciers are currently making a comeback (I trust this to be reliable haven’t researched it myself.) etc. etc. etc.
It’s nonsense on both sides, often orchestrated by the usual sociopathic ruling suspects to aid their need for power and wealth. A plethora of misguided but neatly expensive “green” proposals are proffered and often funded via taxation. Meanwhile, alternative approaches that would help us conserve energy (always a wise thing) are mostly ignored, probably because they don’t make the Usual Suspects (US) rich enough, plus they’d actually work to reduce per capita energy consumption, often without requiring constant maintenance and replacement, both of which concepts offend US, since reduced energy consumption reduces profits from energy sales and our dependence on those who claim ownership of energy resources, while things that don’t require constant replacement offend US because they go against the sacred cow of Planned Obsolescence (PO, in case I need that acronym in a bit).
Newsflash: whatever is causing the current erratic climate, it takes ENERGY to deal with the consequences. Another reason to conserve energy now, regardless of carbon footprint politics, one’s sense of energy entitlement, or one’s desire to share the wealth with, say, poor Africans, etc.
So we are wise to move toward lower energy lifestyles for reasons so plainly obvious that they are virtually invisible t us, because we largely ignore fundamental reality and instead focus on text and virtual talking heads to tell us what is real and what isn’t.
Who the fuck cares what Al Gore said? AL Gore is a schmuck who gleefully plundered Russian resources when he and Clenis were in the catbird seat and the former USSR was not yet modern Russia, and deeply vulnerable to such meddling.
Who the fuck cares what extravagant claims some nerd with a Ph.D. said 20 years ago about snowfall becoming a rare miracle? He probably said it for political reasons, which is to say that he probably made the more arrestingly dire remark he could make without going into horror overdrive like ‘your grandkids are likely to die of thirst, exposure, starvation, blah blah blah. People like nice soundbites not too crunchy but not too mushy.
Who cares how much of the verified, indisputable Global Climate Disruption (GCD) is anthropogenic or ‘merely’ natural? We know that rogue asteroids are not at all anthropogenic but we also know that the only thing that will stop the next inevitable globally significant impact is wee(sic) humans. It’s our problem and we have to either fix it or someday experience global catastrophe to put nuclear winter to shame.
Even if we really can start colonies on mars, the problem exists there to. Asteroids don’t care. Get in their way, they’ll smack you.
If people insist on discussing these very real and genuine problems in terms handed down to them by politicians and talking heads, they deserve to eat their words, or have their children eaten by their grandchildren. Especially when they do so while mocking the very talking heads and politicians from whom they take their conceptual formats for apprehending and discussing this problem.
Newsflash: the climate is going nuts, there are 7-going-on-8 billion human souls vulnerable to these effects, and the very largeness of said population (the triumph of humanity! we rule de earth! woohoo!) makes the size and scale of the catastrophe too large, too hot/cold, to handle, that is, mitigate somewhat, which is all we can expect, without at least *some* surplus energy at our disposal.
But all we seem able to do is fling poo at each other in opposing camps while somehow managing to avoid doing anything even remotely practical or effective. Soon, we will wish we at least had poo to fling, because a) the ability to poop means you’re being fed, not starving, and b) poo makes good fertilizer for growing food.
The sole saving grace I see in any of this comes from that notoriously brilliant crankhead, Dimity Orlov, who informs us that Rosatom has nuclear powetr tech that actually work, is reasonably safe, and can run for a decent while, providing a time in which we might, just might, pull our collective head out of our communal asshole and work to gradually scale down our population and per capita energy consumption to a point where our descendants might live on a level higher than wearing furskins and trading dried fish and slaves.
Political solutions are dead. Politics is an extension of war by other means (Clausewitz must’ve been dyslexic.) There is war ahead. Beyond that, the usual digging out of the rubble to greet a new kind of bleak terrain.
But please, let’s fling more poo. It’s what we *do*.
“mass debtors prisons – oh sorry that’s right they are here now and they are called the suburbs, where you get carpet and netflix to help you sleep so you can go back to planet raping jobs each morning and get that old trophic pyramid sucking life out of population feed lot centres (called cities on fake news stations) through a tube to the Cayman Islands.”
Wow. That’s a powerful analogy. After owning (paying mortgage, that is) our home for 20 years, wife and I live in some so-so apartment complex.
I call the apartments prison cells, but never thought of it so vividly as oxy has here.
Oh well. How we treat the lesser beings is ho we will treat each other. Anyone here ever worked in a slaughterhouse? Or feedlot? Isaac B. Singer, I think it was, said that every day is Treblinka for the animals we’ve decided to exploit.Karma is a bitch. For the remaining feral animals, it’s an ongoing eviction from former habitat.
God’s Covenant With Noah from Genesis 9 in the Bible:
“1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. 4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.”
Amazingly, most Xtians read this as God giving humanity a charter to ‘have dominion’ over the environment. I can only read it as something closer to a curse. Not a punishment, just God saying, ‘O goodness gracious. You people are so fucked. You are going to eat this planet — and then yourselves — alive.’
I looked up Vindman this morning and perused his wiki and a few other mentions. Colin Powell redux. He’s been licking military arse for 20 years after getting a bit of glow-time in his youth in a PBS documentary on immigration.
I’ve got underwear older, smarter, and cleaner than this creep.
And that bolded text you cited:
“The only reason for Trump to risk asking a foreign leader for help getting political dirt on an opponent is that he feared that rival’s power.”
It’s Dead On Arrival to anyone who considers that there are many reasons why a president would ask for an investigation into a crooked senator working the dangerously antagonistic ground under Russia’s belly.
There are also many kinds of power that a rival might challenge, including a sitting president’s ability to breathe should a bullet enter his body.
“Brand name ketchups: Ah but to dream!”
Where I first learned about this awhile back:
Back while a pizza cooks me lunch.
SYlvain LaForest raises some terrific notions. The *effect* of Trump’s actions (described with the pill/aftereffects metaphor) seems pretty much as described. Trump might even have been smart enough to plan his actions this way.
But I don’t know how intentional or witting those actions were. Another perspective could be that Trump simply says it like he wants to on any given day, cuz that’s Trump.
The author kinda stains themselves with this:
“Terrorism and anthropogenic global warming will jump in the vortex and disappear with their creators.”
I’ve watched global climate change for a long time. I’ve been watching Peak Oil since ’75, altho the name wasn’t around back then that I knew of. Yes, we are influencing the climate. The climate ia very finely tuned, very complex system., Such things are very susceptible to changes in their dynamic balance. The fact that this means that sunspot activity, major volcanic eruptions, etc., can also disrupt this balance is not evidence against anthropogenic influence in global climate change, it is evidence supporting the basic concept of anthropogenic climate change (AGC), which is that any significant different input into said system will produce significant change.
FWIW, the person who popularized AGC was MAggie Thatcher, and that shaved cunt did so to stomp on Welsh coal miners, who were an ornery bunch, a real force to be reckoned with. She stumbled upon AGC and saw it as a tool to make people believe that Coal Is Bad. I don’t recall her objecting to North Sea oil drilling/production/consumption.
She has previous experience in shafting (ouch!) coal miners:
“But in his search for cash to clear the tips, George presented the families of Aberfan with a bill for £250,000 (later reduced to £150,000) which he slyly called “a local contribution”. It would come from the charitable fund that had been set up to alleviate suffering and rebuild the community. George – a socialist later ennobled as Viscount Tonypandy by Margaret Thatcher – had behaved in a way that shamed and angered other Labour figures. The money was rightly repaid (at modern standards) by Labour’s Ron Davies and Rhodri Morgan many years later.”
As I recall, the repayment was kinda shitty, too. But the point here is that she had no trouble with a fellow his peers saw as disgraced. Speaking of disgrace:
Yet Another UK Politician Sex Scandal Involving Pedophilia
God loves a fool, they say, which is the only way in which I can think of Trump as any kind of Chosen One or righter of wrongs.
Trump’s verified history shows him as a man of minimal conscience at best, but he is Trump, not Trump-bot. He is what he is, and he is willfully independent and disruptive. But his presence is useful at least in the short run because he won’t march to any drum but his own. Confusing this independent streak with morally virtuous fortitude is not justified by what’s known of his history.
Any swamp-draining he does, any bank-busting he does, is most likely for three reasons: one, to show those fuckers he is too better than them (after every bank in USA blacklisted him because he prefers not to repay bills unless forced to, two, because anything that makes people say, ‘Yeah Trump! is not just manna but necessary life-giving oxygen to a seriously insatiable ego (probably created by deep wounds in his early childhood along with a probable genetic predisposition toward sociopathy), and c) those fuckers want to kill him for being who he is and prez at the same time.
“bosco, no idea what happened there, I was trying to fix the coding error that made all your text bold, and when I pressed Save, it was gone. Sorry for that. You still have it stored somewhere?”
Sorry, Raul. I typed it online.
I know the following logic is indistinguishable from rabid paranoia, but I can’t help but think that all the NSA-ish ghosts in the ionternet have, like all things manufactured by today’s quasi-industry, has gone so wonky it screws up everything. If that tinfoil notion is true, let’s take solace that somewhere deep in the bowels of Langleyville, some spook is saying, “SHIT! no idea what happened there, I was trying to fix the coding error that made all your text bold, and when I pressed Save, it was gone.”
“Anyway, then what do you make of Mueller, since he would have been all over the Russian connections like fleas on a dog. Is he working for Trump? Or Putin?”
Mueller isn’t worth considering, imo, as his final showdown in Congress revealed. He just did what he was told. Wadda maroon! I think the reason they didn’t go after the established money-laundering ties between Trump and (mostly Kazakhstani, as I recall) Russosphere banksters is that it lay too close to the very same grave they are now nonetheless witlessly disinterring. If they went after Trump with genuine verifiable data, that would’ve taken them down too.
So instead, they did the Putin Rigged the Election dance, which has nonetheless brought them to the very same grave of closet skeletons they wished to avoid. It’s a BIG grave.
They acted so because they’re as crazy as Trump, and hardly brighter if not dumber, but Trump has the dubious benefit of the truth being more on his side than theirs.
I believe someone here quoted Hemingway recently. Something like ‘It will end two ways. First gradually, then suddenly.’ While Trump is deep in shit as much or more than they are, he knows it. He’s a Bad Boy, a rebel, and doesn’t enjoy the false sense of protection that these aging political sexbots, and their younger apprentices (anyone care to flesh that metaphor out for us? I’m tired, and a bit scared of where that might go.) So even a crazy, not fantastically bright geriatric with obvious signs of doddering into a nursing home soon, is outfoxing them like Chanticleer on rocket skates.
It’s been great fun, y’all, but I have to run and do some, er, serious writing. Or so they call it. Stuff like this:
“Her brother had been assassinated by a hacked delivery drone. Neat little protuberance at the front of the unloader proved adept at intruding into the dude’s solar plexus after briefly chewing his face with its rotors.”
Not that I’m writing a thriller. Ick. I don’t like having my adrenaline amped unless I’m having sex. But the crazy revenge/societally nihilistic citizen-kills-citizen death toll grows in an up-trending curve every day, and why should guns and knives have all the fun, and why shouldn’t vengeful code-monkeys have a hand in the mayhem? It’s just something I had laying out in my certifiably chaotic notes. A slice of life detail to convey how crazy modern urban life has become.
I talk too much so I’ll lay low for a few days. Yakking in fora and on comment threads is a former bad habit I’d finally broken until Raul, damn his gorgeous soul, lured me in with TAE. So I have to use the gift of online gab as a highly controlled substance.
Wow. I actually conned myself into getting to work. Procrastinate Your Way to Getting Off Your Ass, my new self-help book. Available in finer imaginary bookstores.
“Putin says the US$ is going down right now. No Saudi oil = no Saudis = no Petrodollar = no Fed.”
I totally agree, and the craven selfish part of me wants it to be postponed another year or even two so I can crank some money out to buy some distressed rural property for my kids to escape to.
And while said hope is based on irrational emotions, I think it’s not entirely illogical as a hope. Putin doesn’t want us to crash too hard too fast, imo. That would be a likely gateway to global havoc by the Dukes of Nuk’em.
If they do manage to get Trump impeached, we’re up for radioactive toasting, pronto, I fear. The people will generally elect the best candidate available if the duopoly will let them run a clean-ish election, which means Sanders would’ve been our prez if not for the DNC. Oh, Sanders is by now a thoroughly chastened and submissive sheepdog, but at the time, he was living the dream, i.e.winning, and knew how to work the “bully pulpit” well enough to have prevented the worst of Deep State military shenanigans despite his obvious understanding that you Don’t Oppose the Milindustrial Complex Until You Win Office (and are willing to be assassinated).
But that’s probably just wishful retrospective thinking, cuz even when I was an early supporter of Bernie, I knew that foreign policy was his moral Achilles’ Heel. Like too many Jews of his generation, he had a relatively blind eye toward Israel and all the vicious entanglements comprising it.
“And they can’t show Skripal anymore than they can release Assange. Skripal would tell how he wrote the Steele dossier, and Assange would say who the DNC leaker is. That is to say, both of them would utterly debunk Russia. Again. But it won’t matter. Mueller did that already and facts and reality had no effect on the madness. That’s what madness is.”
Illogical, Captain. Assange surely has left instructions with a trusted deputy or three about how to deal with this situation. Something similar to a ‘deadman switch’ dossier.
I say they can’t release him because that would prove you can fight the Black Knight and win.
There is, I believe, an entire flock of black swans winging our way like chickens coming home to roost after being converted into a secret underground lab into flying monkeysharks with laser eyes.
The painting: I see Dali gently mocking, while cashing in, on the Cubist phase of art fads. It was Picasso who made it work to the extent that it did, imo, and absorbed it into his toolkit and approach. Remove the superficially glaring “Cubist” aspects, and the Dali painting owes more to Van Gogh’s powerful use of rhythmic color shading and Cezanne’s use of quiet hues to bring out light by suggestion rather than direct display… altho the light itself is lost in this, as I’m sure Dali knew.
We are left with something that uses a few semiotic labels (the pipe against newsprint, for example) to mock Braques, whose signature work sucked, imo, altho his earlier, derivative and emulative work (like the sample below) at least had joy, light, and color.
Braques Digs Fauvism and Cezanne
As for Trump/narcissism: the kind of insecure arrogance that NPD typifies is more likely to say ‘I don’t care what you think’ than not. But the actions will reveal otherwise.
Not that I think that having NPD is cause for political crucifixion, because:
A) everybody in this life is nuts in some way
B) in politics, being somewhere on the sociopathic/narcissistic spectrum is practically de rigeur.
The thing about Trump is that his NPD is so pronounced that, coupled with being raised as an elite and Trump’s lack of management skills, it sticks out like a sore thumb, in great part because Trump never fit in with the Good Old Boys’ Club. They don’t like him and he doesn’t like them, a mutual revulsion based in great part on Trump’s inability to go with any flow but that of his screamingly wounded existential ego, and on how it makes him not just unwilling but virtually incapable of following The Rules of said Good Old Boys Club.
IMO, the sole reason Trump is more fit to be in office than any of the so-called “reasonable” clowns (including sacred cows like Bernie Sanders and whomever the Right once saw as their Great White Hope (McCain? Colin Powell??? I stopped tracking that side of the fence awhile ago seeing as how the GOP went off the rails entirely with the (s)election of Dubya and the resurrection of the dreaded Neo-con/lib swamp things he brought about), Trump’s one superior saving grace, is that he follows his own nose. Not with integrity either moral or strategic, but with a dogged determination that makes him like a cross between a loose cannon on deck and the Energizer bunny.
I’ve always believed he didn’t want to win, just show that he could. But a week or so before the actually election day, he suddenly conformed and did what the teleprompters bid. Back then, he was still deep in hock to Russian sphere ganksters/bangsters(sic). I reckon they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: win or else.
If anyone confuses that concept with the cracked glaze of ‘Putin got Trump elected’ bullshit, they deserve to be forced to attend every speaking event that Hillary and Clenis can still manage to get, paid for or not. And have every porn viewing they attempt thereon show Ms. Pelosi’s eerily sexbotic face. Imagine an aging sexbot, past the facelift reclamation phase, time to take off the old head and put on a new one along with the entire dermal sheath and some interior hardware upgrades…)
Trump won the election via his own efforts and the deranged state of the USA plebiscite. But, imo, it was Putin et al who insisted he take the job he’d so diligently applied for.
We live in interesting times. Boredom has become the new national pasttime (or, as we call it now, scrolling Facebook).
After all, if Donald lost, it would’ve been Hillary, and we’d probably be vaporized ash spread over the biggest mass grave since the dinosaurs cashed out.
That’s my story and it’s sticking to me like an iron logic straitjacket. (‘Veston detroit’ for those who speak wannabe French. I do. Ask me how!)
In the end, it’s just another Old Fart at Play
What about that Middle East, huh?
As Vietnam Vet often reminds us: only now we have hypersonic nukes. Still, I’d rather be instantly vaporized than set on fire or hacked to bits.
Waddya know. It’s Sunday. Let us pray:
Black swans need not be large. Sometimes a small polyp or vascular obstruction can radically later history:
Trump makes sudden medical visit
I don’t think he’s particularly ill. More likely he’s taking advanced security measures these days so he doesn’t take a bullet.
Also, from the article:
“She added that Trump met with the family of a special forces solider who was inured in Afghanistan while at the facility.”
Even major name brand journalism can’t write above a 6th grade level anymore. “inured”?
Seemed like good music to admire one of Picasso’s giddier experiments in multiple perspective.
Theoretically, low sunspot activity reduces global Terran temperatures. After a decade or three, the sun comes out of its frigid phase.
Ever take a frozen roast out of the oven and cook it at a high temperature?
Burnt on the outside, raw and bacteria-frenzied in the middle.
That’s where I see us circa 2050.
When it comes to weather, about which everybody these days talks and does a little bit of everything but actually deal with it on the ground level where we experience it, instead using it to make more, uh, money, I hear little mentiion of ye olde Maunder minimum
Relating the above to now:
Did someone say Russia?
I had a nightmare about Epstein last night. He was stalking me, probably because I believe he’s still alive. (Call me crazy! Be the first! Avoid the rush!) He didn’t know what to do because every time he got close, I whomped on his ass.
It seemed to confuse him. Not used to people whomping his ass, it seemed.
I honestly can’t take seriously any discussion of anti-Jewish/anti-Israel bias that calls such bias ‘antisemitism’.
Arabs, last I heard, are Semites. It has the same ignorant ring I hear from old school traditional conservatives who deem criticism of the United States of America ‘anti-American’, as if both American continents were subsumed by the United States thereof. Well, they can wish all they want but it ain’t gonna happen.
Personal opinion is that Picasso’s Cubist work works best when the Cubist aspect is minimal, as in this picture. What makes Cubism work (when it does), imo, is when it captures different angular aspects of light, not different angular aspects of a painted subject.
Like this picture. We don’t play Where’s Waldo looking for the flowers allegedly in a vase. We look at a French press and breakfast details and admire the subtle light/color nuances.
Reducing the discourse and editorial opinions on TAE to some non-defined common denominator like “rightwing talking points” sounds indistinguishable to my ears from stereotypical “leftwing talking points”.
Drivel, whether polarized toward today’s quasi-conservative or quasi-liberal asymptotes of ideology (anyone remember “nabobs of negativity”?;) ), is drivel.
Let’s form high school cliques and fling poo, shall we?
I decidedly hail from the left-wing side of politics, and, like Raul, get sllimed with this ‘rightwing’ bullshit.
Bullshit is bullshit, and such name-brand ad hominems as moonraker slung is not even bullshit. It’s steershit. TAE deserves better.
“Thanks to the false charges made by James Comey, John Brennan and others that Trump was a running dog for Vladimir Putin…”
Funny thing is, I think in many ways Trump is in thrall to Putin. Certainly not as the dumbocratic party claims. Trump was elected by Americans with an amazing amount of help by the DNC, not by Putin in some Wizard of OZ fever dream.
But Trump listens to Putin, admires, likes, and often defers to Putin.
I personally think that is a very good thing that helps prevent horrors like escalation into nuclear conflict.
I perceive Trump in thrall to Putin because Putin does POWER extremely well, which Trump admires, and because Putin doesn’t dump on Trump unless Trump makes a glaring dumb-ignorant-crazy thing. Even then, he makes his critique about Trump’s actions about the actions, not Donald.
He lets Donald be Donald on the world stage, treats him seriously, gives him a sense of stature and dignity that encourages Trump to behave responsibly.
But then, Putin can afford to do this, because he has more power than any single man on the planet right now — and he knows it. Trump seems to know this too, and doesn’t antagonize Putin more than is needed to sustain a semblance of independence and whatever that MAGA stuff is supposed to mean.
Putin is a savvy kid who roe through the ranks of one of the world’s most perilous bureaucracies at a time that bureaucracy was navigating the collapse of both an empire and domestic government. Rose to the top. Kicked out the foreign banksters. Balanced the budget. Solved the military problem posed by a rabid run amok USA military.
We have CIA/NSA hacks who rose through the ranks of a majestically bloated and incompetent bureaucracy rivaling, maybe surpassing the decadence and folly of the dying USSR bureaucracy. They’ll go down as the ship goes down. If we’re lucky, some savvy USA Putin will end up trying to hold things together here in the States. But that’s AFTER the collapse of our empire and domestic governance.
As a lifelong power junkie with a full-blown NPD jones for power and praise, Trump is at least smart enough to defer to real power when push comes to shove. Seemingly, the rest of the USA establishment seems determined to force Putin to place our collective head on the curb and stomp till it stops oozing.
Regarding Wisconsin et al:
“For more than two decades, “Parchman Farm” was his most requested song. He dropped it from his playlist in the 1980s because some critics felt it was politically incorrect. Allison explained in an interview, “I don’t do the cotton sack songs much anymore. You go to the Mississippi Delta and there are no cotton sacks. It’s all machines and chemicals.”[14]
from the wiki on Mose Allison
P.S. The Picasso deserved a repeat, intentional or not. It is the most luminous piece from P’s “cubist” still lives I have seen. The colors are like stained glass.
“DC bars to open early for impeachment mania”
They seem to have a form grasp of what’s going on, and what remedy is available.
Raul is a very nice guy who insists on guests at TAE behaving civilly. So I’ll use a cheesy ellipsis and say I can’t imagine a woman fucking restless941111 without being paid heavily, in advance. But that’s just me.
Spleen satisfied, I’ll note that consenting sex between persons under today’s Legal Age is one thing; consenting sex between persons under legal age and powerful rich men old enough to be their father, is another.
But hey, the dude paid her $$$, so that makes everything kosher, right?
All hail the Mighty Dollar, to Whom we owe all allegiance and from Whom all morals flow…
Amazing that the brilliantly logical Nicole Foss becomes unhinged when it comes to treating Trump rationally. It’s like you must either hate him entirely, or love him with irrational zeal, rather than treat him as a phenomenon with various qualities.
“Together our diet and life history, coupled with an ability to cooperate, made us really good at getting food on the table, reproducing, and surviving,” Kramer writes.”
Same is true of crows, btw. What is “successful species” anyway? We live one individual at a time, we creatures of Terra. If a single death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic, how does that apply to a single life versus a growing population?
We believe in these aggregate abstracts, like: commonwealth, progress, (insert favorite whatever). We don’t know what they are.
Currently, we live twice as long as neolithics, and experience much less pain and illness. But we consume 100-200 times more resources than they did to do so while destroying, as John Day noted, the cooperative basis for existing even at a neolithic level.
Ogg and Grogg both thank you for correcting the benighted historical record and spelling their names correctly.
“We will have to take sociopaths out of power. I’m ready to bell that cat.
Who’s up to help me?hands?
It’ll need to be a bunch of us, and some of us will get killed…
waiting…””
Your applicants will likely be more sociopathic than not. Normal people don’t want to save the world any more than they want to own it. It is wanting to own the world that damages the world so badly it needs saving.
Also, sociopaths are in power for the same reason Trump is in power: our systems are designed by sociopaths for sociopaths, with the rest of us willingly doing the work.
Here’s who will take our sociopaths out of power: foreign sociopaths. Our power grids will take hits here and there, agents provocateur will rouse our inflammable rabble, our currency will become vaporware… here’s who will take the power vacated by our ousted former sociopaths-in-charge: local sociopaths, more of the warlord variety.
Here’s who will get by more than most: decent people who form their own local centers of power and don’t truncate their morals for ‘pragmatic’ reasons.
I would study life in Libya for an instructive example laid out in plainly polarized terms..
Learn how to be trustworthy and how to recognize and trust the same, a skill mostly replaced in our culture by the ability to count money, itself also a fading skill.
Even sane discussions on the topic seem fated to be smeared with nonsense.
The will to power concept is not thermodynamic; it’s based ion thermodynamics.
It is instead a concept to be understood via biological or cybernetic concepts held to tight philosophical rigor.
Personally, I think the only way to commence a solution is through a buncha nuclear exchanges. Wasting a few zillion megawatts of unbridled energy blowing each other to kingdom come should teach us that expanding ever more energy in ever concentrated amounts in ever greater locales is hard to distinguish from an explosion.
As for all this moving around: physical work is done in a specific locale and shouldn’t require megajoules just to deliver tomatoes to the local market. Not to mention that we allegedly live in an Information Economy which, while surely not immune from the laws of thermodynamics, would surely burn less energy if we bothered to consume useful information rather than information that is not only ENTIRELY WASTEFUL (TV, cinema, for example) but designed and employed to encourafge ever more wasteful energy.
We are not going to have a soft landing. Not sure we
ll even make it to the ground before we crash.The writing is densely academic but the writer is a genius, so the difficult passages are worth it, and many passages are not difficult but, rather, delightful. You know those academics. Anyway, folks who regular the conviviance that is AutoEarth can know whether they want to struggle with this worthy tome by their feelings about this paragraph from the book’s intro:
“”Finally, it will have to be shown how the delayed failure of the European dream of universal monarchy supplied the driving forces for the terrestrial globalization process, in whose course the scattered cultures on the last orb will be drawn together into an
ecological stress commune.”https://monoskop.org/images/b/ba/Sloterdijk_Peter_Bubbles_Spheres_I_Microspherology.pdf
I swear, Dr. D, if you turn Ecological Stress Commune into a lazy acronym, I will frown. I will.
(caustically sarcastic William Shakespeare voice): ‘O brave new world…’
“And the Squad of Young Turks, including, “How do you do, fellow kids?” candidates like Warren”
Dr.D wins the internet today.
“Saw this map of remaining elephant populations and noticed most of them are where recently researchers said the origin of mankind is.”
Something deeply poetic about that map and your observation.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Jeffrey Epstein is playing Risk somewhere lovely, luxurious, and secluded.
I find Trump useful at this point in that his personality profile is that which will take down everyone it can if it has to go down. It gives a sense of definition to the chaos. Kinda like nuclear war: there’s no lack of closure. BOOM! and it’s done. I think of Trump as the political hot switch to blowing the entire soggy corrupt edifice into dislocated souffle.
But that’s just a filter I paint over current patterns to make some slight music from their tired bones. A plain-day full-noon sore-thumb wealthy political pedophilia prostitution/bondage global network is displayed on front page news and then disappears with a single unbelievable official account… we’re just waiting for the wrong Archduke Ferdinand to step on the wrong dirty secret landmine…an image that makes the rounds. A spark to ignite the dry public tinder…
Line of least resistance, lead us on…
We do what the glowing screens tell us to. They know the sacred Disney memes that leads the lemmings to the Cliffs of Safety.
