Happy Death to 2010!

Drat! Foiled again! (pronounced Britishly) My nefarious plan to explode upon a miniscule percentage of the American public, bloggage such as had never before been seen, along with the exit of 2010, goes out with a whimper. I had assumed that my computer had a dead power supply and, since it was under warranty, took it back to Rent-A-Center to be resurrected. A week later he is returned and not merely revived, but has had a total wiping of memory, a process they called reseating the memory module. Having a born again computer is cool except that you have to teach him everything from scratch all over again, cuz he don’t know de ja vu. (I have met a few born again Christians with similar problems.)

Abiword, which is my beloved [free] word processor, is reinstalled and running fine, though of course his memory files evaporated into the cyber as well, so it’s back to blogging 101.

I had feared for a while there, that I might have to spend the rest of the year and some of next devoid of quality television programming, but no less a light than that bastion of American intellectualism, the CW, has come through, providing a mind stimulating program about lawyers. But wait! THESE layers are hotties wearing teeny little cheerleader outfits! So who cares if they may not know a salt from a battery. Naturally, the show is called Hellcats. Gimme a ‘G’, gimme a ‘u’, gimme a ‘i’... well. Ahh, the ancients would be proud. Er...actually I think they would be embarrassed at our Puritanical prudishness. Have you SEEN the x-rated art on the walls and floors of Pompeii? And they even had teh gayz too! So, I passed on the Hellcats to watch Keith and Rachel...who never showed up. I feel so rejected!

So anyhoo, I will return next year (I’m fairly confident of that now) and hope to post some blogs of educational value. Remember, I will try to post blogs only on Friendburst, Myspace and Blogger. Meanwhile, gonna try embedding a video and see if that works.

Remember the “futuristic” stuff starts tomorrow.

TRB

DEATH

DEATH

sun shines brilliantly through gleaming, shortening icicle
killing it softly in its beams
a conspiracy of painfully, exquisitely beautiful,
active, sparkling death
making a mockery of
drab, pathetic life.

Temy R. Beal 12/27/10

RATS!

We sometimes hear about how bad a place or situation was when it includes roaches. Someone may have been in a jail or prison that had roaches running around or may have had a bad experience with a motel, restaurant, etc., that involved various buggage. To me these people live in a different world. Oh sure, I have seen nice places which are bug and rodent free, at least as far as I can tell, and have even managed to live in a few such places in the past. No more...fellow travelers are the norm here, even if they sometimes travel through your dinner plate or across your face when you're trying to sleep. The buggage, that is. The rodentry, well, that's a little much.

We have at least two of them now who have decided to allow us to share their home. Sometimes the house is quiet and you can hear a clattering going on in the kitchen...sounds like someone is about to cook supper. So far they have not been that useful. Both my mom and dad told me when I was little that I was chicken-hearted. I didn't think so, only that I was smarter and more cautious than most, when it came to people, and that the suffering of animals did bother me. Still, sometimes conflict simply cannot be avoided. So, I got the trap. Managed to avoid having snapped fingers and loaded it with peanut butter. Set the hair trigger and placed it on the floor between the fridge and a wall, in the major rodent highway.

A while later, during an episode of House, we heard a loud SNAP! in the kitchen. Melinda went to look and announced there was a victim. We decided to wait till morning, when one of us would deal with the enemy soldier. Morning came and I gingerly poked at the trap...something seemed odd. It was upside down, and somehow tangled in the old grate that used to be on the bottom of some fridge. When I finally got a good look at the trap, it was empty. No victim. No blood. Not only empty but...taken apart! The wire trigger for the trap had been removed from where one end was anchored. It's not usable now. No peanut butter either.

Later, in the night, I awoke to find either him or his friend staring at me. I know rodents are smart, they learn. I wonder what the lesson was...? Why was he staring at me? What...it shouldda been cheese!? We finally got the new free cell phone from Safelink. If I find a tiny irate eviction notice on my pillow I will call the landlady. If I find a rat head in my bed I will call 911.

TRB

Dementia and Learning

A few days ago I found a video of a debate between an atheist and a theist. I decided to watch it because the name of the atheist was familiar to me and I don't see him a great deal. It was Peter Singer. It seemed odd though, there was an older man giving an atheist argument, and that was followed by a theist named Hare, and there was continual mention of Peter Singer, though I still had not seen him. I missed the name of the first older man. Finally it was time for Peter Singer to come to the mic and I nearly fell off the couch because it was the same older guy who had been on at the beginning. Say what!? It seems there must be TWO guys named Peter Singer! Now, I'm curious so I Google Peter Singer. All the links I get point to this same guy, an older man, born in Australia, a professor, etc. But where's the other one? The Peter Singer I have in mind, I can kind of picture him in my head, he is younger than this guy, probably is not Australian, and has long curly hair. I know I have read at least one book he wrote but the name of the book refuses to show itself.

It begins to dawn on me that maybe the guy I'm thinking of possibly is not Peter Singer. I know it has to be at least a similar name though, otherwise I would not have thought of him upon hearing 'Peter Singer'. It's driving me nuts, I have to figure this out! I message Blair on Facebook and explain the problem and ask if he knows who I'm thinking of. He responds with a perfectly reasonable suggestion, Victor Stenger, but I check and no, that ain't him. I even go to Amazon and start checking authors to see if I see the name. I know I will recognize it when I see it. Nothing. *sigh* It's aggravating as hell but what can I do, it will show up eventually. I went on to other things online and suddenly I have stumbled upon the guy I was thinking of! There it is, the name that would not reveal itself within my fevered brain. Stephen Pinker! Finally, I can satisfactorily associate the correct name with the mental image I have of a guy with curly hair. Singer, Pinker, those sound similar, right? Stephen, Peter? Well, maybe... is it "just" natural memory quality lessoning with age. Does it have anything to do really with any actual dementia? How could I know?

I won't assume that it is the beginnings of dementia yet. Many years back I read Stephen King's The Stand. Maybe a year and a half or two later I came across an old paperback in a box I was looking through. I started reading and was enthralled by this book and surprised that I had somehow overlooked it before. I was nearly three hundred pages in before I realized...I have read this before! Of course! I know Captain Trips and the walking dude, Randall Flagg. I don't think I've noticeably? deteriorated much since then, so maybe it's isolated incidents. But there was the other thing...

You might remember I mentioned we didn't have hot water in the bathroom. We always did before. Because the bathroom is a long way from the water heater, it takes a while for hot water to get there, so you have to let it run till it gets hot. I know this, I've lived here for years. I would let the water run, I let it run once for over 15 minutes and it still never got even warm back there, much less hot. But Melinda informed me that she had no problem having hot water in there!? Turned out I had forgotten which way you push the faucet for hot. Heh.

There was an incident in which Norton charged me for renewal of their software on my computer. Apparently I had installed it last December and authorized automatic renewal. And forgot. I was stunned to learn I HAD Norton on here...I've been using AVG. Anyway, Norton deducted $70 from my account for that. I lacked about 37 cents having enough, which triggered an insufficient funds fee from the bank for about $29. I got on the phone to Norton and got them to cancel that and refund my $70. It isn't there yet but should be in a day or so. The $29 is out the window. There are two bills left to pay, phone and power, which will total about $250. When I get my $70 back I will have about $160. Obviously one won't get paid. Five months left on paying for the computer at Rent-a-Center. Being without two computers is not an option...may as well get on with the suicide in such a circumstance. Melinda is really perturbed about not having the burial insurance. That's $60. I tell her I have to be more concerned with what is here and now than what might be then and there. It could possibly be thirty years or more before either of us kick off. I truly don't care, even slightly, what happens to my body, or hers, for that matter, when we are dead. But having "insufficient funds" prompts such arguments...while our extremely socialist President capitulates with corporate Republicans to make certain millionaires and billionaires have a few thousand more. It's the land of the free over heah, yanno.

I like learning. Everything from atoms to zygotes holds some interest for me though, now at least, I tend to be more drawn to philosophies for in-depth study. I find philosophy aggravating as hell too, because I like to ask a question and get an answer asap and get on with it, though I'm still not certain of what it is I'm getting on with. It gets really tedious to ask questions and think of a particular thing from every conceivable angle. If you are not used to doing that and you start, you may be amazed at how many possible angles there even are. Endlessly asking questions to which I never have any answers would be a kind of hell to me. But I cannot abide simply slapping an answer on for the sake of having an answer either. I feel compelled to keep pushing until I either decide an answer on this one is simply not yet available or until I find one about which I can say, "Yeah, this is right." Perhaps such a thing inevitably leads to something that at least sounds haughty and arrogant. If I find such an answer, it's a little like discovering gold (or something that actually does have great intrinsic value), and I want to tell my friends...if only you will just dig RIGHT HERE, it's down there, I tell ya! And if they dig there and then look at me like I must be insane because they found nothing besides old corroded plumbing pipes and clay... *sigh*

I wonder if Plato ever thought like that about his Forms? I sure understand how he could arrive at his conclusions...but I don't buy them. I'm currently nearing the end of a course called Death with Shelly Kagan, a wonderfully animated little feller, lol. I don't agree with all the conclusions professor Kagan reaches in the course, but I consider him an excellent teacher for such a course. The last lecture in the series is on the morality of suicide. I don't plan any yet, but well... in the last printed interview John Lennon ever gave he said he didn't have any interest in being a dead hero. Three days later he was (according to many fans).

Socrates was under the delusion that the hemlock was not The End for him, that it was merely the opening of a doorway into another life. Would he have been as jovial about the whole thing if he really understood the truth? Would you?

Places you can learn stuff:

Academic Earth
Seventeen different universities, from Berkeley to Yale. list of subjects.

Forum Topic associated with NPR.

Google Talks

Open Culture

Open University

TED

TRB

I See A Darkness

Anyone who has ever experienced genuine depression knows the feeling. To some it is as a darkness, clouding the mind. It calls to MY mind, the voice of Johnny Cash singing I See A Darkness. I've spent the last couple of days...nights actually, watching lectures from Stanford and Yale on philosophy, political philosophy, neurology and the workings of the brain; watching various documentaries; keeping an eye on the news headlines which continually renew in my Google sidebar on my desktop.

The darkness I see comes in two forms; one is purely personal and subjective inside my head, and the other is a kind of philosophical darkness which hangs like a thunderhead over the affairs of humans. Unfortunately, the latter can too often affect the former. One of the videos I watched about the brain is called controlling the brain with light. If you watch this one, note at about the halfway point (it's only about 18 minutes), that it is possible to use fiber optic light to control a brain, in this case a mouse brain, and you can make him turn left. Presumably, you can also make him turn right if the light is repositioned, but a world of people turned politically "right" too great a horror to contemplate. At the end the inevitable note of caution is mentioned about who will control the technology and for what purposes...what technological advance has never been abused or used for evil purposes?

Not having access to the technology of fiber optics and the ability to insert it into my brain, I had to make do with subjecting myself to daylight, and to a brief bout of strenuous physical activity in order to, hopefully, stimulate the electrochemistry to improve the mood...results are mixed. As to the external sources of darkness, one is the rather astounding things mentioned in this Pat Condell video in which he mentions, get this, one does NOT have to be a citizen of Sweden in order to hold high political office in Sweden. I had to look that one up. "Immigrants resident for three years in Sweden have the right to vote and run for office in local elections." Source. I'm not sure if the mere fact of residing there for three years automatically "naturalizes" a person into being a citizen, but that whole thing sounds fishy to me.

Most of us recognize that there always has been, and always will be, propaganda in politics. Do we not? Do we think OUR country is better than that? Well, our leaders are not. Too often, such talk is dismissed as "conspiracy theories", and there are certainly plenty of those, some of them dumb as rocks. That doesn't change the fact that most people who have great political power do not think any law at all applies to them. The following is part 1 of 9 (please watch them all if you care and can) of a Bill Moyers program which aired on PBS in 1987. Yes, it's a bit dated, and much of it deals with the Iran-Contra Affair, which most younger people probably know nothing about. Still, Moyers is not a name that comes to mind in "conspiracy theories", and the program shows documented evidence of the fact that every president from 1945 onward, has looked into the TV camera and directly and blatantly lied to the population about the various wars and other secretive machinations; Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan... and there is no reason to think that anything has improved in that vein since Reagan. After all, we didn't even have the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, or being forcibly subjected to visual and/or physical sexual assault in order to fly on a plane then.

Question: If the US Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war (and it does, in Article 1, Sec. 8), then why has the US been in so many wars? Do you know how many times Congress has declared war? Five times. The last time we had legitimate cause to be in a war was World War II. It is an understandable and legitimate that we decry our alleged leaders repeatedly getting the nation into illegal wars. But, does it occur to us that there could not be any war - at least not yet - except for the grunts on the ground. Why do they do it? Why do they totally abdicate any sense of personal integrity and moral responsibility. Dubya said that torture was legal because the lawyers said so. So... a war is legal if only the president says so?

Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) states that a soldier is required to "...obey any lawful general order or regulation" Do you doubt there would be an immediate Congressional declaration of war if any other nation attacked us? If Congress has not declared any war, then how is it a legal order, even from the Commander In Chief, the President, to go fight? Fight for what? Does anyone care at all?

I suggest you read Orwell's 1984 (it's free online), with particular attention to the notion of perpetual war.

This? Oh, I just really like the song and video...

TRB

On Justice

The following is a tiny microcosm of what is wrong with the world of humans. We begin with a photo. This is an approximation of what one ounce of marijuana looks like.


picture source

In most areas of the US, the mere possession, especially of this much, of marijuana can land you in prison. The following is taken from what seems to be an advertisement page for a law firm in Pennsylvania. This statute presumably pertains to PA law:

780-113(a)(31): (a) The following acts and the causing thereof within the Commonwealth are hereby prohibited: (31) Notwithstanding other subsections of this section, (i) the possession of a small amount of marihuana only for personal use; (ii) the possession of a small amount of marihuana with the intent to distribute it but not to sell it; or (iii) the distribution of a small amount of marihuana but not for sale. For purposes of this subsection, thirty (30) grams of marihuana or eight (8) grams of hashish shall be considered a small amount of marihuana.

Even a simple possession of a small amount of marijuana charge can result in a prison sentence, a 6 month driver's license suspension and criminal record that make it very difficult to find employment. Source.

Let us contrast this alleged crime to another.

"In one astonishing incident in October 2009 the then vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash, according to one diplomatic report. Massoud, the younger brother of the legendary anti-Soviet resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, was detained by officials from the US and the United Arab Emirates trying to stop money laundering, it says. However, the vice-president was allowed to go on his way without explaining where the money came from. Source.

This is - kinda - what $52 million in cash would be like.

It is quit likely that if you are found in possession of even a "small amount" of marijuana, you will go to jail, possibly to prison for years.

One of the stories about Massoud stated that it was the DEA, the same people who ostensibly will be upset by your possessing marijuana, who stopped Massoud and found his $52 million in cash. Massoud did not go to prison because he was not found guilty because there was no court case because there was no arrest because...? "the vice-president was allowed to go on his way without explaining where the money came from" or, presumably, where it was going or why and he certainly didn't give it up.

"Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night." --HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man

to which I would add, what chance then of survival, hath a mere empire?

TRB

Living in the La-la

It's part of a plot, a conspiracy, to see that I don't blog on anything of substance. Or maybe it's just cuz I be scatterbreained. Been blogging - if you could call it that - about blogging. Starting to sound suspiciously like a guy who wandered off into the desert talking to himself and the voices in his head. Also, I'm drawn, it seems. Like an ex-lover, I was caught sneaking back in the side window of Spazz. Yeah, the tiny blog as crap and there are other problems, but there are still friends there...I still get more comments on a blog there than anywhere else. I am NOT an attention whore, dammit, I just like conversation ariiight! Well. Maybe for now we can have a bit of sharing...I'll try having multiple for a while...the Sister Wives of blogging.

Here's a try at blogging about something besides blogging. It may not be surprising that there is no large newspaper on the planet which does not carry US political news. So it is with ArabNews, based in Riyadh. One of their stories is Republicans vow to block all Senate bills. Yeah, we'll get back to that. Lest ye forget you are reading an ARAB newspaper though, one of the side articles is about how there were 11 women in a four by four vehicle being driven by a woman and it wrecked and five of the women were killed. The second commentor on the story opines, "I think this is a sign that women driving in the Kingdom shall be forbidden." Laaaa, laaaa, la, la-la, la.

Now, about them Pubbies. American politics, like all other kinds, has been full of lies, deceits, personal attacks, etc., at least since George Washington. I am not "an historian" by any stretch in the academic sense. But I have studied a little. It seemed there was a period in there where Democrats and Republicans in general, though their outlook and basic values were different, were actually willing to work together to some degree in the governance of the country. Since sometime before the election of Obama, that has changed. For a little while there, for the first time in my life, I was actually seriously wondering whether George Bush would really step down after his term ended. Before then, that was not even a thought, it was a given certainty, as sure as sunrise.

We are definitely in a very bizarre period in American history now, especially political history. Like everyone else who has lived through historic periods, we have no idea how it will play out, what will happen over the next 3-4 years. But I have never seen a time in which one political side in America publicly announces that its sole agenda, aside from lavishing as much unearned wealth as possible on the rich at the expense of the poor, is to see that the current president is not re-elected.

"In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) didn't yield an inch on his position that the main job of congressional Republican leadership is to prevent President Obama's re-election." Source. There has long been a gap between the haves and have nots, but now we are watching our political system in America devolve into an actual class war, headed perhaps, for a caste system similar to that in India. But it gets weirder still...

Virtually everyone, including his political adversaries, say Barack Obama is a highly intelligent man. He is certainly erudite and eloquent in his public speeches. At the same time, though, most "pundits" on the left, and even a few on the right, are scratching their heads in bewilderment at Obama's reactions - or lack of reactions - to those strange positions stated by Republicans. No matter how many and how often prominent Republicans publicly state flat out that they have no intention whatever of working with him on his political agendas, that there will absolutely be NO compromise - on anything - Obama continually talks of bipartisanism. It has reached the point that some are beginning to watch Obama very closely, to see if he starts to emit smoke and sparks during a speech from the cognitive dissonance generated between reality and what he is saying. Is he somehow a Stepford Wife (they have their own organization, yanno) to Republicans, or what? The Manchurian Candidate designated to preside over the transition from country to empire? Laaaa, laaaa, la, la-la, la.

Many wonder whether Obama is biding his time, waiting for some strategic moment to spring something on the Pubbies, maybe planning a Clintonesque rebirth. I dunno, but it's hard to imagine what he might spring and time is running out. I think it will be fascinating indeed if January 2013 has us in an America any of us would recognize. I have no doubt at all that the coming year will be much worse for average Americans than the previous year, certainly by any financial measure. (See, I can think positively!)

Just in time for Christmas... NO! You unemployed bums may NOT have any more money! Two million more of you can just eat cake...er worms, er whatever. Unless... pssst, over here. Say, you got that killer instinct? I got sumpin fer ya... each one of these babies cost between $25K and $30K. It can shoot a grenade up to half a mile, but not just ANY grenade, one that has a microchip in it so
"if a group of insurgents is hiding behind a wall, a soldier can program one of the XM25's rounds to detonate a few feet past the wall to shower the insurgents with lethal fragmentation from behind." Source. We gotz a gun we can point at their front and it will shoot 'em in the ass!Howzat fer some cool-as-shit boy's toys, eh? fah-la-la-la-lah, lah, lah, lah lah. Let us bray for peace in deed.

TRB