Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Maybe The Dems Shouldn't Want To Win The Next Presidential Election.


I say that for two main reasons:

1; The next four years are likely to be the most tumulchous in human history. And I do not say that lightly.

Severe weather is here because of so much extra accumulated heat. And as long as there is a significant repository of ice at the poles, that increasing differential wll cause ever more large, heat transfer events, which is, of course, what evaporation, condensation, and convection are all about. The wind, the rain, and the tremendous pressure changes, that these processes bring about, are all just side effects, horribly damaging though they may be.

How long the ice will last is the question, and the main worry for me.  And I have to say, with the way the trend line has been changing so precipitously, in the last year or so, there is good reason to be very worried that our ability to keep that differential will cease altogether; which will soon have us intimately contemplating the old saw about going from the frying pan, to the fire.

The bottom line here, ultimately, is simple either way, though. And that is because in either case, whether it be with catastrophic storms, or with sea rise generally, the world may well know draught, and flooding, and destruction in general, like it has never seen in... well for a very long time.  And this will be, eventually, because not only will a few places get way too much rain, continuously, but far too many will be getting very little, at all any more, precisely because ordinary circulation patterns, as life has known them for hundreds of thousands of years. will finally cease.

The economic and social effect of this will be catastrophic, to say the least. But this will only be the beginning of our troubles. For co committant to that will be the increasing tensions of the, already terrible competitions for resources, and viable markets, which will become even worse yet, by the amplified competition, of a system gone horribly mutated. An opportunity for which, unfortunately, that represents nothing but sweet gravy to the authoritarians of the world; as nothing serves to cement more "us against the evil outsider's" thinking more than having your people become ever more fearful in general, certainly, but with particular emphasis, when you can claim that the outsiders are going to, supposedly, steal food, and needed strategic materials, from you, and your children (with the real complexities of sustainable resource use be left to damnation, of  course, because you won't be getting much of the truth about anything after that, any more either).

2: This creates, in case you hadn't noticed, the perfect setup for putting a patsy in power for a while. A patsy that will allow ownership of the bad that's coming to be transferred. And they'll do this knowing full well that, even if the patsy party could get, at least some, good legislation passed, it wouldn't be nearly enough to prevent market collapse, and the layoffs that will inevitably follow, for the reasons already stated above.

 More to the point, though, would be the opportunity here for the out of power party to throw, without having to be too obvious about it, monkey wrenches into any effort to start making things right again. And of course they would do that because it would make taking back power not only so much easier, it would also likely end any further ability, of the left, to confront the right again, from within what will then become of government.

From my perspective, it is a hard thing to not want to make the Right own the majority portion of what is coming, as far as seriously bad times for one, and all, on this planet, are concerned. The traditional, Liberal Left has a lot of responsibility as well, because they've been just as invested in making more money, as much of the right has, and that is why Capitalism itself has never been as fully questioned as it should have been, since Marshall McLuhan, at least, made it clear (along with Harold Innis) that very large changes in the instrumentality we use to extend our faculties with, must also come with changes in the way all of our major social institutions must work as well. But that catastrophic coming to terms, with what has actually been done to the planet, as well as to our own sanity, is about to dawn on even the most strident of Trump current supporter. And maybe that's one rude awakening that we need to have in order to have any chance of getting a majority of folks on the same page; as far as being willing to compromise goes, in any case.

Let's just be clear one more time. Capitalism wasn't designed at all to be able to handle the electrification of experience retrieval. How could it when one of the bedrock components of its foundation was the fundamental assumption of the human uniqueness of skill application. Now that robotics takes that assumption away, it no longer has a viable foundation at all.

Let's also be clear that keeping information as a commodity, which capitalism must, unfortunately, impose with great vigor, insures that Democracy cannot survive. That we are in, now, this chaotic world of people being saturated within the info environment of truth going to the highest bidder, ought to tell you exactly how frightening this should be to you.

The bottom line for me is that it is highly unlikely that we will get the real change we need if we continue with the current, completely corrupted two party system.

No, If the last, nearly seventy years, since 1950, when our economic clout really started taking off (precisely because of the electrification of information) has taught us anything, it is that Capitalism cannot be made to be socially responsible. No matter how many laws you might try to pass to make it so.

The only way real change will occur is when enough of us stop participating, in the farce as a whole, to make it stop; and the best way to make our intention clear towards that end would be the instigation of across the boards stikes, involving as many aspects of the American economy as we can manage to include. Strikes and community gatherings, so that we can start engaging each other more directly; so that we can begin to see that, with electrified tech working for us, instead of us working for it, we can set things up to actually make a "Grand Compromise" possible. It will mean finally taking responsibility for ourselves, but that is the only way we will ever be able to begin to heal this planet, and us.

See Also:

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Monday, May 6, 2019

My Avenging Movie Review

Ok. Most of the time I don't feel any need to review movies. At least most of the commercialized, effects extravaganzas that a lot of movies have become. They are meant only as an experience, nothing more. You are not supposed to overthink them in the first place because they usually have less meaning substance than the concession stand popcorn has nutritional value. A difficult situation, certainly, for someone who was made, from day one, to be an overthinker of everything. But, as always, with a little focus, training, and disciplined effort, you can accomplish difficult things.

That being said, however, doesn't preclude me from getting caught, every now and then, to a movie that just shouts out glaring. blaring, gouts of too much dumb, you just can't ignore it. That this same said example might also garner over 2 billion dollars in only several short weeks of release, also screams out the sad state of where we are right now.

It was just so stunning for me. This feeling, that started out, initially, as a major hit of disappointment, actually starting to turn to angry frustration, as Kathleen and I did our Sunday grocery shopping after the movie was over. And the thing was, I just couldn't quite put my finger on why, exactly. Because there were, certainly, a few good, singular scenes in it. But as a whole?

It has taken sleeping on it, and thinking about it more, here in my work space, and rack shack, room, but I think I may have it now.

It starts with this litany:

1:Hawkey begging Natassha to not give him hope. This after having been on five year slaughter binge of any, and all, bad guys still left in the... what would you call it? Getting Binaried? The cut in half version of being decimated.

2: A Norse demigod of epic proportions has burned out and turned into a beer guzzling, obese embarrassment.

3: A former icon of moral leadership, as well as a true knight of old chivalry, is reduced to running a grief counseling group, with prattle he actually doesn't really believe in.

4: The former icon of truly unbending, unyielding strength, gone too brutally far, has become a mostly burned out blend of a scientist who wanted to know too much, and the anger monkey he mistakenly turned himself into, who now can't seem to get angry at anything, even when righteous anger might be needed... even if in measured doses.

5: And the other, former icon, only in this case of science gone too far, on the spurs of money, who made the money machine that put him on as its protector, even as the suit he wore became ever more integral to his whole being. The guy who was mad at the knight because he wouldn't back the Authoritarian security system, that probably wouldn't have saved them anyway, from a group that had already corrupted Shield. They guy who decides, after half the world's consumers have been taken away, to go back to just being a countryfied father; a life he could go to, appropriately, with the Goop selling girl, because they both had gobs of money.

6: And then there is the ridiculously complicated time travel plot the writers wrote themselves into, with a Villain we have very little sense of, other than he's bigger, and stronger than all of them combined, sometimes, with or without the damn gauntlet of magic stones. And he's also fired up to save life by destroying half of it. As if you could control power on that level in the first place, that carefully, and precisely, let alone how stupid the notion of: "We had to destroy the village to save it," is. Or that there might be a whole lot more to talk about in what to do about too much life competing for too little resources. Another notion where, if these idiots weren't creating armies at this scale, armed to the teeth with instrumentality of unheard of scale, maybe a whole lot more resource might be available to help find actual, working solutions to problems, As opposed to just finding a bigger "BFG" (as immortalized in the movie Doom) to blow what you don't like away with.

And at the end of this three hour epic there is the requisite big battle, but with none of the true conviction, or semblance of some meaning, of any of the first Avenger movie battle scenes. And sure, there's a tiny snippet there, where the girls get to kick ass, but it goes by so fast you hardly notice it amongst all of the other general mayhem to keep the "ultimate power thing" away from the current, "ultimate bad guy."

Despite all of this, though, the one thing I want you ask yourselves is this: Did you come away from this movie with any greater sense of hope for things to come for us as a Nation, let alone for the rest of life on this planet, and us as a particular species in it?

Hawkeye asked Natassha to not give him hope. And boy did this move deliver on that promise. The one thing this nation is in the most desperate, short supply of. Because why else would so much of our escapist entertainment be on the inevitability of apocalyptic collapse. And in that sense maybe we can understand Thanatos, because that was his refrain wasn't it... that "I am inevitable?"


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Saturday, May 4, 2019

Absolutely The Economy Is Booming

That's a big part of why it has become so damned destructive in the last few decades, over and over again; every time it does the old "Bubble and Bust," two step, looking for the next place to explode (or implode) with the newest "correction."
And in case you hadn't noticed, the more it accelerates, the more people, and things, just start flying off the handle, off the game board, and way beyond all bounds of sanity, or morality, as well.

This is because the electrification of money demands that everything be made to move faster to satisfy the dictum that money has been made like electrons. Made to move through electric circuits, always seeking the path of least resistance. This is why Capitalism has become a mutated monster, sucking people in, more and more, faster and faster, for jobs that aren't necessarily so good for a healing planet, or a healing people; assuming, of course, that we'd like to heal both planet and ourselves.

Sucking people in, though, to consume them like a fire storm ("Damn the mixed metaphors, and full speed ahead," I say) consumes anything flammable. Sort of like moths to a flame, but only on a truly mind boggling, industrialized scale.

This thing called Capitalism had its day, but that day is long over. It is way past time to retire it.

Do it. Do it now, while you still have the chance.



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