Friday, March 1, 2024
Tired of Trying, Bored with Lying, Scared of Dying
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
New Challenges For Travelers
There is a remote chance that I will return this year for a visit to the country of my birth. That would be America, specifically California. Six years have passed since my last visit, and it appears to me that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically. The changes have not run in favor of an easy and comfortable trip.
The new COVID variant,
Omicron, is statistically significant and obviously dangerous. Every day,
people are contracting the disease. People are being admitted into the
hospital. Most impressively, people are dying. In spite of that obvious threat
level, I don’t see a lot of masking going on. Instead, I hear a lot of yelling
about not wanting to wear masks, and freedom, and you can’t tell me what to do,
and take off that mask you fucking commie. Has any work been done about the
possibility that COVID has a potential psychological impact? Subtle, perhaps,
but acting to make sufferers irritable and unreasonable?
If, indeed, I do travel to
the indispensable country this year, I will be masking. Probably double
masking. I have seen examples of masked people being accosted in retail
establishments or travel situations for having the freedom-hating temerity to
wear a mask. As though, perhaps, the only possible explanation could be that
the masked individual was a libtard, or under the spell of ex-President Obama
and his puppet, Joe Biden. I have formulated a strategy to use if I am faced
with this behavior in a convenience store or something.
My play will be to feign
weakness, cough into the mask, and say in an unsteady tone, “I’m sorry. I was
in Africa for six months (cough) and my doctor thinks that I was exposed to
Ebola. He says I must wear (long, wet, wheezing cough) this mask to protect
(cough) other people.” (Reaches out to lean on something, holding chest and
coughing.) “Oh, shit! I forgot my rubber gloves!”
It was a lot of fun to run
this strategy past a couple of friends of mine, but I know that in reality it
would only make someone want to shoot me. A lot of the unreasonable Americans
are now strapped.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Proof Of Life
Alive, although that condition is subject to change. I am typing on a new laptop, using a version of Word called, “Home and Student.” I am finding it very peculiar in many ways. Things tend to disappear. I am finding that as time marches on, computers in general become more difficult to use, less functional, and less intuitive. It’s annoying. Or perhaps it’s just that life is passing me by, which is true one way or the other.
Blogspot is full of moribund blogs. The reasons are many, and the phenomenon is interesting. Many people set up a cute blog and post two or three times about the wonders of cats. And that’s it, the blog idea expends itself. Perhaps they were killed by their cats. Many people, like Doghouse Reilly, set up a blog and write fantastic posts for years about mostly politics, with some culture and a little sports thrown in for variety. His blog disappeared. He was ended not by cats, but by the human condition, which stalks us all. I still draw breath, but I have reached the age where the entire horizon is sufficient only for a vague terror of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The nearness of death inspires some people. Others, like me, are merely paralyzed by dread.
Best wishes to all. I should
be writing more soon.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Peter Laughner - Baby's on Fire
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Al Green - Perfect Day (Official Lyric Video)
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Here Comes the Sun
Still Looking ForThe Silver Lining In Our Climate Situation
It was a matter of some interest to me that on September 19, 2023 there were two large TORNADOES in China. Not the little cyclones that you see in big storms pretty much everywhere and never give a second thought, no, these were “Wizard of Oz” sized tornadoes, like three on the five scale. (China uses the same scale as the United States, so I guess the Chinese weather service wasn’t as surprised as I was.) These came with enormous amounts of rain and new flooding, adding more misery to what is already probably called “the Summer of Huge Fucking Floods.”
No less fascinating was the twenty or so inches of rain that fell in a day on a large but focused part of Libya, making a mess of a coastal city and destroying two earthen dams in the mountains above the city. The resulting water/ mud event washed away most of the city and the reporting of the death count was disturbingly imprecise. The spokesman said that about ten thousand people were dead, and another ten thousand were “still missing.” He assumed that many or most of the missing had been washed out to sea along with all of that mud. When the numbers get that round, it’s obvious that no one has any idea of the real casualty figures.
Huge amounts of rain in a limited time within a tight location is no longer considered exceptional. It has become a regular thing.
Warehouses are filling up with new stock footage of rapidly moving flash floods in a wide variety of settings. There are also large areas on multiple continents where it hasn’t rained at all for years. Climate driven migration has begun in earnest. Then there are the fires. The starving migrants must be lucky to avoid running into one of the many large fires. Crops have begun to fail, not only because of the droughts, but also because average annual temperatures have gone up a couple of degrees. A warming climate invites new insect pests. That’s no surprise, I suppose, but did anyone else read the predictions that a warming climate would interfere with crop propagation? I read that one, but I wasn’t supposed to live to see it. Only five years ago they were still talking about effects that we would see in 2030 or later. More imprecision.
Ocean temperatures are raising some eyebrows among the scientific community. Way too low in the North Atlantic, threatening to stall the Gulf Stream, and way too high around the West Indies and Florida, threatening stronger hurricanes. You needn’t look far for bad climate news.
Who remembers the way that George W. Bush and his “proud to know nothing” friends were laughing at a temperature rise of only a few degrees. Remember the asshole who brought a snowball into a meeting of the Senate? They, you know who they are, had a good laugh at that. Climate change was a hoax! Or, if it were a real thing, it was the Chinese trying to destroy the American economy. I don’t hear so much laughing now. If it was a Chinese idea, it backfired. The naysayers seem to be holding their tongues, but they have no proposals to offer in mitigation. One of our great statesmen was asked how he feels about the current state of climate change. “Autumn,” he said, “it’s called autumn.”
The only people who are happy about the situation are the lobbyists for the fossil fuel industries. Those companies just want to maximize profits while they can. Time to cash out boys! I’m sure that they have proper bunkers prepared, and food stocks put away for emergencies. It was fun to read about the plans they have to protect themselves from their own security forces. Now there’s an interesting conundrum: they obviously need the security forces to protect their compounds or bunkers from regular people, but then it’s also obvious that the security forces will see their own best interest in slaughtering the rich people and taking the security for themselves. Don’t worry, no beautiful women will be harmed in the course of these takeovers. I’ve already seen multicolored maps showing what areas may fare better, and what areas will soon be musts to avoid. The entire South West of the United States is a death in progress, with colossal heat waves in effect and water disappearing faster than a magician’s assistant.
I guess it’s good that people in every demographic seem to be getting the message that urgent action is required, but the people who actually have the power to alter our destructive habits are either going along with the wait and see thing or actively getting in on the cashing out thing.
It all strikes me as doom writ large, but that’s my nature anyway. So don’t listen to me. It’ll all be fine!