It's still October 27, 2012 -- still, or is it again?  (I  wonder if there's a support website for amnesiacs?  Well, I suppose if there is/was such a thing it's already forgotten ((Gasp, what a cheap joke!....))

Deep thought:

We humans have fucked up our earth and our destiny (or is it that we are living out that very destiny imparted on us when our jaws didn't grow as big as primate jaws are meant to grow and thus our brain just about festered into a large grey mass filled with coexisting and contrary stuff. 

Stuff?  Today I'm depressed so I see that stuff as tiny knives in constant combat with each others.  These cutting knives are otherwise known as  synapses...  (I know I know, synapses are great and good, I was  just looking for a paradoxical word here in order to impress myself)

Today is September 10, 2012! My how time flies... in two days I'm going to be 70. I wouldn't mind, except that I am in constant pain... did I tell you, oh dear imaginary (hallucinatory/phantasmagoric?) reader, that I had a stupid (and I mean stupid!) accident 5 months ago? What happened is that my car veered just a tiny bit off the road. I saw a tree ahead but I had plenty of time to redress the steering wheel and get back on the rightful path. Probably because I don't have depth perception and only use my left eye, and probably, even though I scored an A+ in sideway eye test a couple of years ago, it aint working no more. So I didn't notice ....

(it's now October 27, 2012) .... a small tree on my right which bounced me to the bigger tree. So this evil tree totalled my venerable very solid old Camry, yes it did!  And to add insult to injury, that damn tree barely had a scratch to show for it. Steel v. wood, and wood won.

As for me, a huge ovaloid lump grew out of my forehead (from crashing it on the steering wheel). The lump was exactly the same shape as that of the Coneheads, the old TV show, except my cone went a bit sideways.... oh and I also fractured a vertebra and had the most perplexing lumps in my boobs (= inner bleeding from the safety belt -- no there were no airbags in the car, it seems it had been totalled but repaired before, so we got it at a good price. It's now dead in the junkyard. R.I.P. Green and proud Camray.

Why am I writing this blog? I finally figured it out just a few minutes ago. It's a bottle in the sea, albeit in this case it's a message ejected in cyberspace just in case there will be "others" out there to read it in a million miles/years hence, or perhaps a million/miles years ago?

Or am I just writing to myself?

Time to digress!

Digression nb. 1: I just read an article in the New York Times (January 22, 2012) about why Apple and others are not bringing back jobs to the US.

Obama during a meeting with CEOs asked Steve Job why he did not manufacture iPhones in the US. Steve Job said those jobs are never coming back.

An executive explained proudly later on to a NYT reporter that it's just not that "Asian workers are cheaper" (notice it's not that they are not "paid less" but they are a cheaper "product" rather than a person, this in contrast to corporations which are now persons, except they can't be arrested like the rest of us can), it's that they're more flexible. After Steve Job decided to change the iPhone prototype at the last minute, the proud executive described what happened at the Chinese factory:

"A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the
company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a
biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour
started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96
hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day."

Doesn't that strike you as slavery? And isn't this the factory where they had to put up large nets all around the buildings because so many of their workers committed suicide?

Digression nb 2: I am pretty discouraged today, particularly since the likes of Newt Gingrich have actually become serious contenders for the Republican nomination, not to mention the presidency of the US. I am afraid that there's a chance that Obama signing into law the new Homeland Security Act that this time gives the executive the right to arrest and/or assassinate terrorist suspects without trial even if they are US citizens and even on US territory? (I'm not sure of that, I hope I'm wrong but I'm afraid I might be remembering right) might prove our undoing as a democracy. Can you just imagine what Gingrich would do if he had that power? Bye bye democracy, bye bye constitution :-(

Digression nb. 3: remember that Hitler was first voted into office (he got 44 % of the votes in what was then a parliamentary system) and then he did away with democracy with the support of the German financial elite of his time (with some exceptions of course, one of which is well depicted in "Schindler's List" --which goes to show that in even the most terroristic situations there are always decent folks risking their lives to save others :-)). If you look at old footage, you can see what happened next: Representatives are shown being kicked out of Parliament at gun point by the police...

The image of elected representatives violently chased out of this Parliament is one of the scariest historical image because it was a portend of what would follow, not only the 11 millions individuals murdered in the Holocaust (Jews or people perceived as such because one of their grandparents was though to have been Jewish, Romas/gypsies, people of color, gays, Seventh Day Adventists whose religion had also been "racialized", and lest not forget, the mentally disabled --though in the occupied countries it was all disabled.... ) but also the millions of dead civilians and soldiers in WWII.

Well, things would go a lot faster today if a Gingrich or his ilk got their hands on the red button.... (and we do know that Gingrich, the only Speaker of the House kicked out of office by his fellow party House members because of his fraudulent financial activities, has quite a beef to settle with Congress) The only thing that might keep us safe is that our armed forces would not go along with doing away with our democracy, unlike the German army which initially supported Hitler (with again a few exceptions).

However, don't we now have as many paid fighting contractors as regular armed forces members? In a way we have even outsourced our military which means that we have outsourced half of our fighting force to very flexible people. Perhaps as flexible in their work as the Chinese Apple workers are forced to be in order to keep their families from starving. China is now the prime example of the sort of capitalism that held sway during the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution: no labor protection, no more health care unless you can pay for it, not a trace of any safety net, but oh yes the "dictatorship of the corporations" while the government still call itself "Communist" (well it never was, but that's another digression!) and still uses the violent methods invented during this "Communist" rule... Is this why it's so hospitable to US/global corporations?

Where was I? Oh I know:

Digression nb 4: Of course all digressions are always linked. We (and the generations that will suffer the consequences of our actions and inactions) are victims of compartimentalization: keeping things in separate boxes in our mind even though they sure are connected in our lives...

neutrino question?

Aren't we all made of identical neutrinos, cells, or whatever? So if "someone" from outer space or from out of space would look at our little earth, perhaps all it could perceive would be a mass of undifferentiated molecules? Perhaps our whole universe would appear that way?

I wonder if forms are that tenuous? Of course, if I hit my head against a wall, I definitely know forms do exist.

Why? Why? Why?

Why is it acceptable to show the inside of your butt but not the outside. An example is Katie Couric who for a very good cause had a colonoscopy on TV. But why is the close up of the inside ok while one of the outside would cause a scandal?

And while we are at it, why is it ok for men in the US to show their nipples but women can't?

Evil Seagull!

I know I know, seagulls are supposed to be mystics and great philosophers. Their soaring flight dances are supposed to inspire us... but let me tell you the truth about those shitting creatures and the saga of their persecution of my otherwise bird loving beloved partner Rich.

It first started long long time ago. Rich was a sailor in the navy (I’m being redundant, everyone in the navy is some sort of sailor, right? Even submariners.) So a resplendent admiral was inspecting the troops lined up on the carrier. The sailors were in their formal white attire which they had painstakingly washed and ironed. Rich was doing his best to stand ramrod at attention. When the admiral came in front of him, guess what happened? A seagull shat on Rich’s shoulder. Rich, nineteen at the time, felt horribly embarrassed while the admiral visibly was doing his best to repress a chuckle.

Now I’m asking you! Out of hundreds sailors, why did a seagull chose Rich? Why didn’t it for instance shit on the admiral’s head so that the sailors could be the ones to repress a chuckle?

Not surprisingly the story doesn’t end there as seagulls seem to favor Rich and he’s persuaded they’re doing it on purpose. He practically has to carry an open umbrella for protection when we walk by the shore. As for me, I seemed immune up to now, but no longer...

We woke up yesterday and there was an enormous bird poop on our car. It began on the roof above the passenger window, dribbled on the window and then there was an gigantic plop spread out under the window on the door. At first I thought that some kid had thrown a milkshake at our car, or that someone had suffered a truly explosive bout of puking. But no, we were facing genuine bird shit.

So the troubling question is: what kind of flying creature can produce such a giant poop? Is it a monstrous seagull sent by its fellows to still wreak havoc on Rich’s life? Or is it some sort of alien species? (No it’s not a Canadian goose because they produce well formed brown turds --we have an abundance of them at certain time of they year and you really have to watch where you’re putting your feet down when walking by the lake....).

Anyone has some zoological insights on the identity of the guilty species or on how a supposedly small bird can produce such a great amount of shit?

Doom and Gloom Chronicles: King Midas (Montsanto & Co.?) is an ass (no insult intended to our four legged friends)

Earth has been rumbling and grumbling and spitting more than usual it seems. Well you know, I do live close to a volcano’s foothills, so I thought it best to check things out. To that end, I went into my yard, laid down (on mud and gravel, ouch!) and put my ear to the ground.

There was an immediate explosion of insults: “You idiot, you moron, you imbecile, you you you how could you!?” I had to jump up because my ear was hurting from those sulfuric insults. But curiosity got the best of me so I put it back on the earth and asked why?

Well it turns out the earth is pissed off because of our (Montsanto etc) invention of the Terminator a.k.a. Suicide seeds. These are self sterilizing seeds so that farmers can’t save seeds from the resulting crops to plant for next harvest. They have to buy new ones each year.... Now there seems to be a pseudo-ban of those seeds, but there are still cases of cross-contamination galore (you know the wind etc) and others are being created and sown around, such as for instance seeds that contain their own pesticide which –surprise surprise– has led to less pollenization and thus less crops...

So said the earth, “your species was stable for at least one million years and enjoyed life and painted beautiful paintings on cave walls and worshiped buxom women, and then what do you do? You invent agriculture around 10,000 years ago --give or take a few millenia-- and look where it got you: famines, inequality between groups of people and also between men and women, and is driving me, Earth, to the brink of destruction. And now as a logical deadly continuation of this nonsense, you’ve invented suicide seeds which have the potential of also contaminating wild plants. Do you thrive on impotence, or what?”

“Of course I would survive your suicidal impulses even if all of you idiots died but I wouldn’t survive you throwing your nukes at each others. I probably turn into a comet that might be visible to other sentient beings for a split second ten millon light years away. So since you morons have invented total suicide weapons it’s perhaps not surprising that you also invented suicide seeds”

“But but I say to the ground, how about the profit motive? Isn’t it a great motivator for human enterprise?” “Ha,” spews Earth into my ringing ear, “don’t you remember what happened to King Midas? He was granted his wish that everything he touched would turn into gold –and soon enough that idiot starved to death... profit motive, my foot! –well if I had a foot ...”

I went off after this conversation and instead of listening to the earth rumblings I put my ears on Google. I found out after all those years that there has been a kindred spirit sharing my long held dim view of agriculture in the person of one Jared Diamond who, among many other books, wrote an article titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” –meaning agriculture! (It’s on line like almost everything else!). And then about those impotent seeds, there’s the body of works by Vandana Shiva....

So if I may digress, my impression is that there must be or has been a whole corpus of King Midas stories. But I know only one other and it’s Hungarian. It goes like this: King Midas had donkey ears which he kept hidden under his crown. The only person who knew about it was his barber who had been sworn to secrecy under pain of death. That information was swelling inside the barber’s head and giving him hemorrhoids at the other end. So he decided that he had to relieve himself one way or another. He traveled to the country side, the Hungarian plains in this case, dug a hole in the ground and told it his secret. Then he filled the hole and went back to barbering feeling much better.

Well what do you suppose happened next? The grass grew over the freshly filled hole and soon enough the grass all over the prairie was singing in the wind “King Midas has donkey ears... King Midas has donkey ears....”. I don’t know what happened to that poor barber, you can fill the blanks, but I just realized why Montsanto came up with sterile silent seeds....