The simple logic of the Flat Earth argument has swayed me & made me a convert
And what more could a simple creature want in terms of an existence myth. Even on the edge of self snuffing we need a simple explanation for why and where we are. That the Earth is a sphere with a paunch around the equator is less than satisfactory. That its a circular plate makes much more sense. How can gravity pull in all directions to hold onto the water in the seas and oceans? It defies common sense. The water, duh, sits on it like on a dish. The southern hemisphere, that is the underside of the plate, has hitherto been a problem for Flat Earth Geometricians – but no longer. Two leading groups, one up on top, in the UK and the other down under in Oz, have demonstrated the veracity of the one plate, two hemisphere view. By the fortuitous luck and blessing of magical thinking the presidents of the respective groups, The London Flat Earth Institute and the Royal Australian Flat Earth Society, have made contact. The pure luck was that their back yards were each others antipode. Antipodal means on the opposite side of the Earth. With just a little effort each man dug down a few feet, the man in England, near his garden’s flower bed. His counterpart in Australia made a hole in his potato patch. At three feet there suddenly appeared sky at the bottom of each hole. “Haaaaay” came the call, “you there mate?”. They had broken thru and put pay to the idea that it takes twenty hours to get from Old Blighty to the land of Oz. When the local media was handed the press release they ask, “well, did you go thru the hole and visit the antipode? No, we didn’t. Couple of reasons. The Covid card and expired passports. Plus it was getting late. The holes were backfilled, new flowers and potatoes planted. I don’t think the world is ready for the truth.
Under the category of, stuff I’d never think of in a million years…The Blue Yeti hangs from the ceiling and captures my human like vocalizations
My time capsule of tid-bits for the future to ponder is nearly full. Just room enough for a couple more headlines. Lets see, “Government votes funds to increase supply of baby formula”. No, not the procedure for making babies. The formula for feeding them in ways nature didn’t intend. The government has had to step in. At the risk of revealing my naivety, how did human babies survive before? Ooops, I see a trip-wire and mine field around this question, better step back. With that the capsule is nearly full. When opened a thousand years hence people will marvel at our moment in history. I hope there’s room for this week’s UFO news. Or more accurately, the latest in non-news. The news is that we still don’t know what those things are. Washington, our seat of government, where baby formula and flying saucers meet, had another UFO hearing. Its been fifty years since the last one. Let me go out on a limb and predict. In another 50 years, another congress will hold another hearing to expose the truth about UFO’s. Drum roll please….and they’ll announce “we don’t know what they are”. Lest the people opening the capsule in 3022 BCE think it’s boring here in 2022 we’ve informed them of the Australian beetles who are attracted to beer bottles. Sexually attracted. The beetle is the “Jewel” beetle. The object of the Jewel beetle’s lust is an empty bottle of “Emu Export”. Seems the bottle’s color and dimpled glass get this little guy excited. The outback’s road sides are strewn with discarded bottles. The bottles are often covered with frustrated beetles. The bottler, in a rare gesture to conservation, has altered the bottles. The change worked and the female beetles are happy, I guess. Not the first time a male has left his mate for the bottle. I’m not going to put anything in the capsule about the war in Ukraine. If it goes, you know, “unthinkable” the future will not need to learn that from us. They’ll still be cleaning up. Our time capsule is full so screw on the cap and put it in the hole. I’m tempted to climb in after it.
What a revolutionary movement! It is anathema to so many social/political/economic systemsI am still learning about the Blue Yeti, mythical beast of the Himalayas?, No, USB microphone…this recording in “omni” mode
Is lying flat where its at?
Tang Ping is the Chinese name for a social movement. In English it somewhat translates to “Lying Flat”. It’s a reaction to the pressure of working life in China and other Asian countries. A work force asked to work nine to nine six days a week is fraying around the edges. They call it “996” and increasingly reject it. Rather than chase the dream of career, family, car, house and status, many would rather relax, lay back, lye flat. They work enough to share a dry place to sleep. Just enough casual labor to earn a minimum to eat. The movement isn’t part of the government’s plan for moving the country forward. But from the individual’s point of view, seventy-two hour work weeks are not sufficiently rewarded. Those hoping a college degree would ensure a career and prosperous life are also often disappointed. Lying Flat is a drag on the “New Era” declared by the Chinese government. Doing nothing and lying flat is counter revolutionary, radical. The movement began with a single social media post entitled, “Lying flat is justice”. Like a spark finding tinder the movement caught fire among unhappy workers. it spread on the Chinese internet. A spread halted when the government intervened and removed posts. Some question the wisdom of creating a huge consumer market based on debt and everyone working “996”. But a large internal market is important to a nation sprinting to become the prime economy on Earth. People who never bought on credit have in a generation embraced capitalism’s major tenant, debt. To have more, borrow more, work more. A cycle all too familiar to us in the USA. The workers dropping out of the system have a name for themselves, the “Leek People”. The Leek they refer to is harvested with a knife. The leeks standing up are harvested, those that lay down avoid the knife. The rate of burn out in the work force suggests a system being driven hard, seeking an equilibrium, balance. The old idea of community and serving the group has moved toward the celibration of the individual. But what if the individual isn’t willing to sacrifice health and mind for the greater good? Or what the government’s plan plan calls the greater good. Where might this social movement, this pushback, lead? Lets use the adult’s rhetorical question asked of a child. “What if everyone felt this way?” Eating spinach or going to school. When I heard this question as a youngster, my thought was, Gee, don’t know, lets skip spinach or school and see. No I didn’t risk a slap by asking that but Beijing may find out. Andrew Yang was ignored the last presidential cycle when he ask a related question. “What happens when there are no jobs for people who want them? When AI machines and new tech eliminate the need for unskilled workers. Will the productivity gain be spread among the population? Like checks for stimulus under the cloud of Covid. Billions of workers around the world are part of an experiment involving capital and labor. I have decided to watch this experiment from the sidelines, reclining, a spectator, without skin in the game. Well, I live off the taxes workers pay, so I guess I have some pecuniary interest. The lying flat posse, watches too and when necessary runs a few laps in the rat race, just enough to pay the rent and buy another case of Raman Noodles. Is there a natural distribution of slackers and worker “ants” and other types in a human population? A spectrum of ambition? Maybe so.
Not the best defense but a popular oneThe audio for this screed, one take, blue yeti to Audacity trial version
How fascinating to watch the sequence of steps leading to your own demise. To look at the clockwork mechanism of destruction tick toward the end. The spring unwinds and the gears mesh and the minute hand moves toward the midnight of our ultimate day. My last day maybe, with good luck. Or, if unlucky, the beginning of wasting away and being draining of life . The Grateful Dead will be more than a hippy band remembered by retro music fans and old men like me. I refer to the headlines my family members have forbidden me to quote. “Russia sharpens warnings as the U.S. and Europe send more weapons to Ukraine”. I don’t need much imagination to visualize my last days. I had the image burned into my retina by movies. The day after, Terminator, Doctor Strangelove, and many many more. Nightmare scenarios but not fantasy. High tech, cutting edge, but not special effects. And too, I was part of the mechanism. I was a gear in the machine of destruction. A cog, a tooth on an escapement, a tiny little part. I saw the flash of a French nuclear explosion in North Africa. I stood next to a 1.5KT warhead in the belly of an Air Force interceptor in California. I made radio direction finding fixes on Soviet SLBM boats in the Atlantic. I was at a putative ground zero at a NATO base in Germany during the “cold” war. This stuff is all real. But to so many people it isn’t. It can’t be!, can it? They don’t want to hear about it. Ignorance is taken to be innocence. Hands cover ears. I have no argument against covering the ears, blocking the news. History is composted news. The fresh stuff stinks, it has the overpowering stench of something to be feared….But, humans can’t be on the edge continuously, thinking “I’m going to die”. The mind has a circuit breaker. The funny farm is full of people with breakers tripped. The combat veteran tells us that you either become numb or loose it completely. Unless you are in my position, our position my friend. Unless you look at the news then avoid it then look again then look away. Unless you dilute it with, Old movies, jazz, physics tutorials, Amateur radio. But even then. Today I talked in Morse code on 14 Megahertz short wave with a Ham radio operator from Ukraine. He was licensed in Ukraine but transmitting from Croatia. Kyiv has shut down the Ham radio hobby in the country. Its too easy for the invader to use it against his victims. I’ve learned to say “NO WAR” in Cyrillic letters in Morse code. But I know for a Russian to agree would make them subject to a 15 year prison sentence. Its real to them. There is a new Gulag now. A new archipelago for a new Solzhenitsyn to write about. Maybe its because I have never lived an insular life. I have kept abreast of the geopolitical news and dug into history for background and context. People who haven’t are possibly finding this current news thrust at them, unbidden and unwelcome. As though reality was intent on ruining their peace. The hands covering ears, attempting to block unwanted information. Listening isn’t a virtue and turning a deaf ear isn’t a fault. These are habits, the way we interact with “reality”. The imagined objective reality. Of course we do not share one world view so who is to say what is what? Me for my little fraction of the greater world. You for yours. A cloud of doom and gloom over my head gives no advantage. The end will come if it does when it will and nothing I can do can alter that. That pop song from years ago should be my mantra, “Don’t worry, be happy”
You can NOT put the genie back in the bottle, no way !The author reads to the Blue Yeti
I think I was looking for mushroom clouds as reference for drawing when I came across this photo from July 1945. An amazingly short time later two Japanese cities were laid waste by these gadgets. I am told that killing 150,000 civilians in a matter of days was NOT a war crime. Because it did a greater good….ending the war, saving lives. Such was the logical argument at the time and its been the logic ever since. Is morality accumulative? I mean, if you kill ten people you are 50% more moral than someone who kills twenty. If there are not grades of morality, a granularity to goodness, then its binary. But killing on orders of your government, that doesn’t count toward your score. Friendly fire. I have always wondered about that term. Hey, I just shot one of our guys! Oh, that was friendly fire, don’t count toward your score. You do need a score card, it gets complicated. The Knights Templar had a logic worked out for killing non believers and they got paid well for it. Eventually they got into the banking business, they had so much loose change.
Many are motivated by a sense of justice, some are war zone tourists, maybe a new Orwell writing with two thumbs?
The author of two iconic novels of the recent century, George Orwell, was in Barcelona in 1937. Those novels were the product of Orwell’s souring on Stalinist Communism, “1984” and “Animal Farm”. He also wrote of the Spanish Civil war he briefly participated in. The work was called, “An Homage to Catalonia”. Catalonia being the last province to fall to Franco. He grew sour on the organized left in part due to the absolute chaos of infighting among the groups. The POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) organized a militia and Orwell joined it as a fighter on the front lines at Zaragoza. After an injury and bullet wound he returned to Barcelona to find he was being hunted by the police. He managed to escape to France. Right away he started writing “Homage”. I wouldn’t call him a “tourist” because he took big chances and almost bought it by bullet…but he was also gathering material.
So I see a parallel because of the international brigade(s) now and then. A couple of years after Orwell’s experience in Spain Hitler invaded Ukraine. Now Putin has. Sadly there might be another parallel. Russia, then the Soviet Union, had a very dysfunctional military, at first. In part because Stalin had purged the top commanders. Anyone who was a leader was also a threat to Stalin. The Germans drove toward Moscow and almost got there. But, the Red Army, got its act together and turned things around. Somebody recently said “The Russians must loose and be seen to loose” (in Ukraine). The sanctions will help slow or make impossible a turn around in their army in this war. Putin seems to have Stalin’s paranoia. Lets hope it is justified.
As in other industries the business of war has made great progress in a hundred years but the road still leads to hell.
As a break from the experts being interviewed about the current war in endless cycles I am listening to a post game analysis of the “Great War”. They called it that, or the “World War” because they couldn’t imagine another. The first world war. Nobody expects we will need bothering to number a third world war. The terror frozen from the moment of the Trinity blast to the present is thawing. The unthinkable is tangible. President Biden points to a cordon, a crime scene tape, around an ongoing crime, a war crime. But it is a barrier to intervention and also a barrier to the unspoken danger of loosing of nuclear genie. The primitive peoples of the Americas, heathens encountered by Cortez, sacrificed virgins in bloody ceremonies to appease the gods. This to prevent their wrath and the ensuing destruction the world.
The sacrificial blood of the innocent in sufficient quantity will appease the gods and delay Armageddon
The war in Ukraine is being reported as though it were a game. The analysists tote up the score and analyze the various team’s game. Several teams contest the field and their fans and supporters are not far away following the action. Today we are hearing that Putin has been declared a war criminal for targeting civilians. A reasonable charge, he is the commander of the forces attacking civilians. But I have a hard time forgetting that civilians were targeted by an American general at the end of WW2. I think the Russian foreign minister Lavrov pointed this out today. There is a qualitative difference between fifty or a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand. There can’t be a moral difference. I guess it all depends on who the winner is.
I see something. Maybe because I am old. Maybe the perspective of having had the culture shift under me a couple of times. Once a generation and there have been several in my time. I see structure I grew up with being dissolved. The social structure. The social reality. For anyone under forty the US Viet Nam war is history as ancient as the US civil war. Worse than that, the last couple of generations have not been taught or haven’t learned their country’s history. Does that mean they’re doomed to repeat it? They would be anyway, people don’t learn. Circumstances don’t change much and human nature not at all. So I need to disconnect. Following all this without having even the slightest influence is masochism. I don’t need that in my reclining years. My re aligning years. The years I should resign from being a watcher of human history.
Ice out comes early this year in the mid coast of Maine USA
I was just out in the tiny house on the edge of the big field. Today it is warm, 55F. The mud shows signs of drying out. Under the stubble and stalks of last years weeds this summer’s weeds are awakening. Thru the big energy inefficient windows I thought about marking a “No Weed Zone” in yellow crime scene tape. Within the zone weed whackers would patrol. The ground is most excellent for growing weeds. An accident of a sort. Where the tiny house stands now there once was a huge barn. It was the largest barn in the county 110 years ago. Its last years were served as an apartment building for chickens. That use resulted in a ton or two of chicken poop. Before the barn was demolished the poop was pushed out and spread. It composted and enriched the soil to the degree we get five crops a year….five crops of weeds. A lot of whacking will be done. A better use of my time than watching the big “game” on the internet.
A couple of related items registered with me today. A high school teacher told a friend of mine that he noticed students now show less empathy. He has been teaching long enough to see a generational change. Specifically he was talking about news that tornados had killed dozens of people in the Midwest. The kids shrugged and said the events were far away and thus didn’t affect them. I can understand that. The news overload I’ve written about. The draining and burnout of empathy. The other item was something on National Public Radio as I drove into town. Anymore I can’t listen for more than a few minutes before something makes me switch the radio off. The affected voice with the up tone at the end of sentences, question or not. Or the vocal ticks each generation seems to have, Like you know? or so. What got me this time was advice on how to avoid a reaction to the pictures of dead babies on your twitter feed. Putin’s tough love for Ukraine sends missiles into maternity hospitals. Seems people here are being upset by the images. Looking away I think was suggested. So… of course there is less empathy. The young are incorporating the callus that isolates us from a reaction to the murder of innocents. Older people look away when it gets to be too much but we still feel it. We feel a powerlessness too. The kids will be better prepared for a nasty world, the one they will own and suffer. There is no other.
But I wasn’t going to talk about any of that…..and yes, I am one virgin short.
What in the world would make me associate Santa with the Sikorsky H-19 Chickasaw helicopter?
The ex marines I hung out with on the sidewalks of Vilcabamba were tough. Not as tough now in their 60’s and 70’s as they were in their 20’s but still somewhat….tough. They didn’t like the pretend veteran. There are a surprising number of these folks. They will buy old medals on ebay and old uniforms and go out on the street asking for donations. “Help a disabled and homeless vet” Not really homeless but certainly shameless. So these grizzled vets have a sixth sense for anyone trying to “steal valor”, the euphemism for this pretenses of having served. Valor is, I guess, doing your job in spite of being scared shitless. So we are on the sidewalk of this little village in the Andes, drinking and telling war stories. Mine are pretty tepid. I never got shot at and was never scared shitless. So try to visualize their expressions when I told them I was at an American air base near Tokyo during the Korean war. Like hawks spotting a mouse in the open they swooped down and pounced. “Bull Shit!” they shouted, “You would have been five years old!” I said, “Yes, I was”, When my father, an Air Force Sargent was sent to Japan, I went too, along with my mother and sister. Why doesn’t anyone think of the tens of thousands of wives and children, dependents, accompanying service members overseas? So what reminded me of Santa when I saw that Korean War era aircraft? It was a Christmas tradition. On the several dozen US bases overseas Santa arrived on the tarmac in a chopper full of gifts. One of the welfare funds purchased the gifts and GI’s fight off homesickness, as they wrapped the presents. I am pretty sure I got a gift that way in Japan in the early 50’s. Then again in Greece and Libya in 1956, and ’57. So where did I see this ancient flying machine? an old movie on YouTube. Something about rescue choppers in the Korean war. Stirling Haden as the tough officer with a heart of gold. Yes, I am taking a break from the “doom” scrolling by watching old war movies. Sick eh? But I always justify myself by coming full circle. Igor Sikorsky was born in Kyiv Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. He fled west to escape the Bolsheviks who threatened to shoot him. So here is a flying machine fighting the decedents of Bolsheviks, designed by a refugee from Kyiv. Things don’t change much do they?
The mice where I live have runways and the Eagles sharp eyes
I thought someone might be banging on the door. It was the wind. The wind lifting and dropping the show shovel hanging there. Hung by a cord. A handle, a lanyard. The shovel didn’t come with a lanyard – I added it. Shoveling snow must send lots of people to the chiropractor. It sent me. With the lanyard I can stand straight and use my left arm, to fling the snow away. Its called mechanical advantage, leverage. The modification helped. The other pains these days don’t seem to have fixes close to hand. Not my hand. No lanyard to yank collective behavior toward common sense. Greased by human nature we slide toward the greasy abyss. Hey, Isn’t an Abyss the head of an Abby? A religious community where they make wine or jelly and meditate several hours a day. No, they spell it Abbess. Do they meditate or do they pray? No, its raptors that prey. Our pond has raptors hundreds of feet above it . They prey on the mice running on mouse runways. Yes rodents have runways. No aircraft but lots of runways. Runways through the weeds or under the crusted snow. Invisible runways. Our raptors are a pair of eagles. Their territory is the air for a couple of miles around the pond. They fish the pond in the seasons it’s ice free. In winter they still patrol the sky but they don’t see fish. They see snowmobile trails. They watch hot blooded youth enjoying the cold, crashing into drifts, getting numb. I remember that. It wasn’t a big deal to stay out all day in my youth in Colorado. Or snowshoe or ski across the cold whiteness of winter. Its interesting that a painter uses blue to show the shadows in snow drifts. A body of water, liquid water, reflects the sky. Also blue. Feeling blue, ya me too. The sky is blue for some reason having to do with optical physics and chemistry. Or maybe its “FM”. You know FM, fricken magic. FM is the reason for everything really. Science just explains in other terms. Gives grad students something to do. For me its time to sketch something for the top of this post.
This is what the 900 lb. gorilla in the room looks’ like
Elon Musk wants volunteers for a trip to Mars. He has said that humanity is doomed by not having another home, another planet. The practicality of him sending his new space ship to the red planet can be questioned. This in spite of his candor in saying people will not survive. There will be no plan to return anyone. The trip is so much effort that turning around to come back to Earth makes little sense. I think Musk would want to go to Mars regardless of the situation here on Earth, but….he has said the risk of humans making the Earth toxic to humanity is by itself a good reason. Starts to look like some early science fiction where a few of us escape to another world as this one gets toasted. But the best fire prevention is keeping the fire from starting. Easier said than done in the case of total war on Earth. So rockets to Mars will save us? Rocks were one of Man’s first missiles. They were ballistic and deadly when the windage was accounted for. If rockets loaded with colonists are to be our salvation it will be because rockets with warheads were our demise. Our only hope is peace. Going to Mars will not save us. Survival isn’t rocket science – It is the science of peace.
I hope that when the colonists arrive they are searched for nukes. Maybe by then paper passports and ink stamps will be history too
There is good news. The good news needs attention to keep balance. “Ice Out” we call it here in Maine. Ice out is when the crust of ice on the lakes and ponds melts. The cracks and wet spots on the frosted surface of our pond bodes well. History suggests we are still three weeks from local ice out but climate is changing so….maybe a little earlier. Astronomical spring is a week away. My way to mark the start of functional, enjoyable spring, is to take the motorcycle out. Yes only a woos waits for warmish weather to wide. To ride. Thoughts of a trip into Atlantic Canada on the motorcycle have entered my head. Might be on the bucket list. Going over the new bridge would be cool. I would want a camera mounted on the Yamaha to record everything.
That is of course, if I’m still here in the summer.
Doctored still of Stirling Hayden from a Korean war flick with Javelin missiles from the news streams
I watch old movies. Now and then old war movies. This to escape, for a while, the war news that isn’t a movie. Its sort of real, surreal anyway. The news I mean. But the movies are too. The thing about the movies is that they are propaganda. The war was just, the USA wore the white hat, stood for freedom, etc. But objectively the country acted for perceived self interest. As I type this screed I have the fifty inch screen set as window on Kyiv and I watch for flashes in the sky. Its night their. They are eight hours ahead of us here in the eastern USA. The propaganda movies about wars of the past are so different than watching one unfold in front of you. That is something new. But the values cast in these two different views of war stand in such contrast. The raw history and the sculpted heroic history. The one where the outcome is known at the beginning. Then there is the other, where not knowing gives that pit of the stomach top of the rollercoaster feeling. I am sure one of these Tom Clancy types wrote the script for this. I’m just an extra in the production. The cameras are everywhere. I play victim #3459588847498495847 and there are no lines to learn….we just improvise to the end. That will be when God almighty raises his hand and says, “cut”
The “truth” is seldom reality. Objective reality, the kind that is impossible for any human, always differs from any individual reality. And each of us has our take on what is truth and what is real.
The cultural history of the USA over the past half century has landed us where we stand today. A lot of individuals in the United States who were forming “their” reality in the late 60’s and early 70’s distrust everything the government says. Their own government. Another government, the one in Moscow for example, says the opposite of what Washington says….so, logically, its true. Binary is popular. It is either A or B, good or bad, right or wrong. But sadly, most of objective reality isn’t binary, even in simple human perception. Tucker Carlson isn’t a shill for Putin, he’s a shill for Fox Network and for himself. Did he ever say, “I would sell my soul to be a news “personality” I doubt it. These old parables are based on good and evil in binary terms too. No, Tucker and Fox saw a wind blowing in the country and set their sails to catch it. A famous Communist once said, “The capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with” Fox doesn’t loose money promoting sympathy for Putin or his stooge Donald. Put Donald Trump on camera every night. That might be entertaining, seeing him try to read from a teleprompter. RT, Russia Today, the propaganda channel, now largely shut down, has a slogan…..”Question everything” sounds like Socrates doesn’t it. Nothing pro Russia there. No, its like acid…it dissolves structure. When you’ve been cleaned of your beliefs our newly re-installed stooge and his helpers will tell you what to believe.
Moral ambiguity. That is a bottomless pit for people. Anything short of angels and God and his/her staff will not be able to see the moral compass – it’s needle swings wildly when human societies try to steer by it. Morality is the justification for the Godly side killing the un Godly. Hollywood took the cause of moral clarity as their own in all the wars the USA has fought. Maybe that’s why seeing war as a raw feed on modern media is so weird.
My feeling is that being dominated by the Kremlin isn’t healthy for anybody…not the Ukrainians, not Europe, not even the Russian people themselves. But the Kremlin is in the same business Hollywood has been in. Creating propaganda to remove any ambiguity in the cause. They can go to the extreme and ban words, like war, or invasion. George Orwell didn’t invent the “memory hole” on his own. He was inspired by Russian Communism and its use of language to shape a reality. Victory to Ukraine!
CSB 