Remember Science?

When I was a young man, science was the one place all Americans could agree on, even if they didn’t understand the science itself. That is because they understood the scientific method that simply states that we don’t know something until we can prove something, a terrible paraphrase. So, in the case of climate change, it is understood that CO2 traps heat. That is proven and so everyone should get behind that, but what that would mean in our day to day lives, we weren’t sure about and so could be discussed without stepping on the scientific method. Turns out, by the way, they underestimated how serious it would be. But no one in those days was against science. It would be like being against curiosity or the desire to learn more or understand something better.

That has changed. Over the years, the Republican Party has embraced an anti-science agenda, which is beyond weird until you consider the source. Despite what any republican voter thinks, that party is in place for the ultra-wealthy and keeping them that way. They don’t care about the border or trans people or any of the other issues they throw at their voters to get them riled up. Republicans had the White House, senate and house during Trump’s first presidency and they did absolutely nothing about the border. These types of issues are golden for republicans for the very reason stated above, they need them to rile up the base and get them to vote based on these issues, while paying no attention to what really matters. And it works. I can’t tell you how many Minnesotan republicans I’ve seen interviewed who brought up the borders. Minnesota. Only Alaska is farther away from the southern border, I think. Oh, and Hawaii. They’re riled up as they eat fruit picked by immigrants, go to restaurants with kitchen staffs filled with immigrants, have repairs done on their homes by immigrants and so on. And just how many Minnesotans have had a bad experience with a trans person? None?

The new Trump White House just abruptly cancelled all scientific meetings without any rescheduling. This included gatherings and panels and the like. But why? Because if we followed the science, we’d have to invest in policies that will help the whole nation, and the entire world, in the case of climate change. We’d get behind renewable energies, which are scientifically proven to be better in our fight against climate change. The new issue is that those renewable energies are costing less and less and less due to science-based upgrades to the technology and the costs of manufacturing. So, you’d think that republicans, who famously hate paying for anything and particularly taxes, would embrace renewable energies. Nope.

But that gets to another point about republicans. Yes, they would save the nation money now, bring down he cost of energy for all of America, and help the nation and world slow climate change. However, those at the top of the republican pile, the men and women Trump brought on stage at the inauguration, don’t care about saving that kind of money. Whereas, we read constantly stories of homeowners who opted for solar and now not only don’t pay for their electricity but even get money back for it. That’s huge for the average American, republican or democrat, but chump change for those folks. It’s not even on their radar. But what is on their radar? The wealthy fossil fuel industry who would rather watch the world burn than lose their oversized piece of the American pie.

Elon Musk, who sat on stage with Trump and offered up a Nazi salute(?) and gave a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump for his reelection, among other things makes electric cars and solar panels. Does Elon Musk care about climate change? Ten years ago I would have said, yes, absolutely! But now, not at all. He saw profits, money and power, and he got them all in spades. He spent 250 million dollars on a man who hates electric cars and solar and wind and so on. But Musk knows that electric cars are our future, as are solar panels, so he plays both games.

I’m certain we need better science and civics education in high school – and throughout high school. Civics should not be a one-off class as it was for me. The science doesn’t need to go particularly deep, but create a good understanding with students about its importance, the scientific method, and how it is absolutely ignorant to somehow turn against it as Republicans have. As for civics, our voters are woefully ignorant of this and without an understanding of our governments, what they do and our role in making them work, we’re screwed.

One Nation, Two Movies

A friend of mine had wanted to watch Idiocracy with me for years. It’s a Mike Judge film. Here’s how IMDB describes it:

Corporal Joe Bauers, a decidedly average American, is selected for a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.

I knew what the film was about a long time ago – the title gives it away I guess and I didn’t want to watch it all those years because I just knew that I would be struck by intense feelings of, we’re already halfway there! and it’s only funny because it’s becoming true! and blah, blah, blah. So after the election I figured now was the time, so I called said friend and we sat down and watched it.

Holy crap, Judge is a genius. Yes, it’s a little ham-handed, but that’s the funny and so are all the citizens living in our future; but the movie is also razor sharp in its skewering of the true and actual dumbing down of the nation, the thrill of violence on the stupid, the overconsumption of media and addiction to entertainment. Sound familiar? Idiocracy came out in 2006 – long before we slipped rather quickly into our own reenactment of it.

The other movie I happened to watch was Civil War, a 2024 movie by Alex Garland. IMDB again:

A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

I didn’t plan to see this one either and for similar reasons as Idiocracy (we’re already halfway there) but had the opportunity and watched. Depressing. They do a very good job of not making it into a MAGA Republican versus American Progressives war movie and in fact have Texas and California in cahoots on one side of the civil war. But it’s hard to completely avoid the obvious when threats have come from mouths of people who will have a say in the new administration, so of course it’s depressing and frightening. That it’s so new and current makes it even harder to watch. It looks feasible right down to the folks in some towns they travel through who simply ignore the entire Civil War due to callousness or media misinformation – or both – ugh.

Too close to home, that one.

Tests of what?

An obituary appeared in the newspaper a few days ago for Reg Murphy, who was a newspaper editor at The Atlanta Constitution, among other jobs and publications. He passed away recently at the age of 90. What interested me was a story about him that happened in 1974, which is why I don’t remember it at all. (I was ten.) So one day, while at the paper Mr. Murphy was contacted by a man “identified as William A.H. Williams, a drywall subcontractor.” Mr. Williams reached out to Mr. Murphy ostensibly about 300,000 gallons of heating oil he wanted to donate “to a worthy cause.”

It was all rather odd and he wanted Mr. Murphy to go to his lawyer’s office to sign some papers, but as Mr. Murphy said, he went along because it was important and usual “for newspapermen to have to lead open lives and be available to anonymous or strange people.” Strange indeed. Once Mr. Murphy was in the car, Mr. Williams brandished a gun and said, “Mr. Murphy, you have been kidnapped.” Why? It’s going to sound very familiar. First, he said he was a “‘colonel in the American Revolutionary Army’ and ranted against the ‘lying, leftist, liberal news media’ and ‘Jews in the government.'” Murphy by the way was a moderate in politically.

But what the hell? It’s the same shit people are slinging right now. This was 50 years ago! When are we going to grow up? Lump all Jews into a single stereotype and bitch about the so-called liberal media? Great. I think it’s time we put away this way of thinking and acting.

What? They won? Oh. The dog caught the car. This is going to get interesting. However, …

Jews, immigrants, people of color, gay people, sick people, artists, disabled people, poor people, incarcerated people, and decent, liberal white folks, do you understand that the federal government, beginning in January, is actually openly gunning for you? For who you are, what you stand for, how you love, where you worship or come from?

I hope so. Because without you viscerally experiencing the very real fear, danger and anger you should be experiencing right now, and doing something about it, we’re screwed as a nation; and as individuals who do not, for whatever arbitrary reason, live up to the very real and very bizarre physical, mental, emotional, sexual, political, religious and whatever else set of creepy-ass tests of character or personhood or deserving of being treated nicely, or whatever the fuck they make up and use to judge everyone else.

Sit on your hands on the buses of life, blushing at all the apple stealers. That’s a paraphrase, I think, of Davie Bowie. This is not: And then one day, the apple stealers show up with guns.

Love it but leave it

I remember hearing something along the lines of, you can tell the soul of a society by the tallest buildings. They talked about how it was once the church spires and then the government domes, and now corporate skyscrapers. Where the money is, there too is what we care most about. Stadiums.

Whoever came up with: He who dies with the most toys wins, nailed it. We are consumers, if nothing else. Consider the McMansion and explosion of storage facilities. We continue to move away from churches, and no one seems to care about good governance nor is willing to happily pay their taxes for the services they provide. Instead, we focus on us (our accounts, our feeds, our playlists, our entertainment, our silos and echo chambers), and better yet, they focus on us.

Consumerism isn’t new; but in about 1995, it was like a teed-up golf ball and the Internet swung in like a 1-wood.

It’s all very obsessive and dizzying, chaotic and endless, and that’s good for the Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like. They control it, and uniquely control each of us – what we see, how often, and all through a Pavlovian rewards system that responds to our every click – a different experience for every man, woman and child who logs in and turns on. And now it’s about you – your likes, your way of thinking, your videos, your music, your beliefs, your followers, your clothes, your hobbies, your culture – and so, as Greg Jackson in “Sources of Life” writes, “we create a culture in line with what we have been told the culture is like.”

The constant reaffirmation of ourselves online makes it easy forget the rest, or ignore them, misunderstand them, demean them, hate them. We’re developing personal cultures that sometimes intersect or overlap with others but mostly not. I’ve got my earbuds and you’ve got yours.

But to be free and alive, healthy and not crazy, we have to curate our own minds – extricate ourselves from the fast flowing feeds. Choose on our own what we want to put in our minds, and really think about it, as whatever we choose becomes us, too. Neuroplasticity, the ability and in fact, simply fact about our minds is that they are changed and altered, even physically, by what we see, hear, feel, taste, experience. The more we see the same product in our feed, the more we’ll remember it and maybe buy it. If you repeat anything over and over and over, you will eventually believe it. Just ask the religions.

Jackson writes, “Defending art or culture for its own sake may seem trivial, even gratuitous, amid our present crises, but our crises have flowered in the soil of its trivialization. The vacant secular despair that sends us searching for a religious politics – that underwrites the allure of racism, nationalism, conspiracy theories such as QAnon, the violent fraternal gangs; that makes us long for the escapism of entertainment, narcotics, video games and for the endless stimulation of the internet and social media – is precisely what culture of this category is meant to address.”

Support the arts. Curate your own mind.

Think Like This

I noticed I am suddenly offered a pink heart along with the red heart in the initial emoji showing for texts. I’ll bet they’re trying to make us better distinguish between love and LOVE! You know? Temper us; make us less over the top with either love or hate; make us get along better. They can do that, you know. And they do. It’s crazy.

Reason number 454 to get your ass off “X”.

I don’t buy it

This is from the Bible.
Proverbs 6:16-19

“There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.“

Hey! Did you hear Don Trump’s hawking Bibles? Yep. He is. That’s going well.

Tenacious Pugnacious

Growing up there was a woman who lived alone in an old house a block over named Mrs. Guggisberg. I shoveled her walk in the winter. She looked exactly like a Mrs. Guggisberg. She was short and odd, to an eight-year-old neighbor kid. And kind of mean.

Once she asked me to look after her dogs for a few days and I did but I hated her dogs. When I went to the door for my dollar after shoveling, they’d be all up in the doorway, barking and yipping and spinning and loud as hell. And they were ugly. Pugs. Three of them.

Pugs are all smashed face and butthole, with whacked out eyes, fat, little football bodies and legs like tiny twigs. They snort and gag and wheeze – they can’t fucking breathe. (Thanks to human breeders.) And these were mean. When I was feeding them for her, they would attack me. I’d open the door and they’d already be there barking and I’d have to kick at them to get them to move back and work my way into the kitchen, put the dog food in the bowls, change the water, and head back out the door – all the while swinging my legs around to keep the hounds at bay. And the buttholes, put your fucking tails down, you weirdos!

And I had to do that for three days. And they never let up. They are tenacious little piglets. And probably just fucking with me.

Okay, people love dogs. I do, too. And you get into trouble when you badmouth a dog breed, which is why I’m now wondering if my rant about the misshapen, mistaken and poorly designed corgi, the Ikea dog (got the right top, but the wrong legs) might muster more backlash than the pugly pugs bit? I think so. People really love their corgis. And tenacious? You could throw a tennis ball for 24 hours and a corgi would bring it back every single time.

Buds

A couple of people asked me what the hell this is. It’s a voice inside my head, the loser me, the guy always trying to fit in. The bit about mooching the money is not me. I don’t think. Can I just say it was very strange to write it down? And not a little embarrassing?

Ha ha! It’s fun to be with you guys, I mean, that’s obvious! We’re just like, ‘hey, man’ and ‘what’s going on’ and stuff. Just chillin’. Everybody’s all ‘wha?!’ you know? ha ha! So, what is up? Wanna go to one or your guys’s cribs? Check it out, you know, ‘what’s up?’ Be all ‘sweet crib!’ Yeah, no, we could go to my place but it’s so small, we’d be all over each other, I mean, and we’re buds but not that kind! ha ha! Man, especially, anyone got any brews at home? That’d be sweet! We’d be all ‘wha?!’ Hanging out and shit! Drinking some brewskis! Ha. Hey! Shit. I was gonna ask, I left my wallet at home and if anyone can front me five bucks, that’d be sweet! I’d be paying it right back, I’ll be all, ‘what’s up?’ be like, ‘cash on the barrel head, bitches!’ right? so if anyone can, just let me know. Later’s cool! Ha. So are we going to hang out? That’d be sweet. A bite to eat. That rhymes! ‘that’d be sweet, a bite to eat!’ We’re all like, ‘wha?!’ be hanging out and stuff. Anyone hungry? Grab a little nosh? ‘what’s up?’ ha ha. Not to use a big word, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t invite you guys to my place in the very near future! It’d be sweet, be all, ‘wha’s up? want to par-tay?’ Hell yeah! So where do you guys want to go? There’s some good movies out nowadays. We could get some tix, poppycorn and bevies? ‘what’s up?’ be all, ‘I’ll take the biggest tub you got, homey!’ ha ha. So, movie sound groovy? Ha! I’m a freaking poet! ‘Four score and …’ wait! no! shit! That’s not poetry – it’s the Constitution! Damn! Everybody’s all, ‘wha? make up your mind, dumbshit!’ how many times I’ve heard that – my mom and my dad, that is, when he’s actually home, but, oh, shit! What am I doing? You guys are all like, ‘what about your dad, you loser!’ ha. Anybody got any brothers and sisters and shit? Hey! We gonna head out or what? Not that I don’t love hanging out here in the freezing cold – ha ha – you guys all got real winter gear. This beauty’s a wind breaker and it ain’t breaking any wind! It’s freaking cold out here! Wait a minute, isn’t breaking wind like farting? I mean, doesn’t it mean it? That’s hilarious! Good news, guys, my wind breaker ain’t breaking any wind! But someone here is! You all smell that? Be all, ‘Damn dude! That’s rank!’ and shit. Let’s roll! I mean, get on the road. ha ha it’s cool hanging out with you cats! Ha! Cats! You all be all, ‘you hang out with cats, dork?’ ha ha Then my cat will just disappear one day – poof! from the backyard. Dad didn’t bother to look for her. It was his day off. Ha! Just joshing! Be all, ‘I’m fucking with you!’ If you pardon my French! Ha! Damn. So, if anyone does have five buckaroos, that’d be sweet! I mean, I could probably get by with a little less, but, I mean if no one’s sporting a fiver, I totally understand. But one of you fuckers must be able to spot me! Ha! I’d pay it right back, I’d bring it right to your place – special delivery! So, I need the cash for medications for my mom who’s totally wondering where the heck I am! I’d be all, ‘Put a lid on it, old lady!’ ha. ‘wha?!’ But I should probably skedaddle – anyone able to… Naw, I get it. I’m totally cool with… Where are… Okay! Cool! See you guys! Cats! ha ha. cats.

Eddie Izzard

The first trans person I ever met was in about 1976 at Thomas Beach on Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. This was all very new to me at 13. I was sitting on the curb waiting for my friend, Ben, to come back from wherever the hell he was. Up walked this very tall woman in a bikini but covered with a beach jacket of sorts. She sat down on a picnic table and looked out over the lake. Then she looked over at me, staring right back at her. She smiled.

Lovely day, she said.

It’s hot.

One day you’ll grow up into something hot, son.

I’m sure I blushed, but it was summer in 1976 and I spent every waking hour outside, sans sunscreen, but soaked in Coppertone oil, so I was already some dark shade of reddish brown that probably hid said blushing. Someone shouted and she stood up and waved. Enjoy the beach, she said and ran toward the person. I’d heard about “cross dressing” and some talk of people transitioning through surgery and hormones. I believe they had to go to The Netherlands or somewhere to get it done. But now I saw one and talked to one. That blew my mind.

Somewhat related, I was reading an article yesterday about Eddie Izzard and remembering when Ms. Izzard was in the news for coming out as transgender way back in the mid-eighties. She’s been busy, real busy over the last 40+ years as a comedian, stage and screen actor, pilot, very active in LGBTQ issues, and is now again running for Parliament in the UK. She’s also a crack athlete and has run hundreds of marathons (more than a hundred for charities). Here’s what really blew me away:

“It’s not just the sheer number of marathons that Izzard has run that’s impressive: it’s that she runs them one after another. In 2009, she ran 43 marathons in 51 days. In 2016, she ran 27 in 27 days. And in 2021, she ran 32 in 31 days.”

Got that? She ran 32 marathons in 31 days. Damn.

#eddieizzard

Here’s a (Maybe Dumb) Idea

This would be a program designed to bring families out of poverty, enhance and fill in their education, and set them on a path to a new life. And I just made it up so it might not work, or the numbers are wrong, or just an all-around bad idea, but here goes:

Create a gated community outside the city, with 25-50 1,000 – 2,000 square foot homes, outfitted with quality furniture and appliances, all very simple and very clean. The gate, by the way, is serious, for a host of reasons. There would be lots of trees and green spaces, a main hall to meet, play games and celebrate, an office for administration and a pole barn/garage for groundskeeper/gardener and for training residents to work on the grounds and garden.

Other employees would include a caseworker for every ten homes (5), a part-time bookkeeper, banker or accountant to work with families on financial literacy, 3-5 admin positions, security (2), said groundskeeper, and a professional childcare worker and residents working as child-care employees.

Buses would run from community to city and back every two hours from 8a to 10p, with some small number of stops (close to or at mass transit pick-ups). Residents would be required to work from the age of 16 and over. High schoolers 16 – 18 could get out of work requirements when playing a sport or doing other school-related activities. Residents would also be required to sign in and out when they come and go. Allow each family to bring in enough of their own stuff to fill a 10 x 10 shed in the back.

We assume although are not certain that this venture should bring in lots of willing support through donations and in many other ways, doctors, psychologists, nurses, dentists, chefs/nutritionists and others might donate their time, etc. Bring in artists, musicians, athletes and actors to entertain and to teach art, music, athletics and acting.

Illegal drugs and drunkenness would be prohibited.

$4,000,000 to $5,000,000 for land, to build and other start up costs
$1,200,000 for yearly salaries
$200,000 per year for general upkeep
1,500,000 / 50 = $30,000 per family, per year
2,000,000 / 50 = $40,000 per family, per year

As residents work, they pay some sort of rent out of their paycheck; it would be low, but something to keep them in the paying for things mindset, that would be true of utilities as well. They would be expected to buy their own groceries and everything else once they get settled in and working. Families would be parent(s) and one to four kids. Once the kids are 19, they must move out. Parents move out when kids are out, or before if they desire it, or if it is felt that they’re ready to do so, which we would hope would happen the most often.

Just thinking out loud here…