I broke mine.
Or mine broke. I didn’t do it. oh, crap I did do it, it wasn’t quite falling off and so I bent it off, but it was just a matter of time! I can’t be blamed for the Hinge Pin Door Stop Wall Protector with Rubber Tip, Design House Polished Brass Adjustable Door Stopper’s ultimate demise.
I like to write letters to the editor and here’s one (of many) they ignored.
The column inches dedicated to the cost of eggs over the last year has been absolutely ludicrous. Eggs are expensive because there is a shortage of eggs because we humans had to kill millions and millions of egg-laying chickens due to the bird flu. A shortage of something leads to an increase in price. Even our dear leader* can’t do anything about it, short of firing all the people tasked with killing the chickens or possibly adding bleach to their feeding tubes to treat the flu.
What if over the millions of years of evolution each of our eyesight had evolved to be what was best for each of us; the best eyesight for each of us to experience and see the world, to perceive what is happening, to respond, ergo, to survive?
But then we invented glasses and yes, we could all see better, but at the same time started to go just little bit crazy with our evolved eyesight decoupled from our evolved personalities? And with each generation that crazy gets just a little bit stronger?
And that’s what’s happening now? All because of stupid glasses?
I do this every once in a while where I write something after some immersion in the bad news of the day. Note that the current bad news is worse than it’s ever been in my lifetime. But I start pontificating on the evil, greed, hate and blah, blah, blah. This time I’m quite a bit more freaked out but when I got done and reread it, I was struck by how silly it all is. Bestowing upon the world my opinions on whatever. Here’s what we need to do! Whatever. But it’s cathartic and so ultimately it’s worth it, right? And I kind of like this one. Here goes:
Everybody right now open an account on Bluesky. Good Americans can talk there.
Completely shut down all of your other social media accounts – X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. All of them. We’ll do this fast and we’ll do this right and you can get your accounts back. Grab your data, or start fresh. Do it now.
Do not buy anything from any of those companies – purchase nothing on Amazon, close those accounts also, do not buy a Tesla, if you have one, enjoy it and drive it into the ground. Do not use Elon Musk’s satellite connections, nor any of his other companies, and those of you who do the science as astronomers and engineers and the like working for him, you’re smart! Get the fuck out of there! Anybody working for any of those companies, walk now.
Disrupt the activity of everything related to those same businesses. This of course includes Trump companies. Whatever you can do. Good hackers, this especially means you. Blow our minds.
Yes, this will create hardship, but if we do this fast and we do this right, we’ll get through it easily and the old-fashioned way, taking care of one another, looking after our neighbors. We’re the good Americans, remember? We can take a little hardship. In fact, we can take a lot of hardship to save the nation – and ourselves, our families, our loved ones, our friends and coworkers and neighbors.
If we do this fast and we do this right, we can avoid violence of any kind. That being said, everyone be prepared to the best of your abilities.
The only two things they understand are money and power, and they will stop at nothing to use their power to bring us to our knees and take all the money for themselves. They are doing it right now. Right in front of our eyes. We must immediately stop the flow of any money into their businesses.
Please pass this on to everyone you know.
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.
This from Harper’s Findings June 2024:
“Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas, in half the arterial plaques of Campanian carotid endarterectomy patients; in the gastrointestinal tracts of three bottlenose dolphins and a harbor porpoise in the Black Sea; in shrimp in South Africa’s Crocodile River; in two-thousand-year-old archaeological remains buried seven meters underground; and in the gonads of adult oysters in the Mangrove Coast of the estuarine Brazilian Amazon.”
Found their way seven meters underground. And we have no idea regarding the long-term effects of microplastics on humans. We just went with it many years ago and here we are. But are we seeing it already? I read a while ago that tests on mice showed them suffering from both physical and mental maladies, and got, well, dumber. You think?
I’m trying to get my head around how to write about ambient music. I share albums occasionally but struggle mightily to describe any of it. I believe it’s because how I interact with ambient music doesn’t lend itself to adjectives. As might be expected, my relationship with ambient music is rather um ambient; right? There are no verses and choruses being sung at me that I listen to, engage and maybe sing along with. Ambient music exists around me and I tune in and out, mostly unconsciously, I suppose. I don’t listen to parts or instruments, but the entirety of the soundscape, like a landscape. Using that metaphor, most other music is like engaging in the world with people and about specific things; ambient music is more like a walk alone in a forest. They talk about nature bathing, ambient’s like music bathing. See? How do you write about that?
So I think I have to simply put the album up and say, have at it if you’re into this sort of thing.
So check this out. Brian Eno must never sleep. This came out of nowhere* – an awesome collaborative album with Eno, Holger Czukay and J Peter Schwalm. “Sushi. Roti. Reibekuchen” Have at it.
*I should be clear that this came out of nowhere for me isn’t probably all that newsworthy. It’s not like I’m checking in with Eno to see what’s coming.
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.
Dichotomies. Black and white. One or the other. Except of course for the gray areas where everything we consider “black” or “white” actually resides. There’s no true black (completely and absolutely black) and no true white (completely and absolutely white), but a continuum of black to white and back again. But that’s confusing, right? So we’ll just talk black and white.
Nope. Introvert/Extrovert, Asshole/Saint, Liberal/Conservative. Two “opposing” sides of anything are in fact the two ends of a continuum. They touch each other like the two sides of a coin. That’s why questions at the doctor have like eleven choices: agree, somewhat agree, just sort of agree, thinkin’ about agreeing, meh, I’m intrigued…
Atheism/Religion. Even those who’d scream “There is a god!” or “There is no such thing as a god!” right into your face, spittle and all; within each of them, at the very least, there exists a seed that if watered properly through whatever experience or experiences will grow and lead them to think somehow otherwise. We all have the ability to learn, to change; and we can’t help but evolve.
Enemy/Friend. From frenemies to mortal enemies; from ghosting someone to killing them. But even mortal enemies would come together if it were truly needed of them – like if two mortal enemies (I don’t know about you but I’m picturing medieval chainmail mortal enemies) had to jump into a lake to save an old woman in a sinking Oldsmobile. They’d do it! Although chainmail and ponds make for a dangerous combination.
Bad thoughts/Good thoughts. Maybe it’s like a bell curve continuum, so there’s a long, sort-of plateau in the middle, the middle ground, where our thoughts go from bad to good, but the closer you get to one or the other the faster you fall into it. Or maybe not.
Remember the continuum. No one is all good. No one is all bad.
Growing up I could never understand why marijuana was illegal and alcohol was legal. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Marijuana kills no one, essentially; alcohol kills scores and scores. This I just read:
“The annual number of alcohol-related deaths from 2020 through 2021 exceeded 178,000, according to date from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more deaths than from all overdoses combined.”
I would never argue to make alcohol illegal, but something to keep in mind. Dang.
Luke Soiseth 