i wish i was a river

Science and More Gadgetry

 

Science and Gadgets

 .Science has been the double- edge doppleganger sword for every good and evil technological ill in the modern world. We’re so fascinated by gadgets that we are told improve our lives just one little bit yet, nonetheless, we’ve made some indispensable to our daily routines. Gadgetry fascination is about the same as catnip to a cat. Pretty soon we’ll be enchanted by such new technologies as robot and drone delivery systems (for packages under 5lbs) sponsored by Amazon and Google; another Google invention, a windshield wiper that comes on when it rains. Whoopy!! Of course, the driverless car is becoming a part of our lexicon reality before it actually is a real reality. If they’re going to change the way people drive as well as the entire way we’re going to drive the vehicles themselves, the roads management, all that, but still complain that making a car that won’t burn fossil fuels, I’d say they’re not being that serious about global warming or eliminating the fossil fuel burning monsters we have. If our cars and windshield wipers are going to make all our individual choices for us, then what are we as so- called drivers supposed to be doing while we’re traveling. Read the digital newspapers and books? Then why don’t we all make a transition to the train.

However, since I don’t believe in capitalist world where we all are moving toward the illusion that life will become easier and more leisurely for most of us, they’ll also probably make a driverless working space car, so one can spend the endless hours trapped at traffic jams or driverless car wrecks, working. We’ll change the office environment from tall buildings to fill the freeway (or toll) lanes with privatized, driving contracts. Driverless cars and semi’s today. Mobile workstations tomorrow.

In fact, why don’t we just turn ownership over to whoever wants it in a real sense. Make trains our long-range option, make rental type driverless cars for those short trips, and electric bicycles for just getting around town. The cars and bicycles would be operated like short term lease, where the owners take all the responsibility for insurance and ownership hassles. That’s certainly a better option than having fifty different makes of driverless, gas operated individually owned cars, the same as it is now. I’m not sure but with all the cellphone usage while driving, most cars are nearly driverless now. I feel bicycle riders like myself are brave indeed, although it's probably not as bad as, say, Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City. 

If we continue to allow big money to determine the future for the sake of profit-oriented consumeristic expedience, then we’ll have a real mess on our hands. Technology isn’t the answer, you are. We always complain we’re not being considered in legislative and corporate decision making. They’re never going to make the object that will last a lifetime, only the object that starts becoming obsolete as soon as it’s sold. Look how many different cars we have to go on the same roads. Rich people say they should be able to buy something that reflects their own self-importance, yet they still have to drive under the same laws, the same roads etc that everyone else does. We have socialistic roads and capitalistic-consumer vehicles. Everybody thinks of their cars, rather than just being transportation, as privatized, individualized freedom icons, like a flag or some other symbol of freedom of choice.

It’s funny how we see freedom of choice. We think a different color car represents freedom yet we allow the government to set the standard on what real freedom choices we can make.

If we have to live under the pretense of being free, and I understand that part of social community is for everyone to contribute their fair share, though we continue to argue or discuss what ‘fair share’ means, I’ve always been a proponent of allowing people to pay whatever taxes they are required to pay (as their fair share) to whatever they feel is important to them. If a parent is concerned about their child’s education and we are supposed to have a public education system, one that requires children to get an education but also one that doubly functions as a socialization institution, then that parent should be “free” to have their taxes go to education. If one is concerned about the threat of terrorist, then they should be “free” to help finance the military. The same for road maintenance and the million or so other priorities that develop over the course of a lifetime. That’s real freedom.

But what’s happened is we’ve allowed the government to determine all priorities, both local and national. Our schools crumble, our infrastructure weakens. Unfortunately, nearly all our progress has been determined initially by military and strategic interests. The computer itself has always been connected to the defense department, highways to the movement of the military machine, atomic energy, obviously military, solar energy, space program, etc, etc. and now our smart phones have practically become like methamphetamine. I don’t care what anyone says about it, if you can’t lay it down for more than a few minutes at a time, there is something wrong with you. It may not be fatal but don’t call it smart.

Smartphones and cars. We’ve made both indispensable. Technology has changed the way “change” will take place. If I may say the word, “revolution”, a word that has become quite trite in its meaning and is no longer a realistic social ideal but more of an anti-social engagement to commit to keeping up with whatever science wants to throw our way without any consideration of how it affects anything outside of our own self-interest.

What is a person.?

 

What is a person.
A person is one who has universal rights.
A corporation is a person
A set of cells is a person.
A nation is a person
A palestinian isnt a person.
A queer is not a person.
And depending on where you are in the world and who you are, you may or may not be a person.
Who creates personhood?
The supreme court creates.
The congress creates
The scientific community creates.
The religious communities create
Christians point to the declaration of independence as a reference that we are "one nation under god" perhaps but not governed by god.
Whos writing the us script? Biden confusing gaza aid with ukraine. Kamala saying very precisely, cease fire in gaza and while people clap, she says, "within the next six weeks, with the conditions currently on the table." Conditions hamas has already said they wont accept.

I remember

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 I remember when the american people were outraged when saddam hussein invaded kuwait decades ago, and the father of our country and the cia told us that iraqi soldiers were killing babies in incubators and for that the invasion began.

And now we hear our ally, israel, if i must say say its name, commits atrocities against what some would call arbitrary "international law" against babies and innocent civilians.

Does the anti- choice contingent in american politics raise its voice in concern and empathy? No. Why not?

Because in america morality is based on the arbitrary political whims of those who have socialized us, embedded in us an obscure fear and an even more ambiguous reactive violence, like a dog who is trained to respond to rewards and commands of violence.

Oh, what a sweet nature that is!

The american people. 375 million strong, composed of babies ripe for exploitation, fears and prejudices and privileged and spoiled and dreamy ambitious and ignorant and liers and deniers cannot get it up against the mischief of its so-called representative government.

It's not the corporations who run this country, it's the very government and its illusionary mixed up ideology of supremacy, using these fantastical ideologies like the oracle of delphi, ruling and demanding we believe, commanding us, our voices silent.

Our time is gone. It goes in the aftermath of the Palestinians, the aftermath of our own genocide, our commitment to slavery, americas notions of supremacy, and the worship of money.

And where is jesus, or god, in all this? America is god and we can't see that the belief in one is the same as belief in the other. A medieval farce.

Why was america the nation with the most deaths during the pandemic? America, with the supposed best health care in the world.

And before, when north vietnamese gunboats attacked our powerful navy in the gulf of tonkin, for that the war of my generation, was on. 

Starting but never ending.

Technology

 Technology

The age of the gizmo.

That starts in the dirt of many nations where children, men, and women scrounge for cobalt, titanium, gold, diamonds and other precious resources which will be the beginnings of the 

The gizmo connected to the whatchamacallit, inserted into the thingamachig, which when complete, goes to peoria to be hooked up to the gadget, which came from a factory in hoboken, welded to the dogeared sheet, attached via remote control ai to a chip, manufactured in silicon valley, configured and detoxified by a technician in reno nevada, driven to las vegas, stored until further use.

Heres to all the men and women so far detached from what they do, congratulations, you have just built a weapon which will eventually be used to kill, maim, and destroy human flesh or maybe the man or woman who made the gizmo.

The cogs in the machine that keep industry rolling along.

Cog immigrants.

If i'm an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, why do i want to see millions of people forced to leave their own homeland because they can't work or can't survive, come here and become mere cogs in the manufacturing and disbursement of the greatest killing machine nation the world has ever seen? And like their citizen brethren, be totally unaware of their part as toads, and gizmo connectors, weapons collectors, and humanity defectors that run this world.

Yes, work will set you free but your work may also kill somebody else.

Corporations and militaries don't care about the child labor in africa or south america or both chinas that dig the cobalt to make the gizmo that makes its way to cheap labor outlets worldwide, here's to the future of america, built on the backs of the wanna be frees.

“Green Mining” Won’t Prevent Ecological Damage by Global Rush for Raw Materials | Truthout

https://theconversation.com/extraction-of-raw-materials-could-rise-60-by-2060-and-making-mining-greener-wont-stop-the-damage-222818 

Pollution Crisis in Mexico Shows Limits of Plastic Bag Bans in Global Capitalism | Truthout

https://truthout.org/articles/pollution-crisis-in-mexico-shows-limits-of-plastic-bag-bans-in-global-capitalism/ 

How Can Everyone Be?

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The Toads

The Toads

According to the standard english language dictionary, a toad is a member of the amphibian/frog buFonidae family characterized by dry leathery skin, short legs and large warty bumps covering its body. A common toad's lifespan is 10-12 years, unless they try and cross a major thoroughfare when they emerge from their wintery shelters.

On the other side of the toad coin is the human toad who, according to the dictionary of american slang, uses flattery and cajoling to gain familiarity and favor with a superior, or one who acts as a lackey to his superiors.

In order not to disparage the toad who i used to be very familiar with while living around farmland, rivers, creeks, and wide-open spaces of rural sacramento, what i have to say about the toad like behavior of politicians, world leaders, and corporate bosses, though its hard sometimes to differentiate between who's bossing/cajoling who in the world of big finance, corporate greed, and manufacturing the american war dream.

Above the gates of dachau is the german phrase arbeit macht frei "work sets you free."

The original expression originated from a novel by lorenz diefenbach. In which gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through real labor.

Formerly adopted by the nazis or in other places, the slogan became a sort of mystical, spiritual essence of the higher value of work, if not necessarily in this life, at least in the next one, especially if you were one of those who were forced to work until you dropped or were put in the showers.

Working until you drop is only a measure of what is available to the bossman to replace you. Slavery was a buyer/seller marketplace whereas building the pyramids was not nearly as costly to its builders. 

Imperialism and colonization were built on trade and values established on the needs of those who care little for human value, and in fact, most of those critters don't believe humans have any intrinsic value, only a commodity value.

Biden says he wants to take us into the existential future and not go back to the past yet aren't we always reliving the past throughout incessant "cold war" chants, our 1948 palestine annexation by the zionist/western alliance, the divisions in america of every political, cultural, and racial trope, everything is about the past in america. He says he knows america, well thats all he knows, the past because hes never really thought of the future except as a spaceboy, capitalist toy, cold war goy, or political ploy.

Sent from my iPad

Don't Want No More War, No More.

 The primary election is over. Here locally it is hardly noticeable. Our one socialist on the city council has gone the way of every one out of eight or so councilmembers in every us city, the heat of israel-hamas burning the principled, like Lots wife, looking back at what she'd miss, leaving ash.

The US has backed itself into another corner of contradiction. Railing against Russia violation of Ukraine while for decades meowing at Israel for its settler expansion and now has to deal with Netanyahu on His terms, like Zelensky deals with Putin.

A history rewrite would look like this. Back in such and such year, the US makes it clear to Israel that the conditions upon which they were provided a homeland at the expense of the indigenous population (which also included Jews, Arabs, nomadic peoples, palestinians, who got along relatively well, or along as well as possible without the interference of guilt stricken western nations, as people do before settlers and armies throw everything into chaos), they now have to adhere to certain principles or forfeit US support. 

This along with a type of peace in Europe right after World War 2 that demonstrated a new covenant between nations that war is the next to hell in the hierarchy and should not be planned on by establishing alliances once again. US out of Europe. Soviet Union out of eastern europe. It was the whole rabid anti-communist bullshit we've had to live with that Nixon did away with ping pong diplomacy. Almost comical. If capitalists, specifically, and money, generically, coulda stayed out of politics long enough for the dust to die down after the war, i wonder what we would be doing right now?

But, alas, it was not meant to be. We got caught by hook, line, and sinker, as you fishers might say.

War buildups since then are like an addiction, and now, here we are, not only on the cusp of some major change, but we'll also all be drawn in, up to our necks, watching the waves roll in from a sand crabs' point of worldview.

Its not news

It's not news

The continual local and national news programs that believe that consumerism, product display, and promotions for shops, restaurants, and events are news.

Neither is dedicating two full days to the travails of a political prisoner in egypt at the international cop27 oil lobby conference in Cairo Egypt by democracy now. 

The main problem with the type of news that caters to human interest news is that it plays to general authoritarian silence of news relevant to the major national and international policies which influence common people in any nation. There is a belief fostered in authoritarian cultures that what happens in government/national policy making are not interesting nor relevant to common citizens.

Yes, we are.

Sent from my iPad

Don't Obey

 

Don't Obey

 

It’s the people who obey the orders who scare me
Not the ones who give them, those you can ignore.
It’s the obedient, whose conscience is devoid of reasoning.
For when consent is based on authority alone
Freedom and true democracy cannot reign,
REAL Democracy is merely giving temporary consent, each time,
Not relegating power, forever.

Intersectionality

 I was raised up on the tv cowboy, gray matter tv, rabbit ears, and fuzzy "live" news. Actualization, id, three parts of the mind, the soul.

Intersectionality is one of those intellectual euphemisms acknowledged by progressives or woke activists to mean something is connected to not only something else but most of everything else. The range of connection runs the gamut from education, economics, class and race, law enforcement and imprisonment, cultural and social and ethnic exceptionalism, and national supremacy.

It's not a new concept, except for the more recent inclusion of analysis of societies that, up to this point, haven't been looked at in their total sectionality, so to speak.

America, more or less, is the primary example.

The reason for that is America was born capitalist, racist, classist, sexist, but so was practically every other society, tribe, community, nation in the world at the time. However, there was one essential difference between young America and it's western european co- institutionalists and that was, and still is, the ideals America claimed as its premise ( for supremacist) were not the real actualized version of the ideals It espoused, thus creating a division of realities among the people responsible, those who were living out the exception to those ideals and those accepting those ideals (into a form of national pride, patriotism, and supremacy philosophies).

Since then, radicals, revolutionaries, and common people have been trying to ascertain, exactly how much needs to be done in order to bring those ideals into line with themselves. There's been a mess of analyzing here in america spanning the intersectional globe of possible scenarios, beginning with intellectual, cultural, religious, class, sex, race analysis. These analysis' have come from scientific, religious, political trial and error beliefs about how or what or where.

None have actually been realized and all attempts at recognizing change to from change from have been preempted by the institutionalized precepts of the system needing change. Alot of this stagnation comes from the fact that progressive idealists tend to be lazy and almost always are pulled back into the very system they are attempting to change. And sometimes those radicals or progressives are forced out entirely or destroyed.

For example, the Black Panthers were attempting to initiate various black "institutions" in regard to food programs, education, carceral institutions, and self-defense. 

Self-defense is a concept most radicals don't concede as being necessary, especially with all the violence that america represents, it's seen as a more primitive form of revolutionary analysis.  It's true that all the revolutionary "heroes" of the early and mid-twentieth century were killed or rendered helpless by CIA, FBI and other international agencies, including the Panthers.

The political organization, an irresponsive and irresponsible entity, structured to eliminate dissent, freedom, or, at the very least, slow down or stop any faction that demands change. In our system of government, it looks on paper like it might work but as with everything else in this country, it's run by men, for men, and through men, though I have to say as a man, the sex of the leaders of any nation, corporation, wealthy class is more about what adventure they're on about, whether it be military, political, or economic war.

It is a man's world where everyone is a hero (justifying whatever atrocities the country is involved in). That whole concept goes back to every statue and memorial for military, national heroes, despite whether or not they are pedophiles, rapists, killers, genocide promoters or genocide deniers.

Hell, a country that still glorifies it's civil war history rather than treating it as treason is a desperate country to maintain some sort of denial of its nefarious past. We can hardly prosecute nor condemn bankers, ex-presidents, aparthied and genocide deniers, torturers, military atrocity makers. 

America seems to be exempt in the world of international responsibility. America has accepted the mantle of world savior, a mantle that was never bestowed on it, similarly, like Netanyahoo for believing that he(it) is a "jewish" savior, when in reality, he, like America, no one except his (its) own henchmen, (the military) backs him up. Outside of that cabal, behind the façade of order, the world fears what either of these two and a couple of other world culprits can bring to the brink. 

Everyday, it seems we are immersed in a Cold War- Zionist standoff. While Gaza is systematically physically demolished (and if you think about it, never to rise again in any civilized form), we throughout the world, are systematically democratically and ideally decomposing, like a corpse.

The vultures are circling.

So, yeah, intersectionality when put in realistic terms gives us nothing in return, except another framework for a horrible future, unless “the people” wake up. We are asleep. All of us, no matter how black, workin class, or sexually free, no matter what sort of activist, poet, dancer, bright you are.

We all understand the predicament we’re in but that gets us nowhere we haven’t been before.

We want a revolution and we want it NOW!

Start by not voting for the lessor? Of two evils. Make your community or make new community. Use the tools, the skills to build what you want to see. Just Build.

Book Review: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

 

The story is about a young, intelligent Nigerian woman who goes to America to go to school more so because America is where young, intelligent Nigerians go. She goes with all the earnestness of a new immigrant, but not a typical immigrant we are used to portraying in our media. She is one of millions from all over the globe who come on student visas, brought up in their own country in whatever middle class standard is prevalent, and are considering staying in America and becoming professionals but, once reality sets in, have a harder time deciding America is not for them.

The book is the journey of Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman and details the reasons why young people in Nigeria, specifically, and worldwide, generally, see opportunity in America as a viable opportunity to live better lives. She has a lover in Nigeria who must stay when she leaves but the couple see themselves together, possibly in America, after she gets her education.

A sexual assault not long after she arrives in America shames her, changes her and she cuts communication with her Nigerian lover. She feels isolated and alone. That she can’t really tell him over such a great distance, plus he would want her to come home, or he would want to come, neither choice she was ready to make. This decision not to tell him is one of the single most important decisions of her life.

In addition, she realizes that before coming to America she never considered herself "black" in such a way that made her race relevant to anything. Everyone was black where she came from and she soon realizes that being “black” in America is the symbol for a whole lot of problems as well as cultural prejudices Americans, both Black and White, accept or reject.

There are problems here.

She starts writing a blog about being a non-American black in America, often criticizing both white and black relationships.

She has many lovers, and relationships, physical and emotional. She continues to miss Nigeria as represented by her family and former lover, who has become a success, gotten married in a more traditional way, yet continues to burn for Ifemelu.

Years later, she returns to Nigeria wanting to contact her old lover who she knows is married and has a child. The decision she makes is the pivot upon which the last part of the book rotates.

This is a feminist book. It’s the story of the evolution of political thought in an non-American black woman, which allows it to provide detail and perspective about America that one does not normally get from Native writers, both black and white. There isn’t the anger nor the apology but more a sense of the fallibility of believing America has some “special” quality above and beyond what other cultures can provide. It’s kind of like having Mark Twain attend a dinner party in upscale New York to discuss The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

There were times reading this that I had the sense Adiche wasn’t being fair on the other side of the “race’ equation. It may be true that “race” in America is rooted in the difference between “race’ as racist want to define it, but although everyone in Africa is “black” still some of the worst hatreds and genocides of the modern ages have come out of Africa.

2022-2024 With Not Much In-between

 

Everyone is looking ahead to the mid-term elections to save us from the Monster who gave us the apprentice. It should be debatable that if anybody who voted for Trump because he was a celebrity should have their citizenship discontinued for a period of time, maybe a special place devoid of tv and digital news.

Democracy will not be the squeeky clean savior of us all, especially the type of unrepresentative democracy which is currently in the State of America. It is merely a word secured by the luxuriant gift trappings (ribbons and bows) of political philosophers who give us the impression that the people, whoever they are, the belief that we have a say in what their government does. It belies two truths. One, that the majority is those who care to vote (voice their opinion) and not those who neither choose not to voice their opinions nor simply do not care enough to vote (understanding possibly that it doesn’t matter, the choice fix is in). Secondly, maybe the most important of the two (pick your poison), that the majority vote is made up of a population making reasonable, rational decisions about candidates and issues and thus, would naturally represent the “best” possible “worldview”. Of course, once people get over the above mentioned hurdles they accept the outcomes as c’est la vie mainly because unless you’ve recently hit a pothole that engulfed your entire front wheel or had an encounter with a black man that left them uneasy or been recently laid off without good reason, or had a cop shoot down in the street one of their unarmed sons, there is little that will shake their world in the next four or two or one years, convincing them that there must be change.

The fact is that the people who are closest to the potholes, strange black men, laid off, bad cops will be the ones who will want change and look toward the democratic process as a means to their end. But the eye of the hurricane is a big one. The calm prevails while wave after wave of violence spews outward but never coming to rest permanently anywhere.

The ironic thing is that democracy as we know it is the best we have to show for the centuries of other cultures having developed something similar but to a much smaller degree. In Western Civ, bigger is always better. Our civilization is literally built on the size of things. Those societies that based their social order on some sort of democracy-respect- because respect given is certainly equal to respect voted on-were more orderly, smaller, and there were some “agreements” with natural environment which were universal- such as not going and torching your neighbors farm, livelihood- and not expecting repercussions. What was wrong with these smaller, more democratic societies is they couldn’t withstand the onslaught of the New World Order, societies that rather than build the future, built armies and differences to go fight about.

The truth of the matter is we are a petty animal, intelligent enough to recognize certain inconsistencies, contradictions, give allegiances to certain authorities but if intelligence is only me, me, me then we are all certainly doomed because we are also intelligent enough to recognize reconciliation, forgiveness, love, and recognition of whether or not being wrong has anything to do with the law.

That’s the gist of our problem. We know what’s right and wrong through our own sense of wellbeing (what we want to happen) yet we allow, either through mental weakness or lazyness, others to provide enough distraction so we either can’t or won’t make a decision. Certainly, a characteristic of a confused state of mind. Either running from or standing stock still, hoping that blending in is the only natural defense against such an abstract enemy. The herd syndrome. After all, we are a herd animal, a domesticated herd animal, an overly intelligent herd animal. It doesn’t really matter how many skyscrapers or cities we get to roam around in, we’re all as anonymous as a cow out at Harris Ranch.

That’s where the news media and the government come in, the creation of celebrities. The celebrities are whitewashed yet enough of a moral distraction is maintained to keep the curiously mundane interested. The same goes for the politicians who really represent no one except a small circle of friends.