July 21, 2013

Our local grocery store has a sign on the front door: "NO FIREARMS."

Knowing the manager and the cops he is friendly with, they might find prying a gun out of cold dead fingers acceptable terms.



Seriously, the only people who carry guns in our city are cops and gangsters. And too many of the gangsters are fourteen and fifteen year old idiots who can't shoot straight.

My wife sees young gangsters who've been shot, and in another city my sister scrapes them off of the streets, and invariably these kids are surprised how bad it hurts to get shot or that they are not dead, except when they are dead.

Carrying a gun does not protect you from idiots like this. They don't give a shit. Odds are if you are caught in the crossfire you won't even know what's happened when you are bleeding on the ground and the dip-shit shooters have run off or driven away.

I've talked to war veterans too. Usually shooting is a surprise that's over a second or two after it starts.

It's never like the movies. No drama, no music, no slow motion, just "bang-bang-blood."

I have a friend who has never gotten over killing the Vietnamese kid who shot him. It got worse for him when his own kid was a teenager, same age as the kid he killed.

July 18, 2013

Hunter is in a bad mood. He will take guns from cowardly idiots, and he will not give them back.

Crazier than his grandma, mom, a few of his siblings, and many ancestors.

Zero tolerance for idiots with guns, and I have art to make. Your gun meets Mr. Lincoln Arc Welder.

Want to play Wild West? I can do that.

July 18, 2013

I'm happy at 35mph.

If I was Emperor of the Earth I'd make 35mph the universal speed limit and I'd use my space fortresses to vaporize any man-made vehicle traveling faster than that. With the exceptions of wind powered, human powered, emergency services, or peaceful space exploration machines.

Yes, you'd better put a speed limiter on your antique Corvette or you will be turned into hot stinky smoke. Jet airplane? Gone. All vaporized on the runways after fair warning.

Might as well tow your old car with an oat-powered horse, Amish style.

If you must go fast go get yourself a bicycle, put on a helmet, and find a long steep hill to ride down.

Highway 154 down to Santa Barbara used to work for me on a bicycle, and I've done far, far worse on absurdly powerful motorcycles... But I am older and wiser now, and fortunately not dead with scars to prove it.

Yep, these days I'm an environmentalist fascist. I hate your car as much as I hate my own. Our family cars have mileage to the moon and now they are working their way back. They are old enough to vote. They continue to live only to spite me. They hate me as I hate them. This is not a positive relationship. Fuck you, car, you didn't pass the smog test? I can make you pass the smog test. Oh yeah? My fuel pump relay will burn out in a bad neighborhood in Oakland at 1:13 in the morning.

Look, threatening dude, you don't want nothing I've got. C'mon, you think I'd be driving this car if I had money??? Okay, I've got $3.16 in my pocket, a VISA card well past it's limit, and maybe once I get these wires twisted together I can give you a ride. Want some coffee? Threatening dude is bought off with $2.00. His life must suck way more than mine.

I don't understand why everyone is in such a hurry to go nowhere. Life is nothing if you are not enjoying the ride. Get on a big, luxury, high tech sailing ship and cross the oceans. Enjoy the ride on slow trains spanning continents. Open the windows, stick your head out, and smell the air just like a dog in a car.

Tour the world? Sure! A few years on slow boats, trains, on foot, on electric scooters, legs, or wheelchairs. Wonderful! No hurry, no deadlines. Wherever you go, there you are.

Retired mom and dad are calling from Australia. They'll be back in a year or two, or maybe not. But they are having a great time.

July 15, 2013

If there are any interstellar civilizations...

... individual beings are reproducible and no larger than particles of dust.

If they even bother with ordinary matter and energy at all. Maybe all that "dark" matter and energy in the universe is intelligent life. We wouldn't know.

The inter-stellar civilizations are probably too busy creating new and innovative universes to pay any attention to our human so-called "intelligence."

Maybe we humans will get our act together, progress, and create a truly intelligent species that will join the teams creating these new universes...

...but probably not. We humans will live a short time and then become extinct like most other species of life on this earth. Best outcome we are happy Bonobos who created a form of life that is actually intelligent. We will be respected by our intellectual descendants. Worst outcome we are gone and forgotten forever, known only as yet another suicidal species that trashed their home planet and died.

July 14, 2013

Hot piss on the gun culture and their guns.

Asparagus piss.

Piss on Zimmerman.

NRA goons and all you other cowardly, fearful weenies: YOU OWN THIS.

Thanks for starting this thread DainBramaged.

My anger is incandescent.

July 8, 2013

There are three solutions to this: Meaningful Work, War, or Revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Meaningful work and peaceful revolution are the only acceptable solutions.

These lost kids in the USA, Europe, Japan and elsewhere are a standing army that will eventually be rallied as a force for good, or a force for evil.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make this world a better place.

We can do that work, or we can rot away in corruption.

June 22, 2013

Pay attention, activists...

... it's not simply the police, it's giant corporations too and in many cases they are one and the same.

That doesn't mean you should allow your activist group to lose focus in a fog of suspicion, just be careful.

Every time I get involved in edgy stuff I have experiences that are not quite right. Part of it is me, my "real world" self is somewhere on the autistic spectrum and a bit paranoid, but I've often been surprised when dynamic members of an activist group get absorbed into the system they were fighting. I don't think it's "selling out" as is often claimed, or people lying to themselves caught up in the romance of their activism. I think many were always on the other side but profiting somehow from their participation in the activist group.

My first experiences were with peace groups, environmental groups, and anti-nuclear groups. It is a little unsettling to see some of the same people I knew back then working for defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, so-called "mainstream media," real estate developers, and yes, in a few cases, law enforcement.

Sure. people "grow up" and join the "real world," but I think that concept is in itself propaganda fed to us by the oligarchs and plutocrats controlling this society. Our society is a very sophisticated kind of feudalism and this becomes more and more apparent as we run up against the limits of the earth's natural environment and our own human nature.

The yokes we serfs wear did not chafe so badly when fossil fuels were cheap and nature absorbed our environmental assaults without pushing back. But now nature is pushing back and we are about to suffer the same consequences any innovative species that experiences exponential growth does. We might avoid the worst of the storm by voluntarily limiting our growth, by voluntarily limiting our use of natural resources, but we won't. Nature is going to smack us down the old fashioned way and humans will accelerate this process of population collapse by tribalistic wars and oppression.

That's what all this stuff is about; the NSA stuff, the infiltration of activist groups, the absurd levels of "defense" spending. The people in control now want to be in control when the dust of the collapse settles. They won't be, of course, because they have no fundamental understanding of the problem, they think they "know" people, they are masters at manipulating people, but they don't understand the natural environment, they don't understand that we all live and die by the same rules of life that are as old as life itself.

June 16, 2013

The patent and copyright system is broken.

There are so many bogus patents and copyrights, and so many well-financed trolls, that the progress of arts and sciences in the USA is significantly impeded.

Cleaning up the mess will not be easy.

I've no objection to the concept of patents or copyrights themselves, I do not begrudge an author like J.K. Rowling a single penny of her wealth, but for every author or innovator like her making the world a brighter place there are dozens of intellectual property trolls trying to drag us back into the darkness.

June 9, 2013

My own speculation would be that there are possible pasts, just as there are possible futures.

The past is not set in stone, neither is the future.

The photons are not so much "entangled" as they simply don't bother to have any state until they are held to one in the present. From our biologically evolved and prejudiced perspective, the "past" is set in stone and immutable, so it appears the photons are "entangled." What's actually happening is that in the present where this experiment exists, there is only one past that "explains" the results. But there is also a time-distance where the results of the experiment are lost and the photons are disentangled.

There is no solid past or solid future. A "present" perspective shapes it all.

The origins of our own biological perspective, the perspective that makes it so difficult for us to understand this universe, the perspective that makes subjects like quantum physics, time, or relativity seem so alien and perverse, are pretty clear. Each and every one of us have ancestors "all the way back" to the "beginning of life" who somehow managed to survive and reproduce. What are the "odds" of that, that you would be reading this looking at a picture that "demonstrates" "entanglement" ??? It is clearly a meaningless question.

It is what it is, nothing more, nothing less.

June 9, 2013

No, and same for time travel too. Sorry.

I don't think this universe is built that way.

Everything is speeding along at the "speed of light" and there is no way to go "faster" or "slower." Everyone reading this post is zipping along at the "speed of light," none of us are anything more than shifting, shimmering patterns in the light.

We still live in a universe of near-infinite possibilities however. I think intelligent beings of the "free will" variety are able to create any kind of community they wish, becoming essentially immortal (if that is even important to them), essentially creating their own neighborhood realities of increasing sophistication.

(Maybe some of those UFOs are the creation of intelligent dinosaurs who evolved here on earth. Distant relatives of a sort.)

That our species has any future as intelligent beings is still undetermined. The odds seem to be against us. We are still flying blind. A future where we are extinct or much less "intelligent" and similar to our ancestors of 4 million years past seems very likely.