A Tactic

President Trump likes to exercise his Constitutional right of free speech to Twitter hate and bile and stupidity. Most of the civilized public like to react by commenting, screaming, and loudly bemoaning his outrageousness.

What if that is what he wants. His Twitter account serves and a public distraction. He says something (an official something, I might add) and we forget to look at what the men behind the curtain are doing to our country. Like trying to take away easier healthcare access for over 22,000,000 people so there can be a tax cut for the top 1% while raising most others taxes and medical expenses. Or enable companies to ignore environmental regulations that have saved and will save countless lives. Or selloff our national treasures including national monuments, forests, and parks.

 Trump is shouting “Fire” in the theater! We are jumping up and running out the door. He is sitting down with his friends and watching the movie with his friends with out all that riff-raft, the folk. It is good strategy so far. We are falling for it. But at some point soon we need to find the counter strategy or we will lose what makes the United States such a great country and the envy of most of the world. It drives Russia crazy, our success. But our country is under threat.

 Here is one possible counter tactic:

 When Trump tweets, read the tweet, go through your reaction, BUT DON’T RESPOND TO IT! The press may ask one question about it then turn its total attention to what “the men behind the curtain” are doing. If the president says anything about policy, the press should put pressure on him about it. But any public statements with personal attacks, that are truly indicative of his stupidity and ignorance, and his immaturity should be ignored as much as possible. Stay focused, stay alert, and stay the course! Resist!

When Trump’s efforts for distracting go without responses or reaction, we will not be feeding his ego. We will be bringing pressure to our legislators to actually represent us for a change. November, 2018, is still a long way away. But by making our legislators realize that their careers will be over because of our astute observations of their behaviors and efforts, we might be able to stop this destruction in its tracks.

Where we are

We think we are so smart. We think we can solve just about any problem by simply applying our brain power to it. We think the world is ours to modify, to rape, to pillage, to destroy, to conform to our will and wishes. We think the world is infinite, without end, deep beyond any depth we can dig. 

We are so wrong. 

We are smarter than some things and creatures, but do not appear to be smarter that the world as a whole. We evolved on this world, are a part of this world, but are in no way above this world. We are not a part of the moon or Mars. We cannot live on either without bringing a part of this world with us. We need to bring our air, our food (a product of the earth), and our water in order to survive for even a short time.

We are small. The earth is large to us but it is small when compared to even the solar system. We are a part of a pale blue dot. There are no borderlines when the earth is seen from space. There is no indication of our buildings, roads, or fields when earth is viewed from a million miles away. 

We lack imagination to guess what is possible beyond our own earth environments. Our expectations are continually dashed when we see the closeups of other members of the solar system. We were shocked at the craters of Mars. We were shocked to find volcanos on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We were shocked at the varied surfaces of Pluto. 

We have been clever to create our modern world. But we are not smart enough to foresee or try to do anything about the consequences of our shinny creations until it may be too late. We are faced with losing our ice sheets, rising ocean levels flooding our costal cities, increased ferocity of killer storms, massive crop failures, and collapse of out fish stocks. We now hace a hard time seeing the sky through the human-created brown smog in several cities.

We are so primitive we still follow beliefs base on our need to explain things without the proper science. Most of us still follow without question what we are told is the truth as children. believing in our adult Santas, trusting our parental class who have no better ideas than us. Heaven forbid we figure out that, like Santa, it is all untrue. What is here is what we have.

We “progress” down our path too blind to see the our own greed and selfishness, hating that which we don’t understand, not bothering to try to understand. These traits might have been good when we were hunters and gathers, but now they threaten our very existence. We can blow ourselves away in an hour. We can bake ourselves off our planet in a few years. The haves can’t seem to understand that the have-nots are angry enough to fly airliners into our buildings and behead us. We are still fighting millennial-old wars that should be long ended.

Even now, there are serious efforts to put profit before what appears to be our last and best chance for an international agreements and plans to save us from ourselves. Greed and profits before saving anything seems very short-sighted for humanity.

A recent study found that our earth formed fairly early for habitable planets. It could well be that the reason we are not finding other (sic) intelligent life in the galaxy is that there is none yet. Or perhaps they have all gone from early radio to some sort of subspace communication and we simply are not smart enough to hear them. Or, maybe they have blown or burned themselves off their worlds. 

The results for our big brain experiment of evolution are not yet in. For being so smart, we appear to be so stupid. We refuse to see the dangers until we are brushing up against them. The “unintended consequences” of our stupid cleverness will end us all soon. 

We need a great ‘universal’ enlightenment. We need to drop the curtains and our imagined day dreams before our eyes and see who and what we are. We need to work at what we need to become in order to survive and prosper. 

But we are stupid and ignorant and unimaginative when it counts. And now we find ourselves on the beach of a pale blue dot.

To quote Mr. Vonnegut, “So it goes.”

We've Lost

I am so fracking angry with Congress it is hard to put together a simple declarative sentence. Both houses demonstrated that while they pay lip-service to representing the voter, they are in fact spending their time sucking in their corporate masters’ groins, passing legislation that puts the entire banking system at risk, millions of pensioner into potential poverty, and allowing future elections to be bought by the highest bidder.

We have lost. There is no reason to have civics classes in high schools, not that most paid any attention to them anyway. In the future, there will be no need for science or math classes judging by the efforts to dumb us all down to a low common denominator. We won’t even know what means soon!

We have lost due to the news media worry more about Milllie Cyrus or Dustin Beber and our iPods and Android phones. So what if we raise global temperatures until the crops fail and the diseases emerge. At least the world population will get down to a sustainable level through famine and plagues and wars for food and water. It could well be that six out of every eight people on earth will die if we don’t pay attention and get to work doing what needs to be done.

It is getting late in the game. There is a lot to do. But our “leaders” (sic) are absent because they are so intent sucking those corporate master groins. And most of us are too hypnotized by our toys and getting every buck we can to do anything about the disaster ahead. 

The Big Jump

I am making the Big Jump! After 28 years of working on DOS and Windows based computers I am going to a Mac. I resisted the move for a long time. I mean I go back to DOS and Windows 1.0.  When I got my second computer, it had double floppy drives: a Leading Edge, Model D. That first word processor was a revelation after 30 years of banging on a Royal Standard. I wanted to write but a typewriter was not easy and my handwriting could be considered encryption.

I put up with Microsoft’s efforts for world domination. After ten years of being a WordPerfect guy, I was forced to jump to MS  Word and the rest of the Office suite. It seemed to be an effort to keep up, however. Menus would suddenly change between editions that came out every year or so. I always felt that WordPerfect was the better system but was beaten down by better marketing and deals.

What I found particularly annoying, however, was the efforts of bad guys to destroy my and others’ computers with viruses, malware, and hacks. These are attacks on personal property. Turns out that there is a serious lack of proper socialization in Cyber World. That and the fact that Microsoft put so much effort at bringing out products that would force one to replace their computers if one wanted to upgrade. 

I mean, it took me a long time to get to XP, then to Vista. They worked very well and were efficient.  They did what I needed for them to do. Yes, there were holes in the security and biggie at first. But I began to feel that I was being pressured to get rid of systems that worked well for something that was not really an improvement. Microsoft demonstrated they were working hard for Planned Obsolesce. 

I suppose that is to be expected.  Evolve or die. Make is shiner, prettier, more novel. Work hard to get the customer to dump their old machines.

From what I can see, Apple does it a bit differently. I have worked on 10 year old machines that update to the newest operating system without pain and suffering. I don’t like dropping a grand on a computer to have it become obsolete in a couple of years. It is clear these days that we are going to have to get away from our throwaway society. And it appears to me that Apple has started to embrace that change in philosophy.

Now, I am going through the pain of learning the bag of tricks that are Mac. To my surprise, it isn’t quite as bad as I thought. It is dizzyingly easier than I expected.

Maybe I won’t have to buy that subscription to Office 365 for Mac after all!

Weather, Melodies, Chords, and Climate Change

Here is an analogy that may help explain the difference between a weather event and climate change.

As so often noted by the Weather Service, a single weather event does not prove or disprove climate change and global warming. Nor can a single event be blamed on climate change. A single cold snap, heat wave, tornado, hurricane, drought or flooding rains cannot be use and definitive proof.

Why?

Perhaps looking at music and the difference between melody and chords can explain.

Music is made up of two main structures: melody and chords. Melodies are made up of a sequence of individual notes. Chords are made of notes played at the same time. If you listen to a song closely you discover that while there is melody, it exists in association with chords that provide the harmony. If the note is outside of the makeup of the chord, is will sound odd and dissonant. Usually what happens when the note is played, the accompanying chord changes to become one that includes that note.  It doesn’t sound weird.

One cannot identify a melody by a single note; one also cannot say to which chord the note belongs. One has to listen to the melody to understand the chord structure of that melody and how on note fits into that structure.

Climate is analogous to chord structure. One weather event is not sufficient to identify what is happening climatically. A long series of weather events make up the weather “chord.” If that chord has been getting warmer over the last century, and increasing in warmth recently, it should tell us something is indeed changing.

What we are faced with because of human behavior and hubris is a rapidly warming world. In the case of the Pacific Northwest, we will lose the snowpack we need for agriculture, fisheries, and drinking water. The increased warmth will probably change the type of forests we use, making them more susceptible to warm weather diseases and infestations. There will be crop failures when our soon to be inadequate crops lack the rain and temperature conditions they need to grow successfully.

Climate change is not a joke. It is going to bring about radical social and lifestyle changes. By looking at what is probably going to happen now, we can choose what kind of societies we want to be a part of, what we want to save, and what can be dropped in the name of efficiency, health, and security.

Yes, from what I have been reading, it is going to be that bad.

Health Care Gouging

     I am one of the 20% of individuals who cannot tolerate Statins. I have tried over a half dozen including CoQ10 and Red Rise Yeast. I have had to give them all up because of the physical chaos they cause me.

     Physicians at several universities know about this fairly common intolerance. When they got wind that Costco’s pharmacy was going to stop selling Niacin, a natural substitute treatment, they wrote Costco stating that it would be a serious incontinence to do so to a large portion of the public.  Costco responded by keeping in stock 1,000 count bottles of 500mg tablets. These were sold at about $24 a bottle.

     No more. Costco has stopped stocking this Niacin. It is introducing a slow release variety called SLO NIACIN. It comes in 500mg pills, but only 175 pills per bottle. And a bottle will cost just below $15 each.

     To get the same number of pills now will cost over $85. That is a price increase of over 250%!

     And we wonder why health care in general is rapidly increasing in price. It is this greedy gouging customers that is morally questionable. I am surprised that a company with Costco’s reputation for value and fair treatment would stoop to such a thing.

     And is this form of Niacin as effective as pure Niacin with the baby aspirin to take care of the flush?

Not For Sissies

I used to have a copy of a small poster, a post card really, of a skinny, well-muscled guy over 70 years old. He was holding some free weights looking like he was well versed in their use. The caption was simple: Growing Old is Not For Sissies! There was another card with the same caption featuring a woman fresh from doing pool laps.

Know what? The caption is exactly right.

Sissies need not apply to grow old.

Look, growing old is really easy. One just retires, sits, and grows old without any effort what so ever.

Growing old gracefully, now that requires courage.

Fighting growing old is futile. Fighting to not go into a sudden downward slope is much better than doing nothing so long as one understands that the end result is going to be just the same.

But that doesn’t mean one has to surrender without providing resistance. After all, resistance is how we grow, change, mature.

To face the oncoming coldness of what follows life without fear demands courage. Not the being dead part; it is the dying part that we fear. Being dead is unknowable to us in spite of all the egocentric speculation we sentient creatures have done over the millennia.

Rational thought would tell us that we, our minds, just stop. That is hard to imaging since we are so used to having our mind do close at hand all our lives. We have a hard time perceiving and conceiving nothing.

Buddhists talk about the “Good Death,” an easy surrender to pass over to some other side, state of being, dimension, universe, or nothingness. This culture rails against being artificially supported by ventilators, pacemakers, IVs, heart-lung machines “living” in a sort of twilight of not dead, not alive. We all want a good death.

After passing into “the next room” things are easy.

It’s the grace of dying we need to perfect. It is the effort needed to stay alive without killing yourself trying to stay alive. It is taking care of oneself, but not necessarily spending a lot of time in the gym nor just sitting on one’s butt. Get exercise, but it is not necessary to participate in Iron Man events.

And don’t dwell on the past. It will only drive you nuts. The what-could-have-beens and if-only-I-hads never were and never will be. Fantasies, all of them.

Keep busy. Do things one likes and loves. Continue to grow and explore and wonder in the face of what is coming.

Now that takes courage.