December 1, 2014

I'd like to live in a world where the question is, "Who would want to buy a car?"

Any car at all.

I bought a new car once when I was young and foolish and poisoned by newly experienced testosterone floods. I won't do that again. I deeply resent how so-called adults in this society, those who do not live in urban areas with good public transportation, are expected to own and drive automobiles lest they be considered not fully functional human beings.

Not once in my life have I considered driving a car to be a valid "rite of passage" or privilege of adulthood. I'm a licensed driver and have been since I was sixteen but I don't usually carry my license with me. I've only been in one accident, when I was nineteen. It hurt bad, it was expensive, but I was insured and fully recovered.

As an eccentric mostly harmless white guy I can get away with challenging "papers please" fascism. I know my driver's license number, my car insurance card is in my glove box, and the picture downloaded onto any modern patrol car's computer looks like me and matches the name and address on the insurance card.

The thirty year old piece of shit car I drive is a form of protest. I mock the shiny new Lexus or Mercedes. The only thing I wash and polish on the outside of my car are the windows and mirrors. My car has lichen growing on it, like a rock in the wilderness, or the tiles on the roof of my house..

This Thanksgiving I drove hundreds of miles to my brother's house for the holiday, and then Saturday to the memorial service of a childhood friend. It would have been a much nicer visit for me if I'd been able to sleep on a train, especially for the trip back. I was burned out on life but not quite a danger to myself or others on the highway, well more functional than drunk/distracted-by-smart-phone/sleepy/horny/blasting-heavy-metal/little-kids-screaming/air-conditioning-on-high-in-my-face/distracted-by-work-stress levels of typical automobile driver irresponsibility.

But I was still hurting, relying on pain and my fuck-it-all mental state of mind to keep me driving home in 100% plus driver awareness. I even saw a bald eagle on an insulated-top-wire power pole in San Ardo. That was cool. That's why the insulation is on that line, for the eagles and the condors. In the bad old days bald or golden eagles and California condors would spread their wings and be electrocuted. Good people fixed that.

But when I got home, safe from automobile driver danger, I got really, really, angry. My childhood friend, not in an entirely direct way, was killed by our automobile culture. He was severely injured in a transportation industry accident directly related to our automobile culture. He was something of a wizard with coastal construction, often highway construction, on sand and other unstable ground. As a consequence of the accident his driving skills were impaired . Later he wrecked his personal automobile and lost his ability to drive and driver's license entirely. From there it was a downhill spiral of angry self-isolation, pain-killers, and alcohol.

For any number of reasons, from the perspective of individual humans to the entire earth's natural environment, the automobile culture needs to die. We humans can kill it (with extreme prejudice) or wait for Mother Nature to do it by far uglier means.

November 12, 2014

I've been naked and afraid.

Years ago, before I had my shit together enough to play well with others and understand some basic rules of society, I was body surfing naked in the moonlight, sometime past midnight.

Some concerned citizen probably thought I was suicidal and trying to drown myself, so they called the police. I always look suicidal in heavier surf, with or without a board. A true danger to myself and others. That's partly why I was out there at night, nobody wanted me around in the sunlight.

Anyways, I came out of the surf and was looking for my clothes on the beach when the police arrived. In the moonlight a pile of clothes and a blue backpack look remarkably similar to piles of washed up kelp.

Fortunately it was a community where the police were tolerant of a few eccentric citizens, and not long past the age of streaking and other frivolous nudity.

With the assistance of a police flashlight we found my stuff, I put on my clothes, and got a free ride home.

November 8, 2014

There are a large number of heirloom potatos and a very rich gene pool.

For every corporate foray into GMO foods I'd like to see publicly and privately funded efforts, magnitudes greater, to preserve heirloom genetic combinations and to create new Free and Open Source varieties of fruits, grains, nuts, and vegetables. A development process that works for computer software ought to work for potatoes too.

Imagine if there was a non-patented, non GMO potato, that competed favorably with this potato, and could be further developed by farmers to suit their local environments and practices. The world would be a wealthier place.

Monoculture of patented food varieties creates vast deserts lacking in biodiversity. That's bad.

November 8, 2014

Very similar to the stew of drugs in my blood, minus some.

Anyone who thinks I'd be better off without meds is welcome to take me in for the experiment. All I require is an internet connection, some plain food (rice and beans will do; I'll find or grow any other food I need) and somewhere to sleep. For all I care it could be a shack in your backyard and a pile of clean rags.

I'm always ready to reestablish a reputation with some local community as an off-my-meds eccentric but mostly harmless dumpster-diving semi-homeless guy. I may be living in your shack (or not) at various times, or hours, but I might also disappear for weeks at a time and if you are any kind of compassionate person you will wonder if I am dead or held against my will somewhere. Probably not, I'm just wandering, oblivious to clocks and calendars.

My grandfather was a similar sort but his obsessions and compulsions were useful to the Army Air Force during the Second World War, and later the space program including the Apollo Project. (My own obsessions are rarely useful, not in this society.) My grandfather's doctors prescribed amphetamines. He lived 90+ years, so drug abuse obviously wasn't a problem.

It would be interesting to know a little more about him but mental health issues were kept deeply in the closet in past days. Intriguingly, mathematician Paul Erdős used amphetamines too. (That drug has no appeal to me at all. Blechhhhhh.)

The drug warriors always claim drug use is the cause of problems when it's usually the other way around. Sure people can slide down the slippery slope of addiction and abuse, but for the most part drugs are very useful for many sorts of chronic health problems including mental illness.

Nevertheless I think our culture could reduce drug use by being less cruel to people who are different in some way and by treating addiction as an ordinary public health problem.

Robin Williams was taking these meds to keep himself out of some unimaginably terrible mental state. The odds are these drugs didn't put him there, they were simply not working, the same way an antibiotic might not work against some infections, or a few aspirins might not effectively treat some sorts of pain.

November 4, 2014

Solar panels over parking lots for electric vehicles is a good idea.

Free shade and "fuel" for employee and customer vehicles, all in one.

It's already reality in some places. My own community has a few solar parking lots.

Nobody should have to buy fuel to drive to work or go out shopping.

I'd personally prefer a world where legs either natural or electrically powered artificial were the dominant form of transportation. Nevertheless, electric scooters, motorcycles, and automobiles are still much preferable to the stinky fossil fueled machines most of us now drive.

Example of electric legs:

Similar machines have also been built as exo-skeletons for people suffering paralysis.

Ordinary walking (even for those whose natural legs don't work or are lost), solar powered rail and bus and doorstep self driving car transportation, and very comfortable high technology sailing ships... these are my utopia.

October 20, 2014

"Dead Baby Day"

Don't need to explain that.

A health care provider asking for a hug and a drink and a laugh when they get off work on a dead baby day isn't asking too much.

And yes, some sorts of health care professionals are simply assholes (the cold surgeon stereotype...) but maybe if they weren't thick-skinned assholes they wouldn't be able to do their jobs. I'd want a heart surgeon who is a good mechanic. His bedside manner wouldn't matter so much if it didn't interfere with his work.

On the other hand, I once had personal work experiences with a heart transplant surgeon who was such a humongous asshole it did interfere with his work because nobody wanted to work with him. He eventually got fired for his abusive behavior toward other hospital staff, especially women. My supervisor had us all documenting his bad behavior.

I used to work closely with transplant techs. OMG, in a relaxed break room setting they were a clique of Addams Family Gothic. Some of them even dressed the part in subtle ways. I think I understand... removing usable body parts from brain dead people who are still warm... I cannot imagine doing that. But that's what they do to save the lives of others who still have a chance of survival. Underneath the thick black body armor the transplant techs were among the kindest, most gentle, altruistic people I've ever met.

I'm not in the medical professions any more, maybe I'm too sensitive for that, but I have immediate family who still are. I prefer computers. If something goes horribly wrong you can halt the system and revert to previous images for as long as fixing the problem takes. Human beings, so far as we know, don't have backup copies.

October 20, 2014

Human languages such as English are a tool for telling stories and do not always reflect reality.

Too many people want language to be their reality.

Telling stories is so much easier for us than collecting the data and doing the math.

Storytelling languages often get confusing because words are often created and applied to natural phenomena and objects before they are understood.

An example would be the assertion that electrons have a "negative" charge. It doesn't matter much to the math, but the storytelling language implies that the common "ground" of one's automobile is a sink for electrons, not a source. Yet the "negative" ground is actually the electron "source" using hydraulic analogies of electric current, and these storytelling hydraulic analogies themselves have their own limitations. Comparing the electrons in a copper wire to water in a pipe introduces some very serious misconceptions about the nature of electromagnetism.

As a kid I built a relay computer, all "Direct Current," conceptually easy, right? DAMN that machine gave me some nasty shocks, as bad as anything I'd gotten playing with AC powered vacuum tube equipment.

How?, I wondered. With the relay machine disconnected I could touch both terminals of the DC power supply and feel nothing. But at finer levels of understanding one recognizes that all circuits are Alternating Current. In the case of an older flashlight, two "D" cells, a switch, and an incandescent bulb, the AC effects are negligible. As soon as a circuit gets more complicated, they are not.

The first transatlantic telephone cable was a horribly expensive failure because the "scientific" stories it's designers and financiers believed did not reflect reality.

In higher education undoing these misconceptions caused by rote memorization of "facts" expressed in the languages of storytelling is often more difficult than teaching a more accurate representation of reality in the languages of math and science.

If I was teaching astronomy to younger kids, I'd start with the visible planets, hopefully in a clear dark nighttime sky setting with a few planets visible. And then I'd build up from that observational foundation. A kid sitting in a classroom who has simply memorized the names of the "nine planets in our solar system" doesn't really know anything. It's just words.

October 9, 2014

Humans behave according to their instincts too.

The big difference between us and chimps is we tell very intricate stories about what we do. When we created oral history, stories passed down from generation to generation, maybe 50-100,000 years ago, human civilization began to evolve rapidly. And then, when we created writing, that's when the modern technological revolutions began. There's simply too much human history and technology now to hold it all inside the heads of our bards.

I don't know why we feel "alone" and wonder about intelligent life in outer space when we share this planet with a large variety of very intelligent beings similar to ourselves. A shocking majority haven't recognized these intelligent beings yet.

I think it's time we did.

Some animals are not so different than we were not long ago by nature's long measure of time, and it's not so clear yet that the developmental pathway we followed will assure a positive outcome. I suspect the human race will be remembered only as a freakish layer of trash in the geologic record.

For now we ought to be protecting the cultures of our intellectual kin on this planet, the great apes, the cetaceans, the elephants, many of the birds, etc., in much more sophisticated ways than we "humanely" treat other animals of lesser intellectual and cultural complexity.

A chimpanzee deserves to live as a chimpanzee, with many of the same rights of self-determination as we demand for our own selves. And an orca deserves to live as an orca, and an elephant as an elephant.

September 2, 2014

How could we abuse our minimum wage workers if we didn't treat the homeless worse?

Sharing a shitty apartment owned by a shitty slumlord in a dangerous neighborhood, eating shitty overpriced processed food, that's got to be better than sleeping rough and eating out of dumpsters, otherwise why would anyone work?

bitter, bitter,

I actually believe non-abusive government jobs paying comfortable living wages, along with a generous welfare system, ought to compete directly with the crappiest employers.

Nobody should be forced to tolerate an abusive employer for fear of rough living on the streets.

Addicts and unemployable mentally ill people ought to be provided safe humane shelter, a place they can call their own, with plenty of opportunities for improving their personal situations and at the very least establishing themselves in such a way they are not a danger to themselves or others.

July 18, 2014

I own my language, it doesn't own me. I use my language as I please. I recognize no authority.

Language evolves. I'd rather be on the cutting edge of my language than be trapped in the fetid backwaters of some dictionary or middle school grammar text.

The meaning of the phrase "Politically Correct" has been destroyed by assholes I have no respect for. The phrase is dead to me. Useless.

Anyone who uses the phrase "Politically Correct" today, especially as right-wing code-talk, is speaking dead fish.

I don't speak dead fish.

If I'm uncertain what someone means when they say "Politically Correct" then I'll ask them to clarify.

If they are simply being right wing assholes then I won't be shy telling them what I think.

The language of the streets, especially in my community, is always evolving. Minority communities are always bringing something new to the language table. One of the most remarkable things about the English language is its ability to assimilate words, grammars, pronunciations and cadences from other languages.

I live in a community that is a hotbed of language evolution. Forty percent of the kids in our public schools do not speak English at home. The English speaking black community has many gifted ways of storytelling too. The average high school "English" accent in my community incorporates much from other languages, especially those of Mexico, Asian, and African origins.

My wife and kids are language chameleons adapting their own language to the situation. Full academic Ivy League and Stanford English, West Coast "Spanglish," to generic wherever-you-are-from California Spanish. My wife and one of my kids also do a very good Missouri/Southern Illinois and Irish English too. Not consciously. They simply adapt to their audience. I'm always astonished by this innate skill. I sit quietly, invited spouse or dad at the conference table, wondering what sort of beings these are as languages shift about.

A few family friends, and my father-in-law, can do simultaneous translation in multiple languages. They've made good money for that too. Alas, my own listening and spoken language skills are utterly, hopelessly, fossilized into mushy mid-twentieth century American Television English with a slight Wild West twang.

My own language is watered down vanilla Dennis Weaver, except when I write.