July 7, 2014

Dumb-ass first world nation problems all around.

The house under construction is plenty visible on google maps if you want to be a voyeur. (Zooming in made me feel dirty...)

It seems entirely possible the property once belonged with the previously existing house and was later sub-divided out and sold.

Nevertheless, overhead power lines running through backyards are long obsolete.

Most weird about this story, there's a fucking freeway in the backyard. That can't be good for property values. Power lines seem trivial in comparison.

I think if we went back in time to the 1930's and showed some San Fernando Valley resident this article they'd probably hang themselves in utter despair for the future. Where are the flying cars? Where is the glittery emerald city lit by electricity too cheap to meter, with lush gardens irrigated by unlimited desalinated seawater? "

It's simply not possible to pick sides in this story. There's just too much 21st century world-gone-mad in it.

Disclaimer: I've lived in the San Fernando Valley. I escaped once, then returned briefly, and then escaped again. My parents and all my siblings have similar stories. My parents are hard-core isolationists now. They live in a tropical rain forest and drink and bathe in water that falls on their roof. They eat local pigs, goats, and produce. If this civilization ends they'd first notice their telephone wasn't working, their internet was down, and there was no mail in their Post Office Box. Other than that, life would go on.

That's my own imaginary refuge. My wife's sailing skills are much better than my own, and maybe I could learn too, but I do own an accurate plastic sextant and a few very robust timekeeping devices for navigation.

Our family was in the San Fernando Valley because some of my ancestors liked horses and Hollywood. Later, one of my grandfathers was an aerospace engineer who built titanium stuff for the Apollo project using skills he'd somehow absorbed by osmosis from the bad-boy geniuses of World War II. His World War II job, as an officer in the Army Air Force, was keeping "eccentric" people deemed essential to the war effort out of jail.

Eccentric was the "nice" word for alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, non-whites, non-Christians, uppity brilliant women, socialists, people with suspect national loyalties, and any other non-white-male-protestant who could do science or technology or be a pretty face in war propaganda.

July 5, 2014

I've never voted for or supported Nader because he isn't electable, nor is he leftist.

I express my displeasure with the current political system in different ways, and I do it quite openly... my use of Linux and Open Source software is just a small part of that.

But no way in hell do I think there is little or no difference between the political parties. Obama is a competent leader for this train-wreck of a nation. If John McCain or Mitt Romney had been elected the consequences would have been catastrophic; not for the uber-wealthy, but for the people who struggle day-to-day all over the planet.

The world is still cleaning up from the wreckage of the Reagan-Bush-Bush looting of the world economic system.

I do not care for Jerry Brown's or Barrack Obama's gritty "realistic" and Democratic style of politics and management, which hearkens back to FDR's saving capitalism from itself, but that's better than the kleptocracy of the modern Republican party or the false consumerist "Progressivism" of Ralph Nader. (Or, let's just say, Apple Computer and Tesla automobile.)

I divert my own cars, clothes, and computers from the salvage stream, and I rebuild them to do what I want them to do.

My television is strictly a movie player, Many of those movies I find in thrift stores, trade with friends and family, or rent from the RedBox. I do pay for movies at the theaters, and I do purchase new DVDs of excellent movies, so I am not a total deadbeat when it comes the movie industry.

I rarely see television commercials unless someone reposts them here on DU. I NEVER watch television "news" because it's a waste of time.

If a person doesn't exercise an ability they lose it. I exercise my Freedom of Speech and Association regularly.

I know the NSA has many photos of my naked ass and they can kiss those.

June 29, 2014

Time to sleep on this.

Why does it happen? Why does it keep happening?

Maybe people are mostly irrational. But maybe I'm wrong

No worries, I've survived many existential conflicts far worse.

You:

Safely eat, drink, sleep, be happy.

It's not over until it's over.

June 17, 2014

Personality dictates social spiders' roles

Yep. I do believe humans are remarkable for the complexity of our social interactions, but not "exceptional" in the sense of having something other animals lack. There's a continuum of "personality" stretching from animals like humans, dolphins, elephants, parrots, ravens, dogs... all the way out to animals like spiders.

For all we know plants have personalities too but we animals generally live too fast to perceive those patterns.

Like it or not, every living thing is an automaton or none of us are. I myself wouldn't want to be an automaton, so I do my best to extend that same consideration to my fellow living beings, respecting even the food I eat.

June 16, 2014

The Bible twisted my thinking in a big way too, Hillary.

I read The Book cover-to-cover when I was seven years old. Bad, bad shit and my young inexperienced somewhat autistic mind missed most of the metaphors. I was a very early reader of everything and the child of a religiously insane mom. Maybe you know how it goes.

Ezekiel's guys with giant schlongs spewing semen like stallions, that was real man. (Ezekiel 23:20; some translations more explicit than others.)

My mom eventually found home with the Quakers and family life got better. No more getting kicked out of churches (or once an entire nation...) just because my mom had God's private phone number and the preacher, bishop, or authorities didn't. My mom is still the sort who would get into a fist fight with a Pope, and he would lose. God save Peter when my mom is in line at the Pearly Gates. There will be a riot. I suspect she'll pass, she is impeccably (sometimes horrifyingly and inappropriately) honest, but there will be many trap doors in the heavenly-clouds-before-the-gates opening up to hell that day.

Sigh. Alas I am a simpleton. The biggest influence on my thinking ever was the National Semiconductor-CMOS Databook.

Or perhaps the Boys' Second Book of Radio and Electronics which a subversive third grade teacher let me keep at home for an entire semester.

May 25, 2014

Oh lovely. I'm a dx'd Aspergers kid and I've never ever wanted to kill anyone.

My misfortunes with women as a young man? I could write entire novels about that and I've posted some of my stories here on DU.

I really didn't figure the world out until I was 26 years old and before then I'd left a lot of my own blood, skin, sweat and tears on some very mean streets.

But I never learned to hate and I've never cared for guns, even after guns were identified as one of my talents. My family is make-the-pretenders-piss-in-their-pants Wild West, and my first "real" girlfriend was even more terrifying, ex Soviet occupation. She once handcuffed a pimp to a urinal and was beating the hell out of him while I was standing outside the men's room door muttering something about "rough sex" to very drunk guys who had to pee. We broke up after that and everyone lived happily ever after, even the pimp guy, or so I've heard. Personal file: things I will never investigate.

BTW, my middle and high school nickname was "queerbait." I quit high school for college, and rapidly progressed beyond that pain.

Call me whatever you like.

May 1, 2014

I flunked two classes in college.

Once for fighting with a teaching assistant.

The TA and I were having an, um, heated debate when he started throwing stuff at me. I don't know why. I told him his data was bullshit, not that his work was bullshit. He had nothing to do with the data, he was not the one who had fabricated it. Well fabricated it was. $$$

Unfortunately the campus police already knew me by name, not him. I always had a friendly relationship with the campus police. I was mostly harmless, occasionally homeless, an interesting break from their usual dreary duties of drunks, date rapes, overdoses, etc.. They'd pick me up for things like jogging with bloody bare feet at two o'clock in the morning, dumpster diving, or sleeping in my car, the library, classrooms... I'd also show up in places where I wasn't expected to be, and people might eventually say, "Hey, wait a minute, who are you?" sometimes after I'd been there a few days and was getting a bit ripe. Anyways, I wasn't allowed to take the final in that class. The university let me repeat the course, different TA, different professor, both more cynical sorts, and I aced it.

Another time I flunked a hard science class. I could pick up day work moving furniture for eight or ten dollars an hour sometimes (gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon then...) and I'd missed too many lectures to keep up. I did pass my paleontology class however, even though I couldn't tell you a damned thing about Foraminifera today. But the professor of that class helped me get back into school for my third try and I didn't get into any more trouble after that. Well, except for when the people I was living with moved away without telling me, without paying our rent, so I just lived in the empty apartment for two months with the door to my room locked, sleeping on the floor, ready to jump out the window with all my stuff if I heard anything. One day I returned "home" and strangers were moving in. Sigh. I had left everything in the apartment clean and spotless, it was part of my ritual. And that was a better experience than I'd had living in my car in the church parking lot...

I have much more recent Groucho Marx "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" experiences; the parking valets leave my old car in the same lot the dishwashers park in so as not to offend the BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus cars, but if I ever die crazy in a cardboard box with newspaper insulation that's okay with me. I've always done what seems to be the right thing to do at the time.

Even when it turns out to be wrong.

April 18, 2014

In some nations the fine is proportional to your income.

That way everyone, wealthy or poor, supposedly feels the same sting.

It would surely distort trafic "enforcement" in the U.S.A. where speed traps, DWBs, and other forms of harassment are common.

Wouldn't it be amusing to see the wealthy getting shaken down for a change?

Who would the traffic cops aim for, the working class guy who will pay a $50 fine, or the guy who will pay the $10,000 fine?

It's too bad the very wealthy own the U.S.A.. They get away with stuff that lands non-wealthy people in jail or prison. What's $218 to someone who regularly buys $200 meals and stays in $1200 hotel suites without thinking twice about it?

April 2, 2014

Disconnect your cable and broadcast television, throw away your junk mail unread...

... and quit buying stuff.

Don't trade your freedom for a few shiny trinkets and a false sense of security.

Convince others to do the same.

The only television commercials I've seen for years now are those I see posted here on DU.

Rather than feeling disconnected from the world, I feel like I've got a much clearer view of it.

As a nation we seem to be willing hosts to the oligarch parasites. But it's only because they've gotten inside our heads.

February 24, 2014

Our "market economy" is a religion; it's just that simple.

In science the way one manipulates numbers in a model doesn't change the nature of the universe itself.

Look a physics. Relativity still existed before Einstein came along to describe it. We were not living in a Newtonian universe before that.

The earth has never been "the center of the universe" whatever humans happened to believe at the time.

No matter the mathematical models we create to describe our universe, the universe is not going to change to accommodate them.

Economic theory isn't like that.

Congress could pass a law to change the speed of light, or set pi=3, but the universe doesn't care. If we try to live by the laws of Congress and ignore the laws of nature, then nature will kill us. We can't legislate "zero gravity zones" and do away with elevators in buildings, or wings on airplanes. Step into an elevator shaft without an elevator, fall, and die. The wings come off your airplane, fall, die. Your pi=3 engines explode? Die.

To an outsider observing our current economic system it is clear that only a small percentage of economic activity is actually "productive," in the sense of making this world a richer place, not just for humans, but for the overall cultural and biological diversity of life itself, and not just human culture and biology either. Wolves have a culture. Whales have a culture. Condors have a culture.

But most of the things economists call "productive" are actually exploitive. There is "profit" to be made by destroying the natural environment and increasing the overall misery of cultural populations such as ourselves.

There's nothing "productive" about that exploitive sort of profit.

There's so many ways religions can fuck us up. How many gay people have our religions discarded? Alan Turing? Far, far, beyond that, and into the depths of hellish sorts of despair .

How many rich cultures and environments have our religions destroyed?

What do we know? Somewhere in North America maybe there was a plant that cured some common form of cancer. The indigenous people knew about it, knew how to use it. Then the Europeans invaded, killed off the indigenous people and their culture, and slash-and-burn destroyed the forest where the rare plant grew.

We are much poorer today for that.