Global Warming....Conspiracy?

I know this sounds like more wackiness from the interweb, but give this a chew. There has been much squawking of late regarding global warming. Every day, it seems, another pseudo intellectual celebrity is out there talking about global warming and how it spells our doom and that not eating meat or not spewing tons of filth into the atmosphere can help avert a disastrous future. Sometimes, the noise comes from the other side of the fence. Right wing assholes like Rush Limbaugh insist that global warming and environmentalism is a new commie plot to redistribute wealth. Even Neal Boortz ( I hope I spelled his name right.)..a guy who says a lot of unpleasant, but true things, calls global warming a scam.
In all this hullaballo, no one has devoted much time at all to wondering why there are so many nasty chemicals in the water or why so many kids have asthma. Instead, the big show gets all the attention. It seems as though the wedge issue has chained itself to any expression of concern for the environment.
We all know that temperatures have been trending upward since reliable records have been kept, but we haven't been keeping records for much more than a century. As for reliable, global data, that has only been possible for a short while. The entire hypothesis that human activity can be directly related to a dangerous warming trend might be impossible to prove. Impossible, especially given the fact that the current administration has had almost eight years to hamstring almost any research that might have been done on the matter. So...the outcome is this..
Can't prove that stinky old coal plats make it hotter? Fuck you, get out of my way! We'll keep on building them just as filthy as before, because we have the free market on our side. Can't prove that reducing emissions might keep the big ice shelves where they are? Screw you, we'll keep on building them like we did back in the 80's. It's cheaper for us and that's what the people want. When it all comes down to it we'll blame China and India for all this stinky smoke, even though they're making stuff for U.S. companies by our standards.
When you raise a fuss, they talk about cow farts and volcanoes to try to make any objections look ridiculous.
Meanwhile, we know that the rain is dissolving ancient land marks and we can see our streams and rivers becoming so filthy that the medicines we ingest start showing up there and that toxic chemicals are in places they never used to be. We can see more and more asthma and some kinds of cancers. There is a spot in the Pacific Ocean about as big as Texas, that is literally choked with mountains of floating plastic garbage.
Still, all our energies are devoted to figuring out how hot it's going to be and why. We are fighting a war for the future, but we are fighting the wrong battles. What we should be fighting for is air we can breathe and water we can drink and land we can live on. And we'll never get anywhere if we don't stop talking about the weather.

New lyrics

Signs and wonders light up the sky
we get choked up when we see the preachers cry
ordinary sinners are just trying to get over
and advertise their dreams "for sale by owner"
everyone wants to be somewhere else
don't we all deserve a little help?

It's a dustbowl that's comng down
the waters rising on the edge of town
either way you're gonna choke
either way you're gonna drown

Now they're up there printing money
and they start to pass it round
the bankers don't come running
they have to leave it on the ground
you can't cry about what you never had
you can't keep spending what you don't have

It's a dustbowl that's coming down
the water's rising on the edge of town
either way you're gonna choke
either way you're gonna drown

now the same people begging for a handout
are the same ones who put you down
they ridiculed your little place
in the common part of town
you got to give in to temptation
and throw those mothers out

it's a dustbowl that's coming down
the water's rising on the edge of town
either way, they're gonna choke
either way, they're gonna drown.

Giving it up....

We all have little things we like to do. I like to smoke. I've cut down in the past. I've even quit for a year or so, but I haven't been able to shake it for long. It keeps coming back at me like a really shitty, dysfuntional relationship. I used to say it's because I smoke to give shape and form to my day or it's a habit that keeps my hands occupied. I would sometimes get closer to the heart of the matter, by saying that I smoke when I'm in a nervous situation.
All Caca del Toro, as we say in bilingual America. I smoke because I am a stone cold junkie.
When I don't smoke, I want to kick random people in their genitals. I am nervous and unpredictable. I get headaches and worst of all, I can't sleep (or drop a georgie).
I feel like shaking people violently and saying mean shit to them. I don't want to keep going through this. I hope I either give it up all the way or get hit by a bus.

Bumbling

My kids don't speak Swedish and neither do I. Now, I love "surfing the web" as they used to say back in the neolithic age. "Surfing" is not really what I do, though. Given the fact that I have at least some residual ADD, I more like "bumble" around on the damn thing. Bumbling like a bee, rolling and flitting from blossom to branch to soda can to bag of cheetos, to iridescent thigh etc..



I was bumbling on youtube a few weeks ago, and I was looking for paper airplane videos to entertain my kids (ie. how to make and fly really kick-ass paper airplanes). This got me to thinking about my favorite kooky airplane designer, Burt Rutan. I looked for Rutan and found something called "Ika I Rutan".

I clicked and my kids and I were hypnotized by a new wave, clown,mime,dancer-thingy that spoke in swedish and used every twitch of her big big eyes and every milimeter of her expressive face to draw in and captivate my little yard apes. They were not mesmerized so much as ENTRANCED.
So, for the next few days my almost two year old and my five year old had me searching for as much of this strange woman's work as possible..... We soaked up an entire other weird,cute, Swedish kiddie world. I double dog dare you to sit down and check this shizzy out and deny that it rocks at least at some level.

Anyway, I always go on about the internets and all that stuff. I know that it makes my thechnophiliac wife cringe when I do. But I still can't help it and it's harmless as far as I know.

a brief glimpse

It's funny how the vision of the future changed so rapidly. The generation before me, everybody had dreams of shining metal skyscrapers and flying cars. Then later on, when I was a boy, I remember seeing pictures of the shuttle and space stations. There was talk of people living and working in orbit and even under the sea. By the year 2020, we were even going to have colonies on the moon and mars.
Then, I can't really say when, we started thinking of the future as some horrifying dystopic world. If it wasn't going to be post-apocolyptic,it would be savage and broken in some way. The future began to be something to be mourned in advance. Was it because so many of those "world of tomorrow" visions turned out to be utter bullshit? Was it because we got more and more bad news from every corner of the globe?
All I know is that I personally never imagined a world so filled with orwellian things, a vague, shadowy enemy, a vague shadowy government run by scary, remote, sinister men with weird and threatening agencies like "Homeland Security" and "Total Information Awareness".
I never could have imagined that we would become myopic and our airwaves would be filled with the screeching, hateful sounds of propagandists, ranting and raving, supporting government agendas. ......

At times, though, I have to pull back and look at the bright side. I am typing letters on a keyboard and they will go out there on the internet and people who have never met me will be able to read my thoughts. I can use the same internet and learn virtually anything from Ether Kinematics to swahili. I can communicate and I can look at great works of art that I will never see in person. True, it's all so fragile, but it is too vast to ever completely be destroyed ( I hope).
Within this new sea, we can understand people from all over the world. I know millions of people have written about this, many of them more effectively, but it is an awesome time we live in.
Where gross materialism begins to fail, we find ourselves turning to solutions that rely on our own native intelligence and creativity. The other shoe that is the global energy crisis is going to drop soon. It's impact in America is going to be colossal...but, we have people here who have the ideas and technology that will change everything. We just need to be nimble and strong enough to move when the time is right. We know that government and big business can't solve the problem. They ARE the problem. I hate to start a ramble here, but I know that somewhere out there is the next greener, nicer, Edison, Ford, or Wright Brothers. They are going to help us move forward.
The future is going to be quieter, cleaner, and....more kick-ass for those of us who are willing to see it and embrace it.
Everyone else can wait for the rapture as long as they stay the fuck out of our way.

one in the woodpile.

I look at all kinds of random stuff on the internet. This evening, I was looking up Spanish castles because I like that. Then I wondered what kind of weapons the average ordinary guy would have used back in the day. So I saw a video where a guy loaded and fired a .75 calibre matchlock three times in 37 seconds. Then I saw a demonstration of what my ancestors probably had to fight with, which would be mostly converted farm implements. These guys were smashing, poking and stabbing each other with pikes and halberds which is like a big wicked ass ax on the end of a pole, or in the case of a pike a long nasty spike on the end of a really long pole. Then they brought out the clubs. These are big heavy things with lead and nails and god knows what all kind of spiky stuff and they showed what these things could do to meat and bones. This sort of thing was probably better than special forces training. Mission: walk 100 miles in the cold rain and hot desert with almost nothing to eat, don't die from dysentery or exposure, and kill until you're dead or you run out of enemies. rinse and repeat.
Now, I don't lay claim to much, but I do happen to know that my ancestors had to throw down a lot. Either they could really kick some ass, or they could run real fast or hide real well. The same goes for ANYONE. So, the next time you find yourself amazed at how strong you can be when the shit hits the fan, go ahead and thank the badass in your woodpile.

Wanderlust

What use is an epic?
Why go from Naples to Rome, Seville
to Marrakech to Cairo to Mecca?
What purpose to box the compass and round
the horn when
in any small street
in four small rooms,
he can span the distance
from love to indifference
from grief to delight?