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I am interested in dreams, I like it when I can remember and try to analyze my dreams, but that happens less and less lately. I’m not sure if that’s old age, marijuana, watching too much TV (sometimes my dreams are set within whatever show I was watching before bed) or a combination of the three. Then I came up with another theory.
Short term memory v. long term memory. Now, scientists have discovered that it takes something like 6 or 7 seconds for short term memories to be stored in your long term memory, which explains why people who wake up in the hospital after an accident which caused them to lose consciousness pretty much never remember the accident itself. Their last memories are about 6 or 7 seconds before, because that last part never got stored in long term memory.
So, I thought, the key to remembering your dreams may be just making sure you think about them within 6 or 7 seconds of waking up. So, I went to sleep last night determined to try that out. Well, I can’t say it was the first thing I thought about in the morning, not consciously, but I did hang on to a couple of snippets of the dream. There was a tall, wooden, rickety house, maybe a bit like the Weasleys’, and it was painted a very light blue-green, and I was there for a large part of the dream, sometimes teaching and sometimes just looking in and out of rooms. Then there was something about the “Odzbroyne Effect” I’m not sure I’m spelling that exactly as it was in the dream, I don’t think I ever saw it written down and my memory may have changed it in those few, initial, essential seconds but, there it is.
So, did it work? Did I remember more than I normally would have? I don’t know, I’ll have to experiment with this for a while.

Just saw a great meme and it goes like this: “Remember when there used to all those articles about how Europeans live than Americans because they drink red wine and eat lots of olive oil or bullshit like that? Turns out it was universal health care the whole time.”
There’s a great deal of truth to that. While there are regions where people live very long and its usually some rural region where people have a healthy diet and lifestyle, and it’s proven that lack of stress is a major factor, there’s little doubt that a lack of health care is part of what’s holding the USA back.
It should be kind of obvious, it should be the way of the world that all the leaders would look, for a moment, at which countries do better than others and see if you can spot the pattern and then everybody should copy what they’re doing.
Colorado legalized marijuana and it worked out great. Everybody should follow their lead. France has a really cool high speed train. Every country deserves really cool high speed trains. South Korea, I have heard, has the fastest computer connection in the world. Whatever South Korea is doing, doesn’t it make sense that every country should do that?
You could extend the same logic to any problem. Which nation handled the pandemic best? We’ve got stats for that. Whoever nipped it in the bud the quickest, and had the fewest deaths, well, whatever protocol they followed is probably the protocol the whole world should follow next time around. And it is absolutely certain that universal health care played a part.

In a thread about taking down the statues and stuff like that, I saw somebody comment “When will we stop viewing the past through the lens of the present.”
Well, never. We are in the present and that is the lens we look through. If we try to look at the past through the lens of the future, that just distorts things and makes them go all wobbly and blurry, and if we try to view them through the lens of the past, as historians try to do, we are mostly speculating.
We can make adjustments to that lens, calibrations and compensations, but it’s still the lens of the present. That’s where we are.
The future will judge us through the lens of the future, which they will call the present. Maybe they will blame us for letting the planet die. Maybe they will blame us for blowing the planet up.
The best we can do, to avoid being judged harshly, is to have those values, and promote and work on those values, that will bring us into the best future possible. But, it probably won’t be enough.
If the Earth in 2300 is a smoldering hellscape, we will be regarded as the bad guys, just as Jefferson is being condemned today for being a slave fucker. And so we should be. Live with that.

Well, I’ve been a bit slack on the old blog writing lately, so here is my 2nd blog for today and that should even it out a bit.
I was just sitting on my balcony smoking a joint a few minutes ago and suddenly got hit with a revelation. Now, like many great revelations it sounds kind of obvious when I put it into words. In that, it resembles many great revelations, like Archimedes principal of displacement discovered when he sat down in the tub, or Newton’s almost undoubtedly apocryphal apple leading him to think of gravity, or Freud’s blinding insight that the dreams are coming from inside your own head and not from God or your dead ancestors, or any of that crazy stuff that preceded him.
So, a lot of people will read this and say well, duh, that’s obvious, and a lot of others will read this and say well, duh, you’re stoned, and that’s O.K. I am, a bit.
But, here it is: There was a run in my joint, what some people call a canoe. Don’t know why, but they do. You know, when the paper has burned faster down one side than the other and you’re left with a big chonk of ash that won’t fall, and a joint at risk of totally falling apart.
Well, I did what every stoner does, wet my finger a bit and brushed it on the faster burning side. It really only takes a touch, the slightest bit of dampness and the fire will move to the other side.
Because fire, like water, will always follow the path of least resistance. What do fire and water have in common? They are both naturally occurring phenomenon, like wind, and light, and lightning. All of which follow the laws of physics, one of which is to follow the path of least resistance. They are totally indifferent to the whims, desires, and even the needs of human beings.
If we can learn to live in co-operation with the physical universe, we will do great, and maybe someday in the future we’ll all be living in giant bubble cities in the sky. If we can’t, we will suffer for it.
Human nature is a whole different problem, we haven’t figured that out yet.

If you are a vbnmw voter, today’s blog is not aimed at you. I am not going to change the way you vote, you are not going to change the way I vote. You have made your bed, and you can lie in it, like Joe Biden lied about his grades in college.
This is addressed to my fellow Berners, who are very split about what to do in November. And, yes, I know I have written a very similar blog at least once before. The thought bears repeating.
The way I see it, Berners have 5 choices, and only one of them produces a positive result.
1. We could sit the election out, refuse to vote. It’s our right, it is not wrong, but it accomplishes nothing.
2. We could write Bernie in, which accomplishes nothing. In many states, those ballots will be tossed out.
3. We could vote for Joe. Fuck that, as far as I’m concerned. Worse than voting for Trump, it acts as an endorsement of the corporate machine.
4. We could vote for Trump. Strategic, maybe, in view of 3, but I could never bring myself to do that. I would feel dirty forever. I suspect most of you are the same.
5. We could vote Green. Same agenda as Bernie, and it is a vote against the two party system. It is a vote for the right to vote for what you believe in. That’s how I’ll be voting.