Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’m pretty sure that most thinking people  think that President Trump is a bona fide retard, and I’m pretty sure he was just blathering and had no concrete plans at all when he said that the wall  should be topped  with solar panels, and be transparent because if it’s not transparent, or at least has holes in it, you’re never going to see it when somebody heaves a 60 pound bag of wacky tabacky over it and crushes your noggin like a cow patty under a cowboy boot.

Now, despite your odds of getting beaned on the head by a 60 pound bag of dope while talking a casual stroll under the prison walls being only slightly greater than getting struck by lightning in January, while on the moon, and despite the fact that I don’t like the idea of a wall at all, because it’s very unfriendly and totally counter to the idea of one planet/one love, I think the fat old pervert might be on to something, in a blind pig finding an acorn once in  a while kind of way, and since he’s determined to build a wall, it might as well be a cool wall.

Solar panels.  A large portion of the territory the wall has to cover is just flat desert, i.e. most of the southern borders of New Mexico and Arizona, and it would be a great place for solar panels.  Say about 5 or 10 miles deep, both sides of the border (if the Mexicans are so inclined)  and it would keep anybody from coming across, or at least slow them down, and provide all the energy  that both countries need.  I mean, that’s an area that’s as large as two or three of our smaller states.

Trump and his supporters can  say  they built a wall, and nobody’s going to be bonked on the head by  large bags of pot hurled by catapults, which is  a relief.

The rest of us get cheaper energy and a cleaner environment.

It’s a win-win.

Today I saw a thing, I think it was from Ted Talks, but reduced to cartoon form and  kept to less than 12 minutes, just the way I like it, about Utopias and why  they always turn into Dystopias when you get to  figuring out how they’re implemented.
It struck me as a bit defeatist, since we need to keep striving toward building a better society, as the alternative would be to try and build a  worse society and that is truly a dumb idea.

Bad will always figure a way in by itself without  us going and looking for it.

Maybe we should spell it Eutopia, like the Eu in Eugenics (which originally was meant to be a good thing, it’s right there in the name), euphonia, euphemisms, or euphoria.  Eu means good.  Like Europe.  Good rope.  (I just made that up.)  Just better PR than Utopia, which means ‘nowhere,’ as in it can’t ever happen.

Not as an abstract concept, maybe, because no matter how much we perfect  society, there will always be people who want it perfecter (They are malcontents.  However,  they sometimes have a point.) and, just like a Navajo Blanket, there’s always going to be a flaw somewhere.  But, mankind has the technology, the resources, and everything needed to create a world of wealth for all, in which greed, environmental degradation, war, crime and violence are downright unnecessary, and not common at all.

We need to ask ourselves one question:  What kind of a future do we want?

A.  The Star Trek future, in which the problems of Earth are pretty well sorted with some sort of benevolent socialism (although the Ferenghi are mad capitalists and still seem to get along with everybody), even the refugee problem would be solved because, you know, space.
B.  The Hunger Games future, where the rich people in Capitol City seem to be doing pretty well, but life sort of sucks if you live in the districts.

C.  A Logan’s run future, where people live in domed cities and things are super clean and well organized, but you can’t go outdoors and you get ‘renewed’ when you’re about 28.
D.  A Waterworld Future, which is what we’ll get if we don’t do something about Global Warming.

Did everybody say A?  Good.  Because people who would seriously suggest one of the other models are just being trolls, and trying to derange the conversation.

The conversation then turns to “How do we get there from here?”  And that could be a very interesting conversation, indeed.

I had a blog half written when my computer started convulsing, I swear, the blog disappeared and I’m left staring at my home screen, so I tried to reopen Mozilla Firefox and the home page would pop up and flare out like the most frustrating lighter in the  world and then I got this  weird circus music when I pressed the enter key and that truly freaked me out because that’s not normal and then I tried to shut it down and restart and I got two choices.  It said two ‘apps’ were preventing me from shutting down, and I don’t even  know what an app is. I haven’t signed up for that yet, haven’t jumped on that internet bandwagon yet.  So at first I hit cancel and thought maybe it would send me back to my familiar internet space to  shut a couple  of things down and save them, but no, that didn’t happen so I chose the 2nd option, figuring I’d lose what I’d written and taking it as a sign that it was a stupid blog, and it was, about Facebook quizzes, which aren’t relevant to anybody.

It’s a stark reminder, though, how vulnerable we are.  I hope that turning it off and on again got rid of whatever virus or glitch which was lurking amid the synapses, but time will tell.

I’m not a super fan of sports, and this blog isn’t about  sports.  But, in an interview today after losing at Wimbledon to an American, British player Andy Murray was giving the post game interview when a reporter prefaced his question “Sam (Sam Querrey) is the first American to reach the quarter final of a slam since 2009” and Murray quickly corrected him “First male American.”
All of the comment threads I’ve seen have been praising him like he’s a great feminist hero and I was thinking ‘Hey, nothing against the guy, but all he did was make a factual correction’ and then, after thinking about it a bit more, thought ‘Well, a factual correction was what was called for, and most men wouldn’t have made it, most wouldn’t have spotted it, so maybe he is a feminist hero.’

And maybe that’s true in a lot of other situations, too.  Just speaking up, making sure the facts are set straight, that the conversation doesn’t get too stupid.  Maybe if we all do that when somebody says something stupid and racist, or stupidly right wing, or stupidly contradictory of scientific laws, like “I don’t believe in global warming because it’s cold today,” then the world would become a slightly better place.

Or maybe not.  People sure hate it when I correct their spelling.

The longest journey begins with a single step.  So  goes an ancient Chinese saying, or maybe American Indian, or Hindu, or  I’m pretty  sure I’ve seen it credited to both Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, it just depends on the meme of the day.  But today, a long journey began with a single pair of photons.

Don’t read here for details, I’m not a physicist, but it’s something to do with  what Einstein called  ‘spooky action at a distance’ and what current scientists call quantum entanglement, so it may not exactly  be the same as teleportation from Star Trek, but the Chinese have managed to  somehow affect the state of a photon  in  space, from Earth, from the middle of the yurt spotted, yak infested, hard baked sands of the Gobi freaking desert, instantaneously.

This journey could lead to faster than light travel, to teleportation, to instant communication, at least, over distances of light years, meaning a huge advance in interstellar travel, but maybe it wouldn’t be travel as we know it at all, just identical photons of you on a planet around another star, and each of you would know what the other was doing simultaneously.  It’s huge.

It may not electrify space exploration the way Sputnik did, there’s no beep-beep-beep up over our heads in the clear October sky, but I’m sure the scientific community is sitting up and taking notice.

Two major takeaways, for me:  China has taken the lead in the space race, and in the race to dominate the technological universe of the future.  They have the capacity.  They have the resources.  They have the will.

And, the road China has sent us down is  never-ending.  Just as this one is beyond the understanding of most of us, dealing as it does with  the sub-atomic universe where the laws of physics are, indeed, somewhat different, so will a greater and greater of the great discoveries of the future.
But, damn, what an awesome future it’s going to be.