Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I am very frustrated with facebook, but that is sort of inevitable.  Facebook is an extension of our real lives, our real conversations, and I’m often frustrated with those as well.  I think, to some extent, everybody is.  Why doesn’t everybody agree with me, when what I say is so obviously true?  Why does everybody go into an argument with their mind already made up?  Why do people link  to things you’ve seen a dozen times already?  Why do they quote song lyrics, or print poems by famous poets, which are maybe sometimes interesting but add nothing new to the conversation?  Why do I keep coming back?

I had dedicated today to working on my book, the biography I am ghostwriting, and I did get about a chapter and a half done, but I kept going back to facebook ‘just to check in’ and spending an hour, 90 minutes, two hours at a time, and what did I get?

Several frustrating arguments about Israel, a cute picture of goat kids, and a pretty good speech by Allison Lundergan Grimes, which liberal pundits are hailing as ‘historical’ and ‘the end of Mitch McConnell’ and I hope they’re right but it looked to me as if everybody in that audience had their mind made up already and no one was shifted one way or the other.

Then there was the thing that specifically frustrated me, a rather long post by I forget who, about how people are frustrated with people because people are not what people want to he, like collectively, the human race, and I was in the process of coming up with the clever reply to end all clever replies, because that’s what we do, we want to speak our piece, to make our voice heard – most human conversation is just ‘I am here, I am here,’  which is the same as dog language, but before I could write it down, my wife asked to use the computer, for the boring purpose of actually looking up something relevant to our lives.

I said “Don’t lose my place,” but I knew the place would be lost and it was.

The reply I wanted to make was that sure, we’re not as good as we’d like to be, anyone who is as good as they’d like to be is devoid of ambition and, in the end, we are only and  exactly as good as we are.  Before we can get better, however, we need to ask the question: What do we want to be?  What do we, as a species, really want to be?

It has become an every day occurrence for me to get into arguments with supporters of Israel, many of whom I believe are Jewish people having a hard time dealing with their loss of ‘world’s greatest victim’ status.   That’s the way it goes.   You can’t expect people to feel sorry for you when you’ve got your own state and you’re doing very well, no matter how persecuted your grandparents were.

Take that, Kim Jong Un!

A couple of days ago, one of my facebook debate opponents said “What do you expect us to do when they’re firing missiles at us?  Send juice boxes?”  Which brings me to tonight’s topic.

In South Korea today they launched 50 large helium balloons carrying 10,000 ‘choco pies,’ a popular South Korean snack which has been banned in the North.  They launched them from a town on the border, and presumably at a moment when the wind was favorable.

Even if Kim Jong Un has them all shot down, the choco pies will still rain down on North Korea like manna from heaven, a pure gift from their southern brethren.

Everybody loves chocolate.  It is hard to hate people who give you chocolate.  Also, chocolate doesn’t kill anybody.

I suppose it all depends on what the Israelis want.  If they want to kill all the Palestinians so they can steal their land, which seems to me like a hollow victory, although there may be resources under that sand I know nothing about, then they are following the most effective course of action.  If they want to kill all the Palestinians out of pure blood lust, or for revenge over previous terrorist attacks, then they are on their way to achieving their goal.

But they will not achieve peace.  Any surviving Palestinians, people throughout the Arab world, and a fairly hefty percentage of the rest of the people in the world, will come out of this with a severe resentment of Israel, and the next time Israel is hit by a terrorist attack, no one will wonder why.  Few people, except the Israelis themselves, will say ‘poor Israelis.’

If what they want is peace they should send pie.

With all of the immediate horror in the world, in Gaza, in Syria and Iraq, in Ukraine, and let’s not forget the kidnapped Nigerian school girls, it is easy to think of the unexplained holes that are turning Siberia into the world’s largest swiss cheese as a bit of comic relief.

Big mistake.  If the currently popular theory – exploding methane – turns out to be correct, this could be  a huge problem, something with the potential to destroy all oxygen breathing life on Earth.

The idea is that the holes are caused as the melting of the permafrost (due to global warming) releases methane gas which has been trapped for centuries in rotting vegetable matter, like some ancient monster.  The gas explodes, leaving the hole.

Two big problems: if this is true, then these three holes are the first of thousand, maybe millions, which will  soon appear all over Siberia, and Alaska, and Canada, and Greenland, and Lapland, and maybe Antarctica, too.  Secondly, a whole shit ton (actually, several million shit tons) of methane will be added to the atmosphere, thus accelerating global warming but it won’t matter because we’ll just gag and die from the gas long before that.

This is a way bigger problem than cow farts.

So, we’d better start figuring out what to do about it soon and it’s never to early to speculate, that’s my motto.  Here’s my suggestion and, if my understanding of the science of it all is way off, feel free to let me know.

We need to cleanse the air of the methane gas (a carbon product), so what we need are plants, all around the holes, to absorb that shit and turn it into good old oxygen.  Of course, all of these holes are above the tree line but, the whole problem is that things are melting, so maybe that tree line needs adjusting, too.  If they require a little bit of extra attention to make them grow, so be it.

If tress grow too slow, perhaps hemp could be tried.  It has many fine uses and is a tough, resilient, fast growing plant.

Two birds with one stone.

I haven’t written about the ongoing tragedy in Gaza in this blog for a couple of weeks, and things have certainly not improved.  Plenty of people are talking about it on facebook, I had to unfriend somebody just five minutes ago.  Actually, that was the 2nd person I unfriended today, but the first one’s transgression was much less serious.  She’d just written “O.K., people, some of you are tempting me to unfriend you” and I had no idea what she was talking about, so I went to her page and found out we really had nothing in common and I didn’t know her in real life, so there you go.

You want to unfriend?  I’ll make it easy for you.

But, back to the topic.  Israel is now killing large numbers of Palestinians every day, there’s no let up in sight, and there’s not a damned thing anybody can do about it.  The Israelis could do something about it, but they won’t.  Although Benjamin Netanyahu is now seen as a monster and a war criminal around the world, he has plenty of support inside Israel, like the guy I just unfriended.

The American government could probably do something about it.  If they were to stop sending military aid to Israel, it might make the Israeli government sit up and take notice.  If Obama were to withdraw our support for Israel at the U.N., a resolution of universal condemnation would be issued tomorrow, and that might make a difference.

For some reason, the U.S. is never going to do that.  I’m not really sure I understand. I used to think it was about the Jewish vote, or Jewish campaign contributions, but it can’t be that.  Any candidate who suggested cutting Israel off, at this point, would get support from at least 50% of American Jews.

So, there has to be something more.  Oil?  Israel doesn’t have any.  Military control of the Middle East?  Could be.  Dirty secrets?  We may never know.

My other question is, since no outside forces appear willing to step in and stop this slaughter, exactly how many does Israel plan to kill before they stop?

Whenever you ask them, they say “until Hamas stops shooting at us,” but that’s a short sighted view.  For every one they kill now, there are a dozen people who see it, friends and relatives who will never forget it.

5, 10, 20 years from now there will  be even more Palestinian terrorists than there are today.  The difference will be that  no one in the world will need to say “Why?”  This is why.

The future is unwritten and therefore entirely down to us, fate and predestination are nonsense because they can only be measured after the fact, we look back at WWII and say, well, that was inevitable, but there was probably a point in the 1920s when it wasn’t. 

It is entirely possible that the reason we have no firm proof of extraterrestrials visiting us is that there is a natural tendency for species to evolve to the point where they are capable of destroying themselves – which is about where we are now – and then to do so.  In other words, perhaps most species self-destruct before they make it out into space and start discovering other planets.

Still, a tendency is not 100% and it is easily within the realm of imaginability, i.e. not proscribed by the physical laws of the universe, for a species to continue to exist, and evolve, beyond that point.  I propose we set that as our goal: continued existence.

The way to do that is to put our smartest people to work figuring out a way to sustain our environment, prevent disastrous meteor strikes, come up with an emergency plan to survive (or prevent) supervolcanoes, earthquakes that measure 9+ on the Richter scale, and megatsunamis, save the honeybees, end eliminate poverty by giving everybody homes, sending all the children to excellent, high tech, modern schools which have an adequate number of teachers, build high speed trains that go around the world, and begin the colonization of space.

Then, once they’ve done so, to listen to them and implement the plan.

Will that eliminate war?  I believe it will.  Not because people will suddenly become nicer, less bloodthirsty, or less desirous of holding on to their pathetic, little piece of land which they believe, in their tiny little minds, is theirs by divine right, but once people are comfortable, well fed, and have a good chance of living into a comfortable and healthy old age, they are a lot less likely to want to risk their lives, even to kill people they really hate.