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The astute visitor to this blog may notice  a couple of changes.  We (because I’m computer challenged and when I say we I mean  my wife, Helena) ditched that boring, stock photo of books from create space that used to be over the blog and replaced it with that  handsome animal to the left, perusing my latest book, “155 Sonnets.”  His name is Bonzo, and he lives with Max and Max’s mom, Becky, in Oklahoma City.

Also, the  bar across the  top has  been simplified.  I moved the Tarot Poems in with the  rest of the poems, so now there are just two choices up there, i.e. Home, which is this daily blog, and Poetry, which is everything else.  Then, we moved the  Sonnets book in there, as well as Rheets 2013, which is 365 very short  poems (140 characters or less) about the  relevant  topics of our times.

The  idea is that, as much as I would love people to buy my books, it’s even more  important  to me that people read my books.  I realize that a lot of you are starving artist types, or just people  who prefer to read whatever is free, because there is so much of it out there, or people who don’t know me from a bar of soap and have no particular reason to believe that the writing is any good.  Here is your chance.  You  can  just click on Poetry, read the book, or as much of it as you like,  and then you’ll know if it’s worth owning or not.  (Also, do not forget, books of poetry make nice gifts.)

A study from NASA, which has nothing to do with space, has predicted that unless we do something really drastic, like a massive redistribution of income, and/or seriously strict environmental regulations, civilization will collapse within a few decades, a century or two at most.  I’ve got a few things to say about this.

First, I’m a bit surprised because it seems a little bit outside of NASA’s jurisdiction.  Not that I object.  It’s basically a computer type study, so it probably didn’t cost much, and I’m glad somebody’s doing studies like this.

Also, it’s a little bit harder to dismiss a report from NASA than it is a report from some religious wackjob who’s used the Bible as a literal reference work to calculate the days since Noah’s flood, or some Mayan legend that even actual Mayan’s didn’t believe in.  NASA puts people into space and brings them back, alive.  They are no slouches.

However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I do not think civilization is going to collapse.  Not completely, anyway.   Sure, there are dozens of possible real bad scenarios: death of the honeybees, nuclear disaster, Monsanto destroying our biodiversity, leading to pretty much the same result as the extinction of the honeybees, global warming, fracking poisoning all the world’s water, acid rain, a pandemic, a meteor strike.

But a lot depends on what you call civilization, and what you consider collapse.  Rome collapsed.  In some ways, it was a step backward for mankind but in some ways it was a step forward.  It enabled everything that followed.

Certainly, as the report indicated, the rich are likely to continue hogging all the wealth, and this will lead to one of two scenarios.   First, there will be widespread famine.  People will react to that in one of two ways.  They will succumb quietly, or they will kill all the rich people.   If there is a lot of succumbing quietly, the population will eventually drop to a level where it will be sustainable again, just by small scale agriculture, and hunting and trapping and scavenging.  Out of 7 billion people, if only 1% survive, that is 70 million survivors.  Among that number, there will undoubtedly be some who are capable of building water wheels and generators, planning drainage and irrigation systems, and forging metal.  O.K., civilization may collapse, but it will recover.

Alternatively, people might decide they prefer to exterminate the rich,  which would allow for many more people to survive, and civilization to more quickly regenerate.

If civilization collapses to the point where industry stops, the rivers will flush themselves of all pollutants within days (if the soil is not too polluted), the sky will clear after a few good rains, and things will start over again.

Of course, if we are smart, we could take the needed steps now to solve the problems, and avoid the collapse entirely.  Ban pesticides, start building massive wind and solar generating facilities, replace all the roads with railroads, tax the rich instead of the poor, and give everybody a free college education, because the more smart people we have, the better off we’ll be.

It doesn’t look like we’re smart enough, though.  So, maybe we’re doomed, after all.

They say one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead (a rule I’m planning to violate frequently as the whole Bush cabal dies off, which can’t happen soon enough) so, with regard to Fred Phelps’ passing away I will only say: Good, he’s dead.

On a lighter note, this was sort of a cute video.  The concept was to test whether jokes came across when  told in another language, e.g. English.  From the text of the article, I got the feeling the  writer(s) thought that it didn’t, but I disagree.  I thought the jokes were pretty funny, actually, especially the  one about the two grapes.

Humor Transcends All Barriers

Essentially, anything that’s not a pun will work.  Sure, there are some other exceptional cases; jokes about a given  countries politicians, or that make local cultural references, won’t travel, but that’s not a language issue.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the same jokes exist in most languages.  Or some variant thereof.

It’s inevitable.  We are all human beings.  We all eat.  We all sleep.  We all fall in love, have disagreements, get hangovers when we drink too much.  We all die, and we’re all afraid of it.  Well, maybe some people aren’t, but most are.  These are the things we think about, so these are the things we laugh about.

Jokes about sex are probably just about the most common jokes of all (my favorite is the one about Superman, Wonder Woman and The Invisible Man), because the only thing people like more than talking about sex is actually having sex.  Of course, if everybody was having sex as much as they wanted, there would be a lot less time to make up jokes about it.  In fact, if everybody was getting it as much as they wanted, the streets would be empty, nobody would ever show up to work, and society would collapse.

The other thing I got from the video was further confirmation of my view that with the advent of the internet, we can now research things easily which would have taken great effort before, and you don’t even need to be a real scientist, so studies like this get done.  I reckon it’s a good thing.  At the very worst, harmless.

The 2016 presidential election is two and a half years away, although people are  already speculating.  Will it be Hillary’s year?  Is it her destiny?  Is her nomination  inevitable?

I don’t think so.  It seems to me she learned the wrong lesson from 2008.  The lesson she should  have learned is that the nominating  process can be long and brutal, nothing is inevitable and nothing should be taken  for granted.  Instead, she seems to be doubling down on the inevitability strategem, which will pop like a balloon the moment somebody else says “I’m in.”

I don’t know.  Maybe she is a cagier politician than I’m giving her credit for, and  I give her credit for plenty.  Maybe she has a plan B.  Maybe she’s got  a plan C, D, and E.

Susanne Atanus

But, as I said, that’s still a long ways away.  The 2014 congressional elections are right around the corner, however.  Well, in November.  It’s a bit of a wide, looping  corner, but they’re what’s around it.  It’s a funny thing about the elections this year.  Every single congressional seat is up for grabs, a phenomenon which only happens once every two years.

In Illinois’ 9th district,  the Republican nominee to take on Democrat Jan Schakowsky will be Susanne Atanus.  Susanne Atanus believes that tornadoes and earthquakes and autism and dementia are sure fire signs that God is angry at us,  because of gay rights.

It’s  not just a question of her homophobia, although that, too.  It’s the total disconnect with reality, as if earthquakes and lightning and dementia  and autism all never existed before the invention of gay marriage.

And, there’s a chance she could win.

Haven’t heard anybody much talking about string theory for a while, which is just as well, because I never understood it in the 1st place.   The last few days it’s been all primordial gravitational waves this,  and primordial gravitational waves that, and I don’t understand that, either, except that it’s some kind of wave pattern that emerged just after the big bang, and apparently proves that the universe isn’t cyclical, it won’t all end 20 billion years from now as we are all compacted into one point, or sucked into a massive black hole, to prepare for Big Bang II, but rather it will continue to expand until  I don’t know what, because that can’t go on forever, either.

They Look Like Flowers

That’s kind of the amazing thing about the universe, whichever theory of the origin of it and its overall makeup turns out to be true, its mind boggling.

Like I said, I don’t understand it, but according to The Guardian (my current go-to site for news) it’s like ripples in the structure of space-time from the birth of the universe.  Ripples in the structure of space-time.  That means time travel, which would be one of the most super awesomely unbelievable developments out of science fiction possible, right up there with faster than light travel and beaming as a form of ship to planet transportation.

I don’t think it’s actually possible, just on a philosophical level, because part of the definition of time, at least as it relates to our lives, is that it passes.  If you go back in time to spend 8 months in a covered wagon on the OregonTrail, you’ll age 8 months.  For whatever that’s worth.  But the real reason I think time travel is impossible is because it hasn’t happened yet.  You’d think there would be people stopping in all the damned time, writing the wrongs and such, and our whole reality would change every couple of weeks, but it seems to me like it’s a stabler universe than that, if you were getting a fresh set of memories implanted that often I think I’d have a headache.

Anyway, primordial gravity waves.  Next time you’re at a party, say that really  loud and people will think you are smart.