Archive for August, 2023
Debates, soccer, and repetitious executions
I didn’t watch the Weds. presidential debates, but I did listen to them, running as background while Linda was watching. But I feel like I don’t need to know anything about these cretins beyond their ability to roar at full bellow to cover the fact they had nothing to say and no concept of what they were talking about.
Could be that I missed an occasional snippet of sanity, but I doubt it. I mean… these things are running for president of our country? How have we slumped this low, to become a backwash of rationality?
And why the hell did they have a live audience, where each bunch of boobs could cheer on their own particular court-jester-in-training? I guess to make sure that no one would take the whole business seriously.
But for a far more balanced, modulated and well-presented view than mine of that evening, read this piece – by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, who is now one of the country’s finest columnists and writers:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kareem-abdul-jabbar-on-the-2024-republican-debate?ref=home?ref=home
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Headline of the week:
“Singapore to execute a woman for first time in almost 20 years”
Yup, last time she was executed she was only 16. Third time will be the charm.
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Why did the U.S. women’s soccer team not win the world title? Could it be because they’re human, or that no team anywhere, anytime has a cinch on three straight world championships?
But what pisses me most is how the media hyped this magnificent team to a level well beyond reality – then wanted to dissect what “went wrong.”
They did the same to Simone Biles in gymnastics, shouting that there was no way she could lose at the Olympics. What a godawful burden to place on any athlete or team. Smug motherfuckers who think they have the right and duty to tell somebody two stories above their level of competence how to believe, how to achieve.
We also have our repulsive ex-president cheering their loss because Megan Rapinoe dared to highlight our failures as a country. Well, here’s what she had to say a few days ago on her retirement, once again proving herself a superb human being (and a damned good prose stylist):
“I’ll miss being able to represent our country. I think, a lot of times, that gets lost, when people talk about me in particular: ‘Oh, you guys don’t sing the anthem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t love America.’ But we do love America. It’s just more in a James Baldwin kind of way, not in a bald-eagle-on-your-shoulder kind of way.”
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Wife Linda came up with the best idea I’ve heard yet for the use of a chatbot. The bot would answer robocalls (whether the caller was human or AI) and engage in friendly, pointless talk for minutes on end, thus totally wasting their time and obliterating the sponsoring company’s profits. If adapted widely enough, it would put the bastards right out of business. Nobel Prize for Linda!
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Another odd corner of etymology:
“toast” – how did it come to mean both verbal enticement to liquid celebration… and a charred slice of bread?
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Bitcoin:
I normally want to know how most anything works – the real mechanisms behind what’s going on in the world. But with bitcoin, I just don’t give a royal goddamn. If this isn’t a wholesale asinine scam, what is?
Give me the Shroud of Turin any day.
Humanity
Posted by dsbdavis in Uncategorized on August 10, 2023
I honestly believe that humanity is doomed to extinction. The thing is, I can’t say whether this is optimistic or pessimistic.
The basic problem is there are too goddamned many of us. We’ve proliferated beyond the point of survival, for ourselves and for everything we’ve polluted, physically and mentally.
The second problem is that we’ve evolved into a conflicted mass of warring individuals and cultures based on a wholly outdated concept of survival: “Those not like us endanger us and must be curtailed or destroyed.” This formula can’t work in a world and landscape where 8 billion of us are forced to live cheek by jowl while competing for limited and constantly diminishing resources.
If the planet as a whole is to be considered, beyond and above humanity’s narrow needs and desires, its survival depends on our extinction. Does this assume we cannot change and adapt as a species? Yes. If our history shows nothing else, it’s that social evolution has never come close to evolving toward overall survival. And at this point it would have to do so at a rate of change that’s inconceivable.
But let’s suppose (as an exercise in throwing a few breadcrumbs) that some other existing or future species could reach our level of “intelligence,” isn’t it at least possible that they could salvage the planet (assuming there was something left to salvage)?
Possible, but hugely unlikely, though I’m sure my cat could organize a better environment that our “leaders” and their skulking followers – despite Tigger’s inexhaustible appetite for mice and voles. (Not a Buddhist, I don’t cheer-lead for mice and voles.)
At this stage, what bothers me far more than the end of humanity is that, before its demise, it wants to pollute the rest of the solar system. The current drive by moneyed loonies to colonize Mars and/or Venus is horrendous: “Let us to take our ruinous impulses to the far corners of our celestial neighborhood, build them up, then recreate our destructive asininity there.”
Fortunately, this impulse is not only vile but ridiculous. We have nothing like the technology or energy sources available to support anything this complex or involving concerted action. Plus, the desire to move fast would overwhelm the reality of the measured complexity required, eviscerating the prospect, leaving it another side-issue absurdity. (For those of you who might have read up on “Dyson spheres,” you know how ludicrous such crap can be.)
So… am I pessimist or optimist? I like (naturally) to think of myself as a realist. And as I won’t be around for the outcome, I can jaw on without having any personal stake in the directions taken.
But hey, fellow sinking-boaters, I still like you. That’s what I share my depression with you. Ain’t I the good guy?
lickhaven 