The 21st Century, What’s in Store?

If Nostradamus can string together nonsense words and sentences and be recognized as a prophet by all and sundry, why shouldn’t I take a stab at it? Hell, I can even try to make sensible predictions, so I should have an even better chance of becoming famous for all eternity. Right. For one thing, predicting the future is impossible except in extremely limited circumstances. And secondly, Nostradamus’s fame and fortune was a fluke by any definition of the word.

However, there a few predictions I will make about the coming century. Maybe I’ll prove prescient, who knows, but I’ve studied history enough to know that some predictions can be made. As long as one avoids details, general trends can sometimes be discerned.  For example, there were people who said in 1918 that the Treaty of Versailles would be the cause of the next war. Turned out they were a lot closer to the mark than the people who came up with the treaty.

In any event, for what it’s worth, here are my seven predictions for the 21st century:

1. The metal ages will end in the 21st century. By the end of the 21st century everything from cars to bridges to buildings to kitchen utensils will be made out of synthetic materials lighter, stronger, and cheaper than metal and concrete. (OK, there are very few concrete kitchen utensils.) It’s a no-brainer prediction in a way, still, a lot of folks don’t realize just how anachronistic steel cars and concrete structures already are. In just a few decades, people will look back at us as if we lived and worked in log cabins. Cars made of steel especially will only be seen in Museums.

2. Humans will colonize space. I know, seems obvious. However, the space colonies and flying cars so confidently predicted in the 50s were wildly optimistic, fantasies really. Space is really really hard to live in, and incredibly expensive to boot. I think it will be centuries before humans are seriously colonizing other planets, but I think it’s reasonably safe to predict that there will be a few manned human outposts further than Earth’s orbit by the late 21st century. I hope.

3. There will be no flying cars. Well, let me rephrase that, flying cars will not replace regular cars in the near future and probably not the far future. It’s not that we can’t build a car that flies, it’s just that safely moving around millions of flying vehicles is an engineering problem of enormous scope. I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

4. By the end of the 21st century almost every manufactured item will be “smart.” I don’t mean smart in a human sense, but smart in the sense that human intervention not only isn’t required, it won’t even be considered. Lights will turn off when you leave the room. You won’t be able to drive your car into a tree if you tried. If you leave your kid in a closed car, an alarm will go off and the windows will open. Power tools will shut off if they come anywhere near flesh. Yeah, you’ll still be able to hit your thumb with a hammer, some things never change, but if you injure yourself bad enough … your cell phone will call 911 for you.

5. The aliens will not be landing. For a number of reasons, I’m pretty sure if aliens were hanging about nearby, they’d have introduced themselves by now. Maybe people will still be looking, but I think that by the end of the 21st century most people will have realized that aliens are in the same class as fairies and Santa Claus. And are as about likely to be real as same. Who knows though, maybe UFO watchers will evolve into the next great religious movement, that could be fun. I mean, thinking that aliens are going to show up and safe us from ourselves is so close to certain fundamentalist Christian beliefs that it’s not funny. (Well, I suppose Jesus landing in a UFO would be funny in a way.)

6. Balkanization will continue. I know a lot of people think that world government is right around the corner. I think the trend is in the opposite direction. Things like the UN, Nato,  and the EU are zombie remnants of the colonial era, and sometime in the 21st century they will collapse into dust. New technologies, computers especially, but smokeless gunpowder and IEDs will play their role, are making it easier for small groups to insist on independence. Granted I could write multiple posts or a book on my thinking along these lines, but I’ll suffice it to say here that the collapse of the Soviet Empire was a precursor of things to come. The west’s attempt to control the world through military power is doomed to failure.

OK, I could only come up with six. Seven if one counts the idea that people will continue to be people. There will still be criminal gangs, organized government, wars, murders, social injustice, and all those wonderful things that separate us from the beasts of the forest. There will probably be fewer beasts and forests too, but predicting that is like shooting fish in a barrel.

(The above image of the world’s largest digging machine is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and its use here in no conceivable way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. The machine is built by Krupps, no idea who holds the copyright on the image. I selected it because it looks so cool and futuristic. Will there be other giant machines in the future? Probably, but I think the trend will be for both larger and smaller machines,  talk about hedging my bets, eh?)

Dictator Schmictator, what’s all the fuss?

Following up on last week’s post, a few observations on dictators. The “common knowledge” in the west is that they are always bad, with comparisons to Hitler usually cited to illustrate the point. So of course if some foreign leader is labelled a dictator by the west, people immediately assume the worst. And not only do they assume that dictatorships are bad, they also assume that the people living under them automatically oppose them and want to see them overthrown. As part of this assumption, most people seem to think that the only way to get rid of a dictatorship is through force, I mean, no dictator would voluntarily relinquish power, would they? Lastly, it’s commonly assumed, and frequently stated, that the USA opposes dictatorships on general principles and promotes freedom, democracy, and self-determination around the world.

The reality is little more complicated. OK, it’s a lot more complicated. First let’s look at the idea that dictators are almost universally despised by their subjects. This usually includes the codicil that since dictators don’t hold elections, they don’t need to worry about their popularity. To start with, some of history’s most famous and admired people, especially in their own lands, have been dictators. Julius Caesar, the original dictator so to speak, was wildly popular. Napoleon’s grave is still one of Frances most revered sites. Hitler and Mussolini were both swept into power by popular revolt, Hitler in fact had something like 85% of the vote in the election that put him in power, and both to this day have their supporters. And for our American readers, a certain President Lincoln assumed blatantly unconstitutional powers in his efforts to reconquer the Confederacy. Lincoln was certainly a dictator by some definitions (and in many people’s minds at the time,)  yet he is one of America’s most revered national figures.

Then  of course the idea that dictators don’t have to worry about elections or popularity.  In this sense, the common knowledge is completely ass backwards. It’s the people who are elected who don’t need to worry about popularity. A dictator on the other hand has to worry about their popularity every single day, because if they become too unpopular, bad things can happen. And while the leaders of any nation to one extent or another have to be concerned with assassins, the problem is particularly acute for dictators. The Sword of Damocles hasn’t endured in popular culture for nearly 2000 years for no reason.

As for the idea that dictatorships are always bad and that force is the only way to deal with them, this doesn’t hold up well when compared with the historical record. In fact let’s review, in 1960 or so most of the world’s nations with a few exceptions, were dictatorships. Mostly right wing dictatorships. Salazar in Portugal. Franco in Spain. South Korea was a military dictatorship. And virtually all of Latin America and Africa, as well as Indonesia and other Asian countries. Not to mention Eastern Europe, virtually all dictatorships. Yes, during the Cold War dictatorship was the norm, almost always propped up by weapons from the USA or Russia. And yet somehow virtually all of these nations have some semblance of a modern secular parliamentary government now. Even more astounding, most of these nations made the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy with little or no violence. And very very few of them were “liberated” by foreign armies. Actually, it’s not astounding at all, what is astounding that people continue to make the claim that armed revolution and/or external intervention is the preferred or only solution to the “problem” of dictatorships. The historical record clearly shows otherwise.

Lastly we come to the idea that the USA is a force for democracy and self-determination in the world, part and parcel of the idea that we are occupying Iraq and Afghanistan out of some principled opposition to dictatorships and tyranny. This one is so contraindicated by the evidence that it’s a little hard to even know where to start. So let’s start with 1953, when the CIA overthrew the popularly elected government of Iran and put the Shah in power, where he ruled as a dictator for 26 years. In 1973 we have the USA supporting a military dictatorship that seized power in Chile. And there’s the little problem of the USA’s support for mass murderous dictatorships by any standard in Indonesia and Guatemala. And today Egypt and Saudia Arabia, two dictatorships by any definition of the word are significant recipients of US aid. I could go on, the list of brutal dictatorships the USA has tacitly or actively supported is so extensive that it’s a wonder anyone buys the idea that the USA is some supporter of worldwide democracy.

Well, outside the USA it’s probably not particularly widely believed at all. Especially people who have lost family and friends to our efforts to “spread democracy” at the point of a cruise missile. In any event, that’s not the point of this post, though I will be getting back to  America’s flying death squads soon. The points were, well, as stated above. In a future post I’ll discuss Lincoln and his seizing of dictatorial powers as well as some of my favourite dictators. Lot’s of fun to be had here.

(The above image of Hitler and Mussolini is public domain under US copyright law, at least I hope so. At the very least it is an historically important image, it’s not being used for profit, and I’m claiming it as Fair Use under US copyright law. Yada yada yada (Which is in the OED by the way.))

Politically Charged Current Events Post

The feedback on my “letter to my readers” post has been useful so far, spartan, but useful. Current events posts do tend to be popular, and even better, they are relatively easy to write. On the other hand, as was pointed out, they tend to get stale rather quickly. On the gripping hand, they are often fun to write, so I do plan to keep them up.

So with no further ado, current events. The big news of course is that the recession is over. Yes, it’s official, even Obama hailed the good news. Now if everyone would just go out and start buying stuff again, we’ll be out of the woods in no time. Right. I’m pretty sure all they did was print up enough money and borrow against it to produce the illusion of recovery, and since the malignant economic structures that caused the problem in the first place haven’t been addressed, at best all this means is that some time has been bought. And in fact it means that when the crash does come it will be even worse. Who knows, maybe Obama will suffer LBJ’s fate. He’s the president who claimed we had won the Vietnam War in 1967. Turns out LBJ’s assessment was, shall we say, premature.

Speaking of wars, it’s uglier than ever in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Iraq still has unspeakable violence.  I suppose I should write about them more, but most people either don’t care, are painfully misinformed, or both. And “painfully misinformed” is being diplomatic at a world class level, at least when talking about Americans. I am going to be writing about our predator death squads soon, there’’s some lessons to be learnt there. Anyhow, Af/Pak, short version, don’t order your victory cakes yet, we’re light years away from “Mission Accomplished” in Afghanistan and Pakistan unless the mission was violence and war into the foreseeable future.

Which it might very well have been. My latest theory is that we are most afraid of dictators like Saddam and Ahmadinejad because a strong dictatorship is often where a modern effective nation state is forged. They may be ugly while they last, but the sense of national identity and purpose that they foster is the basis for the modern nation state. And the last thing the USA or Europe wants is modern nation states in ther Middle East and the third world. Colonial client puppet states are far more amenable to selling off their nations resources for a few chests of goodies for the people in charge. I mean, Saddam had this crazy idea that the oil profits from the oil in the Middle East should be used to benefit the people in the Middle East. Compared to that idea,  the threat posed by Al Qaeda is trivial.

In domestic matters, in a fascinating display of human stupidity, some parents pretended that their kid had floated away in a home made balloon.  Two points to be made here. The first, which everyone over the age of twelve should know, don’t mess with the Feds. You can mess with the local authorities, you can even joust with the state authorities,  but only a fool or a crusader runs afoul of the federal government. As for their desire to use their hoax as a stunt to help them get a reality show, I’m pretty sure even in today’s Roman Circus world a reality show based on psychologically traumatizing your kids is going to be a hard sell. Let’s hope so at least.

In local news, part of a repair to the old Bay Bridge that is being rebuilt blew down during a windstorm. Three cars were damaged, one person was hurt. The bridge, the region’s main traffic artery, has been closed indefinitely. Sigh. This in so many ways is a microcosm of modern America. A project that in the first place didn’t need to be done, the old bridge was good for hundreds of years. Every step of the way has been marked by cost over runs and clearly deliberate attempts to chose the most expensive way forward possible. I mean., the scaffolding for this bridge is going to cost 600 million dollars, most countries could build the bridge for that kind of money. And now they are so goddamn incompetent that a little wind starts blowing the project apart.

You know, if the aliens ever invade, we’re hosed. Blackwater and Goldman-Sachs will make a profit right up to the very end though. As Alien armoured columns blast there way into Washington, there will be Obama on TV, telling America that all is well, the new secret weapons will save the day, even as flashes from alien ray guns increrasingly illuminate the Washington skyline behind him.

Have a great weekend everyone.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, it’s the only image available to illustrate the topic, and its use here in no conceivable way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and copyright: L.A.Marzulli. And I’m serious about the alien invasion movie where we lose in the end because spin and propaganda and corruption is no match for alien weaponry. Both conservatives and liberals could be skewered … Cheney goes down fighting with a shotgun in his hand, Michael Moore is captured and undergoes alien probing, and at the very end it’s revealed that all along Obama was one of them! He wasn’t born in Hawaii or Kenya, he wasn’t even born on Earth at all! Muahahahahaha!)

WORLD PANICS AS MYSTERIOUS GREEN BLOB SPOTTED IN DEEP SPACE, PRESIDENT OBAMA URGES CALM IN ADDRESS TO UN

There it is, a mysterious green blob in deep space. I wasn’t kidding. OK, maybe I exaggerated a little bit. What is it? No one knows. Is it a danger to Earth? Probably not, it’s about 700 million light years away. Normally when one tosses off huge astronomical distances, they get qualified by “that’s actually pretty close in cosmic terms.” In this case, no, 700 million light years is actually a pretty fair distance away. The nearest galaxy to Earth is some 2.5 million light years away, this puppy is nearly 300 times as far away as that. At the time the light from this image started on its way to Earth, there was only the most primitive life in the sea, small worms and such, and nothing more than microbes on land. And all the continents were pretty much gathered together in one big lump.

The mystery green object is called Hanny’s Voorwerp. It was discovered by Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007. How the heck did a school teacher discover an object 700 million light years away? I mean, this is a picture taken by a 2.5 metre telescope,  it’s not something one can see with even the finest backyard telescope. Well, she was an amateur volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project. What is the Galaxy Zoo project? It’s pretty simple really, this 2.5metre telescope was used to photograph much of the sky in something called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Literally millions of galaxies were photographed, far beyond what the world’s astronomers could examine. So millions of human volunteers were enlisted to download pictures from the sky survey and pore over them to identify the galaxies and other oddities. Yes, turns out the human brain is still pretty damn useful, especially when millions of them are harnessed. The project was big success, it determined some new information about the universe, and even led to the discovery of a new class of galaxy. And lastly, to the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp.

So what the hell is Hanny’s Voorwerp? (Voorwerp is Dutch for object by the way.) No one knows for sure. It’s the same distance away as the otherwise unremarkable spiral galaxy IC 2497 next to it. It does seem clear that it is something called a reflection nebula. A reflection nebula is where interstellar gas, in this case possibly a deformed dwarf galaxy, reflects the light of some nearby object rather than generates the light itself. The other type of nebula is an emission nebula, where the gas itself has been so heated up that it is emitting light. A gallery of reflection nebula can be seen here.  I haven’t been able to track down exactly how astronomers are able to determine one from the other, I assume it has to do with the exact nature of the light coming from the nebula.

OK, so its a bunch of gas reflecting the light from some green light source? What’s so weird about that? Well, two things. For one thing, it’s green. Reflection nebula are either red or blue, no one has ever seen a green one before. So there is either something highly unusual about the nebula itself, or something odd about the source of the light that is being reflected. And that brings us to the second thing odd about this, notice any brilliant green light near Hanny’s Voorwerp? The only thing bright enough to light up something that size would be a quasar, a huge black hole at the centre of galaxies. Well, galaxy IC 2497 doesn’t appear to have  a quasar at its centre.

Are there any theories at all? Well, sort of. It’s possible that there was a quasar at the centre of galaxy IC 2497, but that for whatever reason it stopped emitting light some thousands of years ago, but the light it previously emitted is still hitting Hanny’s Voorwerp. It’s kind of a stretch, but it at least is possible. The colour though, that’s harder to explain. What scientific speculation along those lines I can find is beyond my ken, here’s a site that covers it but it’s pretty much Greek to me. And while most of the pics on the site show Hanny’s Voorwerp in blue, never fear, near the bottom they explain that in visible light, it would indeed appear green. The only thing that can be said for certain is that Hanny’s Voorwerp is very unusual, and it is continuing to get a lot of study.

No big lesson here, other that my oft repeated axiom that the Universe will always hold surprises for us. British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington (18882-1944) put it best when he said “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

(The above image  is licensed by the Galaxy Zoo under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Credit and copyright: Galaxy Zoo. Coming soon, as a gentle reader reminded me, how scientists are going to weigh tiny pebbles to search for God. And yes, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but in this case, the reality is even stranger than the exaggeration.)

A Letter To My Readers

Botanical Gardens in Bucharest, Roumania

Never fear, this is actually good news for a change. I am making good progress on a companion web site to Doug’s Darkworld, where much of my writing will be available in a more organized and coherent fashion. This will both simplify this site and allow me to concentrate more on what I do best, which is writing. Some of which I hope to sell, which will give me even more time to write. Muahahahaha. Sorry, I digress. Being a starving artist may have its  youthful romantic appeal, but past fifty, the appeal dims rapidly. You can quote me on that.

Resuming, what I want to ask my readers, is this. Are there any posts and/or topics on Doug’s Darkworld that you have particularly enjoyed? What topics would you like to see in the future? My reader’s suggestions will help me what to put on the companion site, and will in fact guide me in selecting what future posts to write about. And maybe I suppose what topics to avoid. All comments appreciated, I always read the comments and try to reply to them on a regular basis even. And yes, I’m well aware that a few promised posts haven’t materialized yet. Remind me about those too. The wheels may grind slowly at Doug’s Darkworld, but they grind exceedingly fine.

Thanks in advance. On Wednesday another post will appear here, and with luck I can keep up at least three posts a week going forward. There’s been fascinating developments in space exploration, the American Empire is in free fall, Obama has shown his true colours, the health care debate continues, swine flu explodes, and the Antichrist was spotted in Cleveland. Meanwhile the mainstream media continues twenty four hour coverage of hoaxes, corporate talking points, and rehashed White House propaganda. Yes, the world goes on, stay tuned.

The picture above sure is beautiful, isn’t it? I sent it to my Romanian sweetie to impress her, then discovered later it’s actually a picture of Butchart Gardens in Canada. My wild talent for unimpressing girls could be a topic for a blog itself, but I don’t think I’ll run with it. Tomorrow, giant mysterious “thing” spotted in deep space.

Regards

Doug Stych

PS: Thanks for all the comments and input in the past.

How a few inches of soil and some leaking cannisters set back space exploration by nearly three decades

Maybe I’m exaggerating  a bit for the sake of a good story, it’s an old family tradition. My dad does it, my granddad was one of the best,  so I’m in good company. And this is an interesting story, and a wonderful illustration of how even scientists can get trapped by their own assumptions. As I recently mentioned, there have been two recent amazing discoveries in the Solar System. It turns out, to coin a phrase, “there’s water in them there hills.” Yes, despite all indications to the contrary it appears that water is far more abundant on the Moon and Mars than scientists previously thought.

Scientists for awhile have known there was water on Mars in the past, and the recent rovers have shown there was lots of water on Mars in the past. How much water remained though was a bit of  a mystery. There is some at the poles, and some indications there might be more elsewhere. Then the recent Mars Polar Lander scraped down into the dirt, and hit water. OK, they hit ice, to be more precise. The clincher though was images like the one above. Mars is frequently hit by meteorites since it has little atmosphere for them to burn up in. And our latest generation of Mars orbiters has been able to spot a number of small recently formed craters. And in many cases, scientists saw something like the above. Right after the impact there would be a lot of ice blasted from the crater, and over the following weeks it would disappear as it sublimated, that is to say it turned into water vapour without going through a liquid phase. And from the amount of ice scattered around these new craters, there must be a lot of water on Mars, all frozen just under the surface in the northern and southern latitudes.

Even more exciting and unexpected was the discovery of water on the Moon. It was so unexpected that scientists waited until three different probes had confirmed it, but the evidence was unmistakable, water was clearly present in surface soil on the Moon, especially in the polar regions. In fact it was being created or transported somehow, since the surface was “wettest” in the Moon’s morning but had dried out by the end of the Moon’s day. Now of course I’m not talking about liquid water, I am talking water bound up in minerals in the Moon’s soil. Tiny tiny amounts, but still, water is water. This makes the Moon a lot more attractive as a way station or a location for scientific bases, since water is not only indispensable for drinking, it can be converted into Oxygen and Hydrogen, the former for breathing, and both for use as rocket fuel. Having your own air, water, and rocket fuel available makes the Moon (and Mars) vastly more habitable since you don’t have to haul the same from Earth at fabulous expense. In fact the fuel for the return trips from Mars will likely be manufactured right on Mars by robots before the first astronauts arrive, since not having to haul rocket fuel to Mars for the return trip will mean vastly larger expeditions can be mounted.

However, I digress. There is another thing about these discoveries that is also fascinating, it turns out both of them could have been discovered in the 1970s. In the case of the Moon, astronauts brought back a lot of Moon rock and soil, why didn’t scientists detect the trace amounts of water in it? Well, turns out they did. However, the canisters the Moon soil and rock samples were returned to Earth in weren’t as air tight as had been planned. So when scientists detected trace amounts of water, they assumed it had to be contamination from air that had seeped into the storage cannisters. I mean, they knew there was no way that there could be water on the Moon, so what else could it be?

On Mars the situation is even more tragicomic. In the 1970s the Viking landers set down on Mars to look for life or at least the building blocks of life in the Martian soil. However, the soil samples they dug up didn’t appear to indicate any sign of life. And the pictures coming back from orbit sure seemed to indicate that Mars was very dry and had been so for a long time. However, as the recent meteorite strikes and the Mars polar lander have shown us, if the Viking landers had been able to dig just a few inches deeper, they would almost certainly have hit ice. And to put it mildly, scientists would have been thrilled and amazed. Instead, in the case of Mars, scientists just had bad luck. And in the case of the Moon, they were blinded by their own prejudices. So the result was that scientists concluded in the seventies that both the Moon and Mars were barren dry “dead” planets, no water meant little to no possibility of life and little reason to consider sending follow-up missions. So exploration of the Moon and Mars literally languished for decades as scientists went on to study the far more interesting (or so they thought) outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

What would have been the result if scientists had realized in the seventies that Mars or the Moon had significant amounts of water? To put it mildly, there would have been vastly greater interest in exploring and examining both. In fact it’s even possible that manned trips to the Moon would have continued, and there certainly wouldn’t have been a decades long delay before sending another lander to Mars. That’s how science works though, there are often halts or delays because of misconceptions or the merest of chances. Sooner or later it corrects itself though and our understanding of our world and the Universe around us increases once again. For example, scientists just discovered that a number of dinosaurs … never existed at all!

How the hell did that happen? You guessed it … it’s a topic for a future post.

(The above images of craters on Mars are being used in accordance with NASA guidelines, they were taken by  NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona. The crater is about 6m (20 ft) wide and knee deep. For a picture of a much larger crater with a permanent ice lake at the bottom of it, click here. Look at it closely, see any ruins? Me neither, but at least one person does. I think the fellow has an exceptionally vivid imagination, how’s that for being diplomatic?)

America, Land of Politically Correct Racism?

I saw this non news event a day or so ago and was going to pass right by it, but someone posted about it is one of my discussion groups. Then people commented on it. If spewing mindless invective can be called commenting. Sigh. So I was forced to actually examine the issue, which I suppose is a break from the post I was going to write about blowing up babies in Pakistan. Basically the above illustration is a Halloween costume that hit the shelves this fall. And shortly thereafter, some folks began complaining about it, and some stores pulled the costume. My initial response was, that’s kinda tacky if not right downright tasteless. My second thought was, gee, I sometimes think people who get upset about stuff like this are doing their cause more harm than good. I mean, no one would have even heard of this costume if it wasn’t for the publicity that calls to remove it from store shelves have caused. A superficial analysis, but that’s all I thought the topic was worth.

Then it got posted a discussion group I used to frequent. And, frankly, the reaction there surprised me. Basically everyone that weighed in on this issue made the claim that people who objected to this had no sense of humour and were being tediously politically correct. Those were the polite ones. there was also at least one racist diatribe. I made a post about how it wasn’t really a bit deal, but that I could see how some folks could be upset about it. And the group moderator told me my opinion wasn’t welcome in this country and I should go back to where I came from. Well, food for thought, nu?

First of all, let’s look at the claim that this costume is “just a joke.” Let’s see, it’s an illegal alien because it says so in big black letters. We know he’s a criminal because he’s wearing a prison jumpsuit. We know he’s not human because he’s not human. And we know he’s stupid because he’s carrying a fake green card. It’s not a stretch to say that this costume strongly (and intentionally) implies that illegal aliens are stupid, sub-human, criminals, nu? I’m pretty sure that most people would be at least a little uncomfortable with a costume that implied that some group they belonged to were a bunch a stupid, sub human, criminals. The point here is saying “It was just a  joke” isn’t any sort of logical defence. Especially in a case like this, where I don’t even get the punchline. What, exactly, is funny about this costume? One lame pun?

What was more disturbing to me though is that attitude of so many that could be summed up as “If you’re offended by it, you don’t belong in this country.” Especially since many of the same were claiming that attempts to get the costume off store shelves was an attack on Freedom of  Speech. Refusing to even acknowledge that people who disagree with them have a point while simultaneously bemoaning the perceived attack on “their” rights strikes me as more than a bit paranoid. It’s not a good sign, and more and more I am seeing this kind of polarization on some topics in America. And I mean polarization in that there’s no point debating with people who disagree, they aren’t going to debate. Until yesterday I thought I was in a reasonably mature discussion group, and boy, they showed me. They were willing to discuss some topics, but something politically charged like illegal immigration, and all they could do was wave flags and call names. Scary.

I know there’s always been an element of this in the right, but it certainly seems to be worse in the past decade. And Obama’s election seems to have galvanized this division further. A huge minority of right wing Americans see themselves as a persecuted minority, and that there’s this vast conspiracy to turn the country into some sort of socialistic fascist un-American nanny state. And I’m not the only one to see this divide either, I ran across this interesting article on interviews with Republicans. In any event, this is why I am avoiding some topics, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in debate.

Lastly, the thing I find most alarming about this, the same way I find 9/11 conspiracies alarming, is that is distracts people from the very real conspiracy going on. Wall Street, Washington Politicians, and the Military have joined in an unholy alliance to rule the USA entirely for their own benefit. Granted the right wingers do have one thing right, Obama is clearly a standard bearer for these folks. The idea that he has been making concessions in order to get some of his putative liberal agenda passed doesn’t pass the laugh test anymore. As the continued whittling down of his health care proposal shows, by the time it gets passed all it’s going to do is transfer yet more money upwards.

I don’t know where this country is headed anymore, but I still think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is arguably a historically  important image. And there is no way its use here could conceivably interfere with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and Copyright: Beats me. My next post will be about space exploration, one of the few bright spots in current human events. And I’m planning a  post on “Ten Predictions for the 21st Century.” If Nostradamus can do it, so can I.)

“That look really hurts when you see it in your wife’s eyes.”

I had an impromptu conversation last night with a vet who served in Iraq, I thought it was worth sharing:

[Spence] : not to wallow but 6 years military with a deployment goes a long way to explain divorce. was is rough on marriages.
[Spence] : war is rough on marriages

[Doug]: Understood, it’s rough on all the participants from what I can tell.

[Spence] : “sarcasm” the best part is the kind of husband i was when i came home. if you know some of the stats war has a way of changing people forever

[Doug]: I blog about it all the time, few participants come home unscathed. One of the many reasons war should be the last option, not the first

[Spence] : forever hence the escape into gaming, im not really a people person anymore.
[Spence] : i could’t agree more
[Spence] : trying to explain what happens in war is impossible if you have never experienced it.
[Spence] : it really is an exclusive club
[Spence] : just not a club someone wants to be a part of

[Doug]: No one really sane at least. I was lucky, never got stationed outside the USA.

[Spence]: And a good thing too
[Spence] : then you have a small taste from the training. you have the idea that its not like in the movies.

[Doug]: Yeah, again, I rant about that all the time on my blog.

[Spence] : nothing against civilians, they just dont understand. they dont know. im glad they dont

[Doug]: You ever want to publish some of your thoughts there, always happy to get first person contributions. Doug’s Darkworld

[Spence] : i have told some people my thoughts about it and they get this funny look in their eyes. this laid back cool guy has “KILLED”.
[Spence] : that look really hurts when you see it in your wife’s eyes

[Doug]: Yeah, that sounds rough.

[Spence] : the younger folk, teens think its “cool” the guys my age dont understand and the older men
[Spence] : from vietnam understand perfectly
[Spence] : we all have little emotional holes that we hide from the world and we try to fill them, unsuccesfully
[Spence] : some turn to drugs, booze, violence,*me, i shut myself down and act around people the way i think they want.
[Spence] : we all have our little twitches.

[Doug]: War is an incredibly unatural and unhealthy experience, it’s a wonder people cope as well as they do with it.

[Spence] : we dont, we get by. try this if i ever met you in real life the first thought would be if you are a threat
[Spence] : the 2nd is what can i use as a weapon??
[Spence] : the last is usually “where is the rest of the team”
[Spence] : like you said it is unatural and probably permanent

Published with his permission. He said that this does not necessarily reflect the opinions of all veterans, just him and ones he has talked to. I will be publishing more first person accounts as I get them. Thanks for sharing Spence.

Obama wins Olympic Gold Medal in Pole Vault, what’s next for our plucky president?

The Olympic committee stunned the world this morning when they awarded US President Obama a gold medal in the Pole Vault event. Explained the committee’s spokesman when asked how this could be, considering that President Obama had never pole vaulted nor competed in the Olympic,  he said the committee was sure that if Obama put his mind to it, he could easily win the gold. “I mean,” continued the spokesman, “winning an Olympic gold medal has to be easier than achieving world peace, or even regional peace? And he was given the peace medal in the expectation of same.” The press had to admit he had a point, and the conference ended there as reporters rushed to file this incredible story.  hehe. OK, that was fun. The only point I still want to make about the Peace Prize thing is, boy, if the best recipient the Nobel committee could find was someone they hoped would be a voice for world peace … we’re all in trouble.

Most or all of my posts are going to be extemporaneous ramblings for the near future as I concentrate on getting my new web site up and running. It’s much easier for me than focused posts which take a lot of research, and people seem to enjoy them. I will get around to many of the focused posts as promised, at some future date. The one on how a few inches of dirt set back the space program for example, and even the one about the Battle of Pegasus Bridge. That last one is proving to be a challenge, since the battle seems to have consisted of a few commandos blowing up an antique French tank, after which the Germans ran away. It’s going to be a challenge to spin that into a whole post,  but I thrive on challenges. Well, writing challenges, I could do with a few less RL challenges.

Moving right along, I see from the headlines that McCain said we should avoid making  a “historic mistake” in Afghanistan. Without even reading the article, I can guess what that’s about. Hint: He’s not referring to staying in Afghanistan long after it was obvious the situation was pointless and counterproductive. No, I suspect he’s referring to the myth that if we had stayed in Vietnam, we would have eventually prevailed. Sigh. I’ve covered this topic before: We Could Have Won in Vietnam. There are two things that really annoy me about this myth, the first is that it’s presented as a certainty. Rarely is anything ever certain in life, let alone when talking about major wars. And the second, is that it simply ignores the possibility that the war wasn’t such a good idea in the first place. I’m sorry, but “We can do no wrong and we will always prevail if we persevere” isn’t a good strategy for a person’s life, as a geopolitical strategy for a nation it’s ultimately going to be suicidal. Not to mention homicidal, but in America, it’s OK to blow up brown people in foreign lands. I mean, they must have done something to deserve it? Right?

And my, what a cheery start to the week. I’m actually in a pretty good mood too. I helped pour the foundation for a chicken coop this weekend, a real man’s vacation. Yes, the grentle reader read that right, a poured reinforced concrete foundation for a chicken coop. My buddy builds for the ages, what can I say. Looking at CNN, I see there’s nothing else going on. Or more accurately, CNN is only choosing to headline the most inane bits of “news.” Maybe some random day I’ll go through the headlines on CNN or one of the other major media outlets and point out both the utter driviality of what they are headlining, and the important stories they are ignoring. That would be a lot of work though, so not today.

On a final note, the NASA “bombing the Moon” mission didn’t kick up the expected plume of debris and ice that they were hoping for. It apparently kicked up a plume of something very dark, so no one from Earth was able to see it. As is so often the case with space missions, it may take a long time for the data to be analyzed so that scientists can figure out what really happened.

That’s enough for this morning. I did look up McCain’s speech, and while I was off the mark in details, I was pretty close in intent. McCain says it would be a historic mistake not to listen to general McChrystal and send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. So McCain didn’t have to actually say Vietnam, but it’s definitely Vietnam all over again. We had over 500,000 troops in Vietnam before our leaders finally realized that “a few more troops” wasn’t going to make a damn bit of difference. I guess we are going to have to learn that lesson all over again.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. Only a small section of the original image is being used, it’s not being used for profit, and it is an historically important image.  Credit and copyright: Reuters. It’s actually an interesting image, see the entire picture and story here. It’s Obama getting the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit. As Reuters describes it: “It’s the country’s highest honor — named for the founder of the modern Saudi state.” Note the galaxy class oxymoron: “modern Saudi state.” There’s fodder for future fun.)

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize and other random nonsense

I haven’t written lately because I have been sinking into despair at the state of the world. Or more specifically at the general state of mental acuity in the world, especially what I see in the USA. I did some research recently and discovered that 15% of American’s think the government was complicit in 9/11. OK, well, that’s not too alarming. Some 40-50% of Americans believe in ghosts, UFOs, or Bigfoot. OK, that’s a little alarming, since there is zero empirical evidence for the existence of any of these. And then the kicker, about 60% of Americans have doubts about the Theory of Evolution. Yes, you read that right, we’re doomed.

Clearly the American educational system has failed in a  big way. Evolution is easily one of the most well supported scientific theories ever. More than a century of observation and experiment has established Evolution so firmly that there aren’t even any competing scientific theories. (“God did it” isn’t a scientific theory, no matter how much scientific jargon is used.) I didn’t look it up, but judging from what I read on line, there is also similar disbelief about the Big Bang Theory. And while the Big Bang is not as well established as Evolution, again, it’s the best theory we currently have that explains the evidence we observe in the universe around us.

What’s worse, is that there just seems to generally be a wave of anti-intellectual and anti-science sentiment sweeping the nation. I remember as a kid when science was almost worshipped and Americans were proud of our scientific achievements. Granted it’s not a good thing to accept anything blindly, including the pronouncements of scientists. Still, without science we’d still be living in some version of the middle ages where if one kid out of three grew up you were lucky, and if you saw your sixtieth birthday it was almost a miracle. Is that really what people want? Apparently some do. Jesus is my health care plan. Sigh.

I blame the TV and the Internet myself. Despite its promise, I am starting to think that the Internet is the greatest mass dumbing down device in history. Idiotic ideas that never would have made it past the fliers-stuck-on-your-windshield stage now get world wide exposure … and adherents. And the mainstream media has played right into this with a plethora of shows like “Ghost Hunter” that dress up silly posturing as “science.” News flash people, if you see it on TV, it’s fake. Calling something a “reality show” doesn’t make it real for God’s sake.

Sometimes I am starting to think I wandered through some interdimensional portal into an alternate Earth where everything is the opposite of sensible. Then I wake up and turn on my computer … and Obama has won the Nobel Peace prize. I’m sure Obama was equally surprised, though I see he had no trouble taking the ball and running with it.  Granted this is going to drive the Rush Limbaugh crowd wild, but anything about Obama drives them wild. Is this proof of a terrible liberal conspiracy? I mean, Bush bombed people and invaded countries and did exactly what Obama has done for the past nine months for eight years, how come he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize? Who knows. What I do know, is this is no big deal. In fact it’s a wonderful example of how committees will often make far riskier decisions that if a single person calls the shots. It sounds counter-intuitive, but tons of research has borne it out, a committee member will often back a far riskier idea than they would if there was no committee, because the risk of failure is spread out among the entire committee. And anyhow, the Nobel Prize organization is a private organization, they can give the prize to anyone. Well, good for Obama, let’s hope he lives up to it.

Speaking of liberal conspiracies, the worst liberal conspiracy of all has been uncovered. Liberals, not content with using a time machine to insert Obama’s birth announcement into Hawaiian newspapers in 1961, have pulled off an even greater feat. Yes, they actually went hundreds of years into the past and inserted liberal and socialist jargon into the bible! Proof of this is that the bible contained socialist jargon hundreds of years before socialism was invented! No, I’m not making this up, well, not most of it. I did make up the time machine part, but some conservatives have actually started to rewrite the bible to eliminate its liberal bias. My mind, formerly reeling, boggles uncontrollably. The absurdity of rewriting your own holy book to conform to your own ideology is so obvious and transcendent that it hardly needs comment. Hopefully this won’t start a  trend. What’s next? The Walmart Bible?

Have a great weekend everyone.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and it’s use here in no way interferes with the copyright holders commercial use of the image, arguably the opposite. It’s a picture of an upside down house built by Polish artist Daniel Czapiewski in Szymbark. Poland. Credit and copyright: Javno. As final proof that the world is upside down today, while writing this post I dopped a piece of toast on the floor … where it landed … butter side up! I rest my case.)