Month: May 2024

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Saw this Venn Diagram on Twitter

I don’t know who created this diagram but I’d like to tip my hat to them.

It accurately explains how I’ve been feeling lately.

I’ve been trying to write but have experienced severe writers block.

On the plus side I’ve been making progress cleaning out the house, so there’s that.

It seems lately that every time I turn around there is some fresh stupid hell created by humanity because collectively humans are bored.

I find that I’m looking forward to some extinction level event, for a change of pace.

I strongly suspect this sort of boredom happens all over the universe in every sentient species. It’s probably why we’ve not detected conclusive signs of other life.

I’m betting that all species get to a certain technological level, things get too easy, they get bored and start making shit up to terrorize each other. It’s not out of cruelty, it’s so they feel something, anything…

Species probably need a hit of adrenalin that they get from pursuing or being pursued in a forest. They need to have real danger, real life & death consequences, and real mysteries to confront.

Had we made it into space, we might have had a decent substitute. Death being less than an inch away in the cold vacuum of space, may have provided the stimulation to drive our creativity and invention forward. We all know we’re not going to make it into space in any realistic way.

The 1960s & 1970s was our window.

We had loads of men who were tough enough, for whom hardship and discomfort wasn’t a big deal. We had role models and heroes that every child wanted to emulate. Big men, doing big things, not for clicks, but because they believed in the potential and dreams of humanity.

The window has closed. 

All we have left is a long descent into barbarism. The herd will be thinned out due to disease, war, and stupidity. The surviving humans will forget, except in legends about all we accomplished. Maybe we’ll have another ice age and the glaciers will scour most of our cities and infrastructure from the land.

Ancient aliens meme.15 – 20 thousand years later when odd looking bits & pieces of our civilization and technology pop up they’ll be completely unknown and unremembered. So… those future humans will think of us as Ancient Aliens.

That’s more than we’ll deserve. The reality will be that we were a bunch of morons who contemplated our navels too much, demanded to be accepted while not accepting others with differing opinions, who lost the ability to think our way out of a wet paper bag, then turned our maintenance over to artificial intelligence, while eating bon bons on our overstuffed couches, waiting for our rudimentary service droid to come rub our feet or give us an orgasm that we were too lazy to work toward ourselves.

When the end came, most of us will have denied the obvious truth, instead of getting our fat asses off the couch and actually doing something useful.

This line of thinking has made me wonder how many times before this kind of thing has happened on this planet. Likewise, I wonder if it’s actually commonplace throughout the universe, and a function of technology. 

I’ve thought that perhaps there’s a very narrow window where a civilization reaches apogee. The only way a civilization survives is if they reach a point in technology & science that they realize their planet is about to undergo some cataclysmic change and this knowledge galvanizes the sentient species to focus on creating a solution to the problem.

If they fail, then they fall back into the muck, after some period of time they rise again with half remembered legends spurring them forward again.

To be clear I’m not even thinking about “Climate Change” as our moronic people think about it.

I’m talking a meteor impact like the one that may have snuffed the dinosaurs.

Consider this, the meteor needn’t actually hit Earth. Suppose something big came in at a fraction of the speed of light and hit the dark side of the moon? Say it splits the moon into pieces. Those pieces needn’t rain down on Earth. Just them spreading around in the moon’s orbit dissipating the gravitational effect on our tides and weather would be disastrous. There’s impressive climate change!

Or let’s say it was a large enough object that it changed the mass or orbit of the moon? What then? Destructive tides becoming the norm. Earthquakes and volcanoes restructuring continents over a thousand years instead of millions of years. Imagine that. What about the moon ending up in a decaying orbit?

Now imagine that scientists figure out the impact will happen in 300 years. Do people keep squabbling, or do they turn all their abilities, resources, and effort toward preparing and saving themselves? Ideally, if a civilization was at the right point in it’s development they’d figure out how to advance their technology to save their species.

The way we are today, we’d argue about what color the paint on a starship should be before we built the starship. We’d be arguing if there would be an appropriate amount of transgender representation on board the ark ship, completely ignoring that puberty blockers 10 years before rendered those folks incapable of reproducing.

Douglas Adams might have been more right than he ever imagined in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We might really be the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

Thinking along these lines is why I think we’ve missed the window.

We’re so caught up in irrational trivial matters that we’d squabble for 300 years and be squabbling / assigning blame right up to the impact.

Looking at our colleges today, it’s painfully obvious our youth don’t compare to the builders, dreamers, creators, and makers of just 40 years ago.

I suppose that’s why I’m not writing as much. It’s too easy to think, “People might be able to read the words that I write, but they’re not going to understand the meaning.”

Thinking like that makes walking the dog, & tossing stuff out of my life, far more productive activities. I need to get small, agile and light.

Then I’ll be ready for what comes next.

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If you ignore it, It keeps getting worse.

When you see those less fortunate than yourself, perhaps living rough, you think, “They’ve had a rough enough go of things I’ll leave them be.” 

Out of kindness you might make sure that these folks have water, or food. Or you choose not to call the police to have them move on. These days in California, calling the police is a useless exercise if these folks are on public land, or even in your home or vacation home. Turns out squatters have more rights than owners.

I could probably wax politically about this state of affairs. I’ll sum up by saying, Squatters have more rights than property owners because the State doesn’t want private ownership of houses or land. If ownership of houses or property confers no advantage, then people will forego the horrendous expense of home ownership and rent or squat because it’s the fiscally logical thing to do.

Remember Klaus Schwab famously said, “You will own nothing and be happy”

It looks like laws may have been enacted, which bit by bit are moving us toward that supposed utopian end point.

I always ask utopian for who? 

What Schwab is saying essentially is, “The underclasses, will own nothing and be happy with the largess of the Elites who allow them to live as long as their numbers are few and their usefulness is moderate.” In Schwab’s version of utopia the elites are wealthy and own everything, possibly even large swaths of people living as something akin to serfs. 

This has been explored in countless dystopian books and movies. Elysium and Altered Carbon for example. Altered Carbon is a bit more layered about it.

I choose these two works because the dystopian societies explored are not the result of nuclear war. Instead, the society is the result of technological innovation coupled with unbridled greed, and laws which failed to keep up with technological innovation. You might be able to include Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 in my list as well.

There are countless other books, short stories, and movies exploring ‘what if’ scenarios from a cultural standpoint, so my list above is by no means exhaustive.

I digress a bit. I was considering all of this over the past 2 weeks for a number of reasons. One reason has been that the squatter issue is increasingly in my face.

First, it was just a little trash left behind by snow players. A few brightly colored bits of plastic from broken sleds.

Had the snow players been sledding in a designated ares instead of the rocky areas where they were, their sled would have lasted longer.

The Winter always brings this kind of trash, and includes water bottles, dirty diapers, food containers and food waste which can endanger the neighborhoods by attracting large predators.

The Snowplayers have zero concern for any of that. They tend to treat the homeowners here in the mountains as though we’re employees at Disneyland, as if we exist to serve their needs.

They’re here to have fun and we, the residents are supposed to shut up, keep the roads and our driveways clear so they can park, provide bathrooms for them, and allow their children to play in our yards.

Second, was a sleeping bag, blanket and pillow. These items kept moving around indicating that they were being used by someone. Recently, the wind carried these items into the wash bed. At that point they were collected and put in a pile for trash pickup.

Third, was a campsite that lasted a couple of days which was built on an abandoned trailer that has been along my walking path for years. Under the trailer the person or persons stored mats and a few items presumably with the intent to come back for them. Oddly, there was also a rather expensive looking telescope mount left behind as well.

Fourth, Jesse noticed a crack pipe off the access road to the wash, When I called him away from it two stoned out people jumped out of the bushes to protect their pipe.

Neither Jesse or I appreciated being surprised like this and to his credit he remained between me and what he perceived as a threat.

When we returned from our walk the pipe and the people were gone. The next day we found more detritus where we had encountered the druggies.

Fifth, it appears that someone decided to use the wash access road as a dumping spot for difficult to dispose of items. At this point I think it was a single person emptying the bed of their truck.

In this case they left a can of paint. It’s been reported to the flood control folks since they’re supposed to police the lands they’re responsible for. They have a camera on a pole to watch the wash during storms. Perhaps they need to improve the camera so that license plates or photos of perpetrators can be turned over to police.

Sixth, we get to the full encampment. Which popped up and was then abandoned.

This left behind a ton of trash all of which will have to be packed out of the area if the locals clean up the mess. Although again, this is adjacent to the flood control access road and the flood control folks could pull right up with a pickup truck (since they have the keys to the gates,) and easily load the trash.

Seeing the images of colleges & universities across the nation after the pro-terrorism encampments, and the aftermath when the encampments were removed. Then recalling the CHAZ bullshit in Seattle during the “Sumer of mostly peaceful protests,” while encountering the trash left behind by people, on my daily walks.

I noticed a lot of similarity between the two.

I’ve been annoyed more than once in the Winters when people pile out of their Tesla exuding an air of smug self righteousness, claiming their “RIGHT” (which they don’t have,) to play in the snow on private property.

I’ve heard stupid things like “You can’t own the land”, and “We’re just going to be here a few minutes…” as they set up a hibachi grill and light charcoal.

These people have no limits, no shame, and no courtesy. Some of them upon seeing how their batteries have discharged in the 20° F temps get upset to find the nearest charging station is 30 miles away. Then you’re told somehow you’ve failed them because you don’t have a compatible socket for their car and that you should because you have solar panels on the roof. Apparently they think you’re  supposed to give them power for free.

All of that is annoying enough. Then there’s all that they leave behind. The detritus of humanity, the 21st century petroglyphs on any available rock, the cartons, wrappers, boxes, and plastic containers.

Somehow these folks have rationalized their entitled-ness and justify it with virtue signaling, instead of real actions. Their entitled behavior continues even when they’ve been forced into the “lower rungs of society”. 

We’ve had the occasional squatter here in town. But never to this extent and certainly not the numbers along the 1.5 mile stretch of access road next to the wash. The squatters/campers of the past at least did a decent job of cleaning up after themselves. They might have been living rough but they didn’t live like animals who shit in their own nests. 

In years past you’d see a trash bag suddenly appear next to your trash cans on trash pickup day. It was the trash from a squatter/homeless person’s campsite. Back then, we’d look the other way because at least the person or persons had respect for the forest. 

These people today have no clue how to camp. They definitely don’t know they’re supposed to pack out the trash they generate, and they’re filthy. Not necessarily in their person but they camp, trash their campsite, and move to the next clean place, repeating the process.

As I walk and encounter these things I ask myself, “Is this where we’re heading?” 

We all know that the economy is bad, regardless of the LIES being told from podiums in Washington D.C. or elsewhere along the reelection trail.

Will the economy being this bad result in more squatters and camps such as I’ve seen in the past 2 or 3 weeks?

What I’ve seen is only on one side of the wash. Jesse likes to walk the other side of the wash and when there’s no water flowing we’ll make a loop crossing at a high point in the national forest then walking down and back up. Right now we’d have to walk a “U” because I don’t want him to play in the muddy water flowing in the wash.

On the other side of the wash after about 1/4 of a mile, there’s National Forest land. There’s also plenty of flat ground that would be good for camping. My concern is that folks might start cooking over open fires. The evening winds coming up the canyon could spread a campfires’ embers quickly into dry brush.

Since I recently saw a video of a young man testing the fire retardant qualities of his clothing while he was wearing said garments in his bedroom.

I have real concerns that some dumb ass will burn the forest down and perhaps the town with it.

In all honesty, I think that perhaps fire is a technology that is beyond some people these days.

All of this contemplation has led me to this inescapable conclusion. I cannot look the other way. I’ve got to report all that I see to proper authorities for the safety and security of the town and my neighbors.

I feel bad that there are people who are having a rough time. But folks trashing the forest, or squatting wherever they can, if tolerated will become the “Norm”. 

That seems to be a universal truth. If you ignore unacceptable behavior, not only does the first unacceptable behavior become normal, but additional worse behaviors will occur. 

God Help me! I’m going to have become a “Karen”

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Now they’re worried about it!

I had to laugh. 

There were two reports coming out of Columbia University that gave me pause.

One was of a student making demands, saying they would continue to occupy some building or other, in defiance of University policies. Then effectively asking for milk and cookies. Saying that the University needed to supply them with food because they were hungry.

What? I asked. 

Clearly this student was a gender studies major. If He/She/It/Whatever, was a history major they might have encountered a concept called a Siege. That is, unless the university thought it would be too disturbing for their students to read about armies starving each other out of fortified towns. If they put a trigger warning on the material then surely no student would have read any part of it.

Then I laughed at the complete and utter stupidity of the entity making these demands.

A second report that made me laugh was the kids essentially begging/demanding that their arrests or involvement in this idiotic protest supporting terrorists not be on their records.

That REALLY made me laugh. “Uh no snowflake, welcome to being an adult where actions have consequences!“

Hippy protestors against the Vietnam War in the 60’s had their arrest records follow them throughout their lives. The arrest records weren’t so bad, but the FBI files were really damaging. 

If any of the students had been taught anything of use, they’d have known that from their American History classes. Instead they were apparently being taught genitalia doesn’t define Male or Female but surgical alteration and removal of genitalia is necessary for transgenderism.

Additional scattered reports from around the country about these Pro Terrorist protests really upped my brain’s RPM (Reboot Per Minute counter.)

Copy of mugshot background 4 5.At UCLA or USC (Who cares? Either one wastes the students time and Daddy’s money. How about just letting the student buy their useless diploma at registration, then they can immediately go work at StarBucks.)

Anyway, at one or the other of these so called educational facilities, the Pro Terrorist protestors set up barriers, one could call these barriers a Fence or Wall, that kept “Undesirable students” out of the particular building and associated library. 

But I thought Fences and Walls infringed on basic Human rights. Oh that’s only when we’re talking about immigration. Right! So many rules and so much subtle nuance, it’s hard for an old “Boomer” like myself to keep track of or understand.

The school in question was assisting in this endeavor by providing wristbands identifying those persons who supported the approved political speech. Those without wristbands were social outcasts, therefore worthy of being denied access to their classes and studies in that particular library. You know, the very things they’d paid excessively expensive tuition fees to use.

Seemed a lot like NAZI Germany, Jim Crowe, The Age of COVID, visitors to Epstein Island, or how the billionaires deal with keeping the riffraff out of golf clubs.

So while these wonderfully “educated” children would be quick to point out how wrong it is to segregate people, and quicker still to point out the evil of the oppressors in our society. When given the slightest chance, they became the oppressors themselves. 

I doubt that these moronic children will have any moment of introspection wherein they see they’re exactly the same as the evil they claim to abhor.

It’s a pity. That would be a lesson worth learning.

Georgia Trooper.The X application lit up when a Georgia Trooper got tired of dragging some whiney snowflake out of an encampment.

There’s a priceless video of a student throwing themselves on the ground much like a 5 year old having a tantrum, and this Trooper without missing a beat, picking the squalling pseudo-adult male student, up off the ground and carrying him bodily toward the waiting police vans.

The trooper looked to be about the right age to have children who’d try that same temper tantrum stunt.

The look on his face was almost serene, like this was just him doing “Dad stuff” on a Saturday afternoon at the toy store.

Florida police teargassed an encampment at the University of South Florida. The previously “Committed” students scattered like cockroaches abandoning all their possessions.

This one caught my interest because as a kid I spent a lot of time at the USF library while my Mom was studying or attending classes. Early on, I realized I could do homework in any library. Knowledge was knowledge and books contained pretty much everything that was known.

USF holds a special place in my heart and I was glad to see the Florida Police fumigating the place.

From vietnam to gaza student led protests that shook the v0 13VAy3Vnt7i7rGQodRVTQ0sNpBnaPzHFkwn9ZZltEFc.jpg.My goodness, I sound very much like the elders of my youth discussing the “Damn Hippie Protestors”. I should probably compare and contrast the protests against the Vietnam War and the Pro-Terrorist protests happening today.

Nah, not worth the time. We probably shouldn’t have been in Vietnam, certainly not with the rules of engagement imposed on our troops.

I’ve always believed that if we’re going to be engaged in a war we should be fully committed to winning. If that means the complete and utter destruction of the enemy, and their country, so be it.

I’m not particularly merciful.

I’m also not a big fan of rebuilding our enemies countries. They pissed us off, they could have surrendered any time, they could have opened negotiations at any time. If our enemies chose not to do these things and we pounded them back to the Stone Age, Oh Well…

In the case of Hamas, the Palestinians, and what happened in Israel on October 7 2023. I find that I have zero mercy. My lack of mercy in this situation borders on “negative mercy”, what would that be called, Vengeance? The IDF can, and probably should turn all of Gaza into rubble. Plow Gaza under, along with the bodies, simple, neat, and efficient.

The people of Palestine are a despoiled people, they demonstrated their depravity on October 7, they have chosen this and it’s their problem.

We don’t have boots on the ground (at least we’re not supposed to), so this is Israels issue. I believe we should support Israel due to treaties and contractual obligations. Beyond that, we should keep our mouths shut. It’s none of our business how Israel goes about defending themselves.

I oppose sending aid in the form of food or money to Gaza or the Palestinians at all. Again, that’s not our table or any of our business. We sure seem to be playing both sides of this foreign war and I disagree with that.

As to these useful idiots on college campuses. I’m all for arresting them even if it’s a misdemeanor charge. If they’re here on student visas then send them home. Deport their asses and never renew their visa again. 

You don’t come to someone else’s country and stir up trouble. You be grateful for the opportunity, pay your tuition, and return to your home when your studies are completed. You do not stand on a street corner or college campus screaming “Death To America”.

I know that’s a quaint perspective these days. I still subscribe to the concept of being a good and polite guest in someone else’s home.