Gas prices are soaring. While The President tried to blame it on gouging on the part of the stations, that’s not really playing well because the price of crude is up by quite a bit. This is what happens when you have supply chain disruptions.
Let’s face it, even if you take the politics out of the situation. It is, at its core a supply chain disruption. When the government decides that pipelines can’t be completed and targets other pipelines for closure higher prices are the result.
Add to that problems induced at the ports, where foreign oil comes into our supply chain and well, the prices have no choice but to go up. It’s a basic supply / demand situation. Then if you add the apparent lack of truck drivers into the mix creating more of a supply constraint it’s pretty damn obvious that prices at the pump are going to go up.
In California we see this every single year. As California switches from the “Summer Blend” to the “Winter Blend” at California refineries there’s always a supply burp. Prices go up and rarely come down. Since California regulations prevent importing non-California gasoline, the good people of California are always under the heavy thumb of Sacramento.
The image below from Despicable Me says it eloquently. If you have any question, we’re the person being crushed.
“Welcome to my world,” to the rest of the country. Get used to it for at least the next 6-8 years. I specify that time frame because with a screw up of this epic proportion even if Biden is voted out, it will take 2 to 4 years to undo the damage.
Biden says he’s running again in 2024. I’m wondering if his next presidential run will be from a hospital bed instead of his basement.
Enough of that, here we are at the beginning of the Holiday Season. It’s supposed to be a time of family, friends, and football.
But then in my warped little brain, I see the following conversation happening in the near future.
No dear I’m not watching football. It isn’t any fun anymore because it’s not just about the football. Now it’s all about “Educating” us on the error of our ways. So this year I just want to enjoy family, friends and a nice meal.
Oh right. Family and friends must now be looked at with suspicion.
Has Grannie had her COVID booster? She hasn’t? Oh well, send her back to the old folks home. Your friend Sharon hasn’t had the vaccine? Well she’s not welcome here! It doesn’t matter if she’s already had COVID, she’s unclean!
So what, if she’s the godmother of our children and you’ve been friends since kindergarten. She’s officially unclean we can’t take the risk to our children! Tell her she can’t come. What? No-one in the family has gotten their booster shots? Well then, I guess we’ll just eat alone.
What do you mean we’re not having a turkey this year? It’s not in the budget? How can it not be in the budget? We’re having tofu? What about the pies, what about the green beans? We’re not having those either, why not? There weren’t any at the store?
What is happening?
Oh right. We all have to keep tightening our belts until the New Administration is able to “Fix” all the messes the horrible Orange Man’s old administration left behind.
Say, it’s cold in the house let’s turn up the heat, it’s 55°F in here. I’m worried that the kids are too cold. What do you mean that we can’t turn up the heat? We can’t afford that either? Can we afford to turn on the oven? What? You’re going to cook Thanksgiving dinner over an open fire, that makes no sense.
We can’t afford to turn on the oven either? Uh yes dear, I’ll go dig a fire pit in the front yard. Yep, I’ll cut down the tree in the back yard. Good thing I’ve got a chain saw. Oh I need to go get some gas for it…
What? We can’t afford gas for the chain saw? Oh, You got me an ax for Christmas? Okay I’ll get to work. Can’t we just break up the furniture? Oh, that’s for later when we’ve used up the trees in the yard.
Why are you assigning me the gender specific role of chopping down trees and digging fire pits? Doesn’t that send a bad message to the children?
Yes dear… No I wasn’t implying that you should do all the work. I was just asking… fine! I’m going out to the garage, my phone should be finished charging in the Tesla by now.
What do you mean the Tesla is dead? Oh right, I forgot about the wind related blackouts this month.
Hey honey? What’s this Carvana paperwork about you buying a 1965 Volkswagen and there’s something else about immigrating to Mexico?
“We can’t do that anymore, because too many people abused the privilege.”
It’s with this in mind, that I’ve been wondering about making services like Twitter and Facebook simply illegal.
I know this flies in the face of freedom, it says that these businesses would be shut down and their employees would be unemployed. That is antithetical to most core American values.
Bear with me here.
Twitter has become a cesspool of hate speech, most everyone agrees that is a true statement. After all, Twitter itself has seen fit to invest in all manner of protections against hate speech, from algorithms to manual reviewers.
Twitter has been forced to endure lawsuits and congressional hearings regarding censorship. Twitter now employs a cadre of high powered attorneys and law firms at great expense just to protect itself from legal action from people who are offended by what they read on Twitter, and those who sue because their opinions are deemed to be hate speech or misinformation.
Facebook is in the same boat.
The simplest solution is to shut down these corporations.
Too many people misuse these services, in some cases these services are being misused to the point that illegal activities are being coordinated through them. Congressional investigations have stated this was true in the Jan 6th event.
This means that both corporations have become inadvertent accomplices to criminality. Not just locally, but on a worldwide level.
Twitter and Facebook were good ideas. Their founders were naive about the nature of humanity. It’s not their fault that people say things that other people do not like. I’d suggest that both corporations accept that as experiments in connecting and unifying people, they’ve essentially failed.
This failed experiment is also not their fault. They’ve proved that too much information exchange between people tends to amplify the worst aspects of social interaction.
Shutting down these kinds of services would tend to limit the negative and deleterious effects of all kinds of misinformation.
Think about it. There wouldn’t be anymore vaccine misinformation.
Local problems would remain local.
Politicians would have to focus on getting votes by traveling to communities and interacting with the residents of the community.
Unqualified or poorly educated journalists wouldn’t be unable to spread unvetted information.
Opinions would no longer be taken as facts without any proof.
Juries in court cases would be easier to impanel because there would be less likelihood of bias or prejudiced information tainting the jury pool.
I think the benefits of shutting down these kinds of services would greatly outweigh the negative consequences.
There would be a period of adjustment of course.
People would have to learn how to live with privacy again. A lot of people would have to deal with addiction issues related to endless scrolling. Neighborhood and Community events could help to address these addiction issues, and at the same time could more effectively address local problems.
Local print media would possibly see a resurgence thereby creating more jobs.
Our government would find it much easier to make sure that their messaging was clear and understood. They could focus on the mainstream news outlets and make sure their statements were read precisely.
Surely, the elimination of all this free exchange of hate speech would be in the best interests of public safety and security.
The translation is a little rough in the quoted material from President Putin’s speech. But it’s very readable and he makes some good points.
I suppose this caught my attention because Putin is supposed to be “The Bad Guy”. I grew up in the 60’s At the time common perception was, the Russians were always evil… In fact over the last four years we’ve seen that much of Washington D.C. still seems to think this is the case.
Sting made a little bit of a wave with his song, Russians love their children too, back in the day.
I’d long thought that the Russians weren’t the comic book super villains they’d been portrayed as. The first time I heard Sting singing this song I remember being glad that someone else was thinking along the same lines.
Now, President Putin is speaking a truth that so many of us in America have been cowed into keeping to ourselves.
I’m posting his comments copied directly from the American Thinker Article because even if you don’t have time or inclination to go to the piece itself, you should read Putin’s comments to the Valdai Discussion Club.
The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.” This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there. By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.
In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go – not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there.
Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “’birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times.
Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists – is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.
When, Vladimir Putin makes more sense than most of the “Leaders” in the West, we’ve gone around the proverbial bend.
Putin, in his time may well have done some questionable things. He has probably had dissenters and dissidents imprisoned. He’s certainly in absolute control of his nation.
One could say he rules with an iron fist, making money along the way. These are things that have been said about President Putin for years and during that same time Leaders in the West have pointed to President Putin and said, “This is what we’re fighting to prevent.“
Were you to ask the folks arrested in the “Jan 6th mostly peaceful protest” if they felt there was any difference between America and Russia today, what do you think their answer would be?
What would locked down Australians or New Zealanders say?
When Vladimir Putin… Now, think about this, Putin alludes to cancel culture, essentially saying it’s no different than Bolshevik thinking. Perhaps we should all take heed.
We might even thank President Putin for speaking truth to the “power of the mob” because he is in a position of authority that allows him to do so.
I was just thinking about the way Putin treated Obama. It was obvious there was no love lost there. In my opinion, Putin consistently humiliated Obama on the world stage. Putin and Trump appeared to have at least grudging respect for each other.
With Biden… Putin has demonstrated that he may be a man of honor. Thus far he’s taken actions to protect his nation from Biden’s fuckups.
But he has not actively humiliated Biden. After all, there is no honor in embarrassing or fighting with, a sick, weak, opponent. When Kamala becomes The President, I’d bet that Putin will mostly ignore her too. That’s not sexist, there is simply no honor in beating-up the village idiot.
Indirectly, Putin not engaging in any serious way with America’s leadership is in fact humiliation. It says that we are no longer powerful or threatening. Without saying it, Putin is communicating to the world, that America has become irrelevant.
Given that President Putin has much more experience dealing with communism, and socialism, I suspect that he will be able to manipulate our leaders into whatever he sees as advantageous to his country.
Be that lifting tariffs, export controls, or increasing trade. Russia is a modern country now, in another five or ten years it may well be completely indistinguishable from any other European country, with one exception. Russia will be moving forward into the future, not seeking to destroy itself with pointless divisiveness or contemplation of its navel.
Who knows? Perhaps I’ll have a lovely retirement in a Moscow suburb.
Now, I’d just be content to hitch a ride off this rock to someplace else.
Anywhere else.
It’s not this planet that’s the problem. This world is a beautiful place. The indigenous flora and fauna are spectacular. Except for one species. Even amongst that species there are some very nice individuals. As a group though, the species, Homo sapiens sucks!
Yeah, we’re a bunch of semi intelligent, semi evolved apes. We’ve done some clever things. Our music, art, and literature, explore some interesting existential concepts. We have an interesting imagination and all. But when you come right down to it, we’re not as spectacular as we think we are.
We’ve barely left our world. We’re driven by silly tribalism, religion, and fear. If we were in a zoo we’d be seen as creatures too fascinated by our own poo, to see even a slightly larger picture. One thing we’d miss, might be that we were the subjects of clever psychological experiments.(Hat tip to Douglas Adams) Or perhaps miss the fact that we were in a zoo at all.
Give us shiny trinkets and we’ll be entertained for decades. Give us differences in religion, appearance, or politics, and we’ll entertain ourselves for centuries.
Perhaps it’s a function of growing older, lately I’m less and less concerned with trinkets, religion, politics, trends, or appearance.
All I find myself longing for is simplicity and peace. The view of cities from a distance makes me very glad that I’m not living in one. Being alone and disconnected from Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of the social media platforms provides me more happiness than my participation in those systems ever did.
I’m no longer concerned with what people think of me, and am happy reading, working outside, or thinking my own thoughts. There are days now when I don’t speak more than a few words to anybody. I go for weeks without seeing anybody other than my dog and significant other.
When I scan the news, with few exceptions all I feel is pity, or sit shaking my head wondering how stupid can people be.
I would gladly pack a few belongings and board a starship to get away from my fellow Homo sapiens. I might occasionally long for the company of other humans if I left. I suspect however, that the next planet or beauty of the universe would be enough to make thinking about distant humanity not worth my time.
Lately I’ve found myself thinking along these lines…
All civilizations fall. If you change your focus just a little bit and look at our planet and all it’s inhabitants as a whole. Divisions disappear and you realize that our technology has unified us in what is essentially a single civilization.
Homo sapiens is not ready for that.
Instinctively Homo sapiens realizes this truth, and is actively destroying this planetary civilization whether they admit it or not.
One need only look at the growing tribalism worldwide. A tribalism that directly or indirectly states, “My beliefs must be ascendant above all others.” What comes next, we can extrapolate from history.
The “Dark Ages” lasted 500 years. During that time, almost everything that had been known was lost. Homo sapiens devolved back into small bands of people drawn together out of mutual need.
Imagine the collected works of Shakespeare used as firelighters, because no-one could read anymore. In 200 years or less, everything that we take for granted will likely become legends repeated around a fire pit.
Will the next dark age last only 500 years? I suppose that depends on how much is lost, what is remembered, and in what context. If some kind of “Green” religion took hold I could see the next dark age lasting 1000 years or more.
Imagine a religion that said something like, “Thou shalt only burn the oils rendered from the fat of thine sheep, for light in the darkness. All other light, save that of the sun, is an abomination before god,” or “Thou shalt only walk upon thine own feet. Any other conveyance is an abomination. Thou shall not sit upon thine animals, nor shall ye ride upon thy wagon, for this is a sin and thee will surely be damned to hell for all time.“
Adherents to a religion like that might take 2000 years to even begin rediscovering technology. If a belief like this were dominant, it’s reasonable to expect that heretics wouldn’t last long. It’s also reasonable to assume that any community with a different view would be burned to the ground. Such is the power of religious fervor.
Religion isn’t confined to God, Allah, Buddha, or any other pantheon of gods. Religion is about belief. Belief in anything.
Belief in and of itself isn’t the problem, it becomes a problem when a belief takes on a life of its own. When beliefs are practiced and never questioned you have a religion. The consensus of all knowledgable people once was that the Earth was flat, and the entire universe revolved around Earth.
Folks who questioned that “Fact” were murdered as heretics. Even when scholars had evidence to support that the Earth was round, and was not in fact the center of the universe, they were hesitant to discuss it with anybody.
Religious leaders in those times, insisted that the world was flat and cited their holy texts to prove it. But nowhere in those holy texts did their god ever say, “By the way, the world is flat and you’ll fall off the edge if you go too far.” Also, nowhere in those religious texts, does God discuss the blueprints for existence or the universe.
There’s the disconnect. Superstition became entwined with religion and the two formed a foundation for persecution and more importantly, a framework of control. Another example was the belief that if someone was sick, they were sick because of demons or evil spirits. Ever wonder how many epileptics were burned at the stake? Just sayin…
I suppose what’s tired me of humanity is that so many “well educated” people are so unlikely to ask questions. It’s not about the vaccines, or the death rate, versus the case rates. My tiredness isn’t about the politics and obvious efforts of politicians to aggrandize themselves by attempting to control all aspects of people’s lives. Those are factors, to be sure.
The main thing is that so many people refuse to see or interpret the facts before them. So many people have abdicated their personal responsibility to learn in favor of a 20 second blurb about the world around them from a talking head on a screen. They don’t question what they hear, then these folks call themselves “well informed”.
At a family event recently, one of my relatives was haranguing me about vaccines and COVID. I’d ignored him on the matter for three solid days.
Finally, I asked the questions, “Would you take your umbrella if there was a 2% chance of rain? If there was a 98% probability that you’d win the lottery wouldn’t you bet the farm on it?”
After several other family members present busted up laughing, the matter was closed. This particular family member stomped off and said nothing more about COVID. The sad part is that he is, or was, a scientist. In point of fact a lot of my knowledge of scientific proofs and objective evaluation of fact, I learned from him. I found it very disconcerting that he of all the relatives was not asking logical questions and thinking for himself.
He’s not a bad person, I choose to believe that his haranguing was coming from a place of care and concern for members of the family. That’s admirable, but his method was all wrong because he wasn’t providing proofs or facts. He was simply repeating the same message CNN had been spouting for more than a year.
Perhaps my expectations were too high. I’d expected a scientist to be armed with facts and proofs. I would actually have welcomed that. I’d have asked questions and asked to look at, and evaluate the data as he’d taught me to when I was a young man.
I suppose I’m still dealing with the shattering of my illusion that this family member was about the reality of scientific process.
Science can teach you a lot. Often, science will teach you that your preconceived notions about the world are wrong. Pure science challenges your beliefs. It doesn’t take sides and cares nothing for your feelings.
E=mc2 Works. The equation is dispassionate. It contains no inherent moral judgement. It’s up to the individual to decide if they will use the resulting energy for destruction, or to generate power that lights a city.
Superstition on the other hand is nothing but beliefs. In a revival tent, those that the faith healer can’t heal, didn’t believe hard enough. It’s the unhealed, who are at fault. They’re told to go home and pray on it then come back next week. “The donation box is by the door, leave as much as you can and god will know. Perhaps he’ll heal you next week.“
That’s the way this past couple of years appear to me. It’s like we’re all living in a revival tent.
The problem for me is that the revival tent has been growing around us for a decade. Science, truth, facts, are being replaced by beliefs and superstition. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve reached apogee in this phenomena yet.
I don’t want to be on this planet when we do.
Here’s a thought experiment.
Imagine yourself with your car, manufactured goods, and all your digital devices suddenly appearing on a street in Barcelona during the inquisition.
Witch! Demon! Unclean Spirt!
You’d be dragged in chains to the grand inquisitor before you even had a moment to take stock of what had happened to you. You’d be summarily executed too.
Imagine the same scenario, but this time you appear in 1947 near an army base. You’d find yourself in a military prison. You’d be under “protective custody” and interrogated about the technology you were carrying. The military would recognize your car, as a car, with internal combustion engine but 99% of the circuitry they couldn’t conceive of, nor could you explain. You’d die in prison as a national security asset or risk. Imagine trying to explain your navigation system, or iPhone or computer. Even a Chromebook has more computing power than all the computers extant on the planet at that time.
Now imagine that scenario but you move forward 100 years.
We like to think that the future is all bright and shiny. We’d like to think that appearing in Los Angeles in 2221 we’d be accepted as a quaint relic. Our antiquated technology would be museum pieces and we’d have to learn everything that happened in the intervening 100 years.
But suppose instead we succumb to superstition and abandon true science, individual thought, and freedom.
What would be the outcome?
Would it look like Spain during The Inquisition, or would it look like Kandahar today?
I don’t want to know. I sure don’t want to live it.
Which leads me back to wanting to hitchhike off this planet. I’ve lost faith in humanity.
I seriously think that at our current rate of decline, we’ll be using candles for light and fire pits for cooking inside 200 years.
If I could hitch hike, I figure a quick jaunt to Betelgeuse and back, should be just about right to miss all the messiness on Earth.
There I go, trusting in Einstein’s math (Science) that states time slows for a ship traveling at or beyond the speed of light relative to Earth.
For me, 5-10 years might pass. For Earth, maybe a few hundred years pass.
If I come back and the planet is still a hot mess, I could head out to Alpha Centauri with side trips to other star systems that are interesting.
Either way, I get to keep on learning new things.
I don’t want to live in a world where knowledge is suppressed based on its potential to upend politics, religion, superstition, or beliefs.
If I was to find a way to leave, I’d do my best to grab digital copies of our Science, Art, Music, Literature, and History. I’d stick it all on some kind of storage media and take it with me. I figure I could trade copies of my archives for food or transport while I was away. If I returned the Earth, I’d have an archive that could help fill in the blanks.
We all know history, is being rewritten. It might be nice to have a collection of unedited data for comparison sake 1000 years into the future. I’m under no illusion that our history as recorded is pristine. But for comparison it might be useful.
The first time I saw it, It was pure science fiction.
Now, well, it was unsettling to rewatch.
The premise is that the elites of the world live in a marvelous space station. They have the highest technology and medical devices that can instantly fix whatever ailment someone might have. The elites living on the space station live in opulent luxury and ease.
The folks left on Earth, not so much. That’s the set up.
It’s a typical underdog makes good despite the odds, scenario. Complete with an abusive supervisor and shitty worker safety. The movie depicts abusive police and parole officer robots and a criminal element that is generally criminal out of desperation, not any particular desire to commit crime.
The folks left on Earth are treated as if they’re unclean and generally left to squalor and hopelessness.
At the time the movie was made, It was probably a commentary on wealthy countries ignoring the poor.
Eight years later, with our current political situation, the movie has a somewhat different tone.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the older movies in my collection are changing. It’s not that the movie is being re-edited, it’s that my perspective is changing.
What was once escapist fantasy and easy to dismiss as unthinkable is becoming more thinkable, perhaps even possible.
GATTACA from 1997 springs to mind.
That movie was pure fantasy when it came out. Entry to workplaces and venues was restricted based on DNA “purity” testing. But watch it now with vaccine passports needed to enter certain venues or travel, and it’s suddenly not so fantastic.
There’ve been a number of references to Orwell’s 1984 but there are a lot of other science fiction stories & movies that are equally unsettling against the backdrop of events we’re living through.
The weird thing is that a lot of my personal collection deals with these themes. Okay, so perhaps I’m a sick puppy. Whatever!
I suppose it’s proof that whatever we as humans can imagine, we will be able to achieve.
Jules Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea imagined a submarine that was powered by some mysterious power source.
We named the first nuclear submarine after Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Verne had no knowledge nuclear power but he imagined a dangerous and unending power source.
Later, Forbidden Planet from 1956, explored the price of hubris.
The Krell, learned everything and then turned inward. They destroyed themselves in a single night accidentally, because they forgot about the darkness within their own souls.
Arthur C. Clark explored the human condition in many of his stories, I like his books, but I like his short stories more.
All these stories have at their core, kernels of much older stories. Human stories, from cultures across the planet.
Stories that at one time were teaching stories designed to instill values into whatever culture they existed in.
These stories explored right and wrong, good and evil, and I think we should listen to those ancient voices as much today.
We can and have modernized many of those stories but somehow the lessons contained in them don’t have the same impact in today’s society.
The notion that greed is a trap is explored in the story of King Midas and also in a Native American story of the eagle who became imprisoned by man because the eagle would not let go of a fish.
Two entirely different cultures separated by thousands of miles and years, and yet the message is the same. Greed leads to ruin.
We, Humanity, can no longer afford to allow hubris to blind us.
Our technology is marvelous and magical. A thousand years ago steel was the metal of the gods. Technology at any point in time is always the most advanced.
Human drives though, remain just as primitive as they were before we ventured out of the Olduvai Gorge in Africa.
I think it’s time for us to rediscover the stories our ancestors left us. There are lessons to be had, and enjoyment in learning those lessons.
Go grab a copy of Greek Tragedies. Look to Shakespeare, read Verne, or Clark, or Orwell, or rewatch any of the old movies in your library. Enjoy the entertainment and take a moment to consider the meaning behind the story.
Be warned, your pride might be bruised when you find that you’re different from your ancestors only due to your iPhone.
