MONDAY, SEPT 21, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
Dearest Bitches
Telling truth to power
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: DO NOT BELIEVE, FROM THE WIRES, HIT THEM WHERE IT HURTS
Abstract: When all else fails, try a 2x4 upside blindered heads. Smart people are the ones who have some grasp of how stupid they are. And, yes, there is the horror of the average man and that half of all hu-mans are even dumber and more dysfunctional, but it is the idiots who think they are running the show who pose the greatest existential threat to humanity.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Dearest Bitches:
'Enquiring minds want to know', or iterate towards knowing, and I never saw tabloids or 'tavern talk' as a source of verities, nor today's social media and now mainstream media as other than distractions. Even what our best and brightest talk about after hours is only sometimes of interest. The prattle of politicians, NGOs, and all public intellectuals is a distraction as they are limited to telling the public (including some minority factions they serve) what they want to hear.
If any use their well earned position to tell the truth to power, they soon fade away as have all of those I view as sources, secondary to their endeavor to listen to THE source, to Nature who has all the answers. Those who would rather know than believe have been or are being ignored, marginalized, ridiculed, obfuscated.... They get their 'better view' out there until the consensus of pundits (whether academic, intelligentsia, or the public they serve) realize the implications are not to their liking (nor to those whose bread they eat), requiring them to use their mighty and fine words to cancel the speakers and typers who dare to repeat what the still small voice of Nature has whispered to them (e.g. Odum, Catton, and now Clugston).
But enough fine words. Overshoot, as the 'pulsing paradigm' of the Odums, is the norm. Predators and prey, as do all organisms with their environment (which they are), live by 'dancing with the system' as one person of interest (Donella Meadows) put it. Sometimes we trip, fall, and resolve ourselves into a fine mess of acute angles. It doesn't look 'normal', doing the 'plague-phase' thing or 'overshoot and collapse' thing.
Amoebas blob about 'thinking' (like human corporations) about but one thing: 'Is it engulfable [take it] or is it an impediment [avoid it]?' Slugs are ever so much more complicated. They blob about asking two questions: 'Is it consumable (or not) or can I have sex with it?', not unlike some men I've observed. And for others, life can be even more complicated, but not much more.
Yeast overshoot to the max every occasion they get. They love doing the exponential growth thing and always prosper thereby. They, doing the MPP thing, sporulate, filling the environment with information about how to do it again. Humans lack this adaptation and typically lose 90-100% of the information gained, even if chiseled in stone, because 100% of the literate didn't get through their regional bottleneck nor successfully emigrate beyond the collapse zone (e.g. the writers of Harappa, Elamite, Minoan, Akkadian, Egyptian, Meroitic, Canaanite, Hittite, Phoenician, Sumerian, Olmec, Vinča, Mayan..., and Rongorongo) to pass on such information as they may carry.
But, what, me worry? There are locusts to consider. They (environmental conditions permitting, of course) pulse unto plague-phase overshoot with enthusiasm. Humans have been too, but with a different outcome. Will we ever be able to do our empire-building thing sustainably?
Orwell thought so. We'll fragment the current global growth hegemon into three (or maybe a few more) empires that maintain boundaries (more or less) through constant sustainable war with each other as population sink. It'll be a world wherein each empire has perfected a social control system (including educational system) whereby the O'Brien's always teach the Smith's to love Big Brother. And the merry dance of devolution can go on and on, like a benign tumor, as Earth becomes a humanscape of crops, pets, livestock, and industrial sprawl (empowered by renewable energy sources, of course) with prosperous people everywhere even if their population is only half a billion — mostly peasant slaves working the fields. Or not, as 'Nature is unkind'.
We are playing [badly] a global endgame, bitches. Basically humanity got the 'Houston, we have a problem' message by 1980 when Catton published 'Overshoot' summarizing the prior three decades of what Nature was telling those who listen about the human problematique following the start of the Great Acceleration. Meanwhile 'the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed' [to quote David Suzuki from his 80th birthday email to supporters]. Jack Alpert was listening to those who listen to Nature, and took the next step.
The next step for those having astronaut concerns was for NASA scientists and engineers to come up with a short list of viable solutions and pick one, then make it so. Doing so now would be adaptive, perhaps enabling humanity to be not only an adaptive dissipative system, but an evolvable one as well. Asking politicians for 'solutions' or religious leaders to pray for the astronauts would have ensured their deaths as it will for most humans currently feeding from the trough of industrial society.
'Thought makes the whole dignity [potential value] of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality.' — Blaise Pascal
Humans are the only animal who could detect an incoming planetesimal impact (or other threats) that could destroy all vertebrate life on Earth (and perhaps deflect it). We could evolve into beings that are to Earth as our brains are to our bodies. Or we will keep on keeping on and go extinct (or worse, e.g. become Borg), taking perhaps all vertebrate life down the rabbit hole with us.
Jack has a design for a viable civilization. Don't like it? Nature doesn't care what we like or dislike as our primate preferences will not determine the outcome of our endgame (if we don't do the dissolution thing). Being complacent until we panic will be fatal. Time to stand down and deliver.
None dare call 'it' revolution. Not the 'for' and 'against', us vs them of pretend political revolution, but the paradigm shift of a new story, the story of no true stories, of our error, ignorance, and illusion. We are all the marching morons who need to stand down and listen to Nature. 'To think is to listen...there is no life without [ecolate] thought.' — Kogi mámas.
'In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called.' —R. Buckminster Fuller
