2020.07.01 The Undeadening

(Re)Activating after a long quiescence.

Life, as the saying goes, goes on. Post mortality goes on and on and on and [... time passes] on and on. I am alive¹, single, living in Ipswich, land of the Western Bogans. I am less capable than a decade ago, and somewhat out of my comfort zone. However, the need to create some kind of presence on the net, and to leave footprints in the taphonic record as it were, has been highlighted by the increasingly untrustworthy nature of regular, ephemeral, social media.

Seriously some of the stuff I write is clever and it reaching an audience most often of a nice guy who barely speaks English, two RWNJ trolls, and a couple of old school acquaintances is kind of depressing. Yes, I am being arrogant, I get accused of it all the time, so I may as well zip it on like Yellow Spandex and see how it looks. [Mental note I need to lose weight.]

I speak English, I have been adding to my vocabulary since I was assessed as having a post-graduate level vocabulary in the 7th grade,so call it 100,000 words or so. (This crippling disorder is called hyperlexia, please donate using the link below² to help me with it, there is no cure, but books help make the victim more comfortable.)

My Dad was Scots, born in Newhaven (in Edinburgh), and after a few drinks prone to lapsing into Scots. I widnea say I speak it, but I ken more than I would expect. I learnt a little German but have let it lapse, same goes for Old English/AngloSaxon. I speak a little Latin, but real Rebublican Latin not the mincing barbarous gibbering³ of churchmen and doctors.

Oh and welcome to the new Financial Year⁴ 2020-21, this Boomtime⁵, Day 36, the season of Confusion in the Year of Our Lady 3186.



¹ for some values of life or at least unlife
² paypal VillageIdiotAU
³ /dʒɪb.ə.rɪŋ/ you know jib-er-ing see a later blog post about bad data on the net.
Gibbering Madness
⁴ for Australians
⁵ Wednesday, 1st of July 2020

Culture? Culture!

Culture

Left to themselves, human beings are quite good at running stuff, but unfortunately their primary adaptive tool, culture, offers an exploitable niche for a new kind of parasite, the power hungry little grey man (much, much less often woman).

Kings followed by Priest Kings followed by Priests with the power to tell kings what to do, followed by Oligarchs (because even when you are selfish there is power in numbers), then you get Empires, and the wheels fall off. Then various bit recycle randomly in an escalating series of attempts to stop smart people who like new things making improvements. Which is all sort of OK as long as you can Hitch Your Wagon and cross the Frontier into a New Place where you can do new things. Which ended, depending on how you look at it, somewhere around the start if the 20th century. The borders closed, the West Was Won. You had to fill out a form, to get the form, to seek permission to get authorisation to lodge forms.

Science Fiction came along on the coat tales of Cowboy Penny Dreadfuls (the window beyond the frontier for the masses toiling in the Satanic Mills) to offer hope to the smart ones who liked new things. They, the "other" One Percent, the Scientists and Dreamers and Engineers and Degenerate Bohemian Artists managed to work on the fringes and through the gaps of their cultural matrix to improve the human condition more than it had in a single century than it had in perhaps 20,000 years. And we reached out to the stars, and the nasty little grey men stopped us. They tightened the purse strings, they made it fiscally irresponsible to attempt private access to space buy making it legally effectively impossible.

However, people who thought differently inspired by Youth Culture and Science Fiction, especially Star Trek, and the replacement of Middle Class inertia with a kind of drug fuelled (mostly near lethal amounts of caffeine) mania, made new things and worked out to divert a few hundred billion dollars out of the banking system into individual often quite odd goals. They abandoned the idea that acquiring more money was an end in itself, they did everything possible to make sure they and their kids would have enough, pretty much forever. Then they looked at their vast money bins, threw the Priests out of the Temple of Mammon, and did utterly irresponsible things because they wanted Fly Cars and access to “Zero Gee” and submarines that could tke them to the deepest ocean trenches, and private spacecraft, and hundreds of other “Science Fiction” things because damnit, so twerp with a handful of forms wasn’t going to spoil their fun. Now, the strange thing about that approach to life is that even if you are not Tony Stark, if you have money you can hire people who have the brains and skills to do the things you can’t do yourself.

The government puts a decade of expensive hurdles in your way, you “waste” money jumping through each hoop despite the endless hints that you’ll never make a profit. You do it by hiring lawyers, researchers, engineers, technicians and all the vast flock of specialists needed to support the project. Along the way you solve problems, spawn new technologies and often accidentally make more money.

Or you don’t get lucky in Start Up Roulette, so you join the Open Source movement.

What we are seeing is culture fighting back against control, against the Financial 1% and their lickspittles and hired goons.

The other C-word on FaceBoot

So, arguing with a pro infant Male Genital Mutilation clown on FB.

Tried to post a link to a Lancet article¹, he apparently didn't read the pro-wangdoodle carving article about how the US got into it because it it wasn't peer reviewed². FB blocked the non-peer reviewed URL so I fed it to a shortener, and got away with it. Not so with the Lancet article, which even shortened lead to a ban.

So, science is a violation of FB's community standards.

Explains all the COVID-19 "hoax" articles, not the mention endless Flat Earth and Anti-Vaxx idiocy.


¹ from The Lancet
² Kellogg's plan for teen pain to discourage playing with it

Indigenous Culture in schools.

At my school, we had an Aboriginal "Orphanage" just down the road, so a substantial number of Indigenous kids. In the 3rd grade¹ we did a whole year immersive project on Polynesian culture (nothing on Blackbirding though). ¹ 1973

Trumponoyms

Commander and Thief

Trumplethinskin

Pumpkinfuhrer

Gropenfuhrer

Agolf Twitler

The Anti-Kermit

Lord Commander Marmalade

Dolt45

Lord Dampnut