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Perhaps New England bores you, but into my soul she poured a limpid loneliness which cannot, or at least will not, die. This loneliness, molded, crystallized, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is akin to a serrated wander through elusive sunsets. While immersed in one such sunset, I realized that even its name is strangely tilted, like the planet itself, since the sun has in fact not done a thing ... the sun never sets ... it is the earth's motion, not the sun's, that causes our star to disappear from part of the earth's view on a daily ... (of which there would be none without earthly rotation) basis. Doesn't that mean that the days of the year are unrelated to the year? It is the earth's rotation that gives us daze, while it is the earth's trip around the sun that makes up a year. So it is the speed of one within the speed of the other that determines the speed at which our own demise speeds toward us. So as the earth's spin gives us days, if we were to spin at even a fraction of the time the planet we're standing on does, we'd all be in a daze for days ... Staggering around like a stag does for the does he courts.
The larger the human population swells, the more people there are in the world that will have to die.
Tens of millions of human beings met their untimely demise under the regimes of Stalin and Mao, while the two world wars, those cauldrons used for testing replacement theory, took tens of millions more lives, with another 20 million or so succumbing to the misnomered Spanish flu, all within the confines of the 20'th century, the same century during which the human population of the earth exploded from roughly a billion to what we have now, which is approximately 8 billion.
It is little wonder faint cries and groans unmistakably come up now and then in places, far from any solid structures, from what appears to be the stolid earth. That earth that is for as far as the eye can see, planted with GMO'd corn using solar power to grow food to fuel machines while millions face starvation and grain prices soar while a fertilizer shortage looms, even as armies around the globe use the same ingredients needed to manufacture fertilizer to produce the gunpowder to explode their beloved weapons of mass destruction: gunpowder to feed the guns while grain, sugar and palm oil stoke the machines into action ... do you see now why AI is the important investment for the rich and shameless? Right in front of our face they allocate endless tracts of the little fertile soil the earth has taken billions of years to create, in order to make "renewable" energy. Already the acreage of fields planted to actuate machinery exceed that planted to grow the nutrients essential to the human diet. But whereas the sun's energy is indeed renewable, the fertile soil, the potash, phosphorous, and potassium, along with the fossil fuels without which we can neither build the machines, fertilize the soil, nor water their thirsty roots, are not.
While the earth we love to despoil can no longer sustain the constant barrage of insults mankind bestows upon it, the only succor we offer it is to populate it with ever more human meat, with each ounce of it cynically turned out of its familial nest after eighteen years to stand on its own two feet, and with no other job demanded of them than to go forth and multiply, which each one of them does, though knowing full well that their offspring will reap the whirlwind they have sown. Thus is parenting reduced to pure sadism. Encompassing our offspring is the world we have created and left for them to fend for themselves in, as we can offer them no assistance, our having existed in a world that we have utterly transformed from one rich in treasures to one marred and pitted with the scars of our excavations, empty holes bereft of anything of value, the festering mounds of toxic slag surrounding their hideous maws a towering reminder of the scale of what was done in order to afford them their "effortless" childhood so their parents could bask in the glow of their naïve adoration, even while knowing full well, that when those offspring reach maturity, their life of ease will end, and the options held out to them will contain nothing more than addiction, corporate enslavement and homeless wandering. Thus are they left with nothing more than a hideous sense of sliding down a slope, experiencing a momentary ecstatic frenzy that resolves into a sickening nausea. All around them they see crumbling walls and broken columns, while the very pavement is turned into pools of tar where straggling shoots of grass struggle up from roadways wrenched asunder by raging floodwaters and their pitiful plantings are pummeled by hailstones the size of baseballs. The future rises before them like a basalt cliff, topless and perpendicular, its dark side sculptured by repeated military onslaughts into repellant scenes of carnage.
Horrible beyond conception are the changes which have been wrought by mankind's onslaught, yet the changes thus far engendered are but an inkling of what awaits. Like a dragon guarding its horde, forces beyond human comprehension lie in wait for the day human capriciousness will let them loose to wreak havoc on not only mankind, who has asked for it, but the entire web of life that homo elect-us has rent to shreds.
Allowing the AI embedded in what we call corporations to usurp the benefits of government-produced scientific findings and use them to shape the world to serve their own nefarious ends has proven to be an enormous mistake. We are living in the resultant chaos, leaving those still burdened with compassion and altruism with nothing but two equally tragic alternatives; despair, from lacking the ability to alter by one iota the outcome of mass human and mammalian die-offs that has been already set in motion by the world-wide adoption of that "American Way of Life," the altering of which by even the slightest aspect is non-negotiable (as is the slightest insinuation that it may in fact be a tad askew), so fervently is it embraced by our fellow creatures; and terrors unutterable and unimaginable that await those who escape the first waves of mass-annihilation are even now being erected like so many dominos, needing only the slightest of nudges from some totally predictable event that, "Nobody could have seen coming," to fall in a cascading concatenation of catastrophe. Anyone who dares challenge this human race to doom is denounced as a prey to failure, and left solitary and melancholy to nurse on the nauseating realization that we are the prey of our own success.
After all, what do we know of the world and the universe around us? Our senses' means of receiving impressions are pathetically few; our notions of surrounding objects pitifully narrow. We can only see things as we are constructed to see them and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet even were we beings with far wider, more powerful or a totally different range of senses, we would still only see and study the worlds of matter, energy and life that lie close at hand and can be detected with the senses we have, however powerfully augmented by instruments, which may be able to extend our vision, but not our perception; they help us play detective, but always from the same perspective, such that strange, inaccessible worlds could exist at our very elbows, yet, considering how blind we are to what is staring us in the face, screaming down the wind the evil we have imposed on the living visible world, how fanciful to believe there is any hope we will ever perceive anything that is not overtly manifest.
... Seeings how we are so easily able to ignore so many that are.
MAD, the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, has, for some unknown reason, become mundane now that it has moved out of the realm of nightmares of nuclear-powered annihilation into that of a boiling frog in hot water. Even as coal-fired power plants, oil-burning generators, and gas-driven dynamos all vie for the honor of ushering forth the assured destruction of not only all of mankind, but of all the complex lifeforms with which we are so familiar. But even after more than 75 years of atomic terrorism, no such cataclysmic event as a Super Power nuclear exchange has ever occurred, yet all Russia need do is mention the possibility of deploying their large nuclear arsenal and NATO and the world quails; but try and address the far more real threat of climate-change-induced MADness, and half the world declares it to be a hoax, while the other half claims they can solve the problem of a troposphere heavily burdened with excess carbon by radically increasing the amount of carbon being exhausted into it so as to build and operate an entirely different energy infrastructure on top of the existing one. Which enterprise is on such a mind-boggling scale, that before it is even half implemented in but a handful of countries, more trillions of molecules of still-sequestered carbon will have been dug up and incinerated: billions of years of sunlight stored as fossil fuels, unleashed in a matter of decades and poured into the skies, creating our own little Dome of Doom out of what was once a comfortable space in the cold darkness of Space.
And we do nothing.
Why, one may wonder, is MAD so easily acceptable when it is delivered by easily comprehended molecular reactions, yet so terrifyingly horrible when it is actuated by atomic disintegration the mechanics of which but a sprinkling of humanity can envision?
To theorize an answer to this, we might do worse than consider the fact that Kurdistan’s Khor Mor natural gas field has seen its third rocket attack in less than a week: missile hits on Kurdish assets are proliferating amidst an intensifying conflict between federal authorities in Baghdad and the breakaway government in Erbil.
In case you have forgotten, missiles are weapon of mass destruction. WMD's. Previous to the clown show of the Blob's administration, there was the invasion of Iraq by his Republican predecessor. An attack on a sovereign nation to rid it of its WMD with which they had attacked the Kurdish section in Northern Iraq.
GW of MD fame found no such weapons, even though he declared "Mission Accomplished."
No foreign power has occupied the State of Iraq since the Americans left.
Yet the Iraqi regime in Baghdad somehow now has chemical WMD to once again use against its own people ... Good thing the US annihilated Saddam, huh? (ALL modern weapons are chemical weapons of mass destruction. So: even while we were invading Iraq to rid them of theirs, United states, such as Texas and Ohio, were passing legislation to not only allow, but to incentivize, the proliferation of chemical weapons of mass destruction in their own towns, on their own streets, in shopping malls and theaters, schools, beaches and tourist spots). Where did the Iraqis get them, and why is the Republican Party not fulminating another attack on them for daring to have WMD's? Where did they get them? Who sold them to them? I'm fairly certain that you would have no problem believing (as you should) that they got them from US weapons manufacturers.
It is therefore not too cynical to assume that the reason the world blithely accepts the MAD rush to its own demise by molecular action, while quaking in terror at the proven grandiosity of atomically induced MAD, must be that WMD sales are irresistibly lucrative, while the steps necessary to take to reduce the intensity of climate change, all strike right at the heart of the modern State: Money and Power. There is no solution to climate change that doesn't threaten the way both are used in the world today.
The rush to "Return to Normal", when the ramifications of doing so appear before our eyes every day of the week, with the dehydrated corpses of farm animals, wild horses, and goats providing proof of the inescapable nature of the blowback our actions are resulting in, has now gone well beyond sad, and describing them as "unfortunate" leaves much to be desired. There is really no other word but Evil to describe the rush with which the world has first met, then exceeded, the tonnage of carbon it has decided to do nothing about exhausting into the atmosphere, even after witnessing its own fecklessness in handling the relatively simple task of fighting a pandemic. I mean the Chinese did it better. A country that has never succeeded at anything, one that has to blindly copy science, technology, economics, and anything else that requires innovative thinking, from "The West." Yet it is backward China that has managed to keep its population safe from the deadly disease they let loose upon the rest of the world?
But keeping the population helpless to the predations of an out-of-control billionaire class wielding unaccountable Corporate power is what the West considers "normal," so keeping the population safe was never the priority in the US that it was in China. Keeping Corporate profits safe was. So the specter of human corpses floating by in floodwaters, or cooking in trailers in the Texas heat, bloating in the water-choked streets of Bangladesh, and frying in their parents' vehicles (while they attend "Right to Life" rallies) will keep steadily increasing until there comes another Russia-like onslaught on another smaller, weaker state (the hallmark of Russian foreign policy ... Kazakhstan being the next likely target of Russian predation and occupation. After all, when you're Russian, the safest occupation is Occupation).
Void as we are of leadership by anything other than ghouls and night-gaunts, we can expect nothing more than the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of war to control us when it must. Swept and herded by nightmare tempests that have the full backing of the deities of Death: whether the AK-47-weilding Jesus, or the I Slam anyone who mocks my mockery of all that is Holy, (which is what all religiously sanctioned murder is), or that original death-cult of those under the mind-control of the mass-murderer, Yahweh, (when someone says they "answer to a higher authority" no one seems to mind that that "Higher Authority" is a serial mass-murderer) all we can expect from the so-called religions of the word are a great bellows to fan the flames of hatred and intolerance to a red-hot crescendo, the better to warm their cold hearts while they sanction the horrors of War, reeling drunkenly from the same drugs the Nation states are afflicted with and addicted to: Money and Power. After all, it is only Dead Souls they even pretend to care about; the complexities of human existence lies far far beyond their simplistic, truncated thinking, their own boundless potential having been as purposelessly circumcised as their helpless male offspring's deliberately mutilated penises.
As the long hot summer cranks up the heat, humans will crank up the A/C, and the utilities will crank up the extra generators to provide it, which will crank up the heat, .... etc, etc, with no human brain having yet to bother to suggest a plan to extricate ourselves from this circle jerk with death and annihilation.
So be sure to say your prayers, so the preyers of the world will sleep soundly, and everything can just go back to normal. Which on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years, normal means to a lifeless state: no humans, mammals, or even plants. If we think Life is a Cabaret, we must be convinced, judging by the monomaniacal that way we pursue it, that death is the wrap Party, mummy dearest, and Life is but a Dream.
