Never been one to let the carrier drop

There was a additional point which occurred to me. In the middle of a pandemic, with people starving, people having trouble paying rent, the US government thinks more toys for the military are far more important than a $2000 check for people with income under $152k. Make no mistake, more than $2k of your tax dollars are going to military toys, and the senate overrode the president’s veto on this. Keep in mind everyone in the senate with the possible exception of Bernie has a net worth well north of a million dollars. So, these millionares think it’s more important to keep the big bucks going to the socialism-for-mass-murderers system that is the US military contractors and the military-industrial complex, but you, the people? No. You don’t deserve that money. Better to spend it murdering.

In this particular case there is a clear party divide. The democrats would give you a check, but the republicans think you deserve to starve so they can add another million to their bank account. Those of you who say “Voting democrat is stealing money out of my wallet” – no, both parties are taking money from you. The difference is the republicans think you especially deserve to have your money taken if your income is below average, and also think that the money shouldn’t go to help the starving and sick, but rather to go to more toys for blowing things up, which will be used to commit murder.

So, as of right now, the US is now *double* our closest competitor in terms of COVID cases – and our closest competitor is *India*, a country with 3x the population we have.

I’m inclined to blame a lot of things, including a incompetent, incredibly selfish government (especially the Republicans) which is only interested in it’s own selfish ends and not the needs of the people it is governing, our capitalism as a religion (call in sick for work? You’re barely making rent as it is..), our incredibly awful medical system that exists first and foremost to make more billions for the billionaires, with taking care of the health of the people who use it as a very distant second, let’s not forget our president who has the mentality of a toddler and the IQ of Alexa – he keeps thinking – and telling people – and apparently a lot of people are dumb enough or brainwashed enough to listen – that it will just go away. And of course let’s talk about how people on the right are both dumb enough and delusional enough to politicize *wearing a mask*. I guess the good news is there will be less of them next year, but the bad news on that front is unfortunately most of the ones who will die have already reproduced.

Yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But will we learn? Will we stop spending trillions on tools to blow up other countries so we can steal their oil and start spending trillions on price-no-object health care?

No, probably not. In the meantime a large and disturbing number of people want to overthrow the results of the current election (I can tell you, after personally digging through millions of rows of data, that the number of people cheating on the election is statistically insignificant. It wouldn’t even change a election won by only 20k. Republicans have just increasingly become believers of “if you can’t win, cheat” – and what better way to cheat than by claiming the other side cheated? I mean, it worked in 2016 – while we know Trump used to walk in on teens in beauty pageants and there’s any number of creepy pictures with him and various young girls, the message was pushed hard that Clinton was running a child sex ring. And people bought it.

I guess I shouldn’t let these things bother me since after all there is nothing I can do about them. But it is depressing as anything.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/what-republicans-are-doing-worse-treason/617538/

– I think this article does a good job of pointing out the obvious.  Republicans, in their quest to be as awful as possible and hurt humanity as much as possible so a few individuals can get further ahead, have finally gone over the watershed line and are now advocating to throw out the result of a free and fair election. They are living in a interesting cloudcuckooland where if someone didn’t vote for their Dear Leader, their vote must be wrong – they are now screaming “Count all the republican votes. Throw all the democratic votes out.”

I’m impressed, yet again, by their awfulness, greed, and stupidity.

So, one of the challenges that I’ve talked about repeatedly is how money isn’t value, it is a pointer to it. And I think this is a important thing to remember, just in general. However, someone who will remain nameless talked about how Biden “was going to stop all fracking and it was going to make things more expensive for me”.

Well, first of all, Biden’s not going to stop all fracking. He’s just going to keep us from expanding fracking. But second of all, fracking is something we do that increases costs to all of us enormously. It’s a monumentally dumb thing to do because we’re damaging the most valuable resource on the planet, water, something we all need, in order to get something that’s readily available, energy. (The sky is literally raining soup here.)

The thing that you have to remember, when thinking about this, is fracking’s cost is hidden in the future. It’s huge – probably trillions of dollars – but you don’t pay it now, you pay it 20 or 50 or 100 years from now.

If you don’t frack, we have less natural gas and we have to depend on other sources of power. (The same friend pointed out that there are clouds and days with no wind – I didn’t point out about hydro and pumped storage, or flow batteries, or electrolysis and hydrogen.)

Now, if we do the sensible thing (solar, hydro, wind, next-gen nuclear) all of the sources of power will be considerably cheaper in measured cost to get them than fracking. The cost of energy *in real resources and human lives* will go *down*.

If we do frack, we destroy the groundwater, we lose millions of gallons of water to the process, and we condemn our children to have to spend trillions of dollars cleaning up our mess. Naturally republicans are in favor, because to them, the money *is* the value. They see it making greenbacks now, and the idea of tracing value flows instead of tracing money is beyond them.

It opens a interesting side idea. What about a government where in order to serve as a congresscritter, you have to show certain abilities? A meritocracy, in other words. I would *love* to see a sport pilot license as a minimum requirement to be a congresscritter. (Learning to fly a airplane teaches you a lot of important life lessons). Even more interesting would be one in which you had to show significant proficiency in C. (Hey, at least that way I’d know they knew what pointers *were*)

So, our strategy for COVID vaccinations is both lousy and stupid.

I quote USA TODAY: “More than 12.4 million vaccine doses have been distributed across the U.S., while nearly 2.8 million doses have been administered as of Thursday, per CDC data”

We shouldn’t be handing the task of figuring out who gets vaccines to the government. We shouldn’t be doing *anything* to overcomplicate this. Whoever shows up to get a vaccines, gets vaccinated. First come, first serve.

While we may minimize deaths by trying to vaccinate the most vulnerable first, we are probably maximizing spread, because these are the people least likely to be travelling, working, etc. The most optimum situation is to just get shots in arms, as quickly as posssible. Ask people to make their best guess as to what wave they should be in, and then show up and get vaccinated.

We’re not going to hit the most optimum choice of who gets vaxxed when no matter what – I’d need weeks of playing with a computer to even approximate the right answer to that. But by trying to optimize it,  and inserting a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, we might well hit the most pessimal case.

So, my basic message – which will get ignored – is, people running the country, every person who gets vaccinated is a minimum of one less case, and if they’re a busy, active, travelling, or interfacing with the people case, it’s like 3-300. Until we’re down to less than a million vaxes in reserve, give it to anyone who will take it.

One of the things I really struggle with re: Trump – and a friend of mine reminded me of this the other day – is that, angry as he has made many people, and as much damage as he has done, it’s difficult to call him a worse president than Dubya.

The reason for that is, Trump didn’t start a war. Dubya killed at least a million innocents in a war over false pretenses that was largely to make money for America’s oil companies and military-industrial complex.

Now, Trump did many things that one would have expected to start a war. I think some of what happened here is the world recognized that he is, in fact, a toddler, and used some forbearance – partially because we cannot afford to have WWIII. (And hopefully – this is probably too much to ask, but hopefully – we will retool our democracy so that the loser of the popular vote can never again get into office, since that would have saved us from *BOTH* Trump and Dubya. Of course, it’s unfortunately also a open question whether Hillary would have started a war with Russia.)

However – with the side note that the jury is still out on how much Trump egged on a war between the left and right by repeatedly lying to the very gullible – Trump only got about 200k innocents killed as compared with Dubya’s million – and that’s based on the very difficult to verify theory that a more capable leader would have done a better job of managing COVID. (I do note we’re coming up on *double* the number of cases of our closest competitor – and they are a country with 3x our population – but I also note that America’s very stupid money-above-all-else capitalism-throw-everyone-but-the-billionares-under-the-bus was always going to result in us having the most cases)

My hope is that we’ll learn from all this. Another thing I was thinking about while I was doing my finger exercises today is that one of the big problems with America and maybe just with humanity in general is that money tends to buy power, but having excessive money tends to lead to brain damage. (From my point of view, having excessive money is also usually a sign of brain damage – unless you’re planning to build some enormous project like a spacecraft or a singularity, having excess money is letting the tool use you instead of using the tool – and I’ve known some pretty unhappy billionares personally or two-degrees-of-seperation, so I know of what I speak here. Not being able to have enough even when you have too much is a disease)

Another problem I suspect that comes up is that the children of billionaires never have to solve any really difficult challenges so they don’t learn as much as the children of other people, but they still end up with excessive amounts of power because they inherit the money. This is another good demonstration of part is wrong with Trump (who is one of the worst businesspeople I’ve ever read about – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere if he had just put the money from his father in a mutual fund he’d have a lot more money than he does, and of course we all know about his leaning on America’s “Socialism, but only for the rich” by having repeated bankruptcies.

Anyway, despite my criticisms, I am still thinking Trump deserves recognition as a Republican who’s managed to not start any wars.

So, this marks 300 hours since I installed a hour meter on my mixer (June 27th, I believe)

(Test at https://www.idrlabs.com/4-axes/test.php)

I can’t decide if I’m sad that I’m not more ‘woke’ or happy – a lot of the questions in the quiz make me question whether 100% woke is a wise place to be.

So, one of the things I have pondered over the years is how when people use the word God, they might mean any of several things

1) A personification of a massively powerful entity, possibly a superuser. Sometimes this entity is also strongly benevolent or wise, and sometimes this entity is .. less than wise, less than benevolent, or both. (I find the Official Christian God ™ to be fundamentally evil, for example). This sometimes coincides with the creator of all things, or a subset of them, who sometimes is a engineer / intelligent designer and sometimes just likes to throw some stuff on the wall to see what sticks

2) The broadcast address i.e. some sort of connection between all living things, or at least a direction one would send messages for all living things. My theory is this is what people who say “Oh, God” during sex are thinking of

3) Similar to the above, a shortcut for $PERSON_OR_GROUP_I_DONT_DIRECTLY_KNOW – for example “Thank God for cell phones” or “Thank God for dogs” both go not to #1 but to a specific group of people working over centuries to make things better

4) A interesting seldom case – infinity itself. This isn’t God (#1), it’s the set of all sets, the collection of all possible strings, the number line. It’s in fact bigger than God (#1) and not even the most powerful superuser can destroy it. In some ways, it forms the bounds of things that not even God (#1) could possibly change, which is a interesting essay that I am not going to try to write because I am not nearly a good enough mathematician to get it right.

There’s some other possibilities, but they’re less pervasive. The reason I was penning this, though, is because I’ve always wondered for the musicians who write “Thank God for the music”, what exactly they are thinking.

One of the problems with a variant of #1 practiced by some religions is that they believe that we can never be the originator of anything good. Thusly, “Thank God for the music” because God is the origin of music but we are not.

However, one thing we know from earlier in the blog is that God can no more be the origin of music than we can, because music is in fact eternal and out of the scope of things which can be created or destroyed. Music is part of the number line. You can *find* music, but you can’t exactly *create* it, although the effort of finding it is in itself sort of a creative work

From my point of view, it’s appropriate to think all four of the above for the music (depending on whether you think #1 exists – but as I’ve also said elsewhere, I find the idea that we’re the biggest and most powerful things in the universe depressing and, to be honest, extremely unlikely. I also find Christianity depressing and extremely unlikely.. see the rest of this blog etc for what I think is really going on. I should probably write more essays about that too.)

I myself think I may start adding this to my liner notes in the future, with my strongest thanks to #3 and #4.

So, I was reading a post by one of the christians who I *do* think understands love – Jesus Shaves – and I had one of those sudden moments of connecting the dots.

We’ve all heard that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. But I never really got it in quite the way that I did today.

With the POV that heaven is not a literal place but a state of mind, and the understanding that the “rich” on earth are not rich in the sense that I would like to be rich, it makes some sense. Too much can be as much of a burden as not enough, and certainly a obsession with material wealth that can never be filled is a guarantee of a absence of happiness.