Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Double Feature

Tara has a cold this morning, while I'm playing hooky from Wanderers. I watched the tail end of Stupidity, and now The End of Poverty?

The former is somewhat lighthearted whereas the latter just grinds it into your face that humans and their wee brains are just not that great an animal, but they're what we've got to put up with. I need more est Training I suppose, so this circumstance just clears up in the process of life itself. No, it's not like I want to get rid of humans. On the contrary, I'd like them to succeed, in spite of themselves (a kind of revenge?).

"We insist on justice not charity..." "forgiving international debt" -- there's another one of those English inconsistencies. No one is being asked to forgive, and forget about getting your "money" back. Hey, Chalmers Johnson was just talking, I recognized the voice from the kitchen and came back to hit rewind, as a test of my voice recognition capabilities.

Think more about innocent human bodies burning whatever 100 watt bulbs worth of energy. That's all you can eat. As a body, you consume no more than the next guy, mas o meno. Yet all these gross statistics tell me as an American I'm burning mega-bucks per diem. That's not what my body is burning, which in terms of rice and beans is what a well fed person eats (and then some). So these mega-bucks have to do with control, not bodily intake. I can walk out the door, start a car, and leave the engine running, squandering petrol (a stupid act). I have the freedom to be really stupid.

This was the "freedom" Washington, DC still thought it had, back when we still believed in voodoo economics and took it seriously. Now WDC wears a dunce hat, is a moron, at least in my book, and we're free to wheel and deal with Asians, Africans etc. in ways that mostly bypass its failed circuits.

Thanks to the Internet and other tools (mostly asynchronous), we get to throw those "white papers" in the toilet where they belong and emancipate ourselves from slavish adherence to a relatively worthless, not STEM-savvy, curriculum.

I did get to Wanderers later, on my bike, in time for a few conversations (about end of life care etc.). Steve Mastin is going through the process that happens after a tree branch crashes through a city-campus home-office in 2011.

Now on: Total War by the BBC (coming full circle). Triple feature. Oh, and another one on Rosalyn Franklin (DNA: The Secret of Photo 51, NOVA), the principal discoverer of DNA's structure (lots of overlap in these last two, in terms of timeline). Aaron Klug, who figures in the virus structure story as well, is interviewed in this one.