Category Archives: Communication

Hey! Lookee here! Manmade climate change! Ohshitodear!

Posted on August 17, 2013 by | 11 comments

Prosecutor:  Your honor, members of the jury, we have a guy with an IQ here.  An expert witness.  He knows all kinds of things about climate change.  After I ask him a few questions you jury members will be asked to decide whether climate change is guilty of being man made and what everyone ought to have to do to keep it from happening.  Professor Honest-to-Goodness, have you compiled data and examined it enough to form an opinion that climate change is happening?

Honest-to-goodness no-shit scientist:  Yes.  Climate change appears to be happening.

Prosecutor:  Have you created any hypothesis to explain why this might be happening?

Honest-to-goodness no-shit scientist:  Of course I have.  Hundreds, thousands of hypotheses are possible to explain ever piece of that data leading me to conclude climate change is happening.

Prosecutor:  Have you tested those hypotheses?

Honest-to-goodness no-shit scientist:  Um, well, I’ve tested one of them.  It would take forever to test all of them, and every time one’s tested the additional data the testing provides brings in more hypotheses to explain the data.

Prosecutor:  And did you reach any conclusions from the hypothesis you tested.

Honest-to-goodness no-shit scientist:  Well, it’s entirely possible man is contributing to the current climate changes, though it’s not absolutely certain what those climate changes actually are.  Climate change isn’t fully understood at this time.

Prosecutor:  Ah ha.  So your test of the hypothesis did show beyond a reasonable doubt that climate change is happening?  And a preponderance of the part of the evidence you believe you understand supports the hypothesis might be contributing to that climate change? 

Honest-to-goodness no-shit scientist:  Um.  There’s a strong possibility that might explain the parts we do understand about it.

Prosecutor:  Thank you Professor Honest-to-goodness no-shit scientist.  Your honor, members of the jury, I rest my case.  What we have here is prima faci evidence man is contributing to devastating climate change.  I suggest we dismiss this expert and call in some social engineers to recommend the appropriate penalties we can’t enforce in order to make the weather better.

Judge:  Members of the jury, you’ve heard the evidence.  Now I instruct you to go to the jury room and decide the case based only on the evidence before you.  Decide whether we have a preponderance of evidence [somewhat bad], or beyond a reasonable doubt [a lot worse].  Afterward you’ll all be asked to give television interviews explaining how you arrived at your verdict.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Communication, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Nature, Outdoors, Science, Survival

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What’s so great about being sane and smart?

Posted on August 14, 2013 by | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

The cats have been expressing some doubts lately about my sanity and insensitively observing I also ain’t all that smart.  As happens from time to time.  Seems to run in cycles when they’ve been a long while away from towns and cities where they can observe sanity and average intelligence.

When they’ve lived in, or visited towns and cities where they’ve been able to observe the ‘average’ mental conditions representing sanity and the average US human IQs of 100 at work, they lighten up on me.  For them the illusion of a better life and lifestyle associated with human sanity and average IQ loses a lot of glamor when they’re surrounded by it.  While the gulf between me and sane, and smart, take on something of an ideal.  A condition more to be aspired to than what goes on where sanity and average intelligence prevail.

The problem is those cats are brainwashed by sanist and IQist elitist propaganda, even out here.  They pick it up by words, phrases, value judgements when Gale or the neighbor up-the-hill come to call, and it gradually seeps in, trumping their own experiences and observations.  Same as happens, only more so, to the people in town who are submerged in it.

The only way to put a sea anchor on the illusion that sane and smart are somehow to be preferred to the life they live is to lock them up in the RV and take them to town for a looksee, I figures.  Give them a taste of the cat of averagism.

And if they keep hectoring me I’m sure-as-hell going to do it.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Communication, Education, Solitude

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Niaid: “So why aren’t we being more vocal about all this?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 by | 8 comments

Naiad dawn2

Niaid:  Why aren’t we trying to get some help on it?  Sometimes we might want to sleep late or we might be busy at sunset.

Me:  Proselytising and zeal are consequences of an erosion of faith.  Nobody needs to shout from the rooftops, “Hey everyone!  The sun’s going down this evening.  The sun’s about to come up!”  Nobody on earth does that because they have faith it’s going to happen.

Niaid:  So why do we do it then?

Me:  Of respect.  A demonstration of our faith, tipping the figurative hat to Truth.    We don’t need to recruit anyone to the cause because we know it’s already taken care of.

Niaid:  Then why do they do it on other matters they have faith in?

Me:  I said it before.  Erosion of faith.  Think about it.  The ancient Jews were never evangelical.  They didn’t need to be.  They had complete confidence in their God.  But when Christianity came along, the situation for Christians became an entirely different problem with a different solution.  They were the new kids on the block.  They were mostly Jews.  They’d spent their entire lives being indoctrinated to the Jewish faith.  They needed numbers.  Groups of other people believing the same as they did to help boost their own confidence what they believed was actually true.

Niaid:  All zealotry is from an erosion of faith?

Me:  Every time.

Niaid:  Patriotic zeal?

Me:  Think about it.  Before the Civil War they weren’t posturing and flag waving.  They knew what they were and mistrusted the people running things, but they never doubted what they believed themselves to be.  But after the Civil War the whole question about what this nation is took on new meaning.  It needed bolstering.  Parades.  Shouting from rooftops.  Fireworks. 

Niaid:  Needed it why?

Me:  They needed it to take the minds of the defeated half of the country that they’d been forced at gunpoint to be a part of something they fought hard to separate themselves from.  After the Civil War the country never again had faith in itself because everyone in it knew the premise the nation was founded on was violated.  Dead.

Niaid:  So the reason we pray Old Sol up and down is our way of saying we know it’s going to come up and go down?

Me:  Yep.  And we know damned well it doesn’t need any extra votes to force it to do it.  We know it will come up the same,  whatever Christians, Jews, Muslems, and anyone else might do in their praying trying to stop it.  We’ve got right on our side.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Communication, Government, History, Human Behavior, Spirituality

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Clean laundry and civil discourse – Satanist style

Posted on August 10, 2013 by | 4 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Going to a coin laundry with the RV’s an entirely different experience compared to the various times in my life when I considered hanging around watching clothes tumble something akin to hell.  Just knowing there’s a fridge out there with cold tea, milk, or ice water at a reasonable price helps.  A comfy place to stretch out, a selection of books half-read.  Lawn chair if I want to use it.

But before I decide which way I’m going to enjoy my laundrying I look the place over.  Sometimes it’s worth the hard chair to allow surreptitiously watching the people sharing the place. 

So this time I carried my stuff inside, tossed it into a washer near the front door, and casually allowed my eyes to look everyone over while I walked to the back for quarters.  Sauntered back to the machine.  Several lower-financial-drawer women, several younger couples, and a few old guys.  Mostly ignoring one another.

But I noticed a scrawny old guy wearing a Vietnam War Veteran cap watching me as I fed quarters into the machine.   So when I finished I took a chair as far from him as I could get but still see my machine.  Guy’s wearing Vietnam War Veteran caps aren’t part of my repertoire of wanna-get-acquainted.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I pretended to do the ‘bored-people scan’, opened my book, read a page, put it down.  Twigged to the fact nobody in the place would meet his eye, and he was trying to get eye contact.  I figured, “Oh jeeze, this guy’s been here enough so everyone wants to avoid the nuisance he makes of himself.”

But he was focusing more attention on me, working up to saying something, or coming over nearer where I was sitting.  I groaned and stood up, stretching, to go out to the RV, head off anything he was thinking.  Too late.

I turned to the door and he caught my eye.  “Hey!  You’re a lefty!”

“Um.  Yeah.”  Hell.  How’d he happen to notice that?  Whoopteedoo conversation starter.  He got up and headed to the door with me.

“It’s been a chore, hasn’t it?”  Two of us standing in the shade of the overhang.  Me fidgeting to break loose and sprint for the RV.

“What has?”

“Going through life left-handed.”

“Not when I could find a woman willing to sleep on the right side.”  Figured I might as well clarify my sexual preferences in case that was what was coming down the pike.

A few minutes later it came out he was a supply clerk in DaNang during the Vietnam fracas.  Tough gig.  Whoopteedoo.  “So what the hell’s the hat all about?”

“It’s because of my religion.  People around here don’t like me because of it, so I try to put my best foot forward.  Vietnam Vet buys me an edge.”

I shook my head, remembered getting cornered by the guy preaching Urantia outside the library in Grants, New Mexico.  Wanted to be my new best friend.  Real pain in the ass I never broke free of as long as I lived in Grants, always encountering him. 

I could either brush the guy off even though he was hungry for talk, or I could grit my teeth, be polite, and hear what he wanted to tell me.  Turned out he’s a Satanist.

“Whaaa?  A Satan worshiper?”

“No.  We don’t worship Satan.  That’s just something Christian preachers claim we do.”

At least I don’t have a dog in THAT fight.  “Well, hell.  Better than being an atheist, I reckons.”  I really didn’t want to hear this crap.  “Nice talking to you, but I need to take a nap.”

I left him standing in the shade, careful not to look back.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Communication, Education, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Senior Citizens, Spirituality

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Blown tires and ‘the homeless’

Posted on July 20, 2013 by | 16 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Strange trip to town yesterday to get my town business taken care of.  A guy was telling me about a bunch of ‘homeless people’ living down behind the Kerrville Public Library and the Guadalupe River, and I moseyed down for a looksee.  Middling surprising.

Kerrville’s a fairly wealthy, relatively small community filled with mostly retirees from government, military, and top drawer private sector.  It has golf courses the way most small towns in Texas used to have churches…. one-per-street-corner.  The rest of the population mostly makes do fetching and carrying, ringing up cash-registers to fill the needs of the golf-coursers.  Ingram used to be a different town a dozen miles down the road, but now it’s indistinguishable from Kerrville except for the population being part of the old-timers and people working to make life better for the rich retirees.

But here, out-of-sight in the midst of all this resides a colony of ruffled, smelly people sleeping on the grass and under the bridge over the Guadalupe.  A cursory look would number them somewhere between 50 and 100.  A good many do their washing up and hanging around in the library to get cool now, warm when it’s cold.

Not a homogenous group in any way I could see.  Some are the usual ‘homeless’ stereotype in the larger urban areas, some younger, some drugees and alcoholics, some maybe ghetto types, and some you wouldn’t spot as any of this, just seeing them on the street.

Evidently the Kerrville city government’s getting enough complaints about it to cause them to try to figure out how they can drive them off to somewhere else where they won’t be a nuisance.

I’ve never been comfortable with the word, ‘homeless’ as a means of placing people into a tribal stereotype.  The emphasis on the structure a person dwells in as a tribal name is just too damned lots-of-what-I-wish-different-about-America-disease.  The straight fact is that every single one of us has a few thousand generations of ancestors who lived in similar homes to the ones these people sleep under, minus the library. 

And the names we give our ancestors are peasants, serfs, nomads, hunter-gatherers, the whole range of words describing people who weren’t aristocrats, struggled to stay alive any way they could.  People who were fetching and carrying for the aristocrats and starving/freezing-to-death-doing it.  Filthy, stinking peasants, serfs, nomads, scratching out a living any way they could, stalking the game animals in the rich-man forests and getting hanged for it, or wandering around grubbing for nuts, plants and meat varmints they could eat because they hadn’t advanced far enough to have aristocrats.

What those people used to be was tramps, hobos, beggars, derelicts, which was nearer the truth, but still didn’t cover the subject.  That place between the river and library is a hobo jungle minus a railroad track.  But I don’t think the people living that life can qualify by any stereotype.  For instance, my long-time-ago post about Stephen Schumpert, a guy I grew up with:

Could you choose to live on the street?

 If the cats all croaked on me I think I might like to try that for a while to flesh out my life experience while I still have some.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this as I drove home when I blew out a tire on the RV…. another inside-rear.  Sounded a lot like a shotgun when it went.  After examining it I decided to nurse it home instead of trying to change it on the road. 

The cost of a new tire’s going to set me back about a month in my best laid plans, and trying to get the RV off  the ground high enough to change it’s going to be a day spent in hard labor.  Haven’t decided whether  to try to nurse it back to Kerrville and let one of the working-for-a-living serfs and peasants at the WalMart or Discount Tire do the work.

Maybe instead of ‘the homeless’ a better word to describe the colony of people down between the library and the river would be, ‘the blown tires’.

I sort of like that.

Old Jules

16 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Senior Citizens

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Don’t take any chances – CC all your emails and posts to the NSA

Posted on June 29, 2013 by | 17 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Got to thinking last night before I slid off to sleep, “What if the NSA ain’t reading my emails and other stuff I write?  What if some get lost in the shuffle, or worse, what if they just aren’t interested enough to read mine?

How damned de-humanizing is THAT?

Sheeze!  Brought me spang awake with a start.  Those bastards might be going flaccid on the job, reading everyone elses’ stuff, but not mine.

I thought about it a while as I scratched niaid behind the ears, got up and took my third [under pressure] cold shower of the day, dried off and scratched Hydrox behind the ears pondering it.

Still felt insecure and de-machoed, so I kicked on the AC unit for a few minutes to knock the edge off the cold sweat I was breaking out in.

Okay.  First crack out of the box, this ain’t something I’m going to sit still for, ain’t going to tolerate it.  Those bastards are going to read my stuff whether they like it or not.  I’m going to put them on the list of CCs for all my emails, and if I can find out who my senator or congressman is, I’ll write them.

See if I can get a congressional committee started to get those guys from NSA in and test them, grill them hard to make sure they aren’t falling down on the job.

Piss me off.

Old Jules

17 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Communication, Government, Human Behavior, Police, Politics, Senior Citizens, Surveillance

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Now realllllly – Some things might be worse than dying

Posted on June 12, 2013 by | 2 comments

Mary Jane and Sniffles

They know Mary Jane ain’t going to kill them.  Lying about it, pretending it might just proves to them you’re a liar or a fool and that nothing you say is worth taking seriously.

Wouldn’t it be better to just tell the truth?

Ah baby! Yes. Yes. YES!

Ah baby! Yes. Yes. YES!

“What will your mother say when you get out of the slammer and she discovers you’ve been anally raped by every ethnic prison gang ranging from the White Brotherhood to the Crips, the Bloods, to La Raza Unita? 

“That you were forced to perform oral sex every night for the  guy  in the top bunk?”

Mommy wants that to happen to OTHER peoples’ kids and doesn’t want you to know she wants it for them, but she sure as hell doesn’t want it to happen to hers.  So she tells you the next best thing.  A lie.

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Communication, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior

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Finally it begins to make sense

Posted on June 11, 2013 by | 19 comments

first man in space

I read somewhere recently the efforts to teach sign language to great apes since the 1970s gave a lot of them vocabularies large enough to allow IQ tests. The lowest a mountain gorilla ever scored was 97. Smarter than a lot of people. And I read somewhere else there’s only a 1% difference between the DNA of a chimp and that of a human being.

All of which suggests to me there might be sub-species of human beings, not quite human but not different enough to identify as an entirely different species. Politicians, genetic engineers, Wall Street bankers, CEOs of multi-national corporations, along with Hitler, Stalin et al might finally be explained that way.

I’d never considered the possibility aristocrats might be merely close relations to human beings without actually crossing the great divide to become human.  That maybe they’re just a smidgen of lifetimes behind on the reincarnation trail, sniffing along trying to catch up, but getting distracted by the fire hydrants others among them peed on as they struggled to gain humanhood.

19 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Communication, Human Behavior, Politics, Science

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Bummer if that tree fell on your house

Posted on June 9, 2013 by | 7 comments

He said NEVER!

Ever noticed how many people hang around discussion boards of every description watching for things they can tell other people NEVER to do?

NEVER play with matches! NEVER ride a bicycle with no brakes! NEVER point an acetylene torch at your face when you light it! NEVER try to get inside a tree shredder while it’s running!

I think there must be something about typing a command about never that feels validating, self-affirming. Telling people what they’ll either have better sense than to do anyway, or who will pay no attention and will do it anyway.

And the fact is, it could as easily be said in ways people might listen to because it wasn’t so offensive and presumptuously downtalking:  How about, “Sure would be a big bummer for a person to get his hair caught in that fanbelt.” Something along those lines.

About the only response I can think of appropriate to the NEVER command is “NEVER say NEVER!”

7 Comments

Posted in 2013, Communication, Internet

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FFFuture Shock

Posted on June 7, 2013 by | 5 comments

The Internet came fast, though it’s tempting to take it for granted and just absorb it as it comes along without having to faint and revive yourself.

A person can hop over to Craigslist to see what types of travel trailers and cheap RVs people have they want to sell in lordee-knows-where places he tried to forget exist in Texas.  Pop off an email or two to the people doing the selling.

Exhaust that and pop over, shoot off an email to the USFS district handling the Gila Wilderness to find out the condition of this-or-that trail nobody in his right mind would use. Whether a particular trail has been cleared enough to a particular spot to allow a mountain bike to use it.

Pop over to Google maps for a quickie satellite look at a mountain or three, reboot the machine to clear the memory when things start to die.

Pop to dogpile.com to do a search of bicycle forums and discussion boards to see what mountain bikes are costing and what people are saying about them.  Then another search or two  to find out how much weight a burro could be expected to carry.  Whether anyone’s got a notion about them as riding animals and the maximum weight of the person they could carry under particular conditions.

Spang, another websearch to DIY sites looking for ideas for load carrier devices people have put together on bicycle frames, or using bicycle wheels.

Doesn’t appear to be any limit to it.  However obscure and esoteric the interest, there’s somone, somewhere on the Internet thinking along the same lines who’s already done some of the heavy thinking.

The neighbor up the hill tells me people are putting together 3D printers in their garages allowing them to duplicate anything that’s ever been manufactured.  Putting what they do up on the Internet so other people can manufacture the same thing somehow.  Some guy making a crescent wrench that works from his old crescent wrench and a printer.

It’s no wonder the governments of the world are suspicious and concerned.  With things like that going on there’s no predicting what will come of it.  People might get used to thinking and begin to make a habit of it.

About a century ago two bicycle mechanics put something together the scientific community was busy agreeing couldn’t be done.  Without any help they took a manned heavier-than-air flight convincing enough to turn everything upside down.

Didn’t even have computers and the Internet.  If they’d had those someone might have been able to convince them they couldn’t do it.  Or everyone and his dog would have been making one in his garage.

5 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Communication, Internet

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