Tag Archives: environment

Immigration disambiguated

Posted on November 25, 2014 by | 4 comments

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

As a 1950s kid in Portales, New Mexico, the barber shops always had a bunch of old guys sitting around educating one another [and me] about how many Germans they killed personally during the Big War [WWI], along with how bad chlorine and mustard gas stuck in the gullet.

That’s where I also learned [before Sputnik 1 put that one to sleep] how the Good Lord wasn’t going to let men put anything into orbit around the earth.  How the Bible proved it by the way He destroyed Babylon and made everyone speak different languages.  You don’t hear a lot of that stuff anymore.

But another thing a kid heard a lot in those days was, “My granddaddy fought the Indians for this land.  I’m damned if I’m going to let [fill in the blank] do thus and so.”  Sometimes it was the Federal Government, sometimes the Communists, sometimes it was some potential foreign aggressor he wasn’t going to let get by with it.

A lot of their grandaddies also fought the Yankees for this land, but nevermind.

For most purposes those old guys didn’t find it convenient to mention a lot of their granddaddy’s fathers also fought the Mexicans for that land and took it away from them at the point of a gun.  Pretty much everything from Texas to California with a few other places thrown in for good measure.

That’s a fair synopsis of how immigration works.  Our ancestors came in and took it away from anyone who stood in the way of them.  If someone tried to stop them they dragged them out of their houses and killed them, burned the houses down and stole their livestock.  Just the way the Hebrews did to the folks who tried to keep them from stealing their lands in the Bible.  Just the way they’re still doing it to their neighbors in Palestine.

For a longish time when North America needed white people to fight the Indians, and fight the Mexicans. Live in hovels to scratch out bare livings on hardscrabble farms, coal mines, log forests, sweatshops making textiles, steel, tools, clothing, kitchen appliances, build railroads, immigration was groovy.  They Statue of Libertied the concept.

Nobody’d figured out yet you could just send the jobs to the pestholes those people were coming from and import their products without having to put up with the people.  Everyone could stay here, close the borders and sell hamburgers and insurance policies back and forth to one another or be cops and firemen.

So now it’s only the damned immigrants of earlier generations someone’s going to have to figure out what they can do about.  Sure, a few sneak across the borders still, and a lot of Asians get let in because we need people who can read and write and cypher.  But all in all the immigrants causing all the trouble in the US today are the ones who got here sometime before WWII.

Somethings going to have to be done about those bastards.

Old Jules.

 

 

 

4 Comments

Posted in 2014, Government

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The Logical Ultimate Extreme – Those damned plastic dunes on Titan

Posted on September 1, 2014 by | 6 comments

Thanks to the orbital eccentricities of Saturn and its moon Titan, the equatorial dunes – made of sandlike plastic – appear to be going the wrong way. NASA Cassini radar

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Most of you have probably spent a lot of time pondering those drifting dunes of plastic the NASA Cassini craft discovered on Saturn’s moon, Titan.  http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/05/plastic-wrong-way-dunes-arise-saturn-moon-titan.  And most of you have probably concluded, rightly, that it’s spillover from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch finally having reached Saturn.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch Continues to Grow http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/giant-garbage-patch-pacific-20140817

It’s obvious that all those plastics partially digested by Mother Earth in the stomach of her ocean have been belched into outer space moving hastily enough to reach Titan and create drifting dunes.  Before Cassini arrived.

Which means NASA will be spending a lot of time in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch placing hopeful spacecraft in the way of earth belches.  The NASA budget cuts and ending most government funded space ventures makes earth belches the only practical means of sending anything of US origins into outer space.

But of course there’s another alternative explanation for those dunes of drifting plastic on Titan.  It’s the one the government doesn’t want you to know about because it confirms the existence of the Dreaded Green Men.  A whole civilization of them beginning, climbing to the top of their food chain, inventing plastics, and creating ocean garbage patches of their own.

Yeah, you read that right.  The reason those damned Titanians came to earth and crashed at Corona, New Mexico in 1947 was that they were looking for some empty space in the solar system where they could dump their damned plastics.

Hell, who do you think came up with the idea of selling water in bottles for a dollar each?  That idea didn’t originate on a planet 2/3 covered with water.  The entrepreneurs and engineers on earth reverse-engineered the whole concept from the Roswell UFO crash.  Along with memory metal frames for eyeglasses.

 

Old Jules

 

6 Comments

Posted in 2014

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Canned oxygen for sissies

Posted on August 28, 2014 by | 4 comments

Hi readers.

I finally just said, “To hell with it.”  Ordered something called Oxygen Boost in a can.  60 deep breaths per can.  Even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense, the oxygen-concentrating machine I used when I stayed at Eddie Brewer’s place last year seemed to help a lot.  Several times when I was in the midst of seemingly major events it brought them to an immediate halt.

The past few days around here, maybe because of the Orange Ozone Alert, have me thinking it’s time to give O2 another try, despite the fact the various sawbones haven’t seen fit to prescribe it.  I haven’t been able to exercise for several days, which they did prescribe.

Anyway, if these 60 breath cans of 02 get the job done I’ll be back banging on the door of the VA over in KC Missouri threatening to scream and hold my breath if they can’t bring themselves to prescribe something to fill in during those moments when Mother Earth just isn’t enough.

After all, is it not written, “You veterans are responsible for keeping us free!  You brave guys deserve the absolute best for killing all those brown people who wanted to take away our freedoms!  And while a lot of people can breathe easier because of all the freedoms you protected, if you breathe hard we can afford a bit of oxygen to help you along?”  Ahem.   You believe the bullshit comes out of the mouths of patriots?

Well, I’m truly moved, though I din’t kill any brown people who were trying to take away our freedom.  Got into a few fights with some in bars but nobody got hurt  too badly.  Bastards trying to steal our freedoms.

And I’d breathe more easily if someone over at the VA fixed me up with the freedom to breath when the going gets tough.

Is it not written, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going?”

I ain’t going anywhere without being able to, including all the usual mobility abilities.

Meanwhile there’s canned air at a price that’s probably a bargain considering I don’t drink bottled water.

Besides, the something for nothing  I’m going after is AIR!  What the hell can air cost when you buy it in volume?    Economy of scale.  That sort of thing.

Old Jules

 

4 Comments

Posted in 2014, America

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Hell, no wonder I can’t freaking breath! Damned hole in the ozone layer plugged up my nostrils.

Posted on August 27, 2014 by | 6 comments

This is actually good news. I thought something was going wrong with my health.

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2014, America

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Where desert mountain waits

Posted on August 23, 2014 by | 5 comments

Sun dried jerky of your past
Lies heavy on the stomach-heart
Grumbles, protests, lingers
Long, long after cactus
Arid faith
Uprooted by a desert mountain
Cloudburst flood
Has withered, blunted tines
No longer barbed
While jerky past still grumbles
Lies heavy on the stomach heart.

Lie still and watch
Lantern sun swings overhead
This banner day
Sliver moon salutes from darkened sky

Take heart.  Take heart.  Take heart.

Move the grumble upward to a song
To tines’ decay

Take heart take heart take heart

While dormant hidden succulents
Await return of desert mountain
Cloud burst flood
And full moon rises.

Jack Purcell, From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003, NineLives Press

 

5 Comments

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized

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Fracking – A nation of experts

Posted on August 12, 2014 by | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Everywhere people gather with no television playing and no cell phone calls to attend to the US citizenry conversations eventually get around to fracking.  Drilling oil and gas wells horizontally into shale and fracturing the deposition to release energy producing minerals.

Heck, I’d never heard of it until a couple of years ago, when my neighbor began telling me about the amazing oil discoveries in Texas now reaching production.  Oil reserves larger than the combined deposits everywhere else on the planet.

At first I was skeptical, and I couldn’t imagine what fracking was.  But one thing I discovered immediately was the fact everyone who knew the word was possessed of a certainty about whether it was a dangerous risk to one or another environmental facet.

When I visited Eddie Brewer in Andrews, Texas while waiting for the VA to try figuring out what manner of health problems I’d given myself I found he’d educated himself about it.  A neighbor was drilling a number of wells so’s to sell water to drilling companies for use in fracking.  And Eddie was concerned about depletion of his household water well.

It was through Eddie I first became fundamentally acquainted with what’s involved.  And with him I watched a number of television documentaries on the subject of fracking and groundwater contamination.  I didn’t come away with a deep understanding of the risks, and I doubt anyone actually can lay claim to a thorough understanding of those.  But at least I was able to comprehend the basics.

And gradually became cognizant of how much BS was coming from the mouths of people who didn’t understand those basics in the form of almost religious opinion, either for, or against fracking.

So, even though I don’t have a good reason for doing so beyond curiosity, I recently decided to devote some time to learning about it.  Just enough to decide whether I’d have an opinion if I were smarter and better informed than I am.  I started by watching two movies currently streaming on Netflix:  Gasland, and FrackNation.  What would appear at first glance to be a way of getting both sides of the viewpoints.

Unfortunately, Gasland turns out to be a fraud.  Which doesn’t mean a strong stand opposing fracking mightn’t be valid.  All it means is that Gasland was a deliberate nest of lies and misrepresentations intended to propagandize unfavorably about fracking.

However, here are some other videos giving both sides of the subject.  I’ve watched them carefully and learned a lot.  But I still can’t figure out whether I have an opinion.  Or, if I have an opinion, what it might be.  I’ve graduated from not having an opinion out of total ignorance, to not having an opinion knowing a good bit more, and being more acutely aware of how much a person with an opinion ought to know.  Which most of us don’t.

FrackNation vs Gasland

The Director of ‘FrackNation’ Fights Back!

Dr. Ingraffea Facts on Fracking

FrackNation the documentary that exposes Joshua Fox as a liar?

WARNING Fracking An Inconvenient Truth Watch Learn about Fracking Shale Gas what they dont say

If you watch it all and discover yourself to be without an opinion, I’d guess you’ve learned a great deal more than you knew beforehand.

Old Jules

 

2 Comments

Posted in 2014, America

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Maybe to some it was a terrible tragedy. To others likely it was a blessing

Posted on July 18, 2014 by | 4 comments

Hi readers.  Wil pointed out in a comment that the guy in the White House mightn’t have known yet whether a plane went down when he made his might be a terrible tragedy statement.  I’ve been re-thinking the post and I hope Wil is wrong.

Maybe Wossname, the guy in the White House was demonstrating an uncharacteristic, Zen-like wisdom.  Maybe he was trying to exert some of the world leadership thing presidents are occasionally accused of, albeit wrongly accused.

Fact is, that airplane actually mightn’t be a terrible tragedy because someone the CIA or such had on a list of suspects of being terrorists.  In which case everyone else on the airplane was just part of the price of fighting terrorism.  Maybe the prez didn’t want to stick his foot in his mouth and be forever harangued about it until all the authorities went over the passenger list carefully.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good, any way you cut it.  While it’s tempting to think Wossname wanted to make certain someone he’d personally like to see dead was on the plane, or that someone he had to make a public display NOT being glad as hell, the crash was certainly a secret blessing to some peoople.

People can accurately be described as a pain in the ass to other people.  All of us.  If one of the passengers was the guy next door to someone and had a dog that barked all night, he neighbor would consider the prez a fool, or a liar if Wossname proclaimed it a terrible tragedy.  And so on 295 times.  Plus or minus the airline crew.  Lots of people collecting flight insurance, losing troublesome mothers-in-law, competing people on the career trail, it all reduces the equation when attempting to determine whether there was a whiff of good in the ill wind.

And Wossname!, the guy in the White House, might have recognized this!

Maybe.

In any case, we might as well be ecstatic because now we can make up our own minds whether anyone on the airplane needed killing more than the rest of the people aboard needed to keep living.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2014, America

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Community ‘Personalities’

Posted on July 2, 2014 by | 11 comments

Hi readers.  This town where Jeanne lives and I currently reside on her couch gave me a strange arrangement of ponderings yesterday.  I knew my physical therapy at the hospital will be fading in July.  By coincidence the Olathe Community Center is opening, and I’d heard it would include exercise machines, etc.

By golly I don’t ignore coincidence.  Figured I could buzz over there three times a week as long as I’m here, work out, maybe connect with local seniors to play some chess, chew the fat, exchange low sodium recipes.  Old guys did those things on the Courthouse lawn when I was a kid, playing dominoes and spitting tobacco.  A piece of getting old.

To my surprise, that new Olathe Community Center is a bastion of healthiness, classes on Zombi or somesuch dancing, Yoga, big TV screens people can watch while stationary biking.  A room full of water capable of being peed into from everywhere within 100 yards any direction.  Maybe a hundred walking machines, weight machines, and combinations of all three.

And for kids?  Wow.  Two story water slide indoors with signs saying they don’t want heart patients [me] using it.  Piss on them.  I’ll use that thing if I want to.

Because in that entire enormous structure there is not one, not one single item specifically intended to be used by the elderly.  Not one ping-pong table, for that matter, to allow fast action small area activities, either.

I’d been casually searching for some while for a Senior Citizen Center in Olathe.  There ain’t one, even though the senior population here’s quite large.  Closed down a couple of years ago when the city sold the building, never reopened somewhere else.

Fairly strange.  A rich, rich, how you say, affluent community here with a large area of old, low-income houses in the older part of town inhabited by lower middle class non-upwardly mobile working-class scum and senior citizens.  And that new community center forgot they exist.

Hell, every tiny community everywhere has a Senior Citizen Center, or failing that, a pantheon of senior activities incorporated into the local community center.  Andrews, Texas, out on the high plains desert has a big one.  Half deserted towns all over Texas and New Mexico dying of thirst and hunger have one thing left functioning:  Senior Citizen Centers.

And this beautiful old farming community that’s become the home of thousands of high-income soccer and tennis playing SUV driving tofu eating Kansas Citians during the past 20 to 30 years has the singular distinction of having nothing of the sort.

Jeanne’s jobs are over in the neighborhood of Lenexa. Another grown-over KC bedroom community.  And when she got tired of my berating Olathe regarding the new Community Center and the implied attitude toward senior citizens she took me over there.  They’ve got a center about the size of one in Zuni, New Mexico, or Andrews, Texas.  About the size of each of the three in Kerrville, Texas.

Fine people over there in Lenexa.  We got there around noon, just looking around.  Maybe fifty people hanging around in there chewing the fat.  A lady running the place came up, introduced herself, showed us around.  Full of enthusiasm, got more programs going on than you could shake a stick at.  Even computers, computer instruction.

I asked about chess.  “We don’t have a chess program, but we can!  You can be the first one to get it started!”  Turns out they have a couple of exercise machines, too.  ping-pong table’s next door at the ‘regular people [read upwardly mobile SUV driving, tofu eating] living in Lenexa. 

Well, they ain’t new, and they ain’t as close as the brand spanking new shiny Olathe Community Center full of water sports and rosy-cheeked mamas with healthy white kids screaming their heads off.  But if I’m around here a while and decide to do anything senior citizen-wise, I have a feeling I’ll either try out Lenexa or go another few miles out and do it in a place where they still have real people driving 15-year-old pickups.

If such places still exist. 

Might even swing over into Missouri, where they remember what Jayhawk meant back when it actually meant something.  Lots of little towns over that way still no further than this from the VA Medical Center.  I’m betting they have senior citizen centers, too.

Not to say it’s a big item for me.  I honestly don’t like senior citizens all that much.  Too opinionated, though not as bad as younger people.  But old folks tend to be fairly obnoxious, on the whole.  I don’t blame Olathe Parks and Recreation Department for trying to forget they exist.  Old bastards need to check in at the Emergency Room down at the City Morgue.

 Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2014, America, Senior Citizens

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Something’s happening here but don’t let it fool you.

Posted on June 11, 2014 by | 8 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University is pissed. He was part of the International Entrepreneurial Academians for Climate Change report in 2007 that stuck all the participants up on pederastals by being awarded a Nobel.

Then, damned the climate did change  but differently than they all said it would. Newspapers calling it a “Global Warming pause“, and similarly dangerous misinterpretations of Mann’s and his brothers in academic reputation-sharers predictions.  And Mann doesn’t want anyone thinking he and his buds who have high stakes in selling man-made climate change are off the mark, just because they were somewhat wrong.

Scientific American, April 2014, Mann penned an article, “False Hope” trying to explain why the fact the debatable temperatures didn’t rise as much as expected doesn’t mean “Ohhhh shit the sky is NOT falling.”

Mann says it’s still falling, but falling in slower motion so’s a person standing underneath it is liable to think it’s surprisingly cool this spring, amazingly cold this past winter.   And has actually been something of a Communist for the past 10 years for reasons Mann can’t explain scientifically.  Or, I should say, support with scientific observation and evidence.

Which doesn’t stand in the way of his filling his Scientific American piece with conjectures, speculations and possible excuses the planet might have for failing to dance to the tango Mann and the Nobel Club hummed in 2007.

 Not to suggest Mann and the other partisans for sky is fallingism are wrong.  They might be right.  They surely might be right.  Even though their reasons for being right might be based on all manner of false premises.

Fact is, they bet on a horse and even though it ain’t running ahead of the others at the moment, it still might win, place or show.  Because it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with what Mann thinks, or his academic entrepreneurial associates think.  Or you think, or I think.

That planet and the weather is run by bigger minds than mine, yours, or Distinguished Professor Mann’s.  It’s run by the Coincidence Coordinators.  They love it when people are awarded Nobel Peace Prizes for shit that if it goes differently than they conjectured will have their reputations destroyed.

Same as they love putting aces-high full houses across the table from one-in-a-lifetime straight flushes. 

People believe in God on a lot less evidence than the Coincidence Coordinators provide them through direct evidence everyday of their lives to encourage believing in them.  But God is more of an abstraction, whereas the Coincidence Coordinators are the real item, a part of our everyday lives.

Here’s hoping for the sake of Distinguished Professor Mann and his fellow non-believers in God and the Coincidence Coordinators, both equally, that the sky goes ahead and falls in time to save their reputations.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2014, Adventure, America, Science

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Radiation ain’t all that bad

Posted on March 31, 2014 by | 4 comments

sunflower asbestosHi readers.

I saw a movie on Netflix named, Pandora’s Promise.  It was interviews with all manner of people who used to be against nuclear power plants, but changed their minds.  ‘Good’ environmentalists, mostly.

Their logic is that they were duped by other ‘Bad’ environmentalists into thinking nuclear power plants were bad and dangerous, but that not all that many people died from Chernobyl, and not all that many are dying from Fukushima.  And that most of the time nukes are cleaner than coal and don’t kill as many people.

These ‘Good’ Environmentalists understand that without nuclear power they can’t do anything about climate change, which of course, they haven’t been duped by Bad Environmentalists about.  All that stuff about health consequences of radiation exposure was BS.  Bad Science.  Whereas, everything about climate change is GOOD science.  “How dare they,” one pro-nuclear environmentalist shouts of climate change ‘deniers’, “Deny SCIENCE?  This isn’t the DARK ages.”

Convincing movie.  Leads me to think we were all duped a lot earlier than that, back when the USSR was making such a nuisance of itself.  We could have bombed those people back to the stone age if we’d never had our heads confused about fallout shelters, genetic drift, mutants, nuclear winter and all the rest.  Hell, if someone had told us the only thing we had to worry about was the blast, EMP, shockwaves rolling around knocking things down, firestorms, hell, I think we’re all big enough we could have handled that.

What Fukushima actually proves is they’re spending way too much money building safety features into those nuclear power plants.  Those they had didn’t help, and when the whole thing went south it just hasn’t been all that bad.

Plus there are a lot of people alive today who wouldn’t be if we hadn’t let ourselves be duped into believing getting nuked would be a bad thing because of radioactive fallout.

It’s a heartbreaker.

Old Jules

 

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Science, Senior Citizens

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