Bill's Notes

The New York Times finally gets around to discovering a big hidden problem in blogging -- breakups. And in some cases, divorces. Here's the story.

Here's the blog cited in the article. (NSFW -- she posts herself nude on the Net -- and perhaps she should rethink that. At least softer lighting.)

Just one more way technology makes our lives so much richer :)

Everyone has some internal tension -- we have doubts about our thoughts, questions whether we've gotten things right, stuff we speculate about. Then there's stuff we want to say, but don't want to publicize to potentially the whole world via the Internet.

Over the past four years, I have accumulated 185 unpublished posts that exist on this blogging interface. At this point, that counts as a counter-blog, the blog-behind-the-blog.

Does anyone else have a counter-blog?

Even in the blinding sunshine of today, where spring has finally, most definitely sprung, I find my thoughts returning to Africa. The river was the Ogooue, and I only traveled upriver for about four hours near Lambarene, home of Albert Schweitzer's hospital, but I find myself thinking about it, briefly — another existence. And yes, we saw hippos:

Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an inpenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.

The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands, you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself cut off forever from everything known once - somewhere far away - in another existence perhaps. There were movements when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not had a moment to spare to yourself; but it came back in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

Harry recently read a book and reviewed it on his blog.

Here is the response (with some additions) that I left.

*****

I've mentioned before, in fact frequently, that if AGW is true, we are FUBAR unless nature has a self-regulating climate mechanism to compensate for our behavior.

To combat AGW would require a level of cooperation among peoples never before seen, and that is frankly, flies in the face of everything we know about the human race.

Mankind has never gotten buy in from everyone on the planet to do anything that massive. We've eradicated a few diseases, yes, and we've made progress in many areas.

But I can't imagine MANKIND disowning FIRE. And we'd have to get damned close to that to combat AGW. Even if you shut down all the cars and factories, we'd still have seven billion cold, hungry, naked monkeys needing to burn things to keep warm and cook their food. So you'd have massive deforestation, plenty of fire and smoke, and CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere.

If AGW is true, then that is our destiny, short of a natural compensation or massive government interventions (which realistically, would require totalitarianism, tyranny and genocide).

Our species dies on the AGW hill if AGW is true, and takes a lot more species with us. On the other hand, it would be a good time to be a tropical fish.

Unless ... and this is a big unless ... unless we find a way to make energy out of something else that doesn't produce greenhouse gases. Geothermal is our best long-term prospect — as I've said before, the earth is a giant fireball with a thin layer of crust that's mostly made of water. It's practically a steam engine already. But there's also solar, wind, nuclear, and who knows what's beyond the horizon.

Getting to that point fast enough is the only hope we have in mankind's control (if AGW is true). That will require an advanced, fossil-fueled technological economy that will allow those inventions to come to pass.

Because we cannot, knowing our human history, sacrifice our way out of it. We might and probably will invent our way out of it. If AGW is true.

And chances are, given man's natural propensity for inventing stuff and trying to find/create cheap energy, technological solutions fall entirely within what we know about mankind. We are clever monkeys. We're going to do it anyway.

Thus, don't despair. There is only despair if you see mankind trying to do what he cannot do by his nature, that is, get along with everyone. However, there is great hope if mankind does what he's always done — make tools.

Yes, we monkeys are slow, weak, poorly balanced, possess poor hearing, olfactory nerves and eyesight, and have little in the way of claws or teeth. We are also contentious, contrary, rebellious, proud and unforgiving.

But we have big brains, language, opposable thumbs, and natural curiosity. And we are this world's masters of fire. Don't bet against us.

Golly, after the argument made for same-sex "marriage" removed a key limit on eligibility for marriage, we couldn't see this one coming.

Funny thing is some people will be so hardened by pragmatism and relativism they won't be able to argue against this. After all, if you can't have the "yuck" factor for sodomites, you can't really have it for relatives, either.

BTW, the costs of same-sex marriage and insistence on the normalization of homosexuality have already been high.

Letters-to-the-editor writers, bloggers and blog-commenters sued, hauled before "Human Rights" commissions, fined, and in some cases, enjoined from writing their opinions, in Canada.

A New Mexico photographer forced to pay $6,600 in legal fees to a lesbian couple after she turned down their offer to photograph their "wedding."

The Catholic Church having to get out of the adoption business in Massachusetts.

Justices of the Peace fired in Massachusetts because they disagreed with the state supreme court decision removing the concept of gender from marriage.

Not to mention The Episcopal Church's tossing out orthodox bishops and priests so they justify their sodomite bishop in NH.

And so the cultural battle continues.

For my part, I wasn't insulted. Thought this was pretty funny.

The problem with reading inside-baseball stories about federal governance is it makes you feel both angry and powerless. There is nothing I can do personally about the fact that the senate isn't filling judicial vacancies. Nothing.

So why is the Wall Street Journal telling me this?

A lot of pundits, frankly, aren't really talking to us. Oh sure, we're supposed to buy their newspapers, but really, they want to use us to influence others.

Wall Street Journal: Just leave me alone.

You could grep (or google, for you GUI types) the memories in your brain?

Obviously.

Right now I'm trying to remember who said this one thing to me, and it's just like 1/100 of a memory. I remember the context, but I don't remember where I was or who I was with. Granted, it occurred between 1980-88, so there might be a reason ...

In honor of Jim's feedback, I've offered the following ... from the 70s. Back in college, "Jim" knew all the words to this song:



I do not apologize for posting this ridiculously campy song. Call it a guilty pleasure.