Francis Mont's Blog, page 8

Slapstick in the White House

I have heard the current White House described as a Soap Opera before. It's gone way beyond that: now it has acquired the dimensions of slapstick comedy.

What intrigues me most is how utterly ridiculous statements by political leaders are discussed, in a serious, almost academic manner, as if it warranted any consideration.

It's almost like adults trying to philosophize about schoolyard juveniles teasing and taunting each other. The implication, not at all accidental, I'm sure, is that as long as one keeps spewing out words, one is dealing with a problem.

It almost doesn't matter what words, as long as the lips are moving, one is seen (and heard) dealing with it. Only a blind man can fail to see that the emperor has no clothes, but apparently we all have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It reminds me of a joke I heard a while ago: A man arrives home unexpectedly and finds his wife in bed with another man. When he confronts her, she asks indignantly: "do you believe me, or your eyes?"

Maybe it's time for the few adults still around to start believing their eyes.

Lesson from Hummingbirds

There is a website I visit every day, it’s called “The Astronomy Picture of the Day”. See at
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

The photos displayed there sure put thing in the proper perspective for a perceptive mind.

We are a species, on the evolutionary scale, subject to the causes-and-effects chain of our evolutionary history. We can’t help being aggressive, destructive, dominating, in true spirit of the fight for survival, not realizing that our technology now would enable us to rise above all that and live in a harmonious, cooperative, productive community.

It’s like the old cartoons when Wiley Cayote walks off the cliff and is still walking on thin air, not aware that nothing is supporting him any more. We are still doing the same old routine of fighting, when we lose way more during the fight than what we could gain by cooperating.

I have two hummingbirds doing the exact same thing over the feeder we put out for them. They fight over it every day, even though there are two feeders, one for each, and they end up using mega calories in competition, when they could just coexist in harmony to the benefit of both.

Who can deny evolution in view of this marvelously human behaviour?

Trump anxiety disorder

"In a divided U.S., therapists treating anxiety are hearing the same name over and over: Donald Trump."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-an...

I often tried to imagine how my parents must have felt when they heard, in the nineteen thirties, Hitler frothing at the mouth, spewing out all the irrational gibberish that he was so famous for.

Now I know how they must have felt.

Don't take me wrong, I don't equate the two men, they are as different as an insane mass murderer (Hitler) and a juvenile, attention junkie (Trump) can be. But they had one thing in common.

For both of them facts did not matter, logic did not matter, reason, trust, civility did not matter. They were equally good at stating bare face lies, even when confronted with undeniable evidence. Anything contradicting their irrational haranguing was 'fake news'.

During the US election campaign, before Trump was even nominated, I said: this is tipping point. If he gets elected, then all bets are off, we are on a slippery slide back to the worst decades of uncontrolled Capitalism and the new age of the Robber Barons.

I was right, it's happening, now, as I'm typing these lines.

Vision & Fair Trade - 2 poems

Vision

Adjusting the zoom
of my imagination
I can observe anything I like:
any time, anywhere,
there’s no limit,
not even the sky.

I can watch galaxies collide,
black holes sucking in light,
colourful nebula spinning on its axis,
limitless space: sterile beauty,
peaceful, reverent,
like an abandoned Cathedral.

I notice a blue-white planet
orbiting a star
and wonder how small,
how fragile it looks
out this far.

As I get closer
I fall through the clouds
and fly over the landscape below.
I drink in the colours:
oceans, trees, grass,
golden grain of endless prairies;
pink-gray granite mountains
clawing at the sky;
millions of bluish-white sparks
as I cross from azure day
to indigo night.

One more notch
and I’m close enough to
see the cities, people,
roads, cars, canals,
factory chimneys belching at the sky;
battlefields with white crosses;
bronze statues of generals
who planted them;
magnificent mansions
side by side with the slums,
tin-roof houses,
built of discarded packing crates;
dark-skinned children
scavenging on the dumps;
well-bred youngsters
on the golf-course
learning new intricacies
of self-absorbed,
pitiless lives.

As I fly on,
the landscape changes again,
I’m skimming the canopy
of an old-growth jungle
with its bustling life:
monkeys leaping through space,
rainbow parrots dazzling my eyes,
a slithering anaconda hugging a branch,
armored alligators floating like logs
on a slow-moving river,
winding its way to where it must -
This picture, too, has death, fear, pain
but still, it is clean, balanced,
does not fill me with a sense of doom,
impending disaster.

One more notch, and
I am watching a colony of termites
like the inside of a Swiss watch
when it was an art
to make things work flawlessly,
with relentless precision
like the passage of time.
Perfect order,
machine-tooled by billions of years of evolution
separating transient from everlasting
until it hit upon the idea
of subjecting the parts to the whole…

…It feels so right that
I can’t help wondering
what the world would be like
if God had stopped
on the fifth day:

…then,
His creation would be perfect.

it would be Art.

...................

Fair Trade

In wars
we trade with the enemy:
left arm for a right eye,
burnt face for a kidney,
orphans for orphans,…
it’s not always a fair trade
but the one who was counting
is already dead.

It’s all so practical,
supply lines for
our tools:
shells, bullets,
gas for our trucks, tanks,
and our flame throwers too...
paper clips, pencils, official forms
that need to be filled in
with the names of the dead.

Surgeons operate
on conveyor belt
of young people,
so full of blood…
and we don’t always have
the right kind
to fill them up,
help them to kill
more boys,
on the wrong side,
heroic dead.

Our pilots drop bombs
on your village,
in exchange for the same...
our wives will weep for us,
answered by the sobbing
of your loved ones,
back where you have been
dragged from, or duped,
to come here,
to be crippled or dead.

When it’s all over
with nothing accomplished,
our leaders will make
noble speeches
while wreaths will be hung
over crosses in neat rows
in white forests,
flags draped over caskets,
and the heroic wool
over stupid, stupid, gullible minds,
lamenting the fate
of the glorious dead.

Lesson from the Thailand cave rescue.

It’s so easy to be seduced by one extreme or another.

Extremes make life simple and manageable. Reality is never simple and barely manageable. Complexity is part of reality and the best a scientist can do is make approximations. Analyze long term trends, estimate the strength of all major forces affecting the outcome and make predictions based on the calculated probability of different scenarios playing out. And the scientist is still only guessing. Remember Chaos Theory that documents the unexpected effect of a butterfly’s wings flapping in the Amazon jungle in Brazil?

I have been making blog posts that may appear one-sided, even extreme, about all the bad things that have been happening lately in the world. And then the Thai cave rescue event came to light and mesmerized us all with human compassion, courage and intelligent problem solving at its best.

Does that invalidate everything I had written before?

Sadly, not at all.

What I wrote in the first paragraph still holds.
“About 29,000 children under the age of five – 21 each minute – die every day in the world, mainly from preventable causes.”

During the two weeks of the rescue of those trapped boys, roughly half a million children perished due to the general lack of compassion and intelligent problem solving on this planet.

Were they also “Children of the World” as enthusiastic reporters called the 12 rescued kids in Thailand?

I know, this blog is a cold shower on our smug self-congratulation over a really spectacular achievement. However, it was a brief battle in the war of survival of our species that we are losing. I am still a misanthrope.

Why I am a misanthrope.

I have been calling myself a misanthrope for years. It’s not entirely true because I don’t hate people, I actually love quite a few. My problem is not with individuals, although there are a few I could live without. But most people I have known in my long life are rather nice and decent human beings.

That leads me to the other thing I have been saying for years: there are a hell of a lot more decent, nice people than smart ones. I have been watching people voting against their own self-interest, year after year, unaware of the tragedy and the irony.

The problem is endemic in the human species. We have two faculties to employ in solving problems: The intellectual and the emotional and the emotional wins every time. This gives the opportunity to the power-mad and insatiably greedy amongst us to emotionally manipulate people so they would fight those who are trying to help them.

Problem solving is a strictly logical and rational process that scientists are very familiar with. You define your terms, identify facts and cause-and-effect relationships, identify your objectives, identify the different options open for achieving these objectives and then select an action plan to execute the option with the highest probability of success.

Can you see this process even remotely followed in public life?

Of course you can’t because this doesn’t exist. What you see is blatant distortion of facts, transparent emotional manipulation, appealing to the lowest level of primal emotions of fear, hate, greed. And it works every time.

That’s why I think it is hopeless, that’s why I have given up on the human species. We are an irrational species and irrationality will lose at the end. The planet and the universe doesn’t care.

Lessons from Eeyore

Now I know how decent AND intelligent Austrians must have felt before March 12, 1938, the day of the Anschluss. Most had not believed that the day would ever come, they just shook their heads in disbelief when they heard Hitler frothing at the mouth, demanding more and more concessions from them. An unforgettable line from Winnie The Pooh is uttered by Eeyoye: “They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you're having them.” Eeeyore is one of the wisest of the characters in the book. Another perfect quote can be applied to the supporters of evil dictators: “No brain at all, some of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake". One might be tempted to say that wheeling Hitler out for a comparison is overblown. That’s what I would have thought too, before I read about children torn out of their helpless parents’ arms and thrown into cages, as bargaining chips. If that level of human evil has been reached, then anything is possible. Decent AND intelligent Americans and fellow Canadians, I suggest you brace yourself. More is coming.

The tidal wave of populism

Most people I know
(or even just talk to on the net)
are mostly nice, most of the time.
They work hard, pay their bills,
kind to their neighbors, their pets, their kids,
they don't want to cause any harm.

But, when it comes to thoughts
on politics, religion, social organization,
they haven’t got a clue
beyond what’s poured on them by the media.
Most don’t know how to process information...
...it wasn’t a subject in their education.

It’s not their fault –
dark forces are lined up against us,
by those who don’t want us to know
how our lives on Earth could be simple and beautiful.

Oh, no, they want citizens confused and dutiful,
paying their taxes, rocking no boats,
propaganda rammed down their throats
so they can’t possibly form their own thoughts.

Those of us who know what’s going on
are helpless in helping the masses --
the victims will fight you tooth and nail,
that’s how tough the task is,
every effort that you make will fail.

After a while
you don’t even try --
who enjoys to fry
on the flames of ignorance?
Write your poetry that no one reads
hoping to plant a few desperate seeds.

Predictions

I am writing a new book, this time a novel, attempting to project existing social, political and technological trends to their logical conclusion. This is a science fiction story, happening at the end of the 21st century, describing a futuristic society in which computers and robots take care of ALL production and distribution and the population, while living in comfort and abundance, became aimless without a role in their own welfare. It raises the philosophical question of what human happiness depends on.

A small preface summarizes what had happened before. Here it comes.

Prologue

The 21st Century started badly for America and, indeed, for the whole world. The 9/11 attack threw that country into a rage it had not experienced since Pearl Harbor. It was a major shock to the national psyche. As John le Carre wrote soon after: “The United States of America has gone mad.” They had to hit back hard - first at Afghanistan, then Iraq and finally Iran. Failure to accomplish the objectives of these costly wars, coupled with overreaction and propaganda, led to the election of a most unconventional president. In his first year in office, he did more damage to the environment, to democracy and to social justice than any previous Republican had in two terms.

Meanwhile, weather conditions due to climate change continued to deteriorate at an accelerating pace. Killer hurricanes and tornadoes swept over the land with increasing frequency; forest fires and draughts burned entire states; the sea level rise and tsunamis drowned coastal cities. Due to these conditions building codes were changed to mandate the construction of reinforced structures that could withstand hurricane-strength winds. By the end of the century most citizens lived in such apartment buildings. Single family homes were not safe any more.

Then, international tensions reached a crisis. Fearing North Korea’s boast that its missiles were able to hit the US mainland, the American president ordered a pre-emptive nuclear strike. As predicted by most military experts, saturation bombing could not destroy all of North Korea’s weapons. From caves hidden deep in the mountains, the remaining Korean command launched a vengeful nuclear attack on South Korea, Guam and Japan. Hundreds of millions died and the Japanese and Korean industrial machinery was destroyed. The fallout poisoned and killed many millions more; it made huge areas in and around these countries unlivable for decades.

Horrified by what they had done, Americans tried to mitigate the damage. The president was impeached and delivered to the UN court to be tried for war crimes. The Democratic administration that replaced his government sponsored an international agreement to limit their arsenal to tactical nuclear weapons that were effective only on the battle field and would not cause wholesale destruction of cities. All nuclear capable countries accelerated research in the ‘pure fission’ weapons technology that did not require a fusion trigger - the cause of deadly fallout. The agreement was signed by all nuclear capable countries but never fully implemented.

While politically and environmentally the US declined, two segments of the economy flourished: automation and alternative power generation. Totally automated factories sprang up all over the land; artificial intelligence catapulted robotics into the realm of science fiction. Research integrating all areas - biology, medicine, and food processing - produced startling results. The first synthetic meat factories were soon followed by dozens in every city; the energy sector’s green technologies surpassed fossil fuel sources. In 2035, the first industrial scale fusion generator came on line, pouring cheap, practically unlimited power into the nation’s electrical grid. This overloaded the already fragile delivery systems, resulting in frequent breakdown, which prompted state governments to encourage decentralization. Local, independent generators gradually became the standard model.

With automation and corporate bankruptcies, unemployment reached levels never seen before: entire job categories, including white collar occupations, disappeared one after the other. Nobody was safe any more, even service industry professionals could become redundant from one day to the next. The federal government was forced to introduce guaranteed basic income for all citizens. That measure forestalled open revolt, but people were restless and angry: they demanded action that would put them back to work. No such action was feasible.

By 2050, food production was totally automated. Clean, efficient factories synthesized meat and large-scale hydroponic operations provided fruit and vegetables locally, eliminating the need for transport. Ranches, orchards and market gardens were abandoned; their erstwhile owners joined the migration of farm workers to the towns, swelling the stream of people forced out of coastal cities, overwhelming the smaller communities’ resources. To provide adequate housing for the influx, municipal governments contracted the building of residential low-rise complexes. This huge construction boom temporarily eased the unemployment pressure.

There were compensations for giving up the individual family home. The new buildings were computer controlled, maintained and serviced by efficient robots. Each apartment had a built-in entertainment center, with 3D holographic viewers, unlimited video games, communication stations to connect resident to the whole world and interactive educational programs for the children.

While these changes took place in the USA, the rest of the world did not fare as well. International conflicts, regional wars over resources and population displacement were wide-spread, due to deteriorating climate conditions and the increasing desperation of vulnerable countries. The disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas reduced the water flow in the Indus Basin, destroying agriculture in India and Pakistan and causing mass starvation. The long-standing dispute between the two countries over these shared rivers finally erupted in open war that quickly escalated into a nuclear exchange, with millions killed. China and Russia intervened on opposite sides and were soon themselves in direct military confrontation. Of the two giants, the American administration sided with China. That resulted in a nuclear exchange that devastated Russia and wiped out the major cities of the U. S. The population of both countries were reduced by half, their infrastructures were in ruins. Death rate from fallout by this time was minimized, because nuclear weapons technology had evolved to the point where most weapons were pure fusion bombs, triggered by matter-antimatter explosion.

Telecommunication systems, transportation networks, electrical grid were out of commission. No central governance or control was any longer possible, and there were no resources to replace them. Inconsequential cities and towns that had escaped were on their own. Since most of these already had their own energy generation and industrial capability, the world’s most powerful nation became a scattered collection of independent city states with populations of 20-100,000.

One such city was Oroville, California, population 24,000. The town was in desperate situation after the war. The shockwave from a nuclear detonation high above the Sacramento valley, due to interception by an anti-ballistic missile caused major damage. Most modern buildings, including the automated factories, power stations, newer apartment complexes escaped unscathed, but unreinforced buildings collapsed in ruin. Most of the valley was one big pile of rubble. Bridges were down or badly damaged, roads covered with thousands of tons of debris, many section washed away by flooding from breached levees.

The municipal government had been able to provide all necessary services to its citizens before the war but accommodating a fresh influx of survivors required Draconian measures in conservation and resource allocation. All remaining industries, businesses were expropriated, the citizens still living in individual houses were moved into reinforced apartment buildings. Currency supply ceased with the collapse of federal government: money lost its meaning. Increasingly, the oversight of material resources, of dependable production and smooth distribution, became operations too complex for human agency: in due course, administration was delegated to a central computer complex. Production, distribution and policing were all handled by specialized and humanoid robots. Government itself became obsolete.

I was more prophetic than I knew

When I wrote my novella: "Time Scope", during the recent American presidential election, I was inspired by what I saw on the news.

I never realized that making the character of the leading candidate a closet Nazi, how close I was getting to what was revealed in Charlottesville last weekend.

I wish I was wrong.