Category: Activism

We’re All Aphids

Think about plankton – not Plankton, Mr. Krab’s Spongebob nemesis – the real stuff, adrift out there in the wide, wide, wide, wide sea. Plankton is a plant that converts sunlight and nutrients or other, creepier stuff, into energy that it converts to matter to become, well, plankton.

So, what IS plankton, in the grand scheme of things (the GSOT)? Why, the building block upon which most ocean life feeds. Big fish eat little fish that eat little fish that feed on plankton.

Now, consider the lowly aphid. I just put a post about aphids on my TangleWicket website, so I’ve been thinking about ’em.

Aphids eat plants, just like those things that feed on plankton, and everybody else feeds on them. Ants actually herd aphids because they produce a gel called honey dew that is a major treat over in the ant hill.

There are tons of bugs that eat aphids – beyond your ladybugs, you got your lacewing larvae and parasitic wasps just for starters. They’re pretty low on the food chain.

It’s okay, because aphids give live birth. To females. No need for male sperm. One aphid can lay up to 80 female aphids during its 25-day lifetime. And they can give birth to a dozen of ’em a day. A day, Louie, a day. Boo-boo-boo-boop look, it’s a whole population!

So, here we are talking about bugs and plankton, and somehow it comes back to you and me, doesn’t it?

In the GSOT, you and I are just consumers of stuff that gets produced, right? We have our preferences, but we don’t have control.

We’re like aphids on the leaf of life, consuming what we assume to be important until we’re one day gobbled up by some entity. We all kick off eventually, right? Go to the Big Whatever – what happens next is anyone’s guess.

While we wait for that eventuality, our minds and wallets are continuously picked and prodded by the world around us – by the world we’ve put around us.

I’ve been wrestling all day with AI – from the confusion of the AI engine I’ve been using to build my websites to the ludicrously cheerful female voice taking my order at Taco Bell to the digital assistant at the CVS to the automated AI job interviewer. I feel picked at, prodded, and reduced to answering human yes/no questions to a machine that, for all its clever words and smarmy voices, still only understands yes/no. Binary switches – maybe a billion of ’em in a row, but binary none the less.

Hmmm, I’m not sure I can help you with that. Please press 1 to try again.

We are gobbled up by the massive, monstrously voracious world around us. Maybe not physically, but our attention, our time, our thoughts.

Because, my friend, you and I? We are merely aphids.

Cooler Heads

Following up on yesterday’s fearful diatribe, let’s us think for a minute, you and me.

IF the aliens use this hydrogen technology for fuel, they can’t  be using a lot of seawater. All they use is a single hydrogen proton at a time. Seriously, how much water do they need, when, like, a teaspoon will get ’em from here back to the planet Zemnar, or wherever they live?

I mean, with global warming, the sea level is actually rising. That means they must know there’s plenty to go around.

If they were all that afraid of us, we’d be zapped back to the stone age already. That we’re not means we’re more of a sideshow than a threat.

The big WHEN of our cracking the hydrogen proton puzzle is decades away, and is still a pretty big IF.

And all of it is just theory in the first place.

So, until they land on somebody’s front lawn and say “yes, we’re using a proton-fission engine to create spacetime bubbles around our ships while we harvest droplets of your seawater for fuel and if you interfere with us we’ll zap you into non-existence,” I don’t think there’s all that much to be afraid of.

OMG, what if they land on MY lawn?!? I’ve got to go mow it right now!!!

I Have No Crackers

You know me, right? I like funny stuff, and writerly stories and stuff like that, right? Well, I just had the crackers scared right out of me. Right out.

I just finished reading Luis Elizondo’s book Imminent, you see.

It’s about UFOs, although they are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. They changed the name because our Navy ships have reported seeing vast, glowing orbs beneath the bubbling waves. And because of the Roswell crashed ship (no longer flying).

This author is the former top CIA guy who ran the UAP program for the Department of Defense and has worked closely with guys like General Jim Mattis and Senator Harry Reid. He’s legit.

He’s now gone public because he believes UAP are an IMMINENT THREAT not just to the country, but to humanity itself.

Because. They. Are. Real.

That’s pretty creepy, but here’s what scared the crackers out of me:

We’ve all heard about UFOs darting this way and that, super fast but usually silent. If you’ve seen one, and I have, you ask yourself how could they do that?

Well, Elizondo’s scientific team figured out that alien spacecraft have an energy source so profound that it warps spacetime. They travel through our atmosphere in a spacetime “bubble,” separate from our own atmosphere, yet passing through it. The bubble warps spacetime, allowing them to dart and dash around us and travel vast, galactic-sized distances in the blink of an eye.

The only way to generate so much energy that we know of is to split the proton of a hydrogen atom – we split the atom itself to make hydrogen bombs. Splitting the proton inside the atom releases way more energy. It works out in Einsteinian physics. (In a timely aside, I was reading about our own experiments with that just last week.)

So, these spacecraft probably run on hydrogen.

That’s why they’re here: our vast oceans are huge hydrogen reservoirs.

So it’s not about us, and never has been. We’re a convenient gas station. They’ve only ever been interested in our water.

Except that the UAP have frequently been seen hovering around our nuclear facilities.

Which means that now it is about us, because we’re starting to dabble with those super-high levels of energy ourselves. When we split the hydrogen proton, we’ll be a competitor for their fuel supply.

Elizondo’s team reasons that this is why aliens have been abducting humans – to learn our physiology. It explains the crop circles and the mutilated cows – to figure out what we eat.

He tells very scary stories of UAP starting and stopping our nuclear missiles – shutting down banks of silos, and actually launching a rocket, only to shut if off the last second before it left the silo. And shadowing our aircraft carriers and charging our aircraft. All to figure out and test our military capability.

They don’t want to invade us because they don’t care about us.

They’re just learning how to wipe us out because we’ll be a competitor. An annoyance.

If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, there is one more little data point: we have utterly no defense against them.

Now, Elizondo is a security guy with 22 years in the Army and CIA. He’s got that kill-or-be-killed mindset, and that’s why he sees them as a threat. But he makes it clear that we are no longer the dominant species on this planet, and probably haven’t been for a long, long time.

Now, maybe the aliens will welcome us into their spacefaring community. Maybe it’s not dire. I keep thinking that, like the Europeans first visiting the New World, there are different nationalities, perhaps races of UAP. In that case, maybe they won’t act in concert to eliminate us.

But we have no value to them. We’re like gnats, except when we start dabbling in that level of power. Then we’ll be an annoyance. Pests.

It makes me very sad to think that this could be our fate, that you and I could somehow be zapped out of existence, rather in the blink of an eye, I would hope, over reasons we’ll never quite understand.

Normally I’d make a closing joke, but, honestly, I don’t know what to think.

Read the book – Imminent, by Luis Elizondo – and see what you think.

Thanks for staying with me all these years!

Politic: Tariffs Explained

I promised myself I would keep my mouth tightly sealed throughout this election season. But then Barack Obama interrupted my YouTube music program and told me I need to do something.

Well, here I am.

Here’s an example of how a tariff works. I’m pretty certain they all work in this fashion. I’ve been mentally explaining this to my Trump-flag waving neighbors:

For $10, I just bought a nifty little flashlight from Lowe’s. It’s LED and has batteries and three modes and is really nice.

It’s made in China.

We’re using round, simplified numbers for the sake of example.

I paid $10 for it, but Lowe’s, in order to pay their lease and their employees and their insurance, only paid $5 for it.

They bought it for $5 from a distributor who provides this kind of product to big retail chains. In order to pay his lease and his employees and his insurance, he marked it up to $5 from the $2.50 he paid for it.

He paid $2.50 to the importer, who… employees, insurance, etc., marked it up from the $1.25 he paid to the Chinese manufacturer.

Now, suddenly, there’s a 100% tariff on all goods coming from China.

The importer has to pay $1.25 to the Chinese manufacturer, and another $1.25 to the US government.

He can’t pay his employees or his lease or his insurance if he doesn’t raise his price, so he passes the increase on to the distributor. Instead of $2.50, the price now has to be $5.

The distributor has lost all of his profit on the flashlight at $5, and now must sell it for $10 to Lowe’s.

Lowe’s is big, big, but they can’t sell a product at cost or they’ll go out of business.

Now, when I go to buy another flashlight, son of a biscuit, it’s $17.50! Seems like just last month it was only $10!

At that price, it’s not such a good deal. Maybe I don’t want a new flashlight.

So, I don’t buy the flashlight – almost nobody does. Lowe’s actually stops selling them.

The distributor takes a huge financial hit on one of his biggest money-makers, and has to lay off half of his employees.

The importer goes out of business altogether because nobody in the US is buying what he imports. He lays off all of his employees.

Over time, the Chinese manufacturer will see that they are selling fewer flashlights to the US market, and will either make them more cheaply, or quit making them altogether.

At that point, the Chinese economy is hurt by the tariff.

Until that happens, it’s you and me paying the price of the tariff. And Lowe’s, and the distributor, and the importer.

A tariff is a tool, but it’s not a good concept of a plan for our economy. It hurts our country first.

That’s why I’m urging you, whether you’re red, purple, blue, or of no color whatsoever, to vote for Harris/Walz. Here’s a link to their website.

Choose freedom.

End of commercial.

Mursey, Mursey Me

We’re trendsetters, you and I. We’re writers, creators, pavers of the road forward. We gotta try stuff out and see if it works.

Take, for instance, the murse. The man purse. The European man-bag. Like the line from Madagascar 2: carry your stuff and still look tough.

Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe carried purses. So did the Three Musketeers. They were all fashionable gentlemen of their day.

I work with a bunch of engineers – eggheads the lot of ’em. Not one, zero, not even a percent of one, would ever be caught DEAD with a single-strap backpack. Because it’s a cross-body bag, like ladies wear. Eeeew, icky. Lookit me, I’m a girl!

That’s the mentality that keeps society stalled. The kind of thinking that drives us backwards.

But we’re writers, you and I. Our job is to move the world forward. We can’t leave it to the homophobic eggheads to do it.

In truth, it’s the fold-phone from Samsung that has driven me to the murse. I absolutely love the phone – in fact, I’m writing this post with it.

But it’s heavy – like two cellphones glued together! So heavy that my pants fall down when it’s in the pocket. So I have to carry it.

But the murse carries the phone, and my wallet, and my keys, and some gum, and a couple Granola bars… you know, critical stuff.

I got it from Amazon at a net cost after discounts of about $8. So, for the price of a Happy Meal, I get to be fashion-forward!

I took it with us on our trip up to the trendy beach town of Cambria. While my wife and daughter went tidepooling, the dogs and I sat down and enjoyed a cookie, pulled from the back pocket of my handy-dandy, Uber useful murse!

Icky indeed…

I Don’t Like the Beach

My novels, well one of the ones I’ve published and two that I’m working on, are about ships on the deep blue sea. But those ships are in the sea, not down at the beach.

Continue reading “I Don’t Like the Beach”