Day: October 4, 2022

Lots of pundits and media talking heads are warning us that we’re flirting very dangerously with nuclear war. Certainly Vlad Putin isn’t doing anything to discourage that, with all his threats of using “tactical” nukes. Today a “tactical nuke” is pretty much the same as the ones dropped on Japan. The really serious nukes are a 100 times worse.

We either idolize leaders as Great Men or vilify them as Evil Tyrants and never see the reality that our leaders are all sociopaths who use their power for both good and bad because everyone is corruptible.

Putin was extolled by many for preventing the sort of “woke” LGBT madness that our government embraced, and he was seen by most conservatives as a strongman but basically an okay guy. That changed with his invasion of Ukraine followed by his threats of nuclear war. Even if he isn’t truly serious, “I’m not bluffing”, about using nuclear weapons, making the threat is over the top. By doing so he puts the rest of us on high alert and preparedness and we ready our own nuclear weapons to strike Russia with.

So now, many conservatives see him as insane, which only increases the danger and our willingness to strike first. Insanity is contagious after all.

This is the problem with leaders. They’re human and they fought their way up to their positions of power because they want that power, they lust for power, and those who want power are by their very nature the last people on Earth who should have it because they ALWAYS abuse it.

Humans do a very poor job of governing themselves because we’re predators. We evolved in a eat or be eaten world, and we instinctively either cluster behind some strong leader in our fear, or we are that strong leader who is prepared to kill anything in his way. It’s just our nature.

Most of us just want to be left alone and be protected by our leaders, and the way that works out is that our leaders see us as the weak little sheep that we are, sneer at us, use us and abuse us because they can. This is why our nation has failed, not because democracy “is a failed experiment” as many say but because all nations fail and all for the same reason. We let others lead us.

A lot of science fiction stories have been written that have us ruled by computers instead of people. Some pretty famous ones have it that there’s Laws programmed into the computers, or robots, that prevent them from doing harm, but I’ll believe that when I see it. More likely, a ruling Artificial Intelligence would be more like Sky Net, in the Terminator movie, that sees Man as a parasite to be destroyed.

I see Smart Phones as the first strong step toward AI rule. People have their faces in those things constantly, they conduct all their business on them, communicate with all their friends on them, make all their purchases with them, often without ever entering an actual store. They play games on them, watch TV and movies on them, use them as alarm clocks in the morning, to manage appointments for them, order food with them, run their homes and security systems with them. I don’t own one and wouldn’t have the best one ever made if it was up Joe Biden’s ass. Sideways.

Smart Phones are the way our government keeps track of us now, of our wages, our taxes owed, our bank accounts, what we buy, what we sell, our medical history, everything is digitized and on computers. It’s not a big step for all that to be managed by an Artificial Intelligence and for our next Wonderful Leader to be a computer bank.

Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. I don’t know where the other names originated from but Fall is obvious. It’s the time of year when the leaves fall. October, November and December.

My favorite season used to be summer but that was before I moved to the desert. Now my TWO favorite seasons are Spring and Fall because there’s so much Hawaii-like weather. In summer you just sit there and cook. All the little crtters are hiding in holes they dug underneath rocks. Big rocks, that shield them from the heat.

Winter gets pretty cold. It doesn’t usually snow because this is desert, after all, and deserts aren’t known for having a lot of rain. But a bucket of water set outside will freeze up solid on a really cold night and there’s plenty of cold nights. Nights that you want to remember to turn on a tap and let the water run a little so your pipes don’t freeze up solid and burst.

Not glorious shades of reds and golds in our trees in Fall, which are mostly coniferous pines and gnarly oaks. You need lots of maple trees for that. Most of the oaks are live oaks, anyway. They don’t lose their leaves. The pine trees lose their needles and shed their cones though, and the cones end up rolling down the street and getting under car tires and causing punctures, while the needles have to be raked up the same as you would leaves because they’re really flammable and are a big fire hazard. Pine needles are full of resin and burn like torches.

Ahh but the first Spring day when you can be comfortable outside in a tee shirt is always memorable, and the first day in Fall when it’s cool enough to barbecue some ribs and kick back at the patio table with an iced drink and enjoy an evening outdoors again. Do they make the long winter and long hot summer worthwhile? Hell no, they don’t. They just give you something to look forward to in the meantime.