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Rants and Poetry of a Tired and Angry Man.

Just what the title says, don't look for anything too profound or earthshaking.

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Location: United States

I am my title, the typically overeducated, disenfranchised, socially dysfunctional loudmouth. I am the disgruntled employee of the month.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Decisions, decisions...



Trying to decide which is more upsetting,
the idea that it was all a hoax and I was the last one in on it,
or the idea that it wasn't a hoax and someone is out there impersonating a dead friend.


Either way, I'm kinda pissed.









Friday, September 19, 2014

Oversight


I was going to write tonight about some of the shit that is going on around here.

But I'm tired,
and it's the same shit going on everywhere so you probably already know it.

Sláinte




Sunday, September 14, 2014

Poor Owl.


I normally don't re-post links to other people's articles, but this one encapsulates what a good many of us have been saying for a good long time.

Below is the link, as well as the text of the article (in case the link disappears in the next few hours, as so often seems to happen with stories like this)



Are We Approaching the End of Human History? | Perspectives | BillMoyers.com


For the fourth consecutive year, NASA research aircraft are flying over the Arctic to assess the health of the ice in the fast-changing region. Global warming has had a particularly strong impact on the Arctic, yet the effects on the region’s ice have been anything but steady or predictable. Some glaciers are spitting out icebergs and draining the Greenland ice sheet at an alarming pace; others are barely moving; a few are growing thicker. (Photo: NASA /For the fourth consecutive year, NASA research aircraft are flying over the Arctic to assess the health of the ice in the fast-changing region. Global warming has had a particularly strong impact on the Arctic, yet the effects on the region’s ice have been anything but steady or predictable. Some glaciers are spitting out icebergs and draining the Greenland ice sheet at an alarming pace; others are barely moving; a few are growing thicker. (Photo: NASA/Jefferson Beck and Maria-José Viñas/Flickr CC 2.0)


Global warming has had a particularly strong impact on the Arctic, yet the effects on the region’s ice have been anything but steady or predictable. Some glaciers are spitting out icebergs and draining the Greenland ice sheet at an alarming pace; others are barely moving; a few are growing thicker.(Photo: NASA/Jefferson Beck and Maria-José Viñas/Flickr CC 2.0) This post first appeared at In These Times.

It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.

“The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.”
 
The era opened almost 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, through Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, and from there to Greece and beyond. What is happening in this region provides painful lessons on the depths to which the species can descend.

The land of the Tigris and Euphrates has been the scene of unspeakable horrors in recent years. The George W. Bush-Tony Blair aggression in 2003, which many Iraqis compared to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, was yet another lethal blow. It destroyed much of what survived the Bill Clinton-driven UN sanctions on Iraq, condemned as “genocidal” by the distinguished diplomats Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who administered them before resigning in protest. Halliday and von Sponeck’s devastating reports received the usual treatment accorded to unwanted facts.

One dreadful consequence of the US-UK invasion is depicted in a New York Times “visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria”: the radical change of Baghdad from mixed neighborhoods in 2003 to today’s sectarian enclaves trapped in bitter hatred. The conflicts ignited by the invasion have spread beyond and are now tearing the entire region to shreds.

Much of the Tigris-Euphrates area is in the hands of ISIS and its self-proclaimed Islamic State, a grim caricature of the extremist form of radical Islam that has its home in Saudi Arabia. Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for The Independent and one of the best-informed analysts of ISIS, describes it as “a very horrible, in many ways fascist organization, very sectarian, kills anybody who doesn’t believe in their particular rigorous brand of Islam.”

Cockburn also points out the contradiction in the Western reaction to the emergence of ISIS: efforts to stem its advance in Iraq along with others to undermine the group’s major opponent in Syria, the brutal Bashar Assad regime. Meanwhile a major barrier to the spread of the ISIS plague to Lebanon is Hezbollah, a hated enemy of the US and its Israeli ally. And to complicate the situation further, the US and Iran now share a justified concern about the rise of the Islamic State, as do others in this highly conflicted region.

Egypt has plunged into some of its darkest days under a military dictatorship that continues to receive US support. Egypt’s fate was not written in the stars. For centuries, alternative paths have been quite feasible, and not infrequently, a heavy imperial hand has barred the way.
After the renewed horrors of the past few weeks it should be unnecessary to comment on what emanates from Jerusalem, in remote history considered a moral center.

Eighty years ago, Martin Heidegger extolled Nazi Germany as providing the best hope for rescuing the glorious civilization of the Greeks from the barbarians of the East and West. Today, German bankers are crushing Greece under an economic regime designed to maintain their wealth and power.

The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.

The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems” over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains.

The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore.

One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.

The IPCC report reaffirms that the “vast majority” of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.

A day before it ran a summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe.

One of the most feared consequences of anthropogenic global warming is the thawing of permafrost regions. A study in Science magazine warns that “even slightly warmer temperatures [less than anticipated in coming years] could start melting permafrost, which in turn threatens to trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in ice,” with possible “fatal consequences” for the global climate.

Arundhati Roy suggests that the “most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times” is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing “thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate” in meaningless conflict. And as the glaciers melt, India and Pakistan face indescribable disaster.

Sad species. Poor Owl.


Fun folks 'n feed

So a week ago I had a birthday.  Not a big one just a regular old mile marker.

I don't normally celebrate my birthday, maybe dinner with family and a few close friends.  But I'm not that into gifts...  I figure I've got enough stuff, so unless it's something I can use or something I really really want I generally would rather just be wished well.  I generally don't even like most folks to notice, just the ones I care about.

So this year I had five people wish me a happy birthday.
Four of them are related to me in one way or another, and the fifth is someone who has only known me for a few months and was trying to do be cool (which I can appreciate, and am thankful for).

I just find it interesting that, with all the folks in my life who have claimed such close kinship with me, there were only five who actually remembered. 

I don't necessarily find it disappointing (not one for pointless glad handing).  But I do find it interesting.  Gives me an idea of who I'm dealing with, and that's always a good thing.


Oh well, another year older.

Let's see what this one brings.








The most difficult aspect of moving on is accepting that the other person already did. 
― Faraaz Kazi―

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Huh, a year and a half

It's funny, I didn't think I could make it a week when things disintegrated, but it's already been a year and a half.

I know I've whined for a long time about how I miss the relationship, how I miss the love, how I miss the person...  And that is all true.


But lately especially I have to admit, I've really missed the sex.


Wonder if that makes me an evil male pig, or just an average, middle aged, slightly repressed, horny bastard.






Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Everything old is new again.

I was thinking about it today and I realized that for nearly 23 years I've known someone who had close ties to Iraq.

I have co-workers who had not yet been born the first time we sent people to that country.

In the early 90's the older siblings of many of my friends ended up going over there as part of desert storm/desert shield.

In the mid to late 90's many of my peers ended up going over there as part of the peace keeping force, or to enforce the no-fly zone.

Over the course of the last decade and a half many of my peers, and the younger siblings of my peers have headed over. 

And as I sit here tonight, waiting for tomorrow's inevitable announcement that we're once again sending troops to that dusty desert shithole, I realize that many of my friends growing up have kids who will likely get caught up in it this time around.

And I have to ask why.

I'm not trying to marginalize the service of anyone who went over there, but why are we there?

I mean the first time we said it was because they invaded Kuwait, but does anyone (aside from the BP board of directors and the Kuwaiti royal family) really give a shit about Kuwait?

Then they said it was to protect the Kurds, who we let get gassed into near extinction for a decade.

Then they said it was for weapons of mass destruction, which we never found.

Now we're saying it's to stamp out the terrorism that has taken root since we last destabilized the region.


Am I the only one who notices that we need to 'bring democracy to Iraq' just about every time the economy takes a dump or we find ourselves headed into an uncertain election season?


Just a thought.

And again, I'm not trying to trivialize the pain and sacrifice of the folks who've been directly caught up in this cluster-fuck for the last 20 some odd years.

I just wonder.
With hundreds of thousands of homeless vets,
a crumbling economy
a crumbling infrastructure...

Is going back to Iraq again really the answer?





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