№ 552: Waiting For Nomenclature

TIME, forever, is out of joint.

Which, if you’re TIME, is precisely your point.

TIME doesn't care what you think or like:

TIME is, in fact, rather catlike.

Could be, for all that, TIME is a cat.

TIME doesn't march, TIME mostly meanders.

TIME does not wait for hapless bystanders.

It rushes, it dawdles, it stops, it erodes —

given TIME to itself, TIME often implodes,

collapsing, when apt, into TIME elapsed.

TIME is to space as space is to TIME.

TIME is to life as life is betimes —

entwined, dependent, admixed and blended.

TIME can never be comprehended.

The edge of a knife is TIME's adage for life.

At end of play, TIME leaves nowhere to hide.

Though you sing the song, TIME is NOT on your side.

 Time after time

The question of whether time moves in a loop or a line has occupied human minds for millennia. Has physics found the answer? 

Does the Universe repeat itself in space or time? Or are we barrelling endlessly forward, never to repeat this moment or arrangement of matter, never to retrace our steps?

№ 551: A Letter To A Neighbor

Dear Mexico,

In the event you haven’t heard,

you’re presently bordering on the absurd

notion the nation directly next door

is building a wall from shore to shore,

from gulf to gulf to the Pacific,

which, in specific, is a horrific

waste of time and squandering of money

which you, doubtless, find exceedingly funny —

that this guy (Trump) has the pure gall

to say that you will pay for his wall.

As the rest of the world laughs off their asses,

this is the way America passes,

abandoning sanity and common sense

trumpeting Trumpian incompetence,

handing the future to the Chinese.

What can Mexico do in times such as these?

Breed your Chihuahuas with their Pekingese.

Truly yours,

the formerly great American state,
which, following England, became second rate

№ 550: Lapse To The Future

The Little Ice Age: where, when, and why

Answering those three Ws is tougher than it looks; there’s no consensus on any of them. The term often refers to a moderately cold period in the 17th and 18th centuries that hit Europe especially hard. But it may have gone as late as the 19th century and began—or was at least triggered—in the 13th century.

One theory, based on discoveries out of the University of Colorado, is that four huge volcanic eruptions between 1275 and 1300 kicked it off, beginning a climate feedback loop that kept temperatures cold for centuries. A more recent theory suggests that the massive depopulation of the Americas following the arrival of Christopher Columbus led to a dramatic decline in land use, which led to more forests, which created giant carbon sinks, which cooled the climate.

The Little Ice Age also coincided with a period of “extremely low solar activity” from 1650 to 1715 known as the Maunder Minimum. It’s possible that all three factors played a role in the shift.

Forget Henley's “Invictus”.

Vonnegut said,

“victim. . .series of accidents”.

Stay in bed,

where you're cozy,

thinking of rosy,

brain unrestrained

unreality.

Simply relax.

Ignore the facts.

Don't think of H. Saps.

impending collapse.

“Something will turn up.”

Tomorrow, perhaps.

[updated 3/25/2019 10:54 pm]

№ 549.1: EXTRA! Tuck Too And Hit Far Right

Tucker Carlson: Fox host under fire again over resurfaced racist comments

Remarks made when Carlson was a guest on a shock jock radio show, which he was a regular guest on from 2006 to 2011

If you wish your son to succeed

at anything other than mucker,

please be advised (and be wise, indeed!),

refrain from naming him “Tucker”.

In the school yard, boys being boys,

a Tucker is ever in peril

from other boys testing his poise.

(I don’t mean by calling him Meryl!)

And if Tucker is close to his mother,

bound up in her apron strings,

soon or late, one way or another,

such teasing may make him sprout wings.

Condemned to the closet, locked in a box,

he’ll spend his life lying for FOX.

[updated 3/12/2019 7:30 pm EDT]

№ 549: Home Improvement

Why We Stink at Tackling Climate Change

Global threats result from human culture outrunning human biology.

Our biologically evolved selves are quite good at perceiving events that are prompt and threatening; those that are slow-moving, although equally threatening, not so much. A fire in a building and people run outside. A slow moving fire in the Earth’s thermal budget and people hardly notice. For nearly all of our evolutionary past, it was not adaptive to detect such slow-motion changes, and so our ability to do so is limited.

The Risks, Rewards and Possible Ramifications of Geoengineering Earth’s Climate

Injecting aerosols into the stratosphere could help cool the planet, but scientists have yet to study exactly how such solar geoengineering would work

Researchers have proposed brightening clouds, making sea spray more reflective, or even launching a giant mirror into space to reflect extra sunlight. The most promising and affordable of these methods is stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves spewing tiny particles into the upper atmosphere. Those particles would reflect sunlight away from the Earth, effectively dimming the sun and, in theory, cooling the planet.

That's how things go, we evolve in slow-mo

and we never have the foggiest no-

tion of what to expect from downstream effects

that flow from (misguided) “improvement” projects.

It's not that complex, we're vexed by biology.

We see no need to utter apologies

for mistakes that were made. (Which were inevitable.)

Just wait, next time, we'll be incredible.

(I would speculate — strictly between us —

this aerosol thing is what happened to Venus
where life evolved before here on Earth.
Just my opinion, for whatev' that's worth.
But all of this stuff is taking a toll.
Perhaps we'd be safer burning more coal.)

№ 548: Courting Disaster (2020 FOREsight)

Trump's legacy: conservative judges who will dominate US law for decades

Republicans have confirmed 89 Trump-nominated judges, far in excess of appointments under Obama and Bush

That legacy comprises the 89 judges, and rapidly counting, that Trump has nominated, and Senate Republicans have confirmed, to serve at all levels of the federal court system. They are taking up posts from the district courts (53 Trump nominees confirmed out of 677 total) to the appellate courts (34 out of 179) to the US supreme court (two out of nine). Put together they form a kind of conservative judicial revolution that could impact all aspects of American life.

How can Dems pretend the country's recoverable?

How can they contend there's some grand scheme discoverable,

some closely-held, hidden, worst-case retorts

to undo what GOP's done to the courts?

Some magical thinking, which though convolutional,

Trump's trumped up Supremes could declare Constitutional?

Have Dems from what's happened become so detached

that they cannot see it's game, set and match,

that even with White House and Congress in hand

they'd no longer be in George Washington's land?

This is more than their usual idealist confusional.

The only conclusion: today's Dems are delusional.