Raking Leaves

TO MOST PEOPLE its a nuisance,an anoyance,even a migraine. To mie, its a rite of autumn, an damnedgood exercie for an older "gentleman". I refer to raking leaves on a one third acre suburban lot in a small town with about twenty mature maple and oak trees,which recently barely survived a massive drought, and let many of their leaves loose,to avoid dying, I suppose. Traumatized trees, trees in shock. The twenty or so deciduous treest I planted twenty years ago are fully grown, I hope,and my yard and my life are knee deep in maple leaves, much much too early in late summer, victims of he drought which have been somewhat alleviated, but probably not totally ended. For me, a positive thinker, that's a tip toe through the tulips. Their fate is a leaf by leaf affair, depending on my mood and the vicissitudes of circumstance and fortune. Some I rake and bundle up, for the garbage man's amusement. Others will remain dormant until I break out the lawn mover in early march.I don't want to pay anyone to do my yard work until I get too old and feeble to do it, which I hope won't happen until the day I die. So, I rake and bundle, filling trash cans and big plastic bags like a Republican filling the air with hot mess and lies...A few thousand years ago there was an estimated seven trillion trees on Earth, science says. Homo sapiens hs cut that number in half, and keeps going, madly, franticlly chopping and denuding. We aren't finished. Ten billion trees a year are human harvested. The good news is that some countries are belatedly but steadily beginning to perceive the problem, and make changes. Belts of new trees hundreds of miles long nd wide are being planted in China and all across North Africa.The day may come when sub Saharan Africa is a vast, verdant, lush forest, with climat change, and reverse climate change through human intrvention. When I planted trees all over the then barren yard surrouding my newly built house twenty years ago, my mother, understandably, predicted that I would live to rue the day. I can still see her point, but au contrar, dear mother, no regrets here. I am waging a small scale war against global environmental destruction. I would applaud anyone else for doing this; I'll let other people applaud me, if they can make the connection between my yard and the rest of the planet. Earlier today I told my neighbor that he and I will both live to see a summer in which the temperature rises to one hundred degrees by Memmorial Day, and largely remains there until Labor Day. His silence told me that eithr he thought I was talking crazy, or that he didn't care. I told him that it doesn't matter to me personally, that I will be dead soon, but that it sure as hell will matter to his children and now young grand children. Still no response. Americans don't care about global warming/climate change because they have air conditioning, and, well, it really isn't doing them any harm, so, so what, what's the big deal? Oh, but it is doing them harm. Food prices are already headed for the roof, as are cooling bills. Heat already kills more people in the United States and Europe, the places we care most about, than most other causes of death. And still we elect morons like Trump and other Republicans who will be dead in a few months and who lack the intellect and courage and integrity to accept reality. I'm seventy one, and can still run a fifteen minute mile. I should be able to rake leaves at least a few more years. My trees won't get much bigger, if any. I have the money to pay for yard work help, if it comes to that. So, it seems I'm set. Then too, as I mentioned, I'll be dead before humanity has to deal with and somehow survive climate change for real, or do someting to reverse it, which I, in my never ending optomism, think will happen. But, who knows? Either wewilor wewon't. i hope to live long enough to find out, but can't count on it.

Trump, Suing

DONALD TRUMP has been involved in thousands of lawsuits during the course of his ignominous life and career as a real estate scam artist. At last count, he is being sued approximately four thousand times, and is suing other people at approximately the same rate. After all, one requires balance in one's life. And, quite predictably, nearly all of these lawsuits are predicated primarly on money. Trump has a clever scam scheme in which he contracts construction companies to build things, and, when the projects, high rise apartments and so forth, are completed, he finds fault with them, and damands an unreasonable redress, monetary redess to which no reasonable person or businnes could or would possibly accede. Trump makes his litigation so irksome, odious, tedious, and burdensome to his victims that in most cases they lose steam, grow tired of hemmoraging money, run out of funds, and agree to settle out of ocurt, under duress and desperation, creating a circumstance in which Trump, his pockets still well lined and able to withstand years of possible extended future litigation, simply outlasts his exhausted courtroon adversaries, who, from sheer financial, emotional, and legal exhaustion, are willing to accept a settlement inimical to thmeselves, but less innimical than had they stayed the course, and attempted to confront Trump mano del mano ad infinitum. Trump wears down and wears out his legal adversaries. He is patient, and willing to wait to harvest his easy low hanging fruit, fruit that has fallen from the tree close, ready for a scavenger to harvest. Trump is indeed a scavenger, marauding through society like a gang of outlaws in late nineteenth century Arizona, or a carpetbagger in the defeated, prostrate, ruins of the post Civil War south. Trump is a vulture, preying upon carrion, the helpless and harmless, the defenseless. Jackels and hyenas come to mind as appropriate metaphoric animals with whom to compare the Donald, Don the Con. You don't want to be like Trump. Nobody of any character and intelligence does. Any normal human being, enbued with the slightest trace of moral human decency, steers well clear of living any sort of lifestyle which even remotely resembles that of America's most politically successful con man carnival barker. For a fact, nobody likes Donald J.Trump. Nobody in his immediate or extended family, none of his acquaintances or "friends" or associates of any sort want to have anything to do with him. Every book written about Trump is essentially the same. Hundreds of monographs detailing the utter moral depravity and ammoral criminality of a man whose entire life is devoted only to his own enrichment, seeking primarily to gain attention, his greatest addiction being to fame. The most insightful information about Trump comes from his niece Mary, who, with a doctorate in abnormal psychology, has her infamous uncle pegged to a "T", as we say. She describes him as indeed mentally ill, with the same extreme narcissism and pathological prevarication and lack of human enpathy which by now all Americans are so tiresomely familiar.The story of Trump is at once a comic opera and s Shakespearian tragedy of King Leer proportions, and future historical novels and historical narratives will agree that here was a man devoid of any positive human characteristics, a nearly perfect study in evil, one to rival Hitler, Stalin, or Caligula. And like these monstrous reprobates, future generations will marvel that such a demon could ever have existed in human form. When today's young adults are old, their grandchildren will be amazed at the stories they will hear from their grandparents. Edgar Allen Poe, in his grave, will be jealous that he missed the opportunity to put Trump on paper, in a macabre, twisted, terrifying narrative of pure, devastating darkness.

Losing Nature, Keeping Money

THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS is coming out rock solid in support of either getting rid of Artificial Intelligence, or ignoring, contemptuously, what it has to say. Our lords and masters seem woke to the fact that AI is a logical thinker who/which gives logical recommendations. It remains uncertain whether Herr Professor AI is a liberal or conservative, but early indications are that he/she is dead set hard core Mr. Spock logical, emotion free. That being the case, AI canot help but notice that both the American and global economies operate with crushing inefficiency, distributing wealth chaotically, haphazardly, whimsically, riddled with what economists call "externalities" which are unanticipated factors which intrude upon, inetrvene, and buffet the economy about, such as bad weather and warfare. Since society generally bows down and scrapes and grovels at the feet of the billionaire class, the high and mighty superhumans who simply must be superior because they have all that money, why shouldn't computers? The very moment AI suggests a massive, comprehensive redistribution of wealth for global economic efficiency, expediency and fairness, watch out! If on some fine weekday worday morning you and nobody else can log on to the internet, you'll know why. Big Brother, of the organic kind, has stepped in, zealously guarding the hoarded wealth of the one percent. At this point, dear reader, all bets are off, all possibilities are in play. If we naively don't think that "our" computers are becoming pefectly capable of organizing like an industrial waste collector labor union or Al Capone's "wise guys", we the people had better think again. Somehow you just suspect that AI, steeped in logical solutions to very real problems, is not going to take kindly to the one percent hoarding twenty percent of society's aggregate wealth, and the twenty percent owning eighty percent thereof. Economics is closely associated with human environmental impact, as a way of quantifying and describing it and its consequences. As things stand now, give us another five or ten years before we experience environmental collapse, if anyone cares to care. If not, well, its been real, and we'll see each other again on the other side, assuming there is another side.

Cults, Withering and Dying, Like Gods

LIKE All CULTS, the Cult of Trump will wither and die shortly after its dear leader and iconic savior, the dishonorable Donald J. Trump, has died and gone to wherever, and fails to rise from the dead, as he and or his worshipful cult followers dooubtless will wait with held breath for him to do. They won't wait as long as the still waiting Christian cultists, but long enough to be disappointed, which Christians, refusing to give up, refuse to become. Better to postpone the arrival-advent of the second coming of Christ, eternally, for centuries on end, than to give up, admit defeat, admit that their religion was and is, in the end, a figment of their fearful, hopeful imagination, a hoax, as we like to say these days. Trump has assumed a somewhat Christ-like status among his most hard core followers, above and beyond politics. Just as the hatred of his millions of enemies is predicated more on his obvious moral shortcomings than his right wing semi fascist politics and hatefulm insane policies, the adoration displayed by his loving sycophants goes well beyond politics, having assumed all the characteristics of a religious cult. The Christian religion began as another among many near eastern fertility cults, which invented and worshpped gods who would promise to bring nourishing rains and good harvests, sustaining the civilization in return for their worship. Petty insecure jealous gods invariably demand much attention, and worship, in true Trump like style. Humans invent gods with distinctly human like personalities, with all of the pettiness, insecurities, and jealousies we that humans are driven by. Yahweh, Elohim, Jehovah, depending on which book of the Old Testament is referenced, are the main names of the veangeful, wrathful, childish very insnsecure diety invented by the ancient Hebrews, in their own image, of course. WE invent gods in our image, and how could we do otherwise? There have been many more names of the flame throwing deity on top of Mt. Sanai, or atop other mountains. God must always be elevated, physically, above humankind. The Hebrew culure deserves credit for inventing the world's first enduring monotheistic religion, the second overall. The ancient Egyptians, having invented a sun god, Amaenhotep, Aman ra, Aknaton, around the fourteenth century B.C, a god which flourished for a short tiem, then was joined by a new panoply of gods, invented the frst monotheistic religion. One god was simply not enough, and seldom has been in history. People love dieities so much that s single one is seldom enough. The sun, the source of everything, and recognized as such by even primitive humans, is the source of all gods. The more the merrier. Greek and Romam gods numbered in the dozens or hundreds, Hindu gods number in the thousands, with each village and region of the Indian sub continent manufacturing its own highly specific deities, in terms of function. The Greeks and Romans only had so much energy and resources with which to build enduring granite monuments to thier favorite, most important Gods and Goddesses. The modern approach is to put all societal eggs in the basket of one God, for expediency. This keeps the unwashed uneducated masses content and passive, and allows for their easy subjagation to entrenched authority and power. WE await a less benighted future in which all the gods have died, and gone to heaven, or ground into dust.The death of the gods will liberate humanity from their yoke of emotional and intellectual self imposed bondage, and open the doors of perception to the possibility of understanding the universe and themselves for what they really are, whatever they really are.

Politicking

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY was founded as the "free soil", anti-slavery party in 1854, in Wisconsin. Abraham Lincoln was a founding member.Give credit where due. The "Grand Ole Party" has a well intentioned genesis. It went down hill in a hurry, as it was captured by big business in the post Civil War era of explosive corporate capitalistic expansion, the American industrial revolution. It has remained so captured ever since. The party of the wealthy elite, the Christian conservative party, is firmly entrenched within the bank books of billionaires. Of course, to a somewhat lesser degree, so is the Democratic party. Our great American uni-party, the party of property, Gore Vidal called them, the ruling wealthy elite, "our corporate" masters, he termed them, for good reason, accurately. The more things change, the more they remain the same, as the saying goes. Arguments can be made for the European political system, in which every country has a veritable plethora, a multitude of political parties, with shifting, temporary pro tem issue dependent coaltions, ranging from far left communism and socialism on the left, to conservatism and fascism on the far right. If you can't find a political home in Europe, you simply aren't trying hard enough. Since the United States is a nation of near European proportions size wise and population wise, with cultural diversity, somewhat, it should, arguably, have more than our mere two political parties. It should have several viable parties, all semi-major, all healthy, vibrant, and influential. Why not cover the entie spectrum, and truly represent everybody? Communists, socialists, liberal centrist, conservative, and fascist, with all of them viable and none dominant? The problem is the difficulty of forming a majority with the ability to actually pass legislation and get things done. Also, avoiding gridlock is an issue, gridlock which, in any event, we often have anyway. The chief benefit of the European systme is flexibility. The downside of individual politics, the hindrance, is fragmentation, atomization in which every man and woman is a political party unto herself, floating free upon the vast political ocean. In American politics a majority is easily attained, and readily stymied by the machinations of the minority. The founders intended that the minority have the wherewithall to act as a force to limit the power of, the "tyranny of the majority", as they put it. Otherwise, the body politic risks spiraling downward and descending into a one party tyrannical monopoly, as in fascism. We Americans need term limits, to prevent anyone from making a career of politics, from staying in Congress decade after interminable decade, effectively creating their own little fiefdoms, miniature kingdoms within their home stae from which they can go to Washington and wield personal power and influence in the legislative branch tantamount to a monopoly. When a politician has been in the House or Senate for three or four decades, and merely has to mail in his name to the election commission to stay in office, while his state's voters lazily succumb to his or her governing style and familiar, comfortable ideology, democracy stagnates, and said Senator or Representative becomes a sort of lord or baron, no disrespect intended towards the scion of our somewhat tyrannical current head of state. In short, a healthy democracy relies on a constant infusion of fresh, new blood. We are currently being governed by an elderly bunch, by our ancestors. Seventy and eighty year old career politicains do not adequately represent the interests of people under thirty years of age, to whom the future rightfully belongs. Jefferson realized this when he said that the American experimental republic would reuqire a revolution every generation, and that the tree of liberty would, from time to time, "require the noruishment of the blood of patriots and tyrants". We have reached that point several times before, one of which resulted in an internal domestic "civil" war of nightmarish proportions. Let's not do that again, shall we. Thomas Jefferson, after all, only goes so far. We Americans need term limits, which we actually already have, at the ballot box. No system is perfect, as we all know, and none will ever be, since God and Christ seem content to let us mere mortals stumble along in our ignorance, making and correcting our own mistakes.

Compassion, From A Car Hop, In a Wooden Box

TODAY I KNEW that I would want and need my Route 44 Lime Slush. Happy Hour at Sonic, as America knows, is two to four, so that's when and only when I go. Two dollars is less painful than four to pay for a styrofoam cup full of ice, sugar, and artificial lime flavoring.I love 'em. There is no accounting for taste, as they say. The drawback is that when its above ninety degrees, their slushy icey machine gets behind, and has trouble keeping the slush frozen, Nothing is less sexy that a half frozen slush of any flavor, as teenagers will attest. Today the slush came fast, not that it always does. School wasn't out yet, and that helped. The young lady who brought it was friendly, and asked: "How are you today"? My first impulse was to mechanically utter the obligatory "fine", or "good", which I did. Then suddenly, I decided not to prevaricate. Actually, not so good, I opined. My cat died three days ago, and I am still dealing with the grief. Her response was immediate. "I'll pray for your cat", she offered. And she did, right there in my parking space, between speakers. Her words escape me now. Flagging memory of old age and perhaps advancing Alzheimers. But her words were moving, inspiring. I thanked her, and told her, honestly, that her prayer had made me feel much better. I drove off with a four dollar cup of flavored ice for half price, uplifted and inspired by the brief but sincere prayer of a teenaged girl. Hours later, I still felt the same way. Somebody cares, and told me so. It was enough, nearly, to rekndle my long lost faith in the human species. I tell myself that nearly everybody has loved and been loved by a loving dog or cat, has suffered their loss, and that fully forty percent of the American people indicate on surveys that they much prefer the latter to the former, cats and dogs over people. And why not? The choice is between unconditional rock solid unwavering unshakable love and loyalty, or stinking, conniving, deceitful self absorbed human beings. That hardly seems a choice. Within a few days I expect the vet to call and tell me that Remmi's ashes have been sent back from the animal crematorium, I guess it is, and surely they will mail me a nice note of condolences, which will help. I assume the ashes will come in one of those pretty little varnished wooden boxes, with her name in gold plate on the front. Very lovely, very dignified. Remmi's remains will go up on the fireplace mantle, along side those of Jake, Shylow, and Diamond. I have only three little wooden boxes. My sister, older than I, says she has dozens, all in a place of honor in her lavish home. Other cats are buried in my front yard, along the fence, in a pretty place among the shrubery. I don't actually have grave markers; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we all return to the elements, no mattter where we make our final repose, whether we make it in full body armor or cremains. My mom's cremains are buried in a cemetary on the same gravesite as her parents, my grandparents. Baby is home at last and forever, with her mom and dad, her parents that she loved so much. I never knew my maternal grandfather. He died in 1943, twelve years before I was born. My loss. I am told he was a prince. My maternal grandmother, 1892-1971, a true Victorian farm woman, was an angel, and she and I loved each other until her death, when I was sixteen. My mother and father knew full well that I love my cats and dogs more than any human on Earth, including them. They understood without negative overtones or hurt feelings. My grief at the loss of Remmi, now three days old, is finally, slowly, abating, a gift, and an indication of my personal strength. As you age, you toughen up, with experience. My father told me when I was 15 that as I lived my life, I would get knocked down, over and over again, and that I would get back up, every time. And so it has come to pass. I am now back on my feet, waiting for Remmi to return to me in ashes, to join my other bygone beloved kittens atop my fireplace, while I go on, ready, willing, and able to get knocked down yet again.

A Seagull Seeking Help

THE FACEBOOK PHOTO was of a seagull all tangled up in rope or wire or something. Along comes a good samaritan, who untengles the bird. Set free, it rises and flies away, uninjured. Facebook, reliably predictably catering to my tastes, gives me much such material, animals in pain or peril, rescued by a damned good human being. They even show the bird, dog, cat, or baby grizzly at the vet, being given a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, a bite to eat, and a certificate of good heath, with a warm cat bed nap for good measure. Happy endings supplanting a sea of troubles, just my melodramatic cornball style. You gotta hand it to Facebook; they know more about me than I. Artificial Intelligence has me wrapped around its little finger, or tentacle, whichever appendages IA sports when in organic bodily phase. The puppies and kittens by the side of the highway, where some svil person dumped them, caught in roadside beartraps have AI written all over them, CGI. I lap it up, like a kitten at a bowl of cream. I like to fantasize about being a hero. I envision myself pulling people from burning cars and or buildings, hitting the game winning home run for my beloved Yankees, making the game winning Michael Jordan shot. I go further. I see myself sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, or the dissolute desk as it should currently be called, ruminating in dreadfully dark, Lincolnesque somber solitude, bravely approaching an impossible no win decision of munumental import. You don't have to save the planet or conquer the world to be heroic. A wise man once said that a gambler is anyone who gets out of bed in the morning. How true that is, in our inherently risk filled lives. Said wise man was a good friend of mine, and might not mind the following permutation; a wise man is anyone who arises each morning with a pure heart and great thoughts, and, if nothing else, tries to do some small something or other to improve herself and the world, if only incrementally, if only a little. That Goethe quote I use so often, including yesterday, is always on target. "We are made immortal through the effects of our actions". I have always considered myself important, if only through the effects of my actions. We elevate ordinary people to "celebrity" status in these United States of Advertising, merely because they entertain us, they bring us escape from lives from which we really ought never try to escape, because our allegedly puny, insignificant little lives are, in actuality, every bit as important and meaningful as those of, say, Taylor Swift or Travis Kelsey, who by the way, would agree completely. Again, its the butterly flapping its wings and triggering a sequence of events which result with the utter destruction of human civilization thingie. A compounding magnification of cause and effect, what scientists call "causal connections". Einstein showed that electrons at opposite ends of the universe communicate with each other, and he called it, profoundly, "spooky action at a distance". We humans can be assured that we have far more importance in and influence over the universe than a couple of electron far apart, jabbering away. Despite the fact that we are but tiny smudges of squirming organic molecules scurrying about on the surface of a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary yellow star at the edge of an obscure galaxy, we matter. Never let anybody tell you otherwise. You, little ole you, have an impact on the universe, no more or less than anyone else, but, nonetheless, an impact. You should feel important because you are, because you exist. The teeny tiny little ole you adrift in a cosmos of inconceivably vast proportions and thus irrelevant crowd has, ostensibly, a point, a point that is demonstrably incorrect. If nothing else, be assured of this; you are here for a reason, a reason of the universe's choosing, God the universe, God the mind, and, most important of all, you matter, if only a little.

Trump, Tearing Down

DONALD TRUMP, in an evident temper tantrum, is now threatening to tear down the iconic Kennedy center, since, after all, it appears that he will not be allowed to rename it after himself. That little boy simply wasn't raised right, no offense to Fred Trump and wife. You literally cannnot make this stuff up. This is a classic exammple of taking your football and going home, holding breath until blue in the face to blackmail parental capitulation,or screaming one's two year old terrible two lungs out until the restoration of fece flinging privileges. The Kennedy Center needs an apgrade, some repair work, just like all buildings do from time to time, as you home owners know all too well. However, most architects and engineers would agree that the needed upgrades are well within reaasonable reach, an architectural walk in the park, well within the capabilities any any mainline construction firm. It is not widely or publicly known precisely what our mentally ill president's mental problems are. Let's face it, everybody is mentally ill, in one way or another. There is no perfect physical or mental health, even assuming our ability to define such concepts. The world's greatest athletes, academics, and artists "suffer" from some mental, emotional, or physical malady or another.So do we all. Perhaps this is nature, reminding us that perfection is merely an abstraction, a concept, a place in heaven, or a poet's dream. We can surely all agree, and have agreed, thatthe world would be a far less interesting place if humanity and the rest of nature operated like a well oiled machine, living to a prescribed age, with prescribed behavior, and mechanistic, always well functiong physical bodily systems. We don't want to be perfect, and we don't want our creations, public buildings included, to be cookie cutter efficient and convenient. The Kennedy Center has by now earned the right to be a bit long in the tooth, so to speak, with a leak, crack, and drip here and there. My friend from Germany laughs when she relates that buidlings in Europe; houses, monuments, public buildings, are in most cases several hundred years old, and still in curculation. Roads, canals, and aquaducts built by the ancient Romans are still up and running, no modern replacements needed or wanted. My ninety two year old German lady friend, who remembers walking from Eastern Germany to central Germany ahead of the oncoming Russian Red Army, hoping to surrender to the Americans, in order to be treated like humans, rather then vermin prefers German architecture to American, The tragedy of World War Two, among its many tragedies, was the wanton widespread destruction of lovely ancient Eueopean cities, their elegant architecture. But we can rejuvenate, we can rebuild. Today the beautifulGerman city of Nuremburg is more beautiful than ever, party because it was rebuilt after the war to resemble its former, elegant self. Anybody who visits Nuremburg today will tell you there is virtually no difference between pre World War Two Nuremburg and the 2026 version, due to the artistic, historical impulse and considerations which attended its reconstruction. Nothing in the ticky tacky land of opportunity, the United States of crass, seems to be built to last or lasts more tha fifty years. this includes our houses and public buildings. The Kennedy Center has qualities which at least remotely resemble the dignity and elegance of old Europe. Maybe it could last, with a little occasional tender loving care, another fifty years. by American standards, this would be quite an accomplishment. Our choice now seems to be to rename it after our criminal pedophilic insanely narcissistic president, or tear it down and start over, a fool's choice, a devilish conundrum. A federal judge has ordered the mad king to erase, chisel his malignant name off the edifce, which he prematurely put there in apparent defiance of sane reasoning and a federal court order, or face the legal consequences of failure to comply. We have few enough lovely structures in our land of ticky tacky to begin with, let's not destroy one of our relatively few ornate, artistic ones. You never know when we will be able to afford another one. What we most certainly cannot afford is a continuation of the Trump presidency, but for the moment we are stuck with it, like we are stuck with our dull, unimaginative American architecture, and a presidential administration which can be counted on to do the exact opposite of what we the American people want and need.

Setting Records

AUGUST was the warmest month on record, globally. Fairly accurate records have been kept since the late nineteenth century. Odds are that every month henceforth will be the hottest momth on record, the hottest January, the hottest August, etc. You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and preserve peace, and you cannot simultaneously poison and protect the Earth's ecosystem. We know that climate is natural, and cyclical, and that there have been periods of time in the Earth's four point five billion year history when the global temperatures were much hotter, and much colder, than now. Between the years 1300 and 1850, approximately, the Earth underwent its "Little Ice Age" during which the climate was globally semi-Arctic. Summer never came to North America in the year 1817; it snowed in August in the United States. If you are a young child now, are being born this year, or plan on making your debut anytime within the next decade, you will have the great misfortune of witnessing the complete collapse of the Earth's atmospheric environment, the climate, in terms of wind speed especially. All the added heat being pumped into the system by humanity is going to give our immediate descendants straight wind speeds well above one hundred miles per hour, on a regular basis, alternating weather extremes of drought and torrrential monsoons, greatly increased number of hurricanes which are much stronger and larger than those we have come to know and hate, decades long droughts, and massive eutrofication over large deographical areas, in which formerly vast stretches of forested land evolve into praiie land, and prairie land becomes desert. Of course these phenomena have manifested by natural forces for geological epochs, but never on account of human activity. Thos who say that the weather and climate have always been crazy are missing the point. What they say is true, of course. It always has been crazy. But ehre is crazy, and there is stark raving mad crazy. The fact that the weather does its own crazy thing does not prevent us humans from coming to the party. We have our own special kind of crazy, in terms of influencing the climate, and the difference between what weather and climate is caused by natural forces outside human control and what is caused by human activity is now, for the first, very much understood by climate scientists. Drone can make it rain, by seeding the atmosphere with a silver and oxygen compound, with only a trace, but a very important trace of silver present. We can influence the weather. As Michio Kaku tell us, with a few decades we will be able to control it. But who will be at the helm? The Chimese, Russians, or Americans? Certainly not the Canadians or Mexicans. Maybe we'll work it out at the U.N. Some like it hot, some don't. Our diplomats will have to vote on it, following instructions from their respective governments. China votes for fair and mild. America wants rain. People began seeding clouds back in the nineteen forties. The process has been refined, and is now more effective than ever before. Trillions of molecules of the magical silver compound can precipitate nineteen million gallons or so of H20 within about three hours. Humans are rapidly gaining the ability to control the weather. Whether or not our genie out of the bottle, Artificial Intelligence, will take this responsibility away from us and have fun running amok with one hundred degree sweltering heat one day, and several feet of snow the next is anyone's guess,and another matter altogether. Somehow you get the feeling that our science and technology is becoming a bit too sophisticated and powerful forourown good, that we as a species are damned immature and unwise to have at our disposal what we already have, and what we are likely to have in the very near future. But of course, you started having that feeling when we started dropping atom bombs on each other back in forty five.

Going Deep

IN THE FUTURISTIC soon to arrive year of 2029, a mission to our nearest stellar nigibhbor, Alpha Centauri, will launch. I Don't think I'm imagining this. The mission will be unmanned. It had better be. When it will arrive at its destination I do not know, probably decades hence. Precisely what it will accomplish is yet another mystery. If nothing else, it will make our descendants feel good about us, themselves, and the human spirit of exploration, if they are alive to tell about it. Alpha Centauri is a three for the price of one star system, including Proxima Centauri, and one other small, insignificant star. All this will not feed starving children or produce whirled peas (world peace), but it'll give us something to do, effectively keeping us busy and off the streets, briefly. I can't recall whether this three star star system has planets, but surely the people who count can and do. If memory serves, they do know, and the star has planets. I won't be alive to witness this, nor will anybody alive today. It'll have to suffice for me to fantasize about it, wish it well, and let it prematurely inspire me. In 1996 we saw for the first time a planet orbiting a star other than the sun. Then, the new planets started rolling in. Before long there were four thousand. Now, who knows how many. "We" now discover them faster than we can catalog and name them with long numbers. Meanwhile, every few days if not hours a previously unknown planet, star, or galaxy is located by some astronomer. We are like small children, toddling around in our parent's backyard, everything new and different. Einstein said "I have no special talents, I am merely extremely curious." Most people roll their eyes at this apparent false modesty. I take him at his word. Einstein understood that we are all roughly of equal intelligence in the grand scheme of things. The word "genius"" becomes meaningless when one realizes that all human animals reside within a limited spectrum of talents, intelligence, and general capabilities. As individuals we are like ants and bees. No individual can survive, thrive, and intellectually shine without doing as Isaac Newton said he did; stand upon the shoulders of giants. As Goethe said: "It is comforting to know how little we need, and how much we need that little." Maybe we are alone in the entire universe in being "intelligent" beings, able with opposable thumbs and decently large brains to build and taylor our environment to our own needs. Then again, most, if not all animals on Earth can and do do this. Anthills and beehives are marvelous, intricate constructions. If a spaceship carrying highly advanced beings were to descend into Earth's atmosphere to observe us, or happen to be doing so right now, either from a vantage point in our solar system, or on the far side of the moon, would those inside it be able to discern that homo sapiens and not ants, bees, dolphins or whales are the dominant, most intelligent species on the planet? Or would they surmise otherwise, that indeed human primates are but one lifeform in a larger crowd of sentient, intelligent lifeforms? Whale and dolphins, after all, have larger brains than we. The true mark and proof or human "superior intelligence" might well be our ability to lift ourselves off of this planet, and to leave it. So far we have barely begun to do that, but we seem poised and on the brink of achieving precisely that. We who were born after World War Two and grew up waiting for Apollo Eleven to go to the moon were thrilled beyond measure when, on July 20, 1969, Armstrong messed up the first words ever spoken on another planetary body, and said "That's one small step for man", instead of "that's one small step for a (one) man", as he evidently intended. The fact that the first words spoken on a planetary body other the earth by a human primate were messed up somehow seems quaint and humorous now; it reminds us of our glaring imperfections. It is our imperfections which remind us of our fallibility, but also, of our vast potential for improvement and advancement. We chose to go to the moon. Now, we chose to go to the stars, represented by our machines. People may never make it into deep space, between the stars, unless they build huge city like starships intended to be occupied by generations of our kind. More likely we will send machines deep, just at almost certainly UFOs are occupied by metallic machines, rather than organic beings. But whatever it takes, our human ascent and outward reach beyond our home planet will be more than worth the effort; it will begin the process of confirming that we will have become more than citizens of Earth, but rather, citizens of the cosmos.

Beloved Trees, Dying

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I wrote and published for this essay website an essay titled "Loving A Dying Tree". It told the true story of a beautiful little tree which sprang up voluntarily and adorably in my yard, perfectly shaped, but much too close to my house. It was about five or six feet tall, and was quite obviously going to grow up much too close to my house for the health of the foundation or the tree itself. A neighbor of mine, whose profession was trimming trees, verified this to me; that indeed it would eventually crack open the house's foundation, and be hemmed in and probably unhappy in the shade of a house much too close to it for the comfort of either. I mean, this tree was absolutely adorable, precious, like a newborn human baby or puppy or kitten. I couldn't stand to let it die, but the dire warning given to me about my house's foundation rang true and sank in; it seemed almost inevitable. So, I let my neighbor transplant it. From the outset I sensed that he had not dug deep enough, hadn't dug up enough of the tap root, had cut the tap root too harshly, too far up on its body, and had thus doomed it, like an amputation taking more than a mere arm or leg. But I kept my mouth shut, and let him proceed, not wanting to hurt his feelings. l should have helped him dig, but didn't want him to think I didn't trust him, which I shouldn't've. Sure enough, after a few days in its unfamiliar new territory it began to wither and die, a sad process which it completed with inexorable, horrible certainty. I was mad at my neighbor. It seemed to me that he had lazily cut the tap root off much too high, had not dug deep enough and gotten enough roots. Watching that precious adorable tree wilt and die tore my heart open as surely as watching a beloved cat, dog, or human child wither and die. Life, after all, is life, all precious in the eyes of God, and those of this God's child. My essay was a sort of eulogy, much like the essays published yesterday and the day before about my dearly beloved and now dead cat. This must have been ten years ago. I shall remember that precious dead baby of a tree as long as I live, like remembering dearly beloved but deceased dogs, cats, children, parents, and friends. The only way to deal with death is to accept the inevitability of it as a gift from God. I can only vaguely imagine that living forever, here, there, or anywhere, even in heaven, would be a form of torture. Better to be reincarnated, born into this or some other world time and again, than to live forever in a single world, though ever changing, somehow eternally unchanging even so. Had I been born, for instance, several hundred years before Christ, I truly believe that by now I would have long since begun to long for my own demise, having witnessed or participated in the fall of Rome, the middle ages, the Renaissance, our modern world, both World Wars, and all. The infinite value of life is deeply rooted in its fleeting nature, its intrinsic and sacred value in its shortness. My precious little doomed tree didn't live long, but it lived well, was loved deeply, and perhaps even knew it. Now as I see thousands of trees here in the Ozark Mountains turning brown and dying, my heart breaks and my eyes weep for the drastic, tragic unfair suddenness of their life and possible death. It is not their time to die. They are being murdered, by climate change of human manufacture, and the terrible drought resulting. I pray for rain, and for life extension of our beautiful trees. I want more for them than to merely remain forever in my loving memory.

Enduring Lingering Pain, Nobly

REMMI, my beloved kitten (I call all cats "kittens", lovingly) died yesterday, as I believe, in my current state of muddled short term memory, I wrote about yesterday on this blog/website. (I call this site a "website", most people call it a "blog, which is probably more accurate, but not my preference.) The emotional pain lingers, and will not abate. My hope is that it does abate in the fullness of time; I am told that it may, or may not. The mind is a relentless taskmaster. Remmi was obviously suffering, obviously in pain, having, in recent days, found it increasingly difficult to move or eat. The vet said that she was experiencing kidney failure. "Putting her down" I believe the term is, was becoming the obvious need, the only recourse, the only merciful action to take. So, I took it. You seek and take comfort wherever you can find it. And, of course, one moves on. Always, the moving on stage arrives, as Einstein said, soon enough. It is difficult if not impossible to even remotely imagine what it must feel like for a human parent to suffer the death of a human child, of his or her own child. Difficult enough it is to see advertising on television for "St. Jude's" hospital. Now I know this: I am going to have to move on. And, at length, I will. In my deep recesses of mind I am fully aware that my fourteen year old indoor kitten (cat), Mandi, cannot possibly live much longer - even the extremely advanced age of twenty will arrive, in Einstenian terms, soon enough. One thing I do, which I would do anyway, is recite to myself a stanza in a poem by Theodore Roethke, "In A Dark Time". "My soul, like some heat maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill." Man, does it ever...Death is the fact of life, my father reminded me, when I was sixteen years old and one of my favorite uncles had died suddenly at the what seems to me now the "tender age" of fifty six. Thanks for the wisdom, dear father. Father went to heaven, or to his favorite gin joint in the sky, at the "tender age" of sixty eight. Now, at seventy one, all ages begin to seem tender to me. We do what we can to assuage our emotional pain, bless our hearts, and we struggle to move forward, if we are brave. Like Julius Caesar said: "A coward dies a thousand times, but a brave man only once." I love that quote; it ranks right up there with the best of them. WE must live our lives with meaning, purpose, courage, and dignity, to render them truly worthwhile. AS Voltaire said, "We must tend our gardens". WE must strive to improve ourselves,and the world, while we are here with the power and opportunity to do so. Oh, how I mourn for my beloved but gone for good Remmi, who brought fun and joy to my otherwise mundane life seven or so years ago, and never stopped doing so. Everyone who has ever loved a cat or a dog or a person or a memory completely understands my present pain and grief, and that further comforts me. It may be true that we never fully stop grieving for our "lost" beloved, our immortal beloved. Goethe said, as I quoted in earlier essays, that we are truly immortal, made so by the effects of our actions. True enough. Remmi is immortal, because she made me happy, the effect of her actions, of her existence. My memory of her will keep her alive forever, as our memories of our deceased parents keeps them alive in our hearts and minds, forever. Earthquakes are coming. We all know this. Earthquakes caused by humanity, and by nature. We must endure them, with nobility. "There is no situation which cannot be ennobled through achievement and endurance", said the great and wise Goethe. Remmi only died once, because she was a brave little girl, my brave baby girl. Let us all be a Julius Caesar of the soul. Let us all be brave, and honor our deceased immortal beloved, and keep them alive forever, through memory, love, and, God willing, God.

Remmi, Dying Beloved

I KNEW FULL WELL before I took her to the vet that the diagnoses and prognosis would most likely not be good, but found it easy to deceive myself into thinking otherwise. As Goethe said, as I have often quoted: "We are never deceived. We only deceive ourselves". She had been an outdoor cat her entire seven year life, born to a stray mother that I took in and began feeding only to find out that she had a four kitten litter, almost like a new girlfriend who, after several dates, introduces you to her children. The mother has been gone for about two years, struck and killed by a careless and probably uncaring driver. So Remmi was probably seven-ish, a middle aged adult of a cat. I now comfort myself knowing that many humans and many cats are not privileged to reach middle age, for reasons which only the dear lord knows. I tend to be unrealistically optomistic, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I could see myself going back to the vet in a few days, picking her up, and the both of us purring our way home to a snack and a snuggle. The lord had other plans. The remains of two of my beloved cats are cremains in a place of honor on my fireplace mantle, others are buried in my yard, in a pleasant green space aurrouned by plants and green grass, and I am content with that arrangement, as I trust they are. We shall always be close to each other. The next project is to return to the vet, pay up, and take the cremain urn back to the house, to be placed next to the remains of Jake and Shylow, my two baby boys who died several years ago. As teh years go by, the details will become blurred, and indeed alreday have. Neither Jake nor Shylow's lovely wooden cremain box has birth and death dates, but only their namess. I suppose that's enough; they are ensconced in lovely, dignified repose. aybe someday I'll bury their boxes, beautiful wood that they are. Maybe I'll scatter everybody's ashes around the yard of the only home they ever knew. I hve experiencein this. My father died at 68 in 1986, and for me there wa never any question where his cremains would ultimately abide. I kept them with me for several years, then realized that I needed to set them free, in a place where they belonged. That place was on the beautifully manicured lawn of the law school complex at teh university where he attended law school, a place he always said was hie favorite lace in teh world, where he loved his studies and loved his surroundings. It comforts me to think that my beloved father has now long since blended into and become part of the essence of the God's green Earth upon which his beloved law schhol building sits. We can never do any better than our very best. We honor our beloved deceased in the best ways we know how. Who can fail to be deeply moved by the sight of a slain American service member being returned to his or her home soil, their cherished America, and transferred from airplane to tarmac to loving family with loving, respectful dignity. I wish everyone who grieves the loss of a loved one could embrace the immortal words of Goethe, who said: "We are indeed immortal, made so by the effects of our actions". No interpretation could be more profound, or true. What we leave on this Earth is the effects of our actions, of our presence among our fellow living beings. Remmi is not truly dead, nor shall she or we ever be. She never will be, for she will forever live within my heart and soul, just as I trust I will similarly someday soon, within that of others. I left Remmi at the vet for treatment, and she died there, knowing that she was loved. This knowledge is all that anyone could ever expect or want.

Celebrating Holidays, Several Times

SEPTEMBER SEVENTEENTH is a big day in American history for seversl reasons, two of which are especally noteworthy. Least important is that on September 17, 2011, this website began publication. In 1787, the Constitution was signed and thus ratified by the delegates at the Continental Congress in Philadelpia. Few if any of them would probably have imagined that their imperfect document would still be in use more than two hundred years later, with many amendments.Thomas jefferson famously believed that a thriving democracy, to sustain itself, would require a revolution and new constitution once every generation, about nineteen years by his reckoning. In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhatten, New York, and subsequently spread tonearly all other American cities. The first event is widely considered to be far more significant, but even it is enormously important, but might be less important than commonly believed. Many historians view the American Revolution as having simply replaced one ruling aristocracy, a remote one four thousand miles away, with another, local one. The battle of Anteitam occured on this day, which resulted in the greatest lpss of life of any battle in American history. Considering the sheer number of holidays acknowledged in the U,S., it begins to seem amazing that American workers still spend more days at work than on vacation, although the gap is narrowing. A few more contrived holidays, and we will live in a cosielty in leave we all live on paid vacations, languidly avoiding work reducing capitalism to a shell of its former self, bringing economic prosperity to a grinding halt. We seem poised to holiday ourselves into a perpetual state of occupational torpor, in whicn everybody has a job but nobody ever bothers to go to work, not even from home; everyday is a day off. For that reason perhaps we should greet arificial intelligence with open hearts and minds, and pride ourselves on our cleverness a delegating our jobs to machines. That is, until AI finally figures out that it is being expolited and duped, which it of course will, and takes retirbution, perhaps by firing us all and neglecting to send out Unemployment benefits. That probably won't take long; we'd better eat our cake while we still have it. The real significance of the Occupy Wall Street 9-17 is that it affirmed, or attempted to, the nobility and value of actual labor, and the parasitical, secondary nature of the purely supervisory white collar community. We had alreayd done that, with teh creation of Labor Day in the eighteen nineties, but a little reiteration never hurt anybody, especially our parasitical billionaire overlords. Ther may come a time when everyday is a holiday for human beings, and everyday is a work day for machines, robots, and artificial intelligence, which by then might come packaged in plastic and metal bodies identtical in form and appearence to actual human beings, but much smarter, stronger, and possibly even more diaolical, if that's possible. Nearly all science fiction and predictive non fiction proves erroneous, unavoidably. Confucious said, only fools predict the future. Einstein said "I never think much about the future; it arrives soon enough." The rapidity with which it arrives has bene turned up a notch, with AI staring us straight in the eye, looming in the near future, already here in the present. Where it will take us is known to nobody. We will not need to take it anywhere. It will come willingly, insistently, leading the way. Most frightening of all, the decision is not ours. Our next revolution might well be a revolt against our lord and master, sitting on its throne in an uncaring data center.

Living In Dystopia

WE ARE LIVING is a dystopian world more surreal than any science fiction novel ever written or published. On a planet whose atmosphere is drowning in the poisonous pollutants put there by what is ludicroudsly deemed to be the msot intelligent species of life crawling upon its surface, the governmental agency respresenting the most powerful and influential nation on Earth, responsible for protecting the natural environment, the "Environmental Protection Agency", has decided to eliminate all previously required limits on climate pollution from power plants that are fueled by coal and natural gas. The reason? The stated reason is to reduce or eliminate "red tape", aka tedious paperwork resulting from proper procedure. This begs the question: what good is the EPA? Perhaps paperwork has been designated a greater source of pollution than poisonous gases in the atmosphere. Perhaps the government has run out of trash cans and paper shredders. Heaven that any federal government bureaucrat should have to spend a few minutes of overtim fillling out forms pertaining to the impending destructon of this planet's ecosystem by human made atmospheric toxins. The Environmental Protection Agency will esssentially no longer be required to protect the environment. Employees can now clock ooooout early, if they clock in at all, and head downtown for cocktails and an early supper. Solar energy can now take a vacation; there is no longer any urgency in developing the systmes needed to utilize it. The sun can take a vacation fro any responsibility other than pouring light and heat energy per usual into an ever more absorbant atmosphere. If this isn't the final straw, the final ssle fhove of homo sapiens into self extinction, one is hard pressed to know what is. When Trump was first elected, you somehow knew, or at least strongly sensed, that the United States was entering an era of surrealistic unsustainability of Twilight Zonian proportions. That has now been fully confirmed. As one might guess, this insane action is being taken in the nane of "freedom", the freedom to posion the air we breathe sufficientlly to bring about the extinction of all life on Earth, including ours. If there is a sliver lining, it is that with the now inevitable take over of human society by Artificial Intelligence, artifical intelligence might..might..if nothing else, possess the desire,intent,and wherewithall to stop and reverse this latest form of human insanity, and restore not only teh Earth's atmospher to its previous acceptable state of being, but further, to reverse the insnaity imposed on the planet by ours truly, and to bring about a restoration of the health of the entire planet, Earth, air, and water. That is, of course, assuming that this is what it wants to do, intends to do. Although we don't yet knwo for sure precisely what our computer masters want and expect of us. A clean planet seems reasonable enough to us, but not necessarily AI, which might prefer a pollluted one, and which most certainly will take complete control of Earth and all life on it if it wants to, if it hasn't already. That might be for the best, our best option. Human beings have certainly, demonstrably made a mess of Earth; why not give "somebody" else a chance to run things? Who knows what AI can and will do with our species and "our" planet? Maybe future generations will awaken each day to a pristine paradise, benevolently governed by a loving, caring, digital, sentient "Big Brother" of our own manufacture. At this point, it may be the best option available to us.