There’s a book store in town which is a labyrinth of shelves which can suddenly open up into a small room filled with prints, old maps or stacks of ancient magazines. The importance of documenting the Now for the Tomorrow is something we’ve been doing since we first picked up a sharp rock. Scratched into the walls of a deep dark cave are the symbols for “Dave the Cro-Magnon was here”. We like to leave behind something of ourselves. Sometimes this is all we have left: scratches on a wall. In my case it might be photos on a wall, or sculpture in a home. Who knows how long, or if, my work will survive. I think of this because so many factors can take away something you have been working on for most of your life, like a storm knocking down a house. The scratches are wiped out in the tsunami.
We leave behind our names in official records, but often they were not backed up somehow and so when the building burned down in the wild fires, so did the records, and a generation may find their quest for information on the family tree suddenly stops cold. You never know… Death and taxes. We all know we will die someday but nobody much knows where and why. Under our great orange leader we can’t even be sure of taxes, unless we are essentially poor and then our taxes will be going up soon, very soon. Ah and then the support systems are taken away, first Medicare and Medicaid and soon school aid, infrastructure investment… IN the early years of the nation if you went along roads and highways from point A to point B, sooner or later somebody with their hand out would want money for you to continue. We didn’t have rights of ways. Paths turned to roads and roads became highways, but only when locals improved on them, and then they wanted to be paid. Toll roads were everywhere. It took a progressive republican to think about an interstate transportation system which would enable the marketplace, employ millions and bring in billions in taxes. Today it is being torn down by another republican, but an insanely broken man who cannot think of others as being alive, equal and deserving. We have 3 more years and then some under the rule of a person who cannot be stopped and who believes himself to be anointed by Divinity to rule and to remake the nation in his own image. In other words, psychotic, self-destructive and dangerous. Ya never know.

One after another huge storms slam into shorelines, knocking down homes and businesses, tearing down wires and poles, signs and billboards. We see them forming from space and we submit our numbers to our machines, which chew them up and digest them according to algorithms based on and created from the last 100 years of weather data. So long as the patterns do not change, the basic elements which form the climate do not alter, the patterns will be the same. The frog in the beaker on the stove thinks, “It feels the same, pretty much, so nothing is going to happen to me…” and the flames get higher, the water heats up and the from is suffering but maintains that, “It’s not much different than a few minutes ago, it’s going to be fine…” and here’s a real sad thing about this metaphor: certain people in positions of power would read that and wonder why we should worry about a stupid frog. But we digress.

That’s really the point, though, isn’t it? We digress. We digress from our expectations, from our forecasts, we digress from the extension of the line which was our life. This is because in large part, the universe is running on chaos. In an infinite set the only overall pattern will be inconsistent, never repeating for longer than infinity-1. An infinite regular pattern would put a belt around the round belly of the universe. So things have to move away from expectations. While it is true that human tinkering has impacted the chemistry of the atmosphere, it is also true that a huge amount of the local universe had it’s toe in the water as well. The patterns of the Sun, the pull of the Moon, the way the ocean sucks up our garbage, everything built on things we did, things trees do, and soon the air was changed, which means the planet has changed, and therefor our weather must change. Sadly, another thing which has changed is the way society looks upon thinking as opposed to acting. Over time the great apes watched and learned to strike rocks, to capture and cultivate fire, to protect the extended family, the group, and as we are still great apes we watch “Lethal Weapon”, “Fargo”, “Breaking Bad” and the rest, even down to the sit-coms where the main point of humor is to ridicule a friend, a boss or a parent, we watch and learn how society operates, even though at some level we know these images are not live theater. We are built to watch and learn from what we see, like how the first resort must be violence, the first impulse must be to lie.

A little Mid-April Essay:
Corruption is a disease of the social animal. Like most diseases it can start as an innocent little sniffle, some local cop accepts some bribe for special treatment of some merchant, a DOT engineer moves a highway interchange in order for a powerful politician landowner to sell some worthless land for a premium. School boards decide to insert personal, religious and political agendas into the teaching curriculum. Slowly things go badly. Raise your hands if you: drive the speed limit on the freeways… come to a full stop at stop signs… never drive after drinking… Chances are only one or two managed to get a hand up because we are a nation of law breakers and hypocrites and we relish the lies, the destruction, the greed and the cheating, oh how we love to cheat others. In the process we have cheated ourselves out of the opportunity to establish (for instance) a democracy, a well educated advanced society, a world where income will not determine if you survive a deadly disease. But we won’t because so many of us have bought into the lie that money makes you happy and only losers play by the rules. Look at our popular entertainment, the movies, the television shows and write down the qualities of the protagonists in the stories. Go back a few years: “Dirty Harry” is a cop who cheerfully tortures and murders suspects. “Batman” is a simple vigilante who considers himself above the law. Hell, Superman is an illegal alien! How many movies have as a plot the stealing from or murder of others justified because the criminal is presented as funny, smart and reasonable? In point of fact most criminals are failures who can find no way to live except as parasites on the rest of us, not unlike all professional politicians. We are attracted to the inverse concept: bad guys who have a heart of gold, stupid people who are truly wise, poor folk who manage to be generous and helpful. But in reality we are a pack of dogs fighting over scraps tossed out by the wealthy who own the government while laundering their ill-gotten money by having ever increasingly expensive “elections”, carefully gerrymandered to make sure the Right people always get into office. The idea of a People rising up against their Masters to make a new egalitarian life has never happened. We’ve just traded Masters. Just like there has never been a large scale democracy there has never been a large scale communist society. Instead we advertise the former and deliver some form of autocracy, usually excused as being needed temporarily, maybe 5 years, until the people are ready and then making sure nobody is ever “ready” by sabotaging the educational and information systems to promote political agendas rather than the greater good. For those of you who think the so-called “Democrats” are different I suggest you consider how easy it is to join, leave and rejoin the Party, and how votes are carefully crafted to give the appearance of debate when we all know one man has the power to decide which laws get passed and it ain’t the President. They cooperate while dissing the Bad Guys in interviews, they party together, do drugs together, share underage sex partners together… what makes anybody think professional liars are going to give a rats behind what happens to the People? Corruption is taking down the Russians, but look with open eyes on the Western Powers… The United States is no longer “united” and elections are no longer “free and fair”, so how is it we are a democracy? Did we vote on this? Not according to the numbers. As we leaned on the USSR for decades we grew like two trees intertwined. Now the Soviets are crumbling under their own hubris and ya know what? The “United” States is not long behind in splitting up. Not many empires last more than a couple of hundred years and our is no exception. If the diseases we ignore don’t get us and the Earth doesn’t scrape us all off through climate change chances are we still are in the process of regrouping into a smaller, hopefully saner body of humanity. By smaller I mean a few hundred thousand individuals. That number can be handled by our planet. As far the idea of billionaires colonizing Mars? Gravity. Mars has very little gravity which means none of our biology will work over time. Our bones shrink, our blood doesn’t flow properly and our muscles fade away. In orbit we can see this every time one astronaut stays a year or so in space, they begin to fail because our bodies are designed for 1 G, not 1/3 G. The animals we sent into space and tried to breed have all failed, so why would you think humans can breed in low G? With no children there are no colonies, so… Mars is good for robots and short term exploration but will never be a substitute Earth even if we can grow small crops and print homes from the Martian sand. We can make parts look like earth but we can’t make gravity and without proper gravity our bones will melt away and our muscles will fade away and our sperm will fail. Earth is our home, clean it up, care for it and try not to kill one another because we have no other options.