The most expensive thing ever built and maintained is the International Space Station. At $160B over its lifetime, the ISS is a model for the excessively wealthy.

True, it is not primed for self-sustaining flight, and the quarters are very cramped, but a space-faring über-rich individual has to have a Plan B in case they’re not on the same continent as one of their “end of days” bunkers. Those start at $1 million and can run upwards of $300 million.

About the same time as the first private space station comes into service, we will also find that the rocket and tandem-independent space shuttle will also be feasible. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The right half of the frame is doingmy head in. The mélange of people is very well realized.

My track off this album was always “The Deer Hunter.”

Rivaled only by the track before it, “Respiration”. This is such a great album.

From the past 10 years, in reverse order (from my Goodreads)

• The Passenger + Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

• Ducks by Kate Beaton

• The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

• On Tyrrany by Timothy Snyder

• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Edit: a few more from the past 50 years.

• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

• Two Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

• Post War by Tony Judt

• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

I’m starting to think that the Nobel Prize for Economics should be renamed the Nobel Anti-Peace Prize.

Basically, there has always been opportunity in disaster. The Shock Doctrine uncovers the methods of those who engineer or wait for crises in order to capitalize on, or pass profiteering legislation in challening times.

I read the Shock Doctrine back in '09. It crystallized the Bush II presidency in such detail and scope that I’ve never been able to forget it.

Things have only gotten worse. Even under Obama. Certainly under Trump and Biden.

The part about Yeltsin firing on his own Parliament was very insightful. Again, setting the stage for Russia’s current exercises of Shock.

Letting enough people die expedites certain forms of problem-solving; particularly those that involve the military, technology, heavy industry, reconstruction, and financial sectors of the economy. When the most expensive things are destroyed — like cities, infrastructure, and the concept of human security — that’s where the fuckiteering begins. Debt loads, overcharging, and profiteering on misery for companies /countries that caused the problems in the first place.

It’s gross.

12 more drinks.

Honestly, now — not promoting binge drinking or alcohol consumption at all — but that book tears something in you. It can’t be undone.

The Forever War is such an important and great read. I’d put it alongside Catch-22 and Johnny Got His Gun for an anti-war novel.

Maybe Flowers for Algernon? I read this for the first time near when when I read Canticle. I much more connected to Algernon.

MaddAddam trilogy also touches close to home for me, not least because Atwood is Canadian.

I was also late to Childhood’s End and The Chrysalids.

It was The Corporation for me. Then, I discovered Adam Curtis. Smartest Guys in the Room, some Michael Moore stuff, then I really started taking a look at War docs with Smedley Butler and Dalton Trumbo and Charlie Chaplin shouting at me from the 1930s and 40s. Errol Morris kicked ass in the Fog of War, John Pilger kicked ass in Occupation 101, and BBC kicked ass with the Death of Yugoslavia.

This was 20 or 25 years ago. All this seems trite by comparison to where we are now.

A little late to the game, aren’t they?

This may be anecdotal, but it may also be a canary in a coalmine.

I have seen a civilian population tear down its president and vice-president. Peacefully, and just before an election. It took months of activism. Weeks of protest and a 1-day general strike.

Look up Guatemala, 2015. Otto Perez Molina. #noletoca.

This was underreported, I think. Three presidents later, therr is Bernardo Arevalo. He is a president whose legacy hearkens back to before their Civil War, after WWII, and before US intervention.

Wall-E v.0.1.0.

If I said yes, I’d caveat that by saying, “we’re not special.” There’s no interaction, quid pro quo or otherwise, with whatever presence, energy, or overmind that I would conceptualize as a deity.

Not an architect. Not a creator. Omnipotence and omniscience defy temporality. There are, similarly, no subdivisions of the deity; there are no places that it is present, and others that it is absent. No underboss gods, angels, demons, heavens, hells, or purgatories.

The deity, in my understanding, is simply a unity: An answer to paradoxes, a solution to the incomprehensible, a layer beneath and above all other measurements, concepts, and capacities. A holographic whole that encompasses and inhabits every possibility. It is older than the universe and beyond our feeble attempts to comprehend it, let alone write its character and tell its story.

A bearded white dude who impregnated a virgin, hates masturbation, holds vendettas, destroys cities, sends plagues, and permits humans to hide from “HIM” in the garden of good and evil… it is all just silly by comparison. At that’s just from the tradition I was raised in.

I mean, a burning bush? Or tests of faith?

We, people and all other organisms that are aware of one another, need to get on with finding ways to coexist. Biodiversity is the scorecard.

/rant

The metric is biodiversity.

How many kinds of life are there, and are they thriving? What are the bottlenecks and boundaries for species that slow or stop their progress?

Well, as a living, all-consuming, extinction-level event, I’d say we are making the experiment more impossible. We are a confounding factor, a bias most foul, and the primary flaw in the experimental design.

If only there was guidance in terms of balancing our biological impact and capacity for sustainable development. If only there were some models that have and had worked for millennia. If only there were living groups who could share their wisdom.

If only.

So, for now, plunderous expropriation rules: violent, resource-heavy, rational modern warfare; apathetic, resource-heavy, throwaway consumer culture; and ignorant, resource-heavy, industrial machinations.

What could go wrong?

Nice to meet you, too. Thanks to 세종대왕 (Sejong Dae Wang, King Sejong) for creating a Hangeul, a stronger phonetic system. I look forward to its use for a long time to come.

IIRC, the food, therefore the word, was introduced to Korea. It is a transliteration. Like “tae-kwon-do” is a transliteration from the Korean 태권도 (taegwondo).

Note: Korean is not my first language. It is first non-English script I’ve managed to learn to read and write and makes me happy every time I interact with it.

My read/spoken Korean is atrocious and barely functions.

치즈 (chi-jeu)