Found Bike&Chain and started reading? Got the impression you’re eavesdropping on an ongoing argument between an emotional giant and intellectual midget? How does that differ from latest presidential tweet? Yes, posts are mostly colloquial convo, seldom coercive essays or forensic analyses full of arm twisting and bullying detail. Do allude to crucial news, but usually how it relates to bicycling. Since basic motility defines being alive, both bicyclists and unicellular amoebas self propel, and everything affects a bicyclist’s use of shared space, what topic can ever be exempt? In other words, prepare for another rant. Looking back, like posts have been somewhat prescient. Reliable prophecies are worth more than gold, a shiny element with limited uses, mostly decorative though practical for non-corrosive electronic connections.
Everything in the universe is connected, even dust that eventually forms stars. Many things exert influence, some more than others despite lack of proximity. But causality exists on a continuum: Dominant > appreciable > inconsequential > negligible. Consider the sun, or some federal edicts: Full spectrum. Without sun, earth would fly out of orbit, everybody would freeze to death, and sky would be solid ice; solar radiation absorbed by plants produces, among many things, feed for livestock, food for people, and rubber for pneumatic tires; vitamins for survival come directly and indirectly from sunshine. While stuck in some cubicle, however, outdoor daylight and Oval Office skullduggery seem unimportant. In fact, you may not notice what you don’t directly experience, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you now or years hence. Society’s wellbeing brings forth whatever makes life bearable. Most underestimate how much all are interdependent. Desperation drags everyone down. Obsession with loss puts families at odds. Toxicity, whether physical or relational, ruins lives.
Generalities appeal; specifics bore. Eagles don’t hunt flies, an old adage goes. De minimis trifles are dwarfed by one’s inner universe. Everyday life could be dramatically altered by an original idea imagined aloud. Explains why a dunce badly wielding power would denounce factual news as fake. Politics depend on daily pronouncements and weekly results. Impeachment recommendations and treason accusations seem extreme yet justified. Elected officials can be recalled by constituents, should they ever decide to organize into a quorum. Don’t hold your breath. One dimensional populace never considers progress. Four dimensional beings are so rare you may never meet one. Though inherent in a bicyclist's DNA, no mental midget or psychic naine has any foresight whatever.
Impatient rubes hate to listen to a comprehensive debate. Corporations warn against BLOB presentations with lots of details that detract from conclusion on bottom, prefer BLOT (bottom line on top) so as to ignore rest. Compliance leads to wild claims of document importance. Labann likes to dig right into root causes, too, dispense with steps already taken to derive, expose mechanisms, but never make false conclusions. Nobody prefers to be ignored when they go through the motions of expressing and sharing. Yet structure doesn’t demonstrate sanity. Proof requires successful application. Every standpoint may have merit if it matches current circumstances. “Tough on crime” must be balanced with mercy. “Making great” must weigh “at what expense”, what “great” means, who loses, who wins. “Great for whom?” you might ask. Exactly what year do you want to visit again? For some that's when bullies could get away with atrocities no longer allowed. Nothing that Washington wants will be great for you, just more bankruptcies to brood, beatings to absorb, and bruises to heal. Due to increases in accidents, cardiopulmonary diseases, and obesity, American life expectancy flattened in 2010 and is headed down, despite better cancer treatment and risk management. Those who deny knowledge amassed by science and made available over internet should've expected it, though facts can be buried in bullshit. You’d think medical focus would be on prevention, but too few pay any attention to evidence and trends.
Instead, companies are desperate to get staff to interact well. Hiring is based equally on 2 criteria: social and task skills. They don’t hire minions, who mastered only the latter, or politicians, who practice only the former. Only sociopaths want to assume leadership roles. After all, what is continuous improvement? Not a destination but a process, anyone who buys in creates an untenable career for her/himself. Neither computers nor humans are exceptional at performing flawlessly. Fooling yourself that you're controlling processes really means tolerating what workers do demotivated and hung over, and so is best described by overseeing oppositional defiance and quiet disorder. While surveys are supposed to suggest a desire for customer satisfaction, they smack of distrust in how their staff fulfilled tasks. It's not managing requests, rather policing ranks.
Any outsider who heard corporate technologists would find their explanations incomprehensible. You must have familiarity with fabric and threads they weave with abbreviations and buzz words. You can’t decipher without knowing histories and issues, must sort what's important to you from what's not. Most of it need not be said, only exists because someone thinks it should, either out of duty, ego or fear. Employees learn in 5 stages: identifying, recognizing, reapplying repeatedly, mastering totally, and teaching others. Ability to successfully pass along duties relies not only upon own competence but pupil receptivity and whether facts still carry significance as personnel and situations change. You can never become complaisant, must stay on top of sea changes, or suffer consequences.
How businesses are managed and staffed matters. Takes diligence to fulfill customer needs. However, inventory taxes cause factories to limit production. Lean retailing means you can’t find a pair of shoes that fits, something you have to try on to decide. You can order online, but then a truck must bring and/or return when it doesn’t fit. Shoes are essential for motility, though some survivalists who never visit cities disagree. Prices don’t guarantee quality. Bludgeoned buyers hang onto worn out shoes rather than undergo horror of finding replacements. Because of state policy, your comfort, convenience, and satisfaction no longer matter.
Despite countless excellent transactions, fundamental trust in products and services, and no reason to suspect anything but good will, your faith will be shaken to its very core by one cretin devoted to evil. Creates a climate of mistrust for everyone. Worse, you will be associated with, held responsible for, and persecuted alongside your enemies. Entire German nation was condemned for Hitler’s heinous unilateral decisions. Einstein renounced all national citizenship. Majority without logic or patience can't distinguish between criminals and their victims. Your sole role may be to distance yourself from them.
Why should things be so complex? Can you survive complexity? Could it be you're incapable of learning, or is obscurantism intentional? Instead of automating drudgery and improving efficiency, computers complicate life and frustrate users. Expert systems supposedly transfer knowledge from author to functionary. But it only works when button pushers choose right interface and perform tasks within parameters. Authors themselves are stymied by software rigidity. Consequently, expert systems don't exist to simplify work, rather unify approaches, which leads to conformity, mediocrity, and potentially no improvements. While some hail restraint as a source of creativity, putting artists on a pedestal based on what they’ve overcome seems hostile and inept. You actually don't do the same tasks repetitively, but continuously adapt, learn anew, step into unfamiliar roles. Human adaptability preserves species but reaps few accolades.
All this results in anger, craving, delusion and guilt. One could simplify, but then feel dissatisfied and empty. Corporations profit from barriers to competition. Like it or not, computers do allow more functions to occur and standardize things that ought to be. But operating among diverse systems polarizes users into camps defending their own flawed construct so as to avoid having to relearn. Many corporations settle for 10-year-old operating systems, thus removing educational barriers, but then introduce proprietary applications that unduly challenge and wantonly get replaced. In such an esoteric maelstrom employees struggle to survive.
When you've always operated within a paradigm driven by scientific principles, the degree to which today’s rabble disregards them disgusts and horrifies. Without logic and order, chaos rules and mayhem ensues. Civilization hangs by a hair over oblivion while technology runs amuck beyond democratic command. DataBots are mapping mankind’s thoughts and will soon rule your life. Human blogs should be about organic subtleties—creation cusps, godlike awe, great notions, noble ideals, passionate touches, and reasons to live—everything beyond capacities of artificial intelligence. Intimates swap dreams, fungi, germs, saliva, semen, sweat and things wet. Computers are dry, infantile, sterile and viral; they infect each other but neither create nor procreate, still have trouble making sense of patterns, and suddenly go haywire. Brains of homo sapiens outperform the most complex computers by a quantum measure, yet most men are deemed too stupid to manage own lives, so require governance by equally incompetent egomaniacs who program even duller tools. Protect your language? When computers force you to speak in ways they can use against you, you’re already dead.
Incomprehensible nonsense and inefficient methods rankle circuit cyborgs and control freaks. Since Gilgamesh, authors have hid behind fictional masks and figures of speech that substituted for damning details. Bulgakov himself and contemporary Russian novelists threw finished novels on the fire because publishing them under Stalin’s regime would have meant writing their own death sentences. Today’s terrorists keep blogs that tip heinous acts before they occur, though they are only identified in hindsight. Surely there are better ways to be heard than committing or instigating crimes against the innocent.
If you publicly alleviate guilt and exonerate those responsible for social injustice and worthy of indictment for crimes against humanity, you will find fiscal favor, especially if you put a string of abbreviations—DSc, MBA, MD, PhD—after your name. They toss you a bone for barking at passing strangers, or turn a blind eye while you scream and starve. The privileged few seem amused by this but sincerely threatened by anyone who discloses from where their wealth was plundered, powerless majority. Lust for control, money or power can be listed as a symptom of mental disorder. Anger, resentment, and suspicion are normal reactions to antisocial abuse.
Nature resists human domination. Lawns don't have to be flawlessly manicured. Creatures including humans normally seek fulfillment in food, rest, sleep, touch and warmth. Fear that nature suddenly won't provide drives greedy amassment, but wealth won't save you once environment fails. Money looses all value when there's nothing to buy. Worse, possessing whatever might sustain slaps a target on your back. Sensible solutions? Clean up country, create jobs that commit community, and invest in clean energy.
A cohort of Republican congressmen just don't get this, want to deny climate issue and exit Paris Accord. After a weekend of world class motor sports, zero carbon footprint may be the last thing that occurs to them. Cities and states, not congress, make 75% of decisions that affect environmental destruction or preservation. World knows better, so won't look to America to set agenda anymore. Unless foreign aid still flows, USA forfeits influence, slumps globally, and transmits vulnerability to enemies.
You don't need abbreviations to say what's true. Don't mean to be repetitive, either, but same revelations reoccur to those forced to continually re-evaluate which actions best serve changing scenarios. Well timed messages might get heard, but not when suffocated by nonsense and propaganda. No matter how hard you try, past cannot be revived, but you can plan for a future, though that would require assurance one exists and you can rely on society to work together on what would most affect it. If you've read this far, can you deny having had many of these same thoughts?
Small sentence fragments pop into head, as if thinking in complete sentences was too much to bear. You schizophrenically begin to notice how your brain is being rewired by considering ideas that make little sense. In times like these writer's block thins the herd, so to speak. It most affects people who have nothing worth saying. The cure is to do stuff that might interest readers. How-to writers get overwhelmed while compiling facts, there are so many. But nobody reads how-tos, or how you feel today, particularly irrelevant social media content. What vexes you after being downtrodden and oppressed hardly counts since reactionary conservatives gained control over government decades ago, grabbed everything, and impoverished everyone else. There’s no point having a free press if nobody questions such inequity. Only creative leaps of enlightened minds and organized plans of revolutionary intelligentsia rate as worthwhile reading. Yet authors and journalists run risks of arrest, death, ostracizing, poverty and short lives. Never committing one word to print could assist survival, though it never helped prophets, who were only ever orators. Gave their evangelists plenty to write about, though they too were treated horribly by the ignorantsia. Hear no, see no, speak no evil? Only forgives, neglects, and suggests decline has already begun.
Spring supposedly rejuvenates. Youth have no recollection of how things once were. Those who’ve been around for more than a half century tend to contrast. The phrase Third World arose during Cold War when commentators separated Communist Bloc (second) from NATO Allies (first); rest were gathered into a third bin characterized by lack of modern development. Entire world has begun to resemble the latter, sunk to the lowest level. Joblessness, pavement beat to rubble, survival tactics, and widespread want already approximate a post-apocalyptic wasteland. That’s what happens when you let conservative lawmakers transfer $50 trillion from US treasury into a few private hands. You don’t have to drop weapons to achieve mass destruction. This would not have been possible when things were less global; citizens knew where taxes went. Unions resisted whenever corporations took advantage of workers, that is, until Reagan busted most of them. Your last watchdogs are under attack; vicious dictators lurk around the corner. History favors victors standing upon a mound of massacre. Time cloaks crime and dispels blame. So, no blazing phoenix awaits a bitter nation who won't assume responsibilities.
I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep
And its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow…
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which…
in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.—William Blake
Saturday, June 3, 2017
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