Chaos is hip for the childless

Sure, when you're 27, chaos might seem pretty cool. Nihilism might be awesome at 25. Anarchy is your goal at 21. But, I observe in my gathering dotage, once you have children, these and similar philosophies lose all appeal. I mean, who wants their child to grow up in a Dystopian Thunderdome? Libertarians, maybe. Though I doubt that too.

Also, what the hell is a fox? Dog? Cat? Dogcat? Also too, in New Gondolin news, I had found a rabbit friend who would come up to me in the woods and watch what I was doing. I'd talk to her - "Hi, Mrs. Rabbit. How's life? How are the kids? Hope you're eating well - the grass looks tasty." Etc. She wasn't much of a conversationalist, but she'd twitch her nose and listen. Great listener. Anyways, the other day I came upon an odd looking scat on a trail the rabbit frequently frequented, and consulting my "Big Book o' Scat", I narrowed it down to some type of fox. And I've not seen Mrs. Rabbit since - 6 days! I fear the worst, and I doubt my reward for information will bring any clarity onto this distressing situation.

If you were taken, Mrs. Rabbit, well, I hope your calories help the fox's kids. Cycle of life and all that. RIP.

Capitalism, Comrade

America being America, of course, we stopped paying attention to Russia once the Cold War ended. Let me summarize what's happened since: Near chaos. Oligarchs seized control of the country, and robbed the country blind. Average life expectancy for men has plummeted into the mid-50's. Alcoholism is widespread. Gang and terrorism based violence is endemic and brutal. Putin runs a charade of democracy. And yet! Glimmers of hope appear. There's a vibrant music scene. There are many internet geniuses. And they get more Westernized by the year.

Here we see a Moscow club with a minimum breast size limit for female guests. Too small, and you don't get in.

Bigtime lawsuit in America. Free wheeling capitalism in Russia. Here's a prediction for 2013! Wingnuts will start hailing Russian freedoms as example of what's wrong with America.

They love Oligarchy, after all.

Joker Kick Flip

A real thing - Heath Ledger was a skater dude. So why not do some flips over Batman while on break? Always time to skate, Batbrah.

However, I am not a skater, so I would have to decline any offer of said skatage. I am not Batman, by the way, but Redshirt - and I value my health and life!

The Story (as of today)

Here it is:


A long, long time ago there was something like a point, but not really, of infinite mass and zero space. And then it began to expand, and then really expand (Inflation Theory), and in those first few moments, all the building blocks for our Universe were created in a crescendo of matter-antimatter collisions, with but .00001% of matter surviving, and that small remainder is everything. 


With ever further expansion came cooling and with that matter condensed out of energy, and then matter joined with matter to make a nucleus, which caught an electron, and an atom was born. Hydrogen and Helium filled the universe in great clouds, swirling and twisting with the currents of energy rippling through space, and over hundreds of thousands of years these great clouds condensed down into hot swirling points and BAM! The first stars were born, giant monsters living and dying in a few thousand years and then BAAAMMM! A massive explosion, and the first stellar Black Hole is born, and begins eating, pulling everything towards it. And this relentless pull pushes more clouds of hydrogen and helium to condense, creating stars and stars and ever more stars, some of these giving birth to more Black Holes, which start to merge, growing ever larger, ordering more and more clutches of stars in orbit around them, and the first galaxies were born.

Stars of hydrogen and helium create ever heavier metals, like carbon and oxygen, nitrogen and lithium, and this second generation of stars creates ever more heavier metals, like Iron, and in the biggest explosions of stars, everything denser than Iron is created in an instant - gold, silver, uranium, etc.  And we - life - is made up of these heavier metals. Iron courses through our very blood, and there is only one place in existence where Iron is created: A star.


Life spawned on one planet orbiting one star in a vast sea of billions of stars in billions of galaxies in maybe billions of Universes, and spread from the sea to the land. Evolution relentlessly shaped forms and functions through success and many millions of years later, here we are, you and I, contemplating it all. Brains made of up of hundreds of billions of neurons communicating electronically over a galaxy of connections, producing these very words that I type, you read, you and me - made of this very Universe, with a mind able to wonder why.


We live in an infinite sea of realities, dimensions and times beyond our comprehension and yet still, we can strive and imagine, this fantastic existence we call ours: Blessed to live in this, the Golden Era.


For our future is grim; the earth will be burnt and destroyed hundreds of times over; our galaxy will merge with Andromeda, sending each into a chaos lasting a billion years, and many, many billion more, space will be so stretched out there will be no stars in the night sky, as all matter is so far apart from other matter that there is, nothing. Stretched to infinity, cold and dark and eternal, as time will stop, motion will stop, the credits will say: Fin.


But that is all meaningless other than in a poetic way: We are here, now, alive and able to ask, Why? And "Why?" is the most powerful force ever released in this grand play.

Dispatches from Gondolin

What I find fascinating about this somewhat cheesy drawing: JRR Tolkien basically invented these genres of Swords and Sorcerers, Dungeons and Dragons, Worlds of Warcraft, etc - the entire Fantasy genre, for all tents and porpoises. And this genre spawned, also,  the Sci-fi we know  and love today: Star Wars is nothing but Fantasy with robots and spaceships rather than swords and horseback. 

Tolkien set out to do just this - create a new mythology, made up of bits and pieces of all sorts of existing myths. He succeeded extravagantly, I'd say. He and L.Ron have to go down as two of the greatest writers ever if for no other reason than the numbers of people who swear allegiance to the fake religions, histories, and stories they created. One of them on a bet; the other during a lifetime of deep scholarship and research. Who's to say who'll be more successful in the end?

The end - what's that, anyways? Just a new beginning, always. Nothing ends, just transforms into other things, somethings else to play a part on this grand stage of pretending - ACTING!


Also, too: The Geo-Thermal is kicking ass.

Also also as well: You can try and justify those giant eagles in LOTR all you want. They are literal Deux ex Machinas flying in to save the day, only when it makes little difference to do so.

A Start Too Favre

Under the theory that the first three years of any new decade is actually part of the previous decade, culturally (Consider: 1963 was part of what we consider the 50's; 73 was the 60's; 83 was the 70's leading us to), Brett Favre is an 80's QB, as this poster from the era can attest. And it really is quite remarkable he has played so long, so continuously. Enough to hold almost every major QB record. His start tonight against the Bears on the frozen tundra of Gopher Field was inspiring, in fact. But the 80's were a long time ago, and all things comes to an end.

As my friend L.E.S.T.E.R. relates, entropy rules us all, and we, and everything we could ever know, are destined for ever greater chaos. As with all truths, accept this, realize it, and move on. Any and all facts are but operating conditions for this game of Life.

EXTREME

Premise: Everything IS more extreme than in the past (it's not your imagination). The reason for this is the self-sustaining dialectic created by the Internet/Cable referenced down below. To wit: You have more opportunity to know what's going on out there. This knowledge will inform your decisions, which you then feed-back into the dialectic, which in turn will supply someone else information, and so on. Given the very human need to take something - anything - to the next level, or personalize it, this dynamic will create a feedback loop of ever increasing extremism, however you'd like to define "extreme".

Examples:

 The Police have gotten more extreme.

 The Technology has gotten more extreme.

 The guns and gun owners have gotten more extreme.

 The dialog has gotten more extreme.

The Media has gotten more extreme.

 The infantile delusions have gotten more extreme (for an easy formula to understand a teabagger - they truly believe they are of the same clothe as the folks involved in the American Revolution. The truth is, if anything, they're more like the folks from South Carolina circa 1857, but they'll never understand that. It IS important for US to understand what they think of themselves, however deluded)

I could - and will, later - go on and on. This extremism seems to be in every corner of the world, leaving nothing untouched (sports, for example). It's a function of our times in most ways, specifically the truly revolutionary technological capabilities that are continually reinventing our world.

That is, we're living through a mighty transition, and transitions, while natural and good in of themselves, bring massive amounts of upheaval and suffering. 


The only way to end an "extremist feedback loop" is to deprive it of fuel (true of any feedback). There is only three ways to do that: 1. It dries up on its own because it's exhausted its fuel supply, or 2. People willingly deprive it of fuel (a new mindset takes hold), and/or 3. There is a substantial external event that resets the playing field.

Then, of course, there are the changes each of us can make within ourselves - the only true and lasting change. But that's up to you.

And to conclude, the instigating factor (the spark) to many of the extremities of the day is Barack Obama. Not for anything he's done or said, but simply who he is. Think of American race relations as a blister that Obama popped. It needed to be popped, and will turn out OK in the end. But till then, we've got to deal with a lot of pus - IE the Teabaggers et al.

If you don't believe me, consider a similar era - the Civil Rights era. I don't think anyone could argue that the efforts of those folks paid huge, positive dividends for everyone in the world. But there was a sure lot of pain and suffering to get through it (Birmingham, Selma, etc). 

So buck up!

All things are scaled

By scaled, for example, imagine this picture represents the gravity wells of Blackholes, where the clouds represent our space/time, and the funnels represent gravity wells caused by the Blackhole.

At this point in time, we know the following about Blackholes:

- Giant versions of them exist at the center of every galaxy.

- At the center point of a blackhole, our physics breaks down and we understand nothing. This is the definition of a Singularity, just like the one that birthed our Universe. I don't think that's a co-incidence.

- They exist in microscopic form, coming into and swiftly exiting out of existence all around us.

- No one really knows what a blackhole is, other than a phenomena we observe defined by gravity in the extreme - extreme into the Singularity, where gravity is so dense there is no more matter, no more energy. Where it goes, what happens, no one knows.

Everyone's betting multiple dimensions, however. So, consider.

Chaos

I've never played, but Dungeons and Dragons has what I think is an interesting way of thinking about Good and Evil with their "Alignments" -- Lawful Good (Superman), Chaotic Good (Robin Hood), Lawful Evil (Palpatine), Chaotic Evil (Loki, or, The Joker), among them.

In the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight -- which I HIGHLY recommend - The Joker played by Heath Ledger is Chaotic Evil like I've never seen on the screen before. Pure chaos towards an evil end.

But chaos need not be evil, though I suspect much of what we think of conventionally as "evil", is actually instead, Chaos - Shit Happens, in other words. And because we seem to inherently view the world as personified with human emotions, we tend to see chaos in nature as bad, or "evil".

The questions I have about Chaos tend towards the objective (i.e. scientific), and not the specifics of human values. People like order, and dislike chaos; but does nature have a preference?

Is our reality "ordered" or "chaotic"?


My answer is: All is order; the appearance of chaos simply means you cannot perceive the order within.

Your answer may vary.