Rejuvenation Pills

No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid means you stay hale and hearty.

I've convinced that we humans have pupal, larval, and adult insect stages, seeing as we are ape-shaped bugs, really. Funny little bugs, floating on a ball of lava, at the bottom of a razor thin ocean of air. There's no molting or cocoons, no overt dramatic stages,  but there are stages. Puberty obviously, but research have shown body changes at age 40 and 60. One more late stage adult change, I suspect, happens around 80, where you turn into a tough old bird, or a fragile and more gracile one (both are useful adaptations).

I'm laying the ground work for the rejuvenation pulls discussion. Recognizing biology, we eliminate pills that can turn you into babies, or with lack of access, turn you into a corpse in front of our eyes. Much as I like that stuff, it's unrealistic bullshit.

So, rejuvenation pills might take you back to a prior stage. If you are 60+, you go back to 40. If in you're in your 40s, welcome to 25. Anyone taking the pill before age 25 has no known effects. Let's not rule out compounding, so that someone aged 80+ could over time go back to 25. 

If you hated Boomers, just wait.

Rich people want this kind of immortality, and given the statistics on generational wealth being solid, it's a good bet. You risk the occasional chaos, but you assume if things take a shit you can't get the pills anyway. In which case you age normally, or if things have really taken a shit, die.

But let's say things take a minor shit, a bottleneck, and the rejuvenation pills either have a lasting effect, or are available, many of these bunker billionaires find themselves slaves to the Furious Host. The Great Unwashed Undead Survivors. Immortal Barbarism? Nah. Like it or not we are a superorganism. But the irony of Elon Mush or Donnie some war lord's butt, is funny

All Is Lost

I broke up a fight in my class. Well, not a fight but a pushing and shouting match. I did the drill instructor number on the two of these voting age adults. One of them actually said "He started it!"

And you wonder why Trump won. 

In the age of bullshit, improvise.

The world of 500 years ago, even 100 years ago would to our eyes be an ostentatious abundance, a startling abundance of life. 

We live in a poverty world, caused by our own selfish tastes, not learning; therefore doomed. No amount of prepper prepping or billionaire bunkering is going to help out. The bottleneck is coming, but it can be postponed. Is it worth it? 

It's not too late. All we have to do is stop killing everything. Nature knows how to bounce back after four billion years of knockdowns. Take the sharks as an example, once as numerous as passenger pigeons or buffalo, many are now classified Critically Endangered. Their populations have been decimated by 95% since the 1980s. Pelagic sharks, ocean going sharks have suffered the worst due to industrial fishing.

We are closer than we think to fisheries collapse. The industry response is to fish down the food chain, and currently krill is now on the menu. If we aint heading towards Soylent Green, I don't know what.

Zooming in to the USA, does the choice of a Trump or Harris, Republican or Democratic regime make any difference? The answer is mostly no, but ah there's that mostly.

Biden's Big Fucking Deal that is building 5 trillion in infrastructure is what Trump should have done in 2017. Period. Hard to cancel since it beneifts so many red districts. Biden was old, not stupid.

But the Trump regime had blow jobs and hand jobs to get out of the way, to satisfy the donor class or else. And Putin*

Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with mediocre GDP growth but boy did the rich get richer? And Infrastructure Week was a tired joke. So, this is a problem again. It's amazing how all these consumers just throw their money at these frauds. I mean, when I hear the word entrepreneur, I reach for my revolver. And check for my wallet. 

The biggest worry is that our economy shows no sign of slowing, and after we get over the AI bubble, there is every indication of another roaring twenties. That would accelerate the killing, putting collapse as early as 2032. Biology and medicine are making stunning progress and I wouldn't be surprised if things along the lines of rejuvenation pills or something within the decade.

If you hate Boomers now, just wait. 

All Is Not Lost

Welp, get ready for four years with the Blowjob Queen of Mar-a-lago*. Besides the fat old slut of an orange bedbug, we have his veep, the Bearded Lady, the spastic ketamine fueled prancer Elon Musk to take tongs and sledgehammer to the executive branch, and a shaky fart voiced RFKjr, who is determined to give us all smallpox.

The plan is to deport everyone, shut down immigration, throw up tariffs, make the Justice Department an American Gestapo, and hold military tribunals against perceived enemies. What fun!

The first administration back in 2017 was an inept, incompetent, do-nothing farrago. The only notable accomplsihment was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which helped add 8 trillion dollars to the debt, and the permanent disappearance of trillions into the pockets of the donor class. Oh, right, and one million dead Americans from mishandling a plague.

Unfortunately, Trump stooges now know where all the levers and switches of power are located, so we can expect a slightly more competent handling of our beast of a government. 

The good news is our ship of state cannot turn on a dime. Our government, a globe-spanning kaiju - no strike that, a Lovecraftian horror, is as unwieldy as it is big. Policies put in place years or decades ago are not only still in place, but often, only now being implemented. So, any action from the Trump regime, damaging as it may be to citizens, will take some time. Inertia, and all that. Not to mention the policy of "comply but do not obey" the deep state often uses irregardless of transient personalities.

So the juggernaut of state may not completely or immediately roll over It's citizenry.

There are also policies in place that were Trump-proofed during legislation. The biggest suite of policies are those put in place by Biden which I call The Big Fucking Deal.

Biden managed to get through a massive amount of domestic programs that rival the scope of Roosevelt's New Deal, or Johnson's Great Society. Five trillion dollars of spending for a wide variety of purposes, spread out over every corner of the country, red or blue, but mainly red. Biden has launched large programs to:

"move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or bring back onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, embed racial-equity goals in government programs, and break up concentrations of economic power."

Biden and his advisors did their level best to end the neoiliberal curse that has inflicted this nation since Reagan. (Clinton sure didn't help either).

This isn't just a series of accomplishments, this is a system of the world type of reforms that cannot be quelled for at least a decade - much longer than a tyrant's infantile reign of pouty poopiness.

Trump can try his best to short dick American reality, but the massive Biden wang just  cock blocks his small soft penis. (Sorry for the weird dick metaphor).

So buck up. Things will suck badly for awhile, and the stupidity and short-sightedness of the American people will continue to prevail, but there is hope.

Our Goldilocks Zone

At the middle of Greenland, atop two miles of ice, a drill site callled Eismitte got ice core samples down to the bedrock. This is some 100 thousand years of data treasure. Much has been gleened from the ice cores; past temperatures and air composition, and still more treasures of the past to follow. There is an article in the New Yorker (sorry, behind paywall) that puts the situation nicely.

Analysis of the cores showed, in extraordinary detail, how temperatures in central Greenland had varied during the last ice age, which in the U.S. is called the Wisconsin. As would be expected, there was a steep drop in temperatures at the start of the Wisconsin around a hundred thousand years ago, and a steep rise toward the end of it. But the analysis revealed something disconserting. In addition to the long-erm oscillations, the ice recorded dozens of shorter, wilder swings. During the Wisconsin, Greenland was often unimaginably cold, with temperatures nearing thirty degrees lower than they are now. Then temperatures would shoot up, in some instances by as much as twenty degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again, somehwat more gradually. Finally, about twelve thousand years ago, the roller coaster came to a halt. ... Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State and the author of a book about the ice-coring project, summed up the findings as follows: "For most of the last 100,000 years, a crazily jumping climate has been the rule, not the exception"

So, the ice age was not only cold, it was stormy, with wild capricious weather and megaweather (for lack of a term between climate and weather). Very unstable, with titanic forces battling in the sea and sky. Our interglacial weather is stable and mild by comparison.

The data is harder to find, but a hotter earth also seems to be just as unstable as a colder earth. Hot stormy and shitty.

So, how much time before we fuck everything up beyond repair? Hard to say. Pumping CO2 ironically may have staved off the next ice age (it is inevitable). Perhaps the 1970s scientists were correc tand we were slipping into an ice age, but our own poopy stupidity saved us. But now it seems we've overcompensated.

Other things. I've made some more art.

Quickie

Hi folks,

At this stage my blogger entries feel like I'm talking on a barbwire network over a party line, like on Green Acres. I haven't put out a signal late summer and fall, so here I am. Still alive. Still floating, like the battleship Nevada; sunk, salvaged, shot up some more by both Nazis and Nipponese, ready to survive an atom bomb test at sea. 

My blind eye aches all the time, but hey I'm sturdy viking stock, so I endure it. I think I mentioned that my brain was sad, the visual cortex was sad. It is not sad anymore because it found something else to do.

I'm making stuff. Bronze stuff. Clay pipes, the best. 

I need to win the lottery.

If I win, I will host a class called One Million Years of Technology, all expenses paid for experts to lecture,  every last lotto dollar into this endeavor to educate in depth any era of technology. Or better still, upgrade old inventions/use 21st century tech on cool ideas of the last million years. 

Robusticalness

My right eye has been blind for over two years. I noticed that my brain was sad. The occipital lobes were not getting input from the right visual field, and that made my brain sad.

I'm not sure since when, but my brain isn't sad anymore. I guess the neural nets and associations found something else to do. What that is, I have no idea. 

In related health news, my doctor is trying to get my dangerously high blood pressure under control. I am on 4 different meds taken 7 times a day, and the BP still is up in the 170s/90s. Yikes. Stroke territory.

It's been this way for awhile and I jokingly and correctly noted that having two kidneys would fix it. They did ultrasonics on the heart and kidney. The kidney has a benign tumor which eventually could be a problem due to bleeding. My aorta is slighltly distended and I have a leaky valve, a heart murmur I've had since birth. The arteries look good no blockages thatnks to modern medicine.

I forget how much of a viking* I am. Seriously, for a guy slightly above average, I feel so much taller and bigger than I actually am, and apparently people pick up on that. I'm startled when I see a picture with my group of fellow big boys and realize I'm the shrimp. But I don't feel like that. 

I'm like the USS Nevada; torpedoed and sunk at Pearl Harbor, refloated and repaired, fought in the Atlantic, survived an atomic blast at Bikini Atoll. Sunk by practice naval gunfire in 1948. Well, perhaps not exactly the USS Nevada, but that's how I feel.

I got some welding in after casting more figures for Grandpa Weed's Funeral. I am very close to having to go to magnifying glasses as the cheaters are not good enough anymore. I do have a magnifying lens for my welding helmet. I don't know where it is. Anyway, here's some pics.

Have another.

Here's my work table in the kitchen. Never trust an artist that isn't a slob.

Way Past My Deadtime

I definitely think humans are ape shaped bugs. We go through larval stages our whole life, we just don't shed a shell in between.

I am in the silverback stage right now. I can only pity anyone that never reaches this state of - for lack of a better word - wisdom.

People lament wasted youth. Youth is to be wasted. It is the end years of accumulated effort and intellect that cannot be wasted. You feel the power.

At 67 I may be at my most powerful, although I could plateau into my 90s, but the Kurman side says no dice. So I have a limited time offer to dispense both advice and charity. Being childless, I choose my heirs on merit. I have given monies to people I am not related to but wish I was. I love my blood family, but I have chosen my extended family, through character and competence, to reward with what meager sums I have.

I will continue to do so until I die

I had a 20 year plan, now it is probably 7, before I die. My best and easiest plan is a glorious death, which will be glorious. Still and all, Always Be Recording, and therefore I will build a roadside shrine 

Grandpa Weed's Funeral. 

This is an ongoing art installation. It is a jar with my ashes, and around the jar, at not more than 1/10th scale, are my grieving mourners and curious strangers. Bronze. A fund set up to produce more figures aftyer I die, in perpetuity or the money runs out.

I've been to so many funerals where I said wow all these people show up, I aint; getting these numbers being an old curmudgeon. So I started to create my own mourners at 1/12 scale. And trhen it turned into a collection, a glazy of characters as happens when you work on personal mythology. From there, ritual, from there, science, from there, everything or nothing, the Singularity.