#and now I can't afford it cos the economy is failing and I have no leave to travel anywhere nor money to stay anywhere

[halohamilton]

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[bopinion]

2022 / 40

Aperçu of the Week:

“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

(Mr. Spock from Gene Roddenberrys "Star Trek")

Bad News of the Week:

No one knows Yemen. Sanaa? Myrrh? Gulf of Aden? Saltah? Agame? Wayla? Cholera? Sorghum? Kath? Honestly, the only thing I personally associate with Yemen - which I barely know where it is - is civil war and starvation. And it's been going on for years. To be exact, it was in June 2004 , that the Shiite minority Huthi started an uprising against the Yemeni government. Since then, the country has basically been the site of a proxy war between two Arab ideologies of Islam: Sunni Saudi Arabia versus Shiite Iran.

Since then, Yemen, which is having a hard time anyway due to its geographic and climatic location, has been lost. Health, education, human rights, security and practically all other things a society can take for granted have fallen by the wayside - there isn't even enough food. At least the few charitable organizations that dare to enter the country have been able to rely on a fragile ceasefire. Until now. It expired a few days ago and the warring parties could not agree on an extension.

The UN considers the war and its consequences for the population to be the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. Nearly 400,000 people have already lost their lives in the conflict, and several million are displaced within the country. Infrastructure and culture have practically ceased to exist, state institutions operate only on paper, and Yemen qualifies as a "failed state" in every respect. But somehow no one is interested. Because it is only a regional crisis in which (in contrast to the Middle East, for example) no major geopolitical power sees its interests threatened. After all, it's only a matter of life and death.

Good News of the Week:

Everyone knows Brazil. Samba, Amazon, Capoeira, Rio de Janeiro, soccer, hummingbirds, caipirinha, bossa nova, feijoada, carnival, churrasco. We think we know the biggest Latin American nation. Always in a good mood, open-hearted and communicative, deeply relaxed and positive. So it came as a shock to many when Brazilians, of all people, elected Jair Bolsonaro as their president in 2018. A far-right ex-military man who has always openly stood by his misogynistic, homophobic, neoliberal, anti-environmental, racist and anti-scientific positions - not for nothing was he called "Tropical Trump."

And he delivered reliably, so to speak: from a threatened judiciary to unprecedented environmental destruction to Corona denial, Bolsonaro stayed true to himself. And the rest of the world could only shake its head. But fortunately, that could now be the end of it. Because large parts of the population are not doing well economically - "It's the economy, stupid!". That's why the political revenant Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva scored points in last weekend's elections. For during his presidency from 2003 to 2010, the country was doing better - even if one can doubt the authorship of this. And the rather left-wing co-founder of the Workers' Party was able to pick up where he left off, even though he could not avoid corruption allegations and court cases.

Even if Bolsonaro made it to the runoff with 43% (Lula came in at 48%), there seems to be a sufficient will to change. And there is some hope - also parallel to Trump in the U.S. in this respect - that at least some of his fatally flawed decisions can be corrected by the incoming government. The world simply can no longer afford such erratic despots with the motto "After me, the deluge." It's good that this seems to be over in South America for the time being.

Personal happy moment of the week:

For months we have been forbidding my son overnight guests. Always with the same argument: you can't let anyone into this mess, you have to clean it up first. Didn't work for a long time. Until we - well, let's put it diplomatically - agreed on a compromise. The worst construction sites are eliminated (toilet bowl and sink, used clothes or dishes, garbage ...) and we then turn a blind eye or two. And it actually worked. Also because the short one sacrificed a Boba Fett evening with his father to achieve just those minimal goals. Work in progress...

I couldn't care less...

...about the current discussion about a "gas price brake", which an expert commission is working on this weekend. In fact, energy costs significantly more than consumers and industry are and were used to. Whether the population pays this directly via the billing of heating costs or higher product prices, or indirectly via taxes or subsidies, is actually beside the point. In the long term, it would have made more sense to invest the money in a special fund to promote sustainable, independent and climate-neutral energy sources. But politicians would rather win elections in the short and medium term than in the long term. And everyone is so stupid to play along with this game.

As I write this...

...I try to imagine the "physics of the unimaginable". Because this is what the Austrian Anton Zeilinger - together with the Frenchman Alain Aspect and the US-American - won the Nobel Prize for in the week that is coming to an end. Albert Einstein already spoke of a "spooky action at a distance" in quantum physics: so-called entangled particles that behave as one - even when they are several thousand kilometers apart. And as early as 1977, Zeilinger succeeded in doing just that, namely transferring the state of one light particle to another. In effect, the birth of - hold on! - teleportation. Which is why he has been called "Mr. Beam" ever since. The treckies among us will assign this right away. Unimaginable. At least for me.

Post Scriptum:

Yes, there were pandemics before Corona. And there will be some after. And at the same time, of course. And what SARS-CoV2 is to humans, bird flu is to: Birds, you guessed it. And if birds read the newspaper, they would feel just as queasy as we humans do. Because bird flu is on the rise: this year alone in Europe (by which I mean in this case the European Union and Great Britain. Norway , Switzerland and most of the Balkans remain so even outside) had to be 51 million farm birds, ie chickens, turkeys, ducks, etc, because of a bird flu infection "culled". So killed and burned. No good for anything anymore. Because of the pandemic, there are already warnings in the UK of an impending shortage of turkeys over the Christmas period. Which should leave us mainland Europeans rather cold. Because I personally, for example, have always doubted that chicken nuggets really contain chicken meat - and not just sawdust with an artificial flavor.

[branded-perceptions]

Think about progress: does it advance humanity if we just keep creating more and more "diverse" products that with their core incredients as seen in food industries are actually quite similar just bra(i)nde(a)d with different stories, appearances and hallucinatory triggers?

And can we not imagine human progress, for example as seen in the movie star trek, that goes beyond "products" "profitability"?

The across all the worldwide populations' via covert colonialism agonising and conflict-creating myth of progress arises upon

more and more of our global workforce aspirations as well as the by that served market and voter demands

being shifted towards an economically exploitative elitarian hallucinatory matrix (🎶my dream - Akira the Don) of "hot" "trendy" NYC progress

(*Gary Vee talks about selling 52 Dollar smoothies in toxic plastic*)

detached from causal care and social imagination of utility of how we all as global average population

[of whom most can never afford, will and should never ever be peer-pressured to spend 52 US Dollars on a bra(i)nde(a)d hype smoothie while the from that profiteering adolf hipster can't even solve and warn about the side-effects of the by them similarly mindlessly peer-pressured C-19 vaccine: do you realise the repetitive insanity of such vain err mindsets? No matter what you do, people like Gary Vee seem to continue to be always so insane, "positively". We need to adapt our society accordingly. There was a time when people were allowed to drive while being drunk, then we changed laws. There was a time when we did not have psychiatry, now we have it. Use it.]

want to co-construct our causal lives through society whose industries all tend to act a little bit like the 🎶"MONEY SHOT💸💉💸 - AC/DC":

During last decades this mass insanity became obvious via the deceptive bra(i)nde(a)d food products' low quality incredients growing "bigger" and bigger people (obesity and chronic diseases) that then create "bigger" and bigger market demands for symptomatic treatments' subscription models that like C-19 boosters (🎵I GOT A GOOD PRESCRIPTION)

do not really focus on or are by the for that responsible people (🎵FOR THE STATE OF YOUR CONDITION) desired to in any objective way checked and evaluated

for solving the issues at hand that grow our economy "bigger" and "bigger" (🎵YOU GOTTA TAKE IT THREE TIMES A DAY)

of more and more of our workforce, jobs, aspirations and so on being occupied with that deadly zombified rat race of co-destroying all our lives (🎵OR AS MUCH💸💉☠️💉💸 AS YOU MAY)

for no sane reason at all but a shared chasing of a from causal life needs detached hallucinatory mind matrix status "heaven"🤥😷😇 (🎵GONNA SEND YOU ON YOUR WAY)

of similar like big pharmas' covid pandemic profits from rational means and responsibility checks detached economic measurements (🎵NOW TAKE THIS DOWN)

that "grow" as more of our population via "Gary Vee talks about positivity" get sicker and sicker (🎵LET ME GIVE YOU YOUR RELIEVE) and consume more and more regardless if it actually enhances and serves their quality of life or not due to lacking mimetic cultural mind pattern to collectively habitually introspect about these dynamics:

🎵I BELIEVE I SOLVED YOUR CASE.

What Galbraith failed to acknowledge is that the by that created social imbalance is not about a tension of the private and public sector but about overlapping dynamics:

as more misleading and vain our advertisings' vain err media misguide our propaganda entrainment especially regarding informed consent💉 as more corrupt politics become, not the other way around! Every politician has and will always have private interests because they are just human, and to some degree that is okay as long as they strive to more or less do their jobs they get paid for - and that, primarily, is caring about the public sector and NOT caring about the direction of our free economic markets' social imagination, that is what our advertising industries get paid for and they largely failed regarding the social responsibility they got paid for while via their pleasure bananas' psychological ID motivations as usual (🎵WE GOT A GOOD CURE FOR WHAT AILS YA) being like laughing killer clowns (*smiley Pfizer ads*) "positively" mindlessly hooked upon that (🎵IT WON'T FAIL YA) similar like during last decades in all sorts of topics without caring about morals, introspection or objective reality even if they got reminded about it for years and years, they simply do not care while like a laughing Gary Vee tearing society into their graves without that most of society are aware (📚immunity to change Robert Kegan) about the by that bent social imagination of markets like interplay of big food and big pharma:

🎵DOCTOR, WHAT'S THE ANTIDOTE?

If the public communications (🎵LADY, TRY THE MONEY SHOT)

of our as "hot" and "trendy" bra(i)nde(a)d hallucinatory hypes (🎵BEST TAKEN WHEN HOT)

of economic go(o)d(s) (🎵YOU GOTTA TAKE IT THREE TIMES A DAY)

would incentivise consumers and economy to focus on causal care (🎵OR AS MUCH AS YOU NEED)

then naturally also the DIRECTION🧠👅🧠 of the bribes of lobbyists would be more purposeful and as a result the personal interests of those in public sector would imitate the private sector more healthily in for average population less destructive ways.

This is what Queen Elizabeth has already hinted upon multiple times: no one cares. She, her intellectual friends or anyone could talk or "advice" the for economy responsible people but all they ever seem to do is to talk hot air shit: just watch Gary Vee content and understand the dynamics that "positively" via psychogenic madness put our

🎶money in the grave - drake

(🔍Queen Elizabeth II dies of broken heart💉💔)

To countervail that myth of progress we need to more purposefully leverage our new technologies to more efficiently (less bureaucratic corruption and waste) manage both the private and public sector towards advancing new types of public infrastructures:

think about all the streets that we have, they are not "profitable" in any way, but without them our economy and daily lives would not be what they are. The functionality of the private sector depends upon such infrastructures like from public sector constructed streets, public transportation or like in Germany the public universities that have no huge tuition fee.

We need to apply this also to areas like the online space to construct infrastructures whose main objective are not just "profits" like advertising revenues:

imagine decentralised and transparent evaluation platforms that via optional systems of independent laboratory checks offer complex insights into causal effects of thereby less bra(i)nde(a)d stories of causal economic go(o)d(s) and verified customer feedbacks that unlike Amazon reviews cannot be faked.

Imagine some evolving aspects of food processing, farming and food storage / distribution infrastructures that do not depend upon profits and are managed as public common good like streets, free for all if everyone contributes a few hours each year to their innovation and maintainance that become realistically scaleable via AI-TECH and robotics.

Imagine digital infrastructures regarding shared management of localised public duties similar like families mamage who shovels snow and who takes the trash out and who cooks and washes the dishes and cleans the rooms, metaphorically speaking regarding public duties, as co-constructing shared social contracts via elements of digital direct democracy regarding local communities entwined public maintenance jobs and health care whose huge need for support workers can be connected to social security, even replacing aspects of our insurance systems in ways that 20 years ago were not possible due lack of interconnectivity that we now have.

These things need to evolve slowly step by step via trial and error, incentivised by our monetary flows of our free markets - whose aspirations' social imagination thus need to be directed👅🧠👅 in a causally appropriate and less destructive direction.

[theninjasanctuary]

It would be cool if the universe dropped me a random 5000 € or so, because with these flight prices, even my deluded ass will never make it to Tokyo this August. As in, I kind of saw a deal-ish (under the circumstances) situation tonight that would have been 1100 € via Istanbul for business class, or 800 in economy with a 16-hour connection, and back for 500 in economy via Seoul and Istanbul, with the caveat of needing to change airports in Seoul during a 5-hour connection. And even the boyf was like "so a minor delay would mean we're stranded in Seoul", and I am not feeling all that adventurous tbh. (A full day connection in Seoul, admittedly, might have been cool.) The reality is, I cannot afford this anyway, and where things are currently, it is the season to go out and mingle and enjoy life and drink Spritz whilst wearing sandals, and here I am, needing whole days to sleep and dissociate so I can complete just some minor chores, fml.

I did contact the physio and set up a session, but not feeling great about it. Since we're in a drought, I've helped mom water eeeeeeeeeverything in her garden (except the lawn, as burnt as it is, this would be unfeasible), filling countless buckets and the old cast-iron bathtub with the pre-war water pump, and before that, when it wasn't as dry yet, I did a few sessions of strimming, etc., and the physical toll is just... I wake up with my dominant hand feeling swollen and stiff to the point I can't make a fist and it's hard to grip things (tbh this has been going on for several summers), and for several days now, I've had annoying nerve pain along my ribs below the right shoulder blade. It hurts to take deep breaths, which is obviously not great from the exercise viewpoint. And overall, feeling flabby and worn out and meh. Even with a fresh flippy bob, and polished nails. (Zoya Avril is still a favourite, I wish the brush was better though.) I would like to press pause on the world for, idk, two weeks at least, just to gather myself.

Failing to get work done is not improving moods, either. Did go to a union meetup, which was okay, and an expo opening, and a social with students, too. The disconnect between how I feel and how these bright young people see me is making me uneasy. Also, it's sad that a colleague is moving on to other things, he was great at the job and we get along really well. I mean, the person taking over is pretty okay too, but still. (That being said, a one-time cool co-worker has been taken on as a PhD student in my department, so it will be nice having her around again.)

There is hope for thunder and rain this weekend. Fingers crossed. It might make me feel more sane and less out of it.

Received a Sellpy order with several pairs of trousers to try, and only one kind of fit (the cheapest, so am getting a decent refund if I manage to send the returns back). Also included a black silk tank top (good!), and a Lambretta Cielo watch, because it was 9 € and I thought that maybe having a backup watch is good. Sellpy also has the same model of minimalist, rectangular brushed steel Fossil f2 that I lost several years ago, and the price keeps dropping, but I kind of think I need to let the past go.