compact work station for image editing and gaming.

 I had been able to build an amazing compact light gamer, and a medium sized box that can game at 1440 p. I had attempted to upgrade the medium machine with a great AMD processor. But, this failed when i was sent a bad AMD 5900x chip for close to 500 dollars. Amazon was reluctant to take it back. I threw a fit, and finally ended up just mailing it back to them and yelling at customer service.

I bought a small mother board that can handle the new 12 generation intel chips, and the i7 12700kf processor. both mother board and processor arrived in open packages. someone had already tried both items and found them wanting! The processor box had been opened, but it contained a perfectly clean processor in the intel packaging. the mother board was the one that i had ordered, but it was not in an intel box at all. it was in a taped closed bag with a little bit of paper in there saying amazon refurbished. there was no gigabyte stuff in the bag at all, although all of the usual connectors were in the bag.

this mother board was beat to hell. it could not start with any modern memory. it only booted with 2 old 8 gig memory sticks at a very low clock speed. It had physical damage, so that the video card did not fit in properly. The usb 3.2 header did not work at all. I installed windows, and tried to use the board, but it was junk.  I asked for a ups pickup for both board and processor, but Amazon customer service refused to take the processor back! I sent the mother board back, and they sent a new board in a sealed gigabyte box. I placed the used i7 processor on that board, and it all worked! holy moly, it had been months of battling with Amazon.com to try to get parts for a working high end machine.

By contrast, Amazon had given up trying to sell video cards, and the 3rd party company that I chose sent a sealed box containing a NEW and factory tested asus rtx 3080. This is a huge card, with a massive, thick heatsink and 3 high speed fans. to provide a bit of room around the huge gpu, I chose the Sliger Cerberus case. This case can handle a micro ATX motherboard, which is 9 inches square, and has extra room when you use the 7 inch square mini ITX size of motherboard.

Here is how the case looks from the outside. I got the gray color, which is just beautiful in my opinion....

and inside, you can see the inch or so of space between the lower case fans and the graphics card. the case is long enough and wide enough so that the case fans are not blocked by the gpu, and they are able to positively pressure this case. Exhaust fans at the top further enforce bottom to top airflow. There is room beyond the graphics card for a slim intake fan to it's right.

For cooling, I had originally used a much larger 14 s cooler from noctua. this removed heat from the processor super well, but left the memory and other  components of the mother board screaming hot. I have switched to the much smaller noctua NH-L9x65, and i have mounted a 25 by 140 mm fan instead of a 15 by 92 mm fan. This provides powerful blast of air to chill the m.2 drives, the vrms that power the processor, and the other hot components.

I fit in a data center drive, which is great when I use this machine for graphics. It is a 12 T iron wolf from Seagate. very noisy, but absurdly fast. I use it like a tape backup, because it is dozens of times slower than the 2 * 2T m.2 drives fixed to the motherboard. The convenience of having all images and videos on hand in the box outweighs the extra heat generated. There is ample room for at least 2 3.5 inch drives in this configuration. But, even with this large, well ventilated case, It is hard to keep components cool during gaming. This is the most fans that the Sliger company has seen in the case.

Setting up the system for both gaming and image editing is not so easy. The demands are super different. For still image editing, the i7 is fully used only for very short bursts. Fewer fans can be used, and components can be very close in the box. the environment inside the case is cool, with little bursts of heat that have plenty of time to clear out. Gaming at 4k is a hot proposition. the GPU is going at 365 watts, and the mother board and processor can use over 200 watts. The hard drive and the power supply itself make heat, and the entire inside of the case is 'heat soaked' with a certain minimum temperature. The case is a small oven during games, and if the hot air can not be quickly changed, temperature will go up and up until the processor and the graphics card and the drives all slow down to reduce their temperature.

Within the virtual world of the game, a super sized cup of hot coffee is spilling onto your virtual junk. The monsters have become jerky robots that are killing the heck out of you, and you are running in place. By the time you shoot, they are long gone! So for gaming, you get the oven hot by running a benchmark program instead of a game. then, you monkey with the fan speeds, and the voltage that is sent to both processor and graphics card. A perfect spot is sought, where the voltage is as low as possible for stable operation. As the voltage is dropped to these components, they actually go faster and faster, and make less and less heat. at some point, depending on the efficiency of the part that one ended up with, you get unstable video, followed by a crash. When using a benchmark program within windows, the benchmark program crashes, but windows is fine, and the computer keeps running. So, you can make a lot of small changes quickly, without having to restart a large game, or windows itself.

After the best settings are found in the benchmark program, you start the most demanding game, and play it intensely to see if it will crash. The same thing is going on with your heart, where you are running up it's beats to some healthy maximum. With the heart, you can not go until it crashes though! Computer gaming is not for everyone, and it is only fun for people like me who actually enjoy being highly excited and frustrated for long periods of time.

further refinements: 

the low profile cooler splashed a lot of air onto the mother board, cooling the components that were overheating. This was good enough for gaming where the processor is only used intensely for short bursts [to load new game levels]. It heats up, but then the game proceeds normally and the processor has time to cool down while the video card does the hard work. With image editing, the situation is different. the processor has long hard tasks to do, and it heats up and slows itself down. it makes a lot of noise when the fan on the inadequate heat sink reaches 100% and stays there.

I finally realized that it would be OK to use the large noctua c14s heatsink with the fans blowing the hot air onto the mother board. It just seemed wrong to get all that heat from the cpu, and blow it right back onto the hot motherboard components. I solved this problem by increasing the amount of air A LOT. I used the mellow 140 mm a14 fan against the mother board, and the very noisy NF-A14 industrial PPC-3000 PWM fan on the outside. I removed the mellow 90 mm fan that exhausts the case near the processor, and replaced it with the very aggressive and noisy fan that comes stock with AMD processors. 

for fan control, i had to use an aftermarket program that is not included in windows or mac operating systems. It is able to look at temperatures inside the computer, and base fan speeds on the maximum temperature averaged over a period of time. This is actually very important. while gaming, the fans must be aware of the temperature of the gpu, the cpu, the memory and the drives. the fans have to speed up to keep the hottest component cool. It does not matter how much noise this makes, as a slowing of the game is just not acceptable. So, I put the industrial fan on the outside of the heatsink and the aggressive fan that exhausts the case on the same fan circuit. they do not run at all when temps are normal. The fan on the motherboard side of the huge heat sink is plenty to keep the cpu cool. The 2 140 mm fans at the bottom of the case change the air in the case plenty fast. But, during gaming, when the gpu becomes a 350 watt heater and the cpu becomes a 200 watt heater, the industrial fans kick on. It is not noticable then, because zombies are chasing me all around, and my tiny home is being rocked by massive explosions. the 2 industrial fans ramp up in speed, and blow a remarkable jet of hot air across the room.

The cerberus case is set up for 2 120 mm fans at the bottom, but 140 mm fans fit if they have screw holes like the 120 mm. noctua has 2 types of fans like that: a general purpose round frame grey fan and a brown fan intended to fit on heat sinks with 120 mm fans. the fans can be mounted with screws or with special silicone fasteners that they include. wherever one can use the silicone fasteners, i do, because the fan will run silently at low rpm in that case. The fan can vibrate a little without rattling the metal of the case. Noctua has several ways of reducing noise in the case, including inventing special plastics and coming up with new ways to make plastic parts that fit like finely machined metal parts. The builder of computers does not need to learn all about fan design. they just need to pay 30 bucks a pop for each Austrian fan.

i had been using a mini itx mother board in this case, even though it is able to fit a micro ATX board. I found some problems with such a compact build, so i invested in an inexpensive micro atx mother board, the ASUS Prime Z690M-Plus D4. This board is not full of expensive attractions. instead, it has 3 simple m.2 slots  arranged flat on the pcb, and the area around the cpu is not built up tall as it is on the smaller motherboards. Thus, the memory, and the m.2 drives and the other hot components on the board get plenty of wind from pretty much any fan in the case.

the larger board also makes it easy to get into the case with fingers, and make use of fan headers, m.2 drives, and other things without much disassembly. Of course, it allows 4 memory sticks instead of 2, or much more room around a half empty memory stack for great cooling. 

After watching about a thousand you tube videos, from super users like optimum tech, i became confident enough to strip away the fan shroud and 3 fans from my rtx 3080, and replace that with 2 Phanteks T30-120 fans. These extra thick fans drive much more air through the huge heatsink of the asus tough gaming card. It is absurd how cool it runs now, with 4K gaming in the lower 60s C. i can not imagine water cooling a 350 watt video card when this simple modification is so simple and allows such quiet operation. In this case, there is plenty of room for 140 mm case fans beneath the modified gpu.

I removed the data center drive, to further increase airflow and lower gaming temps. Also, the machine runs noticeably faster without the pauses for the drive to start up. I cable managed the result to create large areas of unobstructed airflow. I added an m.2 drive to the empty 3rd slot, to make more storage after removing the huge drive.

This build still struggles with the 2 16 gig ram sticks that i started with. I have purchased the newer 13 generation I5 processor, and set up a graphics workstation using 2 32 gig memory sticks. The smaller memory and lack of hard drive space make this a dedicated gaming and entertainment machine that can tackle small image editing jobs. When needed, the data center drive is attached as a USB 3 external drive. It is actually not any slower than it is in the case, and adding it brings back the system pauses that are no longer very acceptable.

small form factor.... medium sized gamer

 This system is housed in a zzaw b2 case. this case is 3mm thick aluminum, which feels pretty high quality.

as you can see here, the case is sandwich style, using a sfx sized power supply to run parts on both sides of a divider.

This build is a pure gamer, with stress on the gpu, and cooling.

at the top, there are 2 of the ultra quiet 120 by 25 mm fans from noctua. the power supply is positioned with the intake toward the vented panel, and the output facing the exhaust fan. these fans are expensive, but they are entirely silent at 1000 rpm or less.

I used the corsair 750 watt sfx, which happens to have a fanless mode for lower energy demands. the way that the psu is positioned, the exhaust fans draw air though it, lowering it's temperature and further delaying the fan operation.

I used an old intel board with the i5 9400 processor.  this processor got a bad rep because it cost as much as a 12 or 16 thread AMD processor, but it has only 6 cores with no multi threading. just 6 threads. and guess what? for the games that I play, 6 cores that can hold 4.5 gHz can keep up with a very perky gpu.

i used the very low profile l9 [low profile, 92 mm fan] cooler from noctua to drain heat from the chip.

this leaves room for a much larger fan that blows air right around the heatsink to cool the other components. this is a noctua 140 by 25 mm fan. It turns at half the speed, but moves several times as much air.

for the gpu, i chose the ASUS tough rtx 3080, and was able to get the later version with 12 gigs of fast vram. This thing is a tank, with a full heavy back plate, and a metal 3 fan array that really goes fast.

It has no frills, other than an led to light the logo [everything must  glow!], and a little switch that tells it if you want the fan to shut off at light load. from experience, you want to allow air to flow freely through your case without passing through filters, and to clean off the innards pretty often as they get coated with dust. It is a little oven while gaming, and every degree cooler means as more frames per second.

You should always use the quiet mode, because it does not adversely affect performance. the card will make a real racket when the gaming gets busy, but it will not get warm, or stutter. As you can see, the exhaust fans are arranged to pull air through the gpu heatsink and then exhaust it out the top, so again, the temperature that triggers the fans to spin up are not reached very quickly. 

if you try this same combo, you will have to take off the end of the case with the screws and spacers that hold it, and insert the giant gpu from the open end. It is a little hard to get the screws and spacers back in with the high volume gpu! this card comes very close to the solid front panel, and it is actually threaded for a standard sized screw [times 2] If this card was not so rigid, i would have predrilled holes, and bolted it in solid.

As usual with these builds, the screw holes for the end of the riser cable do not line up with the threaded inserts in the case. a single zip tie at lower center holds it at the right orientation. The reason is that there are 100 different kinds of riser cable, and it is enough to confuse even the case makers!

and finally, please meet my assistant Yang.

he is a grey long limbed box cat.

you can look them up on you tube.

this boxcat can be used for size.......

the b2 case is well larger than the boxcat. by comparison, the smaller A1 case that contains my portable gamer fits inside of the yellow case. These small form factor builds are obviously not water resistant or sturdy enough to take blows, so they need to travel in a  padded case.

update:

i purchased a larger case for my medium gaming system. it is now housed in a Sliger b610 case. If you are not familiar with Sliger, they are a custom case maker based out of nevada. Cases are 200 to 300 dollars, and have nearly perfect, no nonsense machining. this larger case allows a tall cooler, and several hard drives. It is not sandwich style, like the zzaw case, so it does not require a riser cable for the graphics card.  more fans can live in the case, so that continuous gaming will not cause it to warm up.

small form factor gaming computers - smallest possible [ 4 liter ] build

 This is my spot for describing the tiny, high performance computers that i have been building.

Although over 60 years of age, i continue to enjoy computer gaming.

And, i am not talking about tetris.

Lately, i am playing Doom 2016 at the ultra violence level, at 1440 p and at 180 frames per second, with all settings on ultra.

Even this somewhat modest level of play requires a high wattage video card and processor.

Trying to keep 500 watts of parts relatively cool in a tiny case is a real challenge.

In fact, it is a very cool game itself!

Feast your eyes on my smallest build, from the mother board side.

The case is sandwich style, with the mother board and graphics card on opposite sides of a divider.

The case is the A1 from a Chinese company called zzaw. Actually, a pretty good case, made of 2 mm thick aluminum. 

the power supply is the Enhance Flex 600W Power Supply ENP-7660B

it is costly, and you pretty much have to swap out the noisy fan that comes built in.

So, this is a pretty hard project for an ordinary builder of large computers.

In fact, i failed to get the Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (40x20mm, Brown) to run on the internal pins of the power supply. i had to leave a 4 pin fan connector sticking out of the power supply along with the bundle of wires that depart it. So, i used one of the 3 fan headers on this particular mother board, which is the GIGABYTE B550I AORUS PRO AX.

Other items that i used are the samsung 980 pro m.2 drive with heat sink,

and a set of 2 * 8 gig ram sticks at 3.6 gHz and the amd 5600G processor.

In fact, the low end processor from amd can not run an m.2 drive at it's full speed, but an expensive, fast solid state drive is still a useful investment.

The processor is also not the right choice for using with a  graphics card, because it has on board graphics that displace some of it's ordinary processing abilities.

I chose it to run without a gpu during the chip shortage when it was hard to obtain one.

When it tried to upgrade the 5600 G with a 5900 X, i received a bad processor from Amazon. This problem was rampant with the mail order companies at the start of covid.

you would pay full price for a new part, and get an open box with a bad used part.

I also got an intel mother board in a taped shut bag with no gigabyte materials, and it was broken to hell. I tried to send it, and the i7 processor [that also arrived opened and used] back to Amazon, and they refused to take back the processor. 

I had already been banned from reviewing products, because i would reveal their various scams to customers. So, not a huge thumbs up for the company that has become our supplier of everything.

 

Are AMD processors good?

This was my first experience with amd.

These processors are just for gaming, and do not work well in tight cases or for anything outside of gaming. For an example, the 5600 G is limited to clock speeds of 3 to about 4.5 gHz.

That is great for gaming, but terrible for watching a movie. The AMD chip sits there trying to bake a batch of cookies while idling at 1 or 3 % of its wattage. Even for gaming, the intel processors work much better. An intel chip will ramp up to 5 gHz, and just stay there for the whole game. An AMD chip will start at 5 gHz, but pull down to 4.3 when it is loaded. Also AMD gave up on quality control and stopped testing the chips at the factory during the shortage. so, together with the scammy way that the same dead chips are sold again and again at Amazon, you were almost sure to get a bad chip and to have trouble selling it back to amazon. The flip side of the argument is that AMD is reusing the socket for many years, instead of creating a custom socket for each generation of processor. i was impressed with how much graphics power could be packed into the processor itself, but, in the end, this really does not matter. Modern gaming simply does not work well on a processor chip. It requires a card of it's own, with a separate way to remove hundreds of watts of heat.

on the gpu side of the divider, you can see the cute little dual fan gtx 1660 super from zotak. 

this gpu is actually way more powerful than the huge 1660s of the past, because it deploys modern memory that is twice as fast. It allows this tiny box to game for as long as desired at 1080p with ultra settings, or 1440p with pretty high settings and frame rates. there is no ray tracing, and even if ray tracing existed, you would turn it off when gaming using this 125 watt graphics card.

you can see the 4 terrabyte hard drive that is jammed into the slot that has been provided for cables to change sides. i was not sure that this arrangement would work thermally, but with the bare metal top of the drive pressed to the aluminum case, the slim 92 mm fan at the top of the case pulls enough air past the drive to keep it quite cool. It is good that the case maker provided the holes on the bottom, and the tall legs, so that plenty of air could enter the case to be pumped back out through the power supply, and to send a draft past the hard drive, and out through the top. The gpu draws fresh air from the side of the case, and sends it out the top.

All fans are from Noctua, which is the Austrian company that makes the most quiet fans in the world. If there is room, it is possible to swap the gpu fans for Noctuas as well. In this case, there is 1 mm between the fans and the case, so I tied the gpu back with a zip tie and left the stock fans in place.

Performance: the standard way to get smooth gaming is to use a program like msi afterburner, and a benchmark program like heaven, to tune the fan speeds and the voltage for the gpu.

the idea is to load the GPU fully, and to lower the GPU voltage until it looses stability, and then raise it back to the last stable voltage. the fans are tuned to give both cool temps and an acceptable level of noise.
I can go into way more detail, or even create a build video if readers wish to build their own small form factor gamer.  I has been fun to learn more about modern computers. They have become a sort of light sculpture or visual delight, as well as an expensive fun-oven to play with. 

finally, we need to get a feel for the size of this build...

here is my very lovely assistant testing the small build for sturdiness.  He is clearly coiling up for a huge jump, to see if he can reach a very high shelf where he likes to roost. Also, the size is pretty apparent. it is a little small for a cat bed, or maybe even for a cat podium. The A1 case fits in a Pelican 1400 Case.

the only thing better than a cat..... is Two cats!

do current events seem fictional?

 I have been reading and writing sci fi for as long as I can remember.

I mean, as soon as I could write, and was given materials, I began a sci fi story that had been brewing in my mind. 

It was not very interesting, suggesting that a previous period in human history had been more advanced in many ways than the present time.

Real life has never gotten very 'science fictiony'.

What I mean by that: events transpired in a predictable way, where the humans often seemed sane.

To put it another way, if the real events had been found in a novel, the reader would have had no trouble believing in them.

That is no longer true.

Many recent events seem like the plot of a bad science fiction novel.

Things happen, and I say to myself: 'self, that is not really believable!'

I imagine that I am reading the novel of a lazy writer or a writer that is just plain bad.

It is possible that I have gotten too old to accept new events.

Maybe that is what aging is, and each human eventually starts to think that they may be an actor in a lazily written novel.

a decade ago, if I had been shown this outline for a book, I would have rejected it as a stupid plot for a novel:

A new type of computer program is devised, where people visit with one another remotely. they quit visiting in person. This program gets so popular that it is used by an enemy country to help elect a decisively unqualified president.

This president restarts the American civil war, had simply been delayed for over for about a century and a half.

This president refuses to leave office at the end of his term, and leads a coup to remain in power.

The coup fails, but the United States is left with a supreme court packed with highly religious and conservative justices.

Even with a democratic president, a democratic house, and a democratic senate, this supreme court immediately begins to roll back the last 200 years of progress in human rights.

Women loose the right to abortion, and minorities take a step back toward enslavement.

With some irony, a civil war reignites in Russia. [A state that succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union is  retaken by force]. 

It is clearly bad writing, because the war is symmetrical with the American civil war that has also reignited.

The only difference is that the American states were prevented from leaving the US, while this large soviet state did leave, and is being grabbed back.

More lazy writing... The US arms the soviet state that is being retaken.

At first, the US sends tank killing shoulder launched missiles.

But later, the US starts sending billions of dollars in long range missiles to the breakaway state, and positions troops along the soviet border.

It is the Cuban missile crisis in reverse, but, having had more time to forget ww2, folks have more taste for world war. It seems like it will be profitable. Well worth the human lives.

In a later blog, I would like to explore this idea of a taste for world war. Howe and Stowe talk about an 80 to 100 year cycle that brings us back to total war every 4 generations. It is their 'seasons' theory.

In the Seasons theory, a generation is embroiled in all out war, and they do not like it. The next gen has almost no taste for war, but the next has slightly more, and, after a cycle of 4 generations, the folks who were alive during the last world war are all gone. A big war once again seems profitable, and not so bad to live through.

I regret that I have no solution to present.

I mean, other than we cease to sell land mines and missiles to everyone. And, that we once again strive to reduce nuclear weapons before someone makes a second use of them in war.

What happened to Hollywood ?

 This is a real question. The way that it stands now, American movies tend to be about crimes and people talking on their phones. So, stealing money and the cell phone experience seem to be what Americans are 'on' about.

The country is in economic default and deeply involved in a years long cold civil war, so it is no surprise that creative juices have flown the coup. The US is still reeling from Covid, even though we have a vaccine. Basically, about a tenth of the population have packed the supreme court, and are now changing voting laws and health laws. In effect, the black race is somewhat enslaved again, and women are once again becoming the property of men.

The 10% are the cheaters in our culture. the folks who copy homework and test answers in school. The ones who gang up, play dirty, and cheat while playing monopoly with their own family.

Hell, democratic supreme court justices can no longer go to the court in person, because the republican justices will absolutely not mask or vaccinate. And, I guess that people who are party to a slow coup and massive civil disobedience are entertained differently. We enjoy learning new tidbits that make us hate and loose more respect for 'the other side'.

Americans care mostly about the economy. The 'economy' is just a word for people's mental slavery. We have all bought into a system where there is a 'house' that wins no matter what we do. The economy is a system where we can exchange goods easily, but it has it's own overhead. There is a class of people who act as parasites on the money itself. They wear super nice clothes, and get very nice haircuts, but they squat over the flow of money. They take what they want from the flow, and poop into it without any regrets. They have been taught that 'it is only business'.

We used to value bravery and honesty. Now, we have been shown [by electing an evil US president] that bravery and honesty are for suckers. Truth is for suckers. Altruism? Hahahahahahahahaha! suckers! Science was big for a while, but now, we are working with hate and lies. Our culture is like a depressed person that is engaged in self harm, and thinking of suicide. Why else heat up the earth on purpose, and wipe out the other species of animals?

As it happens, I do have an explanation. We are where we are in history because we failed to pilot our ship. We let it drift on the currents, and we refused to guide it. Every time that we tried to let someone steer, that single person went crazy. So, we let money steer the ship of our history. That seemed perfect for a while. We created a new type of person: The corporation. The corporation could do what a person could not accomplish. It could not die like a person, but continued when the founders passed on. And, it was thought that a corporation could not go crazy. In trying to obtain all of the money in the world, a corporation would automatically do only good deeds for human beings.

We let the corporations steer the ship of our fate. Over time, more and more parasites formed on the blood vessels that carry the flow of money throughout the body of the economy. Again, the parasites have nice haircuts, and helpful sounding names. They provide 'energy' and 'search results' and 'social connection' and cheap consumer goods.

Now, it appears that money can not be used to steer a ship properly. Just like a human being, a corporation can go crazy. It can engage in self harm. It can have fights with other corporations and even with governments. And, it looks like chasing money to steer a ship runs it right into things. The prisons  and hospitals in the US are examples of systems that were arranged with the wrong notions of what success looks like. They maximize money for shareholders, but treat human beings like ball bearings to be ground up in the machine. Who the hell feels sorry for ball bearings? you just get angry with ball bearings if they go dry, and are ruined along with everything around them.

It is possible to re design the system, but humans like to do it with world wars. We have one around once per century, and they really shuffle things around. We wish to have one every time that the soldiers from the last world war die off. They remembered how crappy a world war is. That is where we are at now. The US is trying very hard to get a world war going. The best way is to interfere with another countries satellite nations. It is like messing with someone's kids. They will knock the crap out of you for messing with their personal stuff. China and Russia have not attempted to prevent us from building a stupid border wall. They have said little about our practice of torturing folks that were never convicted of a crime in semi-secret prisons. They have permitted us to chase people away from the southern border with US and Mexican soldiers. To punish families by taking their kids and locking them into small cages while driving the adults away.

We have done hundreds of things that other countries could take exception to. Deeds that no one in China or Russia or anywhere could take pride in. Deeds that look a lot like war crimes. We have attacked our reporters instead of toning down the obvious misdeeds. We have the best investigative reporters under investigation, and jail them or run them off  when they reveal too much. Yet, we seem eager to become involved in China and Taiwan. We wish to take part in a war between Russia and a satellite nation. I am sure that we would not love it if Putin decided to take down part of the border wall between the US and Mexico. What if Beijing decided to place an additional border between the US and Canada? It all sounds crazy, but how do you think that US aggression looks to these older and more established nation states? China is about 5 - 10 times as old as the US as a nation, depending on how you count it. We, on the other hand, do not count the US as a country while it was held by Native Americans. I am not sure why this is. It points to a deep problem with the people that 'settled' or 'attacked' north America.

From the Native American perspective, This place was attacked and largely depopulated and destroyed. It is only the good settlers that think that it was 'saved' or 'settled'. We are a newer nation founded on war crimes, and currently struggling with racism and a corporate takeover of the government. We should absolutely not be acting on China or Russia's borders. It would be a good time to stop purchasing humans from warlords and torturing them to death. We need to break up our monopolies and fix the broken systems of medicine and election and transportation. We need to break up cities. We need to switch from fossil fuel to renewables. We do not need to go to other planets or to fly through the upper atmosphere on a tail of burning oil products. We do not need to place mines or drop fossil fuel bombs on other nations.

The money system will select war and increased inequality. There are plenty of signs that we have fallen into the trap that caught Germany twice.  I have been reviewing video of ww2, and our current military gatherings look just like that. We have the snappy uniforms, and the blind nationalism. We built a bunch of new weapons, and sent them to the border of our traditional enemies. We let Germany take a bunch of countries in Europe before we took action. The US was once a fairly peaceful country.

Economic inflation is spiraling, just like it did in 1930s Germany. We have a pandemic that we were unable to deal with, race wars, new restrictive laws, and election problems. I learned more about the Cuban missile crisis, and was surprised at some of the facts. Russia had place nukes in Cuba because we had secretly placed them in Turkey. Both are great launch locations for short range nukes. The overt Cuban installation was dismantled along with the secret Turkish one.

Now, we are building 'anti ballistic missile sites' right along the Russians border. It is common knowledge that short range nukes can also be placed there with no obvious changes. Is Russia secretly placing similar missiles off of our coastline? Subs can be anywhere! What would you do if you were Putin?

Sadly, I have realized that we can actually have a pandemic, a civil war, and a world war at the same time. Right winger organizers are in the position of Nazi party members. They use 'gambits', where you purposely harm yourself in order to get what you want: Refusing the vaccination so that hospitals are filled with un-vaxed republicans on life support; Forming blockades to protest mandates by killing trade and travel; and, all kinds of gerrymandering and new voting laws intended to invalidate democratic votes.

I wonder if we can avoid starting a world war on purpose by splitting up the US at this point. The first US civil war is still simmering. It did not end in 1886. Not all the way. This time, we should not fight. We should split up somewhat amiably, as did the EU and Russia. China has too much history to split up into several Chinas, but they like economic war instead of shooting. And, they are kicking our ass that way! That is my suggestion. One group of US states can go back to lynching with ropes instead of knees. They can convert women into property, and maybe remove female suffrage. They can build walls, and conduct the doxing and the armed protests that they favor.

The world would see us as less of a threat. I believe that leaders and citizens all over the world see us as an ultra nationalistic threat. I may be the only US citizen that thinks that there is a plan for the destruction of the US that has been discussed between leaders of many nations. If they won this war, they would divide the US up, and take away our guns and ships and uniforms. that would probably create a situation similar to Germanys between the world wars. Another war would be inevitable. I doubt that the earth would be recognizable after ww3 and ww4.

anyway.... have a great day!

sheepie to the left

 

feeble sheep up and left, awesome wolves head down and right. 

 If I understand the message of the proud boyz and the other right wing groups, they would like more freedom. much fewer laws. 

More like the old west. 

Well, pardner, that is Texas! 

I can see that it is about to go wrong in a big way if the right wing strategy comes to every area of the US. 

It is better than the reds and the blues do not duke it out any more, but each retreat to their corner. 

Build that Trump wall if that is what you want to do. 

But, build it along the edge of a new confederacy. 

We sheeple [as you call us] will fester here on the west coast, with no walls or moats or anything like that. 

You may live using laws that you choose in the southeast.

You wont have to get any shots, or wear a mask, [but you can wear a gorilla mask and carry an AR15 if you want to!]. 

Everything will be up to you in the promised land. 

Texas has a separate power grid, tougher laws for those pesky criminals, and much fewer mandates and laws for good people. 

You will never have to give up your guns there, and [since it is less socialistic] you will be able to keep more of your earnings. 

If we agree to split up, The new confederacy can have laws that are very different from laws on the hippie coast. 

Drive what you want to. We will use electric sissy cars, but you can keep drilling up oil and using the real cars. 

I am pretty darn sure that we will stop drilling in the next few years on the coast. 

It has not been working. We are going to let women marry women, and adopt kids, and fight in wars. 

Men will marry men, and adopt kids, and fight in wars. 

We are going to be big whiners about infectious disease. 

Diapers on our silly liberal faces. 

always whining and running off for injections!

Sort of like the Asians. 

Hell, a lot of us are Asian and Jewish and Black and Hispanic and ....... 

Lets just say a date, and draw some lines, and everybody get to the right side of the line. 

There are cities and rural areas in this proposed new confed. and on the Coast, so I am hoping that everyone can find a great spot with their chosen people.

Britain left their union. 

Russia lost some of it's satellites. 

Now, it is our turn to downsize. 

There need not be any war or economic sanctions or travel restrictions. 

Just some new borders, and we can slowly let our governments pass different laws. 

It is already happening. 

Texas is passing laws that directly countermand US law. 

There are also left wing law suits against right wing gangs! 

It is just costly and frustrating and inefficient to try to pass the same exact laws for Dallas and for Seattle. 

And, people will not follow laws now, unless they agree with them. 

And, Peoples paradigms have shifted along cultural and geographic lines, so that they believe things that are in direct opposition. 

 So, yea, lets take a few years to get our stuff in the right place and get what walls we like erected, and then split the heck up! 

No second civil war needed.

uncontrolled growth in the Methow valley of Washington.

 

is the boom in the Methow Valley changing the demographic ?
Who is leaving and who is staying and who is arriving?
Does anyone really care, or are we mostly counting dollars?

It is not as confusing for me, because I have already experienced a similar change in Telluride Colorado and then, in Moab Utah. No one causes the change. the free market economy is simply allowed to operate without much oversight. There are laws, but less sensitive folk with money can step way, way over the line without meeting up with enforcement.

when i arrived in all three places, they were each in a depressed condition. Real estate signs growing around the street signs like cancer cells overcoming and engulfing neighboring healthy cells. People wanting work, so that the price of labor reaches rock bottom. People with money end up with everyone elses stuff. But, no one is driven out. Anyone who wants to can live there. They simply have trouble earning money.

These are not areas of blight. I would not go to a area that has been exploited and left for dead. I certainly would not go to a city or a place that is chaotic and unpleasant.

Telluride was a real ghost town when i arrived in 1976. You could purchase a huge, ruined Victorian house on the main street for 2000 dollars. I was offered the place that i rented for something like 100 dollars per month. Why not stop paying my 25 dollars per month for the master bedroom, and purchase the building and the lot? No one would be that stupid, said clever young Alf! I was working for 25 dollars per hour, doing high risk roped painting and construction. So, i made my rent each hour!

The strange situation came about because speculators had bought up the land around telluride, and then started a ski area that would make the land much more valuable. Then, the ski area went bankrupt, and was run by a skeleton crew simply to try to make some use of the huge land gamble. We could ski a few lifts that were not really connected into a ski area, and sort of cross country ski a few miles when we wanted to use a different lift. It was very unusual. When you skied across the flats to another lift, quite often you would find a lift operator that was needing company. They had not seen anyone for hours! just running an amazing ski lift without a single rider!

The speculators continued to market their business or scam, and in time, they succeeded. After about a decade of enjoying the unencumbered possession of a pretty nice valley, the residents were booted out. I documented some of it in a series of cartoons. It was so surreal. Heavily armed sheriffs forcing residents out of their single wide trailers at gunpoint, and physically towing them down the mountain.

The town council, which used to be stoned hippies [like me], were replaced with lawyers in suits. The laws changed, so that anything could be built anywhere. An airport went in, even though it was the most dangerous landing place in the US. After a few years, the runway literally fell down onto the company that had built it. The entire works of the company were buried. Trucks, buildings and all. The stupid perched runway was simply rebuilt. There was no one left who cared about the valley.

At first, there was no housing for the employees of the now successful telluride ski area. There were literally no workers of any kind in the town. They had all been banished to unpleasant blighted areas. But, there was finally so much money in the valley that the poor stayed as close as possible.
They built blighted communities in avalanche run out zones, and in dank, unpleasant side canyons that get no sun at all in winter.

A huge fleet of brand new white trucks drove up the hill each morning to serve the wealthy. The workers in those trucks would go to jail if they tried to stay over night. You have to try to picture it. the workers were ordinary people. banished from their valley, they often wanted to linger after a shift, get drunk, and then sleep in their vehicle. I was a restaurant worker during this period. So, i was part of this thing. I would get off at 2 am, after feeding and serving drinks to very rich folk. I would then recieve a shift drink. At least one! At 3 or so, i would get into my car. If i did not drive, i would be hauled out of my vehicle, and imprisoned. If i drove, i would eventually be killed driving super tired and a little drunk on the interesting winter roads.

i got out of there, became a professional rock climber, tried and failed to move back, and finally, after drifting around for a decade, came to rest in the canyonlands region. I liked the landscape, and the way that the self reliant Mormons leave you the hell alone. I became one of the best know rock climbers in the world. It was easy. I had always been stronger than usual, and trained very very hard. Then, i failed to die on a rock climb, or to kill myself. It sounds crazy, but devoted rock climbers like myself almost never make it past the age of 50. Middle age is not so good for unroped climbers. we tend to be stubborn peter pan types anyway. We refuse to stop climbing without a rope, and fall down [go boom!].

Boom, the town of Moab finally made it big. speculators went big on giant hotels and river companies and residential real estate. They finally repeated what had happened to Telluride. The laws were changed so that tiny homes could not be used, even if you bought property. Camping was forbidden anywhere near the town. The wrong types of tourism were expanded, so that the desert was not a desirable living place. Everyone like me had to leave. We could not abide jet boats coming down the river one after another, and super loud motorized traffic everywhere that we tried to go.

I want to make it clear that that these gentrifications are not straightforward. in other words, it is not the case that each worker looses their home and must leave. There are increasing traffic accidents, fights, spousal abuse, child abuse, etc. When you squeeze humans, this is how they react. The police change from chasing cannabis providers and speeders to enforcing the new normal for the very rich. They are still the same honest and helpful people, but their mission is changed. In Telluride, one of my best friends and a second officer arrested me after a shift at my restaurant job. i was too tired, and could not drive down. They kept me standing barefoot in the snow in tighty whities for a super long time, before i told them that they could hop into the drivers seat and drive me down, lock me up, shoot me, or get the heck away from me. They got the heck away and did not ever contact me again. I had another officer fired and removed from the valley after he started messing with local women during fake traffic stops.

As far as the Methow valley, it was in a bust economy when i arrived. Moab had become so noisy and filled with greed that this northern valley was the perfect refuge. About half of the properties where i lived [carlton area] were for sale, and a person could stay in a lot of places. A caretaker of land was in a good place. You know what happened.
Covid!
Now, the clusters of for sale signs are down, and the street signs can be clearly seen again. The handypersons and wood cutters are mostly gone. Some folks had to be locked up or evicted. A lot of poor people are not poor because they are of low intelligence or have a mental illness. They are poor for other reasons. some will not exploit others [the best way to get money!]. Some are not mentally ill, but require more space or serenity than average. And, of course, some are mentally and physically disabled. Some are quite old and their mate is gone. Some are single people with no family support. [hi!].

Should they all be forced out? Well, if money is allowed to sort out the residents without any human consideration, the answer is a big YES. the economy and the law are set up correctly. No one need lift a finger. Each couple can stay on their 5 or 45 acres with their 5000 or 10,000 gallons of water per day. The Seattle folk can swoop in on Friday night like secretive visitors from space. The automatic door whooshes open and they disappear into their fortress!

The labor shortage is a problem, but it will take care of itself. there are already out of town contractors coming in to fill the gaps. Bedroom communities will grow up down the valley. The brand new white trucks are being purchased now. They will serve the rich instead of 'dirtbags' with their damaged Tacoma's. If it is anything like Telluride's 'rise', the community based organizations will weaken and die. you will call someone in Omak or Brewster when you need shoveling or plumbing. The white trucks will not park here for the night.

We have some organizations that seem to promote diversity and low income housing. In practice, they are helping somewhat wealthy people become really wealthy, so that they can live here. It looks like the long fight to keep the valley protected from exploitive tourism and industry is lost now. We will soon have tourists in boats and motorized rentals wherever we go. The fancy buildings are already going up. it is interesting that the new influx of currency is being used for baubles like a super nice library and rich person public buildings.

In my infantile mind, there are ridiculous visions of the Methow with a diverse community and support for old and sick and poor residents. I did not hope for a really nice library. That is because i am one of those old sick and poor residents. I just hoped to stay here. Refugees during the coming wave of infection will not have the easiest time. The economy will get bad again, and even more folks will be unhomed and driven from place to place. This place will be more like Syria or Afghanistan.

It is so obvious to me. but again, i am a poor person trying to whine or vote myself rich!  please, go right on with the plunder!

is the US government simply a puppet show used to distract citizens while large corporations create the laws?

now the political pendulum has swung the other way. We see a second installment of stimulus payment #2 under consideration. One of 2 oil pipelines have been cancelled. The pandemic is finally being addressed. There is talk of changing border policies.

But, there is the lingering feeling that it is all a puppet show to distract us while the CEOs and shareholders of companies create laws, make treaties, and carry out whatever war that they want. It seems that Trump was a sort of Trojan horse that was rolled into the white house to take over the government more formally, and to drop the puppet show in favor of a never ending civil war.

From the company's perspective, that would have been cheaper than leaving an effective government in place, and spending lots to think up new episodes of the puppet show to distract citizens in new and disturbing ways. it was a strong try, and we got to see a government virtually shut down, international agreements ended, and policy set by an evil clown using tweets in broken english.

There was a pretty obvious lead in to ww3, with the US standing in for Nazi Germany in this act of the show. What is so scary is how close it came to working! Bullies were empowered, and then whipped by the president to overthrow the government after the election was lost. As a country, the US is a very nasty bully. 

How would one go about fixing this problem? 

Our civilization needs a basic restructuring. Corporations do not need to be broken up into bits. They need to be disbanded. The idea of the corporation was sound 200 years ago, when there were huge continents to cross with canals and railroads. More recently, corporations have become predators or farmers. They live off of the people like tapeworms, or keep them captive like livestock.  They are free to create huge messes, and then, after the riches are extracted, their livestock or hosts are left to clean up the mess.

I have tried to talk about insurance as one of the ways that slavery has been able to continue into the modern age. Insurance is a great scam. People used to have stored wealth, that they would use when they needed a car or a medical procedure. Insurance, and expecially government mandated mandatory insurance is like a tapeworm, that eats the creatures food before it can be digested, and replaces the food with their poop.

This works because the people are not educated well. They are superstitious and fearful, and can no longer think for themselves. The few that bother to get a sound education are simply hired by the very companies that are making messes and sucking away savings. I know this because it happened to me. i was trained in computers and astrophysics at New Mexico Tech. I intended to work for NASA when i graduated. But, NASA was falling apart when i got my degree, and i was hired by a giant oil company instead. 

This happened to most of my friends at NMT. People that had hoped to help the environment were hired by Exxon. Folks that has always dreamed of using the most powerful computers on earth to solve problems ended up making weapons of war. This is a direct result of allowing a ficticious entity [the corp.] to get most of the money in the world. The people [or cattle] are left with empty bank accounts, and with insurance for any conceivable emergency. This economic drain does not stimulate the economy. The entities simply pocket the profit, creating an ever more unequal distribution of wealth.

Needless to say, these corps will fight to the death to stay in power. Rather than dissolving, they would destroy the environment, and instigate a series of never ending wars. The wars would not always be between countries. they could be between races, or genders, or groups that believe a certain set of things.

I honestly can not dream up a way to dissolve the corporations without them killing the world. Perhaps someone will comment with a good idea. I moderate the comments, so dont bother to pin the problems to a racial group or religion or ideology. 

why do you do it? a glance at extremely high risk activities

Why do you do it?

A glance at extremely high risk activities.

I was one of the nuts. I climbed cliffs like El Capitan with no rope. First, you have to understand that a very different kind of person WANTS to climb huge cliffs without any safety equipment, or jump off a cliff holding a parachute in their hands. 

One of my friends used to climb super tall, super hard routes with no rope. Instead, he carried a parachute. Think about it! When he began to fail on the climb, he would push off and try to deploy that chute. I am speaking about Deen Potter in the past tense because he eventually jumped from the  top of a cliff that was not steep enough, and he hit the cliff. So did the guy that was flying with him.

There were not that many 'high adventure' rock climbers when I partook, so i interacted with almost every one. 

I helped Todd Skinner to install his climbing wall just before he went to valley for the last time. I had dinner with he, his wife, and his 3 kids. 

I belayed Dan Osmond for some of his gigantic falls during the filming of Masters Of Stone. 

I climbed with Derek Hersey often, and did a new route in the Cloud Peak Wilderness with his significant other after he got stormed off of the Steck Salathe. I also free soloed that route. It was my most difficult onsight free solo. On sight means that it was my first time on the route, and had someone's hand drawn map instead of memories.

I climbed both pitches of supercrack with Hayden Kenedy and his dad shortly before he had his trouble on a mountain route. I had been climbing with his parents since before he was born, and then, BAM!  he was gone. All of us were left behind in a way.

John Bachar was the rock police all by himself when I learned to put up new routes. He would watch your style of ascent through binoculars, and remove the route if the style was not up to snuff. He liked my style, and began to mentor me.  It was I who trained him up for his still amazing free solo of Father Figure in Joshua tree national monument. John fell from an easy route after sustaining injuries in a pretty serious car accident. 

Indeed, eventually it was thought that i was mentor material, and i had a few proteges. One of them, Andrew Barnes, was one of the better climbers that i had even seen by the time he failed on a free solo in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. His mother became a good friend during the long morning period.

I can tell you, as a survivor, that it is awkward to rub shoulders with the loved ones of a high adventure athelete who has fallen. They were not a soldier, fighting and dying for some cause. But, there was something driving them to take risks. What is that something?

If you are not like that, it is going to be tough to understand. Here is a little history from my mom: Alf was a highly sensitive baby. He cried very readily in response to a light that was not that bright, or a sound that was not that loud. 

To me, the light was blinding, and the sound was deafening. I was always on alert, looking for danger. This sensitivity is great when you need to learn something, or are listening to a great concert. But, it sucks most of the time.

Another feature of this sensitivity is that you can be hypnotized by concentrating on something. So, an ant walking around on a little mound right by one eye might be all that you need for an hour or 2 of amazing entertainment. Do you see it? This trance can be used to block out the constant danger warnings. I have been after the trance because it quiets or  silences the constant  danger siren that otherwise dominates perception.

I know, i am writing it, and this makes no sense. A person such as I have described is the last human on earth that you would expect to take part in extreme activites. Wouldn't they turn off the lights and pull the shades; install earplugs; and curl up into a ball in bed? [i hope that you saw the semi colons!]

Some highly sensitive people do it that way. It does not work though, and those that try it kill themselves after a while. The secret is finding activities that put you into the zone for a long time, without killing you right away. I can attest that climbing a really tall cliff with just your fingers and toes fits the bill! You can zone out in perfect oblivion for hours if you have the right stuff. If you do not have the right stuff, what is the point of being alive anyway?

'Normal' folk work the same equation as highly sensitive people. But, they always come up with 'life is frigging great, please continue!' while the HSP constantly arrives at 'life sucks, it is past time to depart!' They get a break when they lift their violin, or create a sculpture, or pull off their clothes and try to tackle a tall cliff.

Normal people do not do that, because they have plenty of fun eating food and mating and raising kids. They do not require a trance to give them a break from living in a kind of Hell.

I have given quite a bit of thought to physical reasons behind this HSP phenomenon. The brain is actually made up of two totally separate lobes. The corpus colostum, where they join, is a kind of  filter than lets some thoughts through. Some of the really dark times seem like a fight between those lobes. The 'voices' that some hear could be the two lobes duking it out. In some respects, they are two different people.

In my case, i have very high eye pressure, and always have. My mother had the same. Gloucoma is the scary medical word. It is swelled up eye balls. Well, the eye balls are just a part of the brain that can be seen, and that sees. Who needs conspiracy theories with reality is this tripped out? Anyhow, i now believe that swelled eyballs indicate a swelled brain.

I looked at a bunch of new scholarly papers about canabis. It is the only natural substance that immediately brings down the swelling in the eye, and perhaps in the brain. It was funny, because the researchers also pointed out that it lowers brain size. They totally missed the point, because they seemed to be trying to prove that cannabis was a very dangerous thing to ingest. I suggest that the brain along with the brains light sensors are a bit swelled up in folk like me. It sure as heck feels like that too!

So, for people who are extreme examples of the Highly Sensitive Person, seemingly absurd risk taking actually prolongs life. Each climb or jump or whatever is like a suicide attempt that will not be considered suicide. If it is sucessful, there is a wonderful respite from pain, and a glow that lasts for a day or 2. If not, well, you are gone, and do not have to clean up the mess => You are the mess!

Each interesting occasion resets the clock, making life well worth living. Ordinary life does not have that effect. It puts the HSP further and further in the red, where a tremendous amount of fun is needed to 'break even'.

HSPs are not mentally ill. Their brains are different than normals, but they are not damaged. In fact, too much sense information gets through the filters, and that is what is unpleasant. HSPs make up roughly 15% of each species of animals. For deer, it is the skinny one with no mate that is always looking around nervously while the others are mating and gorging themselves on branches.

A researcher named Dr. Elaine Aron studies HSPs. When I typed the letters 'hsp' into google, she was the second entry from the top.

If you want more information, or wish to see if I made this HSP stuff up myself, you can look online. And in case you were wondering, i do have suggestions that can help HSPs to feel a greater sense of reward from life. It is possible to mitigate the worst risks, and to use mental tricks to put off the seemingly necessary semi-suicides, but an HSP can not practice, or try really hard,  and become a  'normal'. HSPs live short, very interesting lives. You know them, because the ones who survive long enough become your favorite actors/actresses, authors, film makers and artists. The need for the trance is a stronger motivation than money, fame, love, or anything else.

End of  'Why do You do it?'

by Alf Randell

alfrandell@gmail.com

angry hornets. epidemic ethics

A masking sketch.

My experience at the landromat in Twisp, Wa on Thurday is very typical of what is going on. The business was at about 80% use, and has added brand new machines to help with the workload. 

When I tried to enter [wearing new surgical mask and face shield, i could see unmasked people milling by the front door. I went around to the back, and used a machine near the back door.  I noticed that the mask users were all sitting in their cars, with the engines running to provide heat. I stood outside while the washer was going, and went back in to use the dryer. The 2 non maskers got into a loud conversation while I got my stuff into a cart. I noticed that the conversation was about the uselessness of masking. I opened the back door, and opened 3 dryers for transfer. The landromat owner entered with no mask. He closed the back door, and closed the 3 dryers that i had opened. I explained that i had opened the door for my own safety. When asked about the lack of masks in the business, he stated that one only needed a mask when within 6 feet of another person. He was very polite, but 100% incorrect; Tragically incorrect. 

Covid 19 has mutated so that it is much more contagious. Folks who are going about their normal lives without a mask will be increasingly offering swarms of particles to the rooms that they spend time in. 

We are trying to affect the transmission rate of the virus statistically, so that each secret, [no symptoms] case of Covid causes less that one new case. Even without testing and tracing, this plan of distancing and masking and hand washing can eventually eliminate the infection from our community. We are looking forward to this, so that we can save the masks for big fires and the next epidemic. We want all the kids to go to school. We wish to pack into buildings and enjoy fun community events. 

So, is it OK to stay by the door in a busy and essential business like a landromat? Is it an expression of the personal freedom that we value so highly? Is it an excelent expression of free speach to converse loudly about the futility of masking and distancing?

I suggest that such behavior represents selfishness and bullying. One does not have freedom to hurt another person. This is not a hoax, with the smart people ignoring lockdowns, masks and health rules that they believe are of no use. The people who are breathing through a well fit mask in public spaces 100% of the time are not fools that have been brainwashed by a political movement. The folks who are staying home and skipping visits with their family are not cowards. They do not lack money or courage. Those folks who are distancing and masking and staying at home believe in SCIENCE.

Like it or not, SCIENCE is back in as the guiding principle of our society. It is difficult to believe in semi living particles that you can not see, but that can fool your very own body into rejecting your very own lungs. By rights, these particles should be the size of hornets, and they should make a loud sound. It would be easy to distance from a person whose nose and mouth issued streams of loud, angry hornets.

Since the particles are invisible and have no odor, it seems like an act of faith to believe in them. Further, it seems rediculous to some people to take an uncomfortable action that seems to impinge on their rights. It only seems rediculous because we have not had a health crisis of this magnitude in the US since 1919. And, in a century, your culture forgets it's fear of epidemic disease.

I am not suggesting a fear based response. People have an ample load of economic and behavioral health worries. I am suggesting a science based approach based on the advice of people like Anthony Fauci and Paul Edward Farmer. During our year of illness, These scientists have been apportioning scarse PPE, ballancing the benefits of lockdowns with suicides from cabin fever, and working out health mandates that slow the spread, but allow food to be grown and distributed.

I will post this on my blog under the title 'angry hornets', so when some critic of my inteligence has this thread taken down, you can still read my nonsence! Text or write to me for a link so that you may read as much nonsence as you wish.

Thanks for reading!

The start of things. Symetry and the big bang.

 The big bang, as I see it.

I used to be quite disturbed by the fact that the universe was expanding, and seemed to be doing so forever. That is not a cycle, and cycles are pretty standard in nature. Rarely does a natural thing happen once without repeating.

A lot of things seem to breath, or to do something cyclic to keep existing. In our case, breath in and breath out, eat and poop, etc. Even the Judeo-christian notion of heaven and hell does not work for me. It does not make sense that a soul comes from nowhere, lives a short time on this planet, and then is filed in one of 2 places for eternity. That is not a cycle, and it is not sustainable. It would not keep going.

Everything in nature is in equalibrium. Births and deaths eventually ballance. Matter and energy are recycled forever, with no new matter/energy created, and none lost. So, how can the universe explode one time from a single point, and grow forever? There is no symetry and no ballance to that. It is not beautiful, and it does not make sense.

I started to think a lot about the arrow of time. Processes in the particles realm have no preference about the direction of time. Every single process can happen in either direction. For instance, a particle of Matter and one of anti matter can collide and change into energy. When there is enough energy present in an area, some of it can turn into a particle of matter and a particle of anti matter. 

Bigger objects are collections of many particles. With macro objects, there is a direction of time. Eggs break but they never unbreak. The arrangement of the particles is really important for something like an egg. An unbroken egg is a very organized item, and a broken egg is much less organized. Organization follows a law, so that a given isolated system is always becoming less organized. If you are thinking of the creation of a child, that is far from a closed system. Creating a new human being causes the disorder in the universe to increase. Organization increases in the child, but a larger amount of disorder is created outside the child.

How does this apply to the early universe? There is so much matter in the universe, and so many complicated structures. So the arrow of time is assured. The entire universe will become less and less organized as time proceeds. Matter is scattered farther and farther afield, and energy degrades to ever less condensed forms. 

So, if we follow the history of the universe backwards, we expect to see more and more organization, and more condensed energy. Times arrow remains locked in by this complexity and organization, until the entire universe is in one location. A single universe sized black hole would not give out any light. It could not rotate, because there is no other matter to rotate in reference to. It would be, in effect, a single particle without motion or temperature. There is only one way to arrange that matter, so the 2nd 'law' of thermodynamics no longer holds. Events can happen in either direction in time, exactly like they do in the particle realm. The big bang is free to occur in both directions of time.

If my notions of symetry are correct, there would be no difference in the 2 directions of time. There could be people and other highly organized arrangements of matter in both directions. I believe that people would experience the flow of time in a similar way in either direction. There is no forward and back in this scenario. No one is living 'backwards'. And both universes are free to expand forever, loosing organization. This symetry is enough to make me comfortable with the endless expansion and disorganization of our universe. There is no need for a god, or for any miracles. An endless explosion, taking place in both directions of time, is a ballanced and elegant system that i can hold on to. Otherwise, i need it to eventually condense and explode, again and again, in an endless cycle.