Category: ranting

Two decades ago this week I arrived in Singapore. At the time I left DC I was unsure of the long term plan, I only had a a fuzzy idea; ‘maybe I’ll stay in Singapore, maybe I won’t.’ you can see that in my last post [confusion.cc] from the US before I left:

I have a return ticket but I don’t know if I will be coming back next month or next year or ever.

Turns out I traveled back and forth a quite a bit for a while, racking up the frequent flyer miles on the longest flight in the world —SIN to NYC— but by March of 2005 I had an employment pass and planned to stay. Originally I only wanted to stay a few years, I wanted to go and live in different places every few years, to experience a new, alien, culture as a local constantly. But, life had other plans [confusion.cc].

C’est la vie. Singapore is a great place to live and to raise a family. I complain a lot about the things I don’t like, but I would not love here if it was not a great place. We can always want our home to be better.

Interestingly, while drafting this entry I was planning to post it on the fourth —I’ve always said I arrived on the fourth of September— but I looked at the date of my final post from the US and things didn’t make sense… so I dug out my old passport and flipped through it to find my entry stamp for Singapore. And it was on September first… so, I’ve been three days off every year when I fill out my tax forms for the US that ask when I arrived in Singapore. Oh well, I don’t think three days matters there, but it did mean I had already missed the actual anniversary before I wrote this… so I slacked off and didn’t finish this until the end of the week… hence ‘two decades ago this week’ rather than ‘two decades ago today’.

The original Ghostbusters [imdg.com] was released in 1984. I was six. I don’t remember when I first saw it, maybe as early as 1985, or maybe 1986 or even 1987. In any case I was to young to understand some of the jokes —like Ray’s dream, somehow it was funny but I don’t understand what he was actually dreaming about, and because it was burned into my head from repeated viewing before I was old enough to understand it took a lot longer than it should have to understand that scene. No doubt we rented it from one of the local video stores, maybe the one in Pantops shopping center or maybe the one on 5th Street Extended, of course we also rented a second VCR and setup it up to make a copy. I remember watching that copy it times on summer breaks or on days I was home sick from school.

Sometime between the time Ghostbusters came out and the end of the 80’s an incident occurred at Berry Steam Plant in Alabama where my grandfather worked. Not for the first time an alligator crawled into the discharge pipes to enjoy the warmth on a cold day. I don’t recall all the detail of the story as my grandfather told it but, basically, the plant could not use the pipes with the gator in there and they called animal control or whoever it is you call, but it was taking too long and they needed to use the pipe. So, a bunch of burly steam power plant workers went out and wrestled this alligator out of the pipe and back down to the pond or river.

To commemorate this someone at the plant —I don’t know if it was my grandfather or someone else— had some silk screen shirts made with a Ghostbusters inspired logo of a gator caught in a ‘prohibition’ circle with a slash across it. Around the circle it says “Berry Steam Plant”. And the gator is wearing a hat (I don’t know why, but I imagine it’s just the type of hat a typical burly power plant worker would wear back in the day?).

I remember my grandfather giving us all shorts, I think I had a green one, and there were red ones too. Anyway, I while ago when I was at my mom’s I ran across what it probably the last one of these shirts, a red one. And I brought it back to Singapore to keep.

He didn’t do well. He’s never been an inspiring speaker, and he looked old and out of it during too much of the debate. But it’s him or Trump, that’s how the system works. I can’t see how a decent old man, even with dementia, who’s administration is filled with competent people that are broadly aligned with my political views could be worse than a narcissistic bully who is surrounded by sycophants, christo-fascist and nazi wannabes. I’ll take Biden over Trump. I would take Biden over Trump if Biden was in a coma on Election Day. I wish there was another choice.

I spoke with a friend when I was in the US, long before the debate. They said their objection, or their concern, with Biden was he would die or resign and Harris would be president. They didn’t like Harris —I’m not sure why, we didn’t discuss it— and they didn’t want four years of Harris. I told them they must have failed civics class, I told them that someone who is not the elected president taking over the office in case the president dies or resigns can only server two year as the unelected president (see note below). Then an election must be held. On top of that, two years of Harris is still better than four more years of fake-and-bake Hitler.

In the end, it’s the same to me. The choice boils down to the Trump or Biden, to the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate. I don’t believe the DNC will replace Biden at the convention. My own ballot from Virginia will have other choices but they are false choices.

In 2020 the Virginia presidential ballot had three choices: Republican, Democrat and Libertarian. This year it may have more, maybe RFK Jr. will be there running with his brain worm for VP. But, to me, even if I agreed with the third party candidates it would be stupid to vote for them. I’m voting against Trump. I’m voting against everything Trump stands for. Any vote other than Biden is a vote for Trump. Not voting is a vote for Trump. An intentionally spoiled ballot is a vote for Trump. There is no room for protest or idealistic votes for third party candidates or spoiling a ballot or not voting.

The choice is black and white, red or blue, republican or democrat, Trump or Biden. Given Trumps disdain for the law and for democracy I can’t imagine a scenario where I would not vote for Biden.

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Note: It seems I’m the one who failed civics, I just read the twenty-second amendment [wikipedia.org], and it says:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

So, it seems that if Biden was elected and resigned on day one, Harris could server out the whole term, but then would only be eligible to be elected once. And if Biden made it half-way and then resigned Harris could server the remaining two years and still be elected twice. So I apologize to the people I may have mislead.

It should also be noted that Donald Trump is on record as saying he would be president for “10 to 14” years. Which would violate the 22nd Amendment. Wikipedia points to other; Truman, Reagan, and Clinton who disagreed with the Amendment. It also notes that there have been 54 resolutions introduced congress to repeal the Amendment.

Personally, I think we need more term limits, not less. I think we need limits on Senators and Representatives too. And maybe even Supreme Court Justices. I think it was a mistake that the constitution does not impose limits as getting congress to vote to limit itself seems like a lost cause.

I got back from three weeks in the US last week. Saw my family, including people I have not seen since I was, like, eleven. And two of my sisters for the first time in most of a decade.

Each time I visit the US, I have less desire to go back to the US. It was low to begin with. Since the first time I got out of the US as a tourist I loved being out for the US. When I moved out for the first time I tried everything I could not to go back. Later I jumped at the first chance I got to leave again. Which landed me in Singapore. I’ve wanted to move on from Singapore but never had a serious chance, except for once during the financial crisis, but that was back to the US (needing a job trumped not going back at the time) and it fell through in any case.

Here’s the thing: the US is so fucked up on so many levels. I still believe it has the capability to fix itself but for fuck sakes no one is trying. They are all damn interested in fucking those that disagree with their worldview in every hole as violently as they can.

It’s the same thing that always happens. Everyone wants to save the world… they just disagree on how.

Maximus, Fallout Seasons 1, episode 5

And how. The system has the capability to fix itself but the American people seem too far gone.

There is so much wrong on so many levels.

Infrastructure is falling apart. Has been for years, remember the bridge collapse in Minnesota a few years ago? Almost every bridge on the interstate is older than I am. Most cities in the US can’t fix seasonal potholes much less large infrastructure. This is what taxes are for, for the common fucking good. Admittedly, there seems to be some improvement there, maybe it the infrastructure investment from the Biden Administration’s infrastructure push (seen here in H. R. 3684 – Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act [congress.gov]). Or maybe it’s older Trump-era or even Obama-era money.

Healthcare is fucked. It’s old news that most, if not all of the other OECD countries have better health care systems than the US. …Life expectancy, infant mortality, incidents of heart disease, incidents of obesity/diabetes, etc. We need to fix that shit, I’m not saying we need a single payer system like the UK’s NHS —they got problems too— but the absolute fuck up America has of corporate interests —looking at you private equity— and private healthcare is fucked, fucked, fucked. But shit man “freedom”… Fucking morons don’t know that freedom is not “everyone gets to do what they want” that’s libertarianism or anarchy. Freedom from disease, freedom from want, freedom from simple, easily fixable health problems is also “freedom”. Yet another Christos-faschist corruption of their so-called religion. American Christians would lynch Jesus these days for his liberal-left views. And for fuck sakes it helps the economy if people can work and live. But no, we need to make sure the billionaires and big business can get more money every year. Or they won’t create jobs. If we leave them alone their will invest and it will trickle down. We don’t need a fucking trickle (it never worked anyway [wikipedia.org]) we need fucking torrent. American’s are fucking morons.

Jesus fucking Christ everything has been supersized to stupidity levels. Everything is double the size it was 20 years ago in the US —the cars, the food servings, the amount of chemicals in the food. Fucking hell.

Government corruption seems to having a moment, be it Clarence Thomas obvious bullshit that republicans are tying themselves in knots over playing ostrich to ignore or Nancy Pelosi’s stocks. Time for some fucking term limits on all elected and appointed officials in the government.

Too many, most, American’s seem to have drank the patriotic Kool-Aid. Too many American’s have never spent any time in any other system. It’s sad, and I think more than a little bit responsible for so many issues, that most Americans will never have a passport. They will never have the opportunity to visit and to experience any other system to compare with the American system. Most people who do have a passport probably got it for a week of spring break or a post-retirement trip or maybe a honeymoon. I expect the majority of Americans who have spent any significant amount of time outside of the borders of the US were there to kill people.

I actually wanted to come to some point here and not just rant like a lunatic, but fuck it. I don’t even know where to begin. I’d say vote, but I’m not sure that will have any real effect on things. Politics is the most fucked thing in the whole country. Reminds me of something I heard long ago; “everyone should have the right to vote, most people shouldn’t”. Shouldn’t vote that is. Most people are too brain washed or disconnected from anything to understand the issues and evaluate potential solutions. The parties are pandering to their fucking lunatic fringe-culture-warriors for so long that I think they have forgotten how to actually even pretend to govern. The election is a fucking sound bite popularity contest. The point of a representative democracy was that there are too many complex issues for everyone to understand and so we rely on people who can focus on the issue to represent our best interests, but not we elect a bunch of fuck-tard ideologues based on the verbal diorreha that comes out of their mouth while rich people and companies pump their asses full of cash —fuck Citizens United [wikipedia.org]— and vacations to buy the votes they want not the votes we —the people— need.

Southeast Asia is in the middle of a heat wave. Singapore is not really that much hotter, it’s still hovering around 30-32° every day. But in the mornings, when I go out before six AM with my daughter to catch the bus, I get hit with a blast of hot, sticky air the moment I open the door. It does not cool down overnight, the humidity is so high it’s like the old saying, you could cut it with a knife. Right now my watch says it’s 29º but feels like 35º due to the 82% relative humidity and it’s not even 11AM yet.

I know that “feels like 35º” maybe doesn’t sound that hot, I mean I grew up in Virginia and in the “dog days of summer” it was always nasty. Usually around 40º and at least 70% relative humidity. So it was hotter and more humid, but at least you could look forward to winter. But it’s just hot, crazy hot feeling.

According to WBGT.sg [wbgt.sg], the closest weather station to me is reporting a wet bulb globe temperature of 36, which is… bad. It’s complicated but a WBGT of 36 is in the black zone, which means something like “don’t work outside”. If a place is consistently in this category it becomes hard for humans to live. Humans can live in much hotter places but the humidity has to be lower on average, I mean, how else could anyone live in the desert? To keep living in a place with a WBGT of 36 air conditioning is a must, and of course every minute you run the aircon you are contributing to further baking the planet.

Anyway, the whole point of this is it’s hot, fucking hot.

And it’s only going to get hotter. We have fucked the planet. We have fucked it so hard that a lot of places are at risk of becoming unlivable in my lifetime, or that of my kids. All our grand plans to “limit” global temperature rise to 1º or 1.5º are all for naught. We can’t get our collective shit together because of greed and shortcitedness.

Science has been talking about the greenhouse effect and the potential for human activity to raise global temperatures since at least 1902 (read the history of climate change science [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia.) Here are two newspaper articles about how human’s burning coal was going to warm the world that are more than one hundred years old:

The only thing they got wrong was the timescale. We fucked it up much faster than “a few centuries”.

We’ve been debating if humans were the cause of climate change or global warming my whole life. And capitalism has trumped science every time. Despite the fact that the other day I saw an article that renewable energy now accounts for more then 30% of electricity supply [theguardian.com], (I don’t think that includes trains, planes and automobiles…) it’s too little to late. Then, a few days later the Scripps Institute of Oceanography published the latest Keeling Curve [ucsd.edu], showing how predictable it has become that shit gets worse every year:

This is the record of Atmospheric CO2 since 1958 then they started recording it at the Mauna Loa Observatory. There is a clear trend. And if you want to play the “it’s natural” bull shit game, take a look at some of the other diagrams. The 800 thousand year chart:

So there does seem to be some sort of cycle, but we kinda blew it out of the fucking water in the past 50 years. So yea, we fucked. And while we should celebratge the good, people should also know it’s too little to late.

We need to stop calling it “Climate Change” and start calling it “Climate Changed”, we geo-engineered our bed and now we have to sleep in it, without the aircon. And we can no longer pleed ignorance, not that that was ever an excuse, we know, we have known and we need to start figuring out how to live with it. Actually, I don’t even thing “Climate Changed” is the best, personally I prefer the older term, “Global Warming”, so from now on I’m going to call it “Global Warmed”. The pre-heating cycle is over, we can put the food in the fucking oven now.