confusion

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.

Artist

Run the Jewels

Album

Run the Jewels 4

Release Date

June 3, 2020

I came late to RTJ [discogs.com], I first encountered them via DJ Shadow’s song “Nobody Speak” on The Mountain Will Fall [discogs.com]. Still one of their best songs —and their best videos [youtube.com], I would put it up there with Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” [youtube.com] video. From there I discovered their back catalog and was eagerly awaiting RTJ4, listening to it from the day it dropped.

Run the Jewels 4 [discogs.com] gets a lot of praise as a soundtrack to the summer of protests over the death of George Floyd and the larger Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. The album was in fact released a few days early due to the ongoing protests. But, the protesting nature and the unfortunate an poingent way that RTJ4’s broad themes and specifics fit the death of George Floyd can’t really be called a coincidence. The issues aren’t new, the anger isn’t new. Even the death by suffocation a al cop isn’t new, the most disturbing line on the album, given the way George Floyd died comes midway through “Walking in the Snow” at the end of one of Killer Mike’s verses:

The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four
Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest
And usually the lowest scores the poorest and they look like me
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"

“I can’t breathe” could have been written about George Floyd, and indeed the song became a sort of cathartic rallying call, but it wasn’t about George Floyd. Killer Mike himself clarified on Twitter that, “that verse was rapped in 2019.” It is in fact referencing the last words of another black man killed by police; Eric Garner, whose death was filmed in 2014 in New York City. Despite the fact that this was national news in 2014 [cnn.com] and again in 2019 [cnn.com] when the Justice Department declined to try the officers, people seem to have forgotten it until George Floyds death.

Anyway, if you want to listen to more on the album’s place in the protests you should watch this video [youtube.com] by Polyphonic over on YouTube.

Sitting in Singapore the protests were half a world away for me, I wasn’t listening to RTJ4 because I was protesting. I like RTJ. I’m not a Rap or Hip Hop aficionado, I’ve always loved the Beastie Boys and I like me some Eminem, Outkast and others, but I could never really get into the genre, neither the great popular acts like Dr. Dre or Tu Pac, back in the day or Kendrick Lamar and Drake more recently nor the more underground greats like MF Doom. But RTJ hits the spot. I love Killer Mike’s flow, reminding me of Big Boi from OutKast. And Mike’s southern flow pair perfectly with El-P’s New York style. I’ve listened to both artists solo work and while it’s good I find the whole greater than the sum of its parts. I started with RTJ3 and worked my way backwards to 2 and 1, all great. But it seems that each album is surpassed by the next release and RTJ4 is my favorite. I can’t wait to hear Run the Jewels 5.

Ready to listen?