no flood damage

there is no flood damage... at least in my neighborhood. in other parts of the county, yes there is. and in neighboring counties. and other states, too. in the local region, 4 people died from the flooding. and $100,000,000 damage, according to governor pataki, who was here yesterday. there were sooooo many helicopters flying overhead yesterday, one flew right over my house and it was really loud. i didn’t go anywhere, except on a short walk to the community college and back to visit my dad, who went to work despite the fact that he has the whole summer off and nobody else is there. well ok there was maybe a grand total of ten people on the entire bcc campus. but you get the picture. so yeah, the damage is devastating, in broome county, tioga county, delaware county, and just south of us in pennsylvania, things are also bad there. when i wrote the last post i was kind of nervous because i had no idea what was going on except what i had heard on the radio, and there was not much in the news about it. today the newspaper is entirely devoted to the flood and this is the main article. so i don’t think they really arrested anyone for driving around or anything, but there was an order not to drive unless it was an absolute emergency. in tioga county, they actually said they would arrest people for driving on the roads, but not here in broome county. anyway, there was flooding in all sorts of low-lying areas near the rivers, and all of the most densely populated areas with the most stuff are near the rivers. like i said, i’m on the side of a hill, so no prob here. i was just totally freaking out the last time i posted here. but i’m fine. some people lost their homes and cars and stuff, and 4 people actually died. i’m supposed to mow the rest of the lawn today, since all the rain that went on for days kept me from finishing up the lawn before. that should be annoying, mowing the wet grass... but i have to, or else i will be severely punished. even though the yard is like a swamp. and the weather outside is hot and sunny now... i think there are going to be lots of medical problems in the region, since all the doctors have offices on riverside drive, which is on the side of the river, and i think that got flooded. i have an appointment on riverside drive tomorrow. so, i will see, on that day, if that building still stands, and if it is turned to mush, and if my psychologist is there, he will probably either tell me how he is disappointed in me or excited for me, but i can never tell which he will be beforehand, and it is usually a mixture of both. usually he is mostly disappointed but finds at least one thing to stay excited about, one area where i seem to have made some progress. but today i need to mow the wet, soggy, grass, you know, the grass out in the swamp around my house, because it’s snot a lawn anymore. the lawnmower will probably explode in flames. but i need to do that shit or else i get punished. meanwhile, people who lost their homes and stuff are now off living in the binghamton university event center, which, like i said, is kind of like the new orleans superdome. except, it seems, this one is actually managed properly, and they were able to deal with it much better. actually, they seem to have done an amazingly good job at emergency management around here, i think. there were fricken helicopters everywhere, like i said. my dad is upstairs replacing the old plastic shower head with a new shiny metal one and cleaning the ceiling of the bathtub with bleach. as the new shower head once said, “bite my shiny metal ass!” or was that bender on futurama? anyway, i need to go out and mow the damn lawn. other people in the neighborhood are mowing their lawns now. none of the services ever got shut off, and although we get our water from the binghamton city water supply, they managed to keep it going without issuing a boil water advisory like in another nearby town. but there are some places that were just utterly destroyed by the flooding, like conklin or walton, according to the news. my mom went on a bike ride yesterday with a camera and photographed some pretty awful flooding that is just 2 blocks downhill from here, actually within walking distance. next to interstate 81 is the parking lot for the church just down the street and their parking lot is like a soup bowl that is full; at least one s.u.v. is now clam chowder, and my mom has the photos to prove it. but my car is high and dry, as they say. so, it’s time for my gas-powered lawnmower to use up some fossil fuels and put more goddamn greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to cause more natural disasters. thanks for the warning, al gore, but you are too late! next time, get a time machine! peace, i’m out!

what is this hurricane katrina?

jesus fucking christ. binghamton is totally flooded. it’s like hurricane katrina all over again, except in upstate new york. it’s in the local news, and on the weather channel’s national report, but apparently binghamton isn’t important enough for this to make the national news. so there is like, a travel ban... we aren’t allowed to drive on the roads. actually there isn’t really flooding everywhere. i actually have no idea where the flooding is. somewhere in broome county. dammit! at least i live on the side of a hill. the hill will protect me. i wish i knew the name of the hill. what the hell is the name of the hill my house is on the side of? so deer lake has flooded. where the hell is deer lake? i never heard of deer lake. it’s somewhere in the county. most of the flooding is in parts of the county that are not the place where i am. ya know, low lying places near rivers. but they are evacuating the entire east side of binghamton, apparently, since it is surrounded by 2 rivers (chenango and susquehanna). sending people to the binghamton university event center. this is gonna be just like the superdome in new orleans, i swear. this shit is all because of global warming, i guarantee it. i saw al gore’s movie the other day, an inconvenient truth, and it scared the hell outta me. but really, aren’t we gonna have global thermonuclear war wipe us out? isn’t that what steven hawking was talking about the other day, along with “catastrophic global warming” and “a genetically engineered virus”? i was sure that nuclear war was gonna be the way the world would end. that’s why we need to fund the nunn-lugar program and ted turner’s nuclear threat initiative. and ronald reagan should have listened to mikhail gorbachev when he said he wanted to ban nuclear weapons. jackass. but shit... pretty soon we oughtta start loading up 2 of every species, if ya know what i mean. except this time, we go to mars! i read steve squyres’s book about mars rovers, and it just made me feel like a total dumbass for never getting to know him when he was my professor at cornell. steven hawking’s idea of going to the moon or mars sounds pretty smart to me, right about now. this planet is fucked up! when is it going to stop raining? like, ok, we have enough rain here already. can’t someone make it stop? we need like, a giant laser on the moon to vaporize clouds before they start producing rain. ok, i admit, that is from austin powers, the giant laser on the moon thing. you know, i bet the democratic party doesn’t even exist anymore, because the binghamton headquarters are right next to the place where the 2 rivers meet on the east side of binghamton. and without a binghamton headquarters... a political party is finished. yes, binghamton is that important. hah. ok, so maybe the rest of the country thinks we are expendable, judging by the lack of national news coverage of the flooding. wtf is the deal with cnn.com and msnbc.com? like, i bet there might actually be 1 or 2 people who get injured in these floods, or maybe even someone dead. that is like, the worst natural disaster in the history of the world. well at least in binghamton, while i have been alive. maybe. except for the tornados. or the lightning. or something. dammit, there is a flood and it’s illegal for me to drive my car on the streets! this is some serious shit. i wonder, if this shit fucks up the landscape, how long will it take before i can look at this shit on google earth? what the fuck? just stop raining... it’s not funny anymore. seriously. why is everyone declaring a state of emergency in the county and the city and town and village and whatever? what does “state of emergency” even mean in the first place? i mean, i am kind of pissed off about the weather disrupting normal everyday life for myself and other people in my community. we need to, like, kill mother nature by polluting as much as possible, and that will stop all the weather from happening and then people will control everything. or maybe, i dunno... sell our cars and buy boats? what is this venice or something? i didn’t get any sleep all night because the rain was so loud all night... and my window was closed. and there is a boil water advisory. oh great. i hope they declare “martian law”, like on sealab 2021 on adult swim. we need to like, not die. it’s actually not that bad right where i am, in fact things are perfectly fine in my neighborhood. too bad about those other parts of the county, though... huh. well, i suppose i’ll just see what happens, and, umm, try to avoid any sorts of flooding disaster that might be happening around here? we still have electricity and cable tv and internet and running water... for now. i’m gonna go, like, eat food or something... this weather is kinda dumb. at least i’m not, like, dead or something. i wonder if the downtown area will even exist tomorrow. at least my house will be fine. ugh... i’m going to eat now.

drat! foiled again...

our evil plans have been foiled again. comrade markos moulitsas zúniga, or “kos” as we refer to him in code-speak, is the supreme leader of the glorious blogistan liberation front. the blogistan liberation front is a blogofascist secret society which is quietly planning the people’s proletarian revolution of the blogosphere. jason zengerle, of the counterrevolutionary new republic, has exposed our evil plot to the world. alas! now righteousness shall triumph yet again...

now the new republic are denying that they are counterrevolutionaries, by stating how they share many of the same ideas as kos’s blogistan liberation front. lies! has nobody forgotten about stephen glass? these new republicans at the new republic claim to be democrats but they are really just full of lies and elitist snobs. the new republic may agree with us “progressives” on almost all domestic issues, but their counterrevolutionary foreign policy is shameful, what with their support for the war in iraq and all. and in the 80s they supported reagan’s support of the contras in nicaragua in the iran-contra scandal. on the other hand, the blogistan liberation front, including the kossacks, are big supporters of metajesus, whose teachings describe the proper way to carry out the people’s revolution of the blogosphere. kossacks also tend to use mozilla firefox, while counterrevolutionaries avocate internet explorer. even david brooks at the new york times has taken up the jihad against daily kos, joining the new republic and the national review online. while i am a steadfast ally of kos in the proletarian struggle, i am afraid that the politburo diktat is that the kossacks will be defeated, despite the temporary triumphs of the las vegas yearlykos convention. thanks for nothing, subcomandante markos!

quantum politics

in politics, there are often multiple points of view that are bitterly divided against each other, not only disagreeing on opinions, but on facts. quantum physics has demolished the myth of objective reality, just as einstein’s theory of relativity demolished the myth of time. let me explain. the theory of relativity states that, to different observers, the order in which 2 events occur may appear to be different; moreover, it states that each observer is correct, in their own frame of reference, and neither is more correct than each other. the notion of “simultaneous” events is disproven by albert einstein’s theory of relativity. if we look out into space and watch things that supposedly happened billions of years ago, by looking at stars billions of light-years away, we are actually looking at things that are happening right now, at least in our own frame of reference. when we say that we are looking at things that happened billions of years ago, this is made based on the implicit assumption that there exists something known as time which is objective and universal, and that certain things happened at certain times. but this is a lie. time does not exist in any sort of universal sense, which you can prove by having 2 identical twins with identical watches and sending one into space near the speed of light and having them come back younger than the one that stayed put, with a watch that didn’t go thru as much time. time, like space, is something that matter and energy can move thru, but not everything goes at the same speed, and there is no universal “now”, because i can look in the sky at things that happened billions of years ago in distant galaxies, and they are really happening now according to my frame of reference. billions of years after we are all gone, space aliens billions of light years away may look at us through a telescope, and you know what? in their frame of reference, we will be their contemporaries, alive at the same time. this is the paradox of time, and why time itself is a big lie.

in quantum physics, the heisenberg uncertainty principle plays a central role. it states that you cannot observe something without changing it, and it is impossible to know everything about any particle you are trying to study. originally this heisenberg uncertainty principle only applied to the velocity and momentum of a particle, but since then it has been expanded to apply to all properties of any particle, or wave. another interesting paradox is the dual particle-wave nature of both matter and energy such as light (electromagnetic radiation). things behave in a manner that does not comply with traditional views of logic or of an objective reality. it turns out traditional views of objective reality are highly flawed and do not work at all when studying things on a subatomic level; the empirical data from experiments disproves objective reality. instead, there is something called a wave function, something every subatomic particle has. the wave function covers all possibilities, and a particle/wave is not limited to any single possibility until the act of observation is performed on it. observation causes what is known as wavefunction collapse, causing all possibilities but 1 to be eliminated, and producing the illusion of an objective reality. but objective reality only exists at the moment of observation, and in between observations, particles and waves can cover all possibilities simultaneously, despite the apparant contradictions to anyone who believes in only one objective reality.

so what does this have to do with politics? well, john von neumann wrote a great book about quantum physics in the early 1930s, in german. remember him? he helped invent computers, helped develop nuclear bombs in the manhattan project, and was a leading scientist of his time. in his book, he asserted that observation and wave function collapse can only occur inside the brain of a living organism capable of reflective thought. he specifically said that wave function collapse occurs at the moment a memory is recorded in the brain. seeing something with your eyes is not enough, for example, to collapse a wave function, if you do not record what happened in your brain’s memory. when a record is created of what happened, in an irreversible process, it seems this may be what collapses wavefunctions and eliminates possibilities. one particular interpretation of quantum physics is called the many-minds interpretation. according to this, every sentient being sort of has their own parallel universe, their own reality. we interact with each other, but we have different realities. through interaction, the contradictions between various different realities can be eliminated, by people convincing each other what the truth is. so according to this theory, insane people who say things that appear to be false to everyone else, might actually be correct about everything they say. this can also explain the parallel realities of democrats and republicans. all through the magic of quantum physics.

but i am not a fan of that rubbish. i think the many-minds interpretation of quantum physics is complete bullshit. and while i was once a fan and advocate of the many-worlds interpretation, i have given up on it as well. i still think the copenhagen interpretation is garbage, too. now, there is this new interpretation, called decoherence, which is actually backed by experimental data. decoherence theory actually explains how reality comes about existing, and where objective reality originates out of the chaos of subatomic contradictions. any reasonable theory needs to account for the perceived existence of objective reality on the macroscopic scale, to explain why things appear that way to human beings in their everyday life. simply put, any theory which contradicts basic human observations about everyday life, such as the sky being blue, gravity making things fall, people getting older over time... any such theory is simply rubbish. decoherence is one way to force quantum physics into compliance with human observations about everyday reality, but it is rather a blunt instrument, and does not explain why things work the way they do, just how to do the mathematical calculations. for a reason why, we really need to pick between determinism and randomness. the vast majority of quantum theories postulate randomness as the fundamental basis of subjective reality, and deny objective reality outright. but there is one theory, the bohm interpretation of quantum physics, which embraces determinism and objective reality, in sharp contrast to all the other theories. this makes the bohm interpretation quite controversial among physicists in the field of quantum physics, but the bohm interpretation is a better fit for everyday observations about reality made by ordinary people than those other theories. simply put, the bohm interpretation actually makes sense, explains things logically, and has not been disproven (nor has it been proven). superstring theory also plays into this somewhat, but i am unsure how. i do not understand string theory well enough to know how it fits into the scheme of quantum physics and its various interpretations. perhaps the bohm interpretation is wrong, but for me, it is what makes sense, and what i believe in, because it says objective reality really is real, and things happen for a reason, and randomness is simply a misunderstanding caused by observers who cannot discern the true pattern because they lack complete information about the universe. the bohm interpretation is a non-local hidden variable theory, and resolves all paradoxes. there are some scientists who claim to have disproven the bohm interpretation, but bohm advocates claim to have refuted all the arguments against their theory. so, who knows? all i know is, it works better to believe in reality than not to. so, i reject the many-minds interpretation and its hidden implication that in politics, when people disagree on fundamental facts, both sides can simultaneously be correct. despite what the physicists say, i think we ordinary non-physicist mortals ought to believe in objective reality, because things simply work much better that way. because, if many-minds really is true, then if people start questioning everything, this could disrupt the fabric of the space-time continuum... “mind over matter”. utterly ridiculous. in fact, the ridiculous many-minds interpretation might even make magic and psychics real possibilities, according to very warped views of the laws of physics. i reject that entirely, and advocate real reality. i am an advocate for the universe we are in, the one we know exists. so let us acknowledge reality and move on.

joe klein sucks

i have read time magazine for years and i have always been in awe of how much joe klein sucks. his articles are not your typical unbiased news stories, nor are they opinion pieces. here is his latest one. he tries to write a different kind of article, one that is full of opinions but tries to be fair and balanced to the democrats and republicans. he mostly seems to write about the various strategies of public relations and propaganda done by both sides, and their supposed effectiveness. but the ironic part is, he usually gets brainwashed by much of the propaganda, not always from the same side, of course. like, he thinks immediate withdrawal of u.s. troops from iraq would be disastrous. ok, fine, maybe that is correct, who knows. but he also says a timetable, getting it done by the end of the year would be disastrous. but then he goes on to contradict himself, talking about the zarqawi assassination. he headlines his article about how bush is still winning the war at home, even though bush’s poll numbers are rock bottom and republicans are all trying to distance themselves from him. and then later on, joe klein talks about bush and rove being liars and having failed policies, yet he keeps harping on the democrats and john kerry failing in their attempts at public discourse regarding the war in iraq. what is most notable is, joe klein constantly contradicts himself, again and again, and he does not seem to have many coherent viewpoints on things, often having one opinion early in an article and a completely opposite opinion later on in the same article. his efforts to correct misinformation are laudable nonetheless, but it is questionable what joe klein is motivated by, who he supports, what his agenda is. does he want democrats or republicans to win in november, or is he simply an observer who will report what he sees without passing judgement? he does pass judgement quite often in his articles, but he keeps flip-flopping so fast it leaves me breathless. i am a critical thinker and i always try to evaluate the bias of every article i read, questioning the writer’s motivations and agenda. but with joe klein, i come up blank. i simply cannot understand him at all, based on what he writes. it just leaves me dumbfounded. and i think, if he were a better writer, it would not cause that reaction in me. most political commentators write straightforward one-sided polemics, which i find much easier to deal with. i am able to see their point of view quite clearly, and it makes sense, and i feel i have learned something after reading what they have to say. but joe klein simply writes in a pseudo-journalistic pseudo-balanced style that is really off-putting, and makes you really wonder what kind of hidden agenda he has. why does he always try to diss on both sides equally? it does not seem like natural human behavior, to act so balanced and diss equally on both sides, which is what raises suspicions that he is simply putting on a sort of act, parroting other people’s views rather than stating his own. the natural human response in a conflict such as republicans versus democrats is to take sides, at least partially. like you can say, you don’t like either side, but you think one is not quite as bad as the other. what makes joe klein the impartial arbiter of acceptable political discourse, though? it seems his purpose is to frown upon things he disagrees with, in both parties, to encourage more centrist tendencies. but i am not even sure about that. what i do know is, the american people are ignored by politicians, each party ignores its base, and instead they pursue policies considered prudent by elitist pundits such as joe klein, rather than respecting the views of public opinion. our democracy has been hijacked by the media, who have gone from simply reporting on what happens, to being active participants in politics who frame the debates and set things up to achieve predetermined outcomes. but these media elites distrust mass popular movements, so that is the source of this centrism: they hedge their bets between the 2 parties, while trying to undermine both liberal and conservative activists. however, i remain convinced that grassroots activists are the solution, and the centrist elites such as those in the media are the problem. i think both parties need to embrace their activist grassroots bases, re-invigorate themselves, radicalize, abandon all centrism of the type where the corporate media frames the debate for the politicians. like, although i disagree with the republicans on pretty much every issue, i do have some hints: get tough on illegal immigration, cut government spending enough to eliminate the deficit, change strategy in iraq so you can win the war, and never compromise on core principles. for the democrats, who i support: unite against the war and illegal wiretaps, don’t be afraid to talk about impeachment or where you stand on things, stop caving in to wealthy corporate interests since they are republicans anyway, raise the minimum wage and make it apply to foreigners in this country just like citizens, and never compromise on core principles. i don’t think anyone should embrace washington-style centrism, because centrism is for the weak, and for those who have small minds and cannot frame the debate, and simply let the media and washington insiders dictate to them, without having any core principles to base decisions on. joe klein’s worldview, as i see it, is nihilistic, believing in nothing other than doing what is practical at this moment in time, where how you do public relations is more important than what you are actually doing... there is no higher principle, no guide to what is right and what is wrong. and this is what leads to all the contradictions in his writing, and why he is so out of touch with what ordinary americans think. this is what is so dangerous... it is unprincipled republican nihilism that has brought us all of the problems we face today. (“reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” - dick cheney, showing a complete lack of any moral principles in his reasoning.) now maybe joe klein really is a liberal; maybe i misunderstood him. but i don’t care; he needs to be a better writer, regardless of what he really thinks. so, in short, joe klein sucks.