Chernobyl

The HBO series about the accident well repays repeated viewings.

I've watched it a couple times in the last few days.

Absolutely horrifying from the first moments.

The spin is mostly anti-Soviet liberal propaganda.

The reality is the accident in Japan was as bad or worse, and that can't be laid at the feet of a totalitarian regime covered wall to wall with official lies.

The reality is humans are too stupid, irresponsible, corrupt, and bloody-minded for nuclear power.

Who would build nuclear plans on the earthquake belt?

Humans, that's who, and it wasn't the Russians.

As for Chernobyl, or anyway the events as portrayed in the video, there were two major issues.

The first is that both that and how the core of a reactor of that sort could explode was a state secret kept even from all those responsible for nuclear energy, including the best trained engineers.

So those in charge did pretty much exactly what would be needed to cause such an explosion never knowing for a second that such at thing could happen - though in doing so they had already departed knowingly and frightfully from the limits of safe operational and testing procedure.

The second is that all up and down the lines of authority stupid people were proud of their ignorance and refused to accept judgements, opinions, and recommendations of relevant experts.

Out society is doubtless less endangered by the first sort of problem than Soviet Russia was.

But we are surely every bit as exposed to the second.

And why didn't those non and even anti-Christian Marxist Russians kill those people whose ends were inevitable and filled with unbearable and uncontrollable pain and horror?

Surely not because of scruples about the sanctity of life, eh?

You'd kill a cat to prevent it suffering like that.

Throughout the film dozens of people knowingly incur certain and even awful death to prevent the worst, but Valery Legasov does not dare tell the truth in Vienna in order to ensure the government will actually fix the 16 other reactors subject to the same fatal flaw, though he believes that his exposure to radiation has doomed him to die in about five years, anyway.

The containment building over the ruined reactor cost two billion dollars and is planned to last a century.

Over how many centuries will it be necessary to continue replacing containment buildings?

Destruction for the hell of it, for the sheer delight in chaos

This is what humans are like.

Minneapolis 'Umbrella Man' who sparked AutoZone fire is Hells Angels member: police

A man captured on surveillance video smashing windows at a Minneapolis AutoZone in the wake of George Floyd’s death is a Hells Angels member bent on stirring up social unrest, police said.

Nicknamed “Umbrella Man” for his all-black getup that included a hood, gas mask and black umbrella, police said the man’s actions led to arson -- the first of several that sent peaceful protests into chaos.

Man who helped ignite George Floyd riots identified as white supremacist: Police

A masked, umbrella-wielding man accused of helping incite riots and looting in the aftermath of George Floyd's police-involved death has been identified as a member of a white supremacist group that aimed to stir racial tensions amid largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, according to police.

The 32-year-old, dubbed "Umbrella Man," was captured in a viral video back in May wearing a black hooded outfit and a black gas mask as he smashed store windows with a sledgehammer and encouraged people to steal, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in court this week.

His actions quickly led to the first of several arson fires that police say transformed peaceful protests into local danger zones, the affidavit said. 

He's also accused of spray painting the words "free s--- for everyone zone" on the doors of an AutoZone before he allegedly smashed in the windows. 

The store was broken into and set on fire shortly after, the affidavit said.

. . . .

Investigators said the suspect is associated with the Aryan Cowboys, which the warrant describes as a "known prison gang out of Minnesota and Kentucky." 

The Anti-Defamation League lists the Aryan Cowboys as a white supremacist prison and street gang, although the group's Facebook page claims it doesn't care "about a person's color."

Who knew Americans are so weak?

Too weak to face the facts about the virus and too weak to make the sacrifices and take the efforts necessary to save thousands and tens of thousands.

But maybe not just Americans.

It's happening all over the world.

Millions more will die than need to.

Maybe tens of millions.

What does that tell us about how things would go in case of a bug this easily spread but as deadly as Ebola?

Half or nearly half of humanity would die, right?

And how would things go for those who survived, with the global economy put through a shredder?

How soon is that bug coming, I wonder?

The Good Samaritan

This orangutan saw a man wading in snake-infested water and decided to offer a helping hand

A revealing impulse, in lots of ways.

The thug in the White House

We have known since the 2016 campaign he approves of the third degree, police brutality, torture, and war crimes like murdering the families of terrorists.

His voters like him because they share those attitudes.

Trump issued direct order to halt disciplining of Navy Seal Edward Gallagher

Hitler's Nazis had a mass following. The Italian Fascists were a mass party.

Brutality was part of their appeal, and is still essential to the appeal of modern authoritarians and so-called "populists" in America, Europe, and around the world.

Lindsey Graham and others of the fucking bastard party are now talking about the need to cut, if not to outright privatize, Social Security and to cut Medicare benefits so money gathered by the relevant dedicated taxes can be diverted to deal with the shortfall in general tax revenues created by the Republican wet dream tax cuts so long wanted by the plutes and so well fronted by that pal of the common man, the forgotten man, Bozo the Liar, the Mini-Mussolini in the White House.

Plutes gonna plute.

An entire party whose central task is to fuck over everybody who isn't really, really rich, on behalf of those who are.

And they are delighted to find a front as effective as Trump.

They are like German and Italian plutes and capitalist sympathizers between the wars happy to find so effective a bulwark against the dreaded socialists and communists.

Warren and Sanders are, on this matter of excessive individual wealth, right, just as both Roosevelts were.

And I could live with a cap on individual private wealth.

Might be a good idea, like trust busting.

Too much individual wealth is also too much market power as well as too much political power.

And that's why Obamacare for all is better than Medicare for all.

Not a good idea for just one insurer to be effectively the only customer of all medical providers in the country, and that one under the direct, immediate, and constant control of bourgeois politicians of only weak, unreliable, minority, and limited loyalty to the masses.

Still, he's wrong to urge actual socialism as better than capitalism and she's right to urge what's needed is capitalism run by progressives for the social good.

All the same, a lot more Americans need to learn that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and libertarian ideology are just bullshit really handy for the plutes.

They need to stop thinking, in effect, that the rich have every right to screw them to the wall.

Marx was certainly right that the moral and political convictions of the many are to far too great an extent a duperie, a false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen that makes the 90% - or more like 99.99% - their own class enemies.

But this is not.

There is no reason for the 90% to accept any version of capitalism that doesn't work as well as possible for them.

Even such a capitalism will work just swell for the remaining 10%, don't you worry about that.

Not as much as they want, but then there is no limit to what they want.

It goes way, way beyond anything remotely like rational self-interest, except on the most ludicrous construals of what is or might be rational.

Homo homini lupus, not because of need, but because of human nature.

The idea that there is no human nature, that "socialist man" is a social creature so much superior to "capitalist man", is part of the bullshit the left, unwilling to face the horrid truth, have sold themselves.

That it's all nurture, the stuff that matters, and none of it nature.

Sociobiology me this

A man would sacrifice the child to save the mother. You can always get another child.

But the woman would sacrifice the father to save the child. You can always get another man, eh?

At the start, anyway, a man just doesn't have as much skin in the game.

Is that still allowed by the PC fanatics?

Can people regret blindness in their children?

If it were possible, would people be allowed to cure or seek cures for blindness?

And what about sexual orientation?

Ann Widdecombe one-woman show pulled after gay therapy remark

Parents often regret not having, or having too few, grandchildren.

Not exactly an unrelated thing, is it?

Or is that, too, no longer allowed?

Wanting your own children and grandchildren, yours by blood, yours by sperm and ova, flesh of your flesh, rather than somebody else's by adoption.

PC so often seems to run against nature, what has emerged from the sculpting of humans and human desire by evolution.

Myth. Science. Whatever. Wheels in the head.

We human beings have an irresistible need to think we've got it all figured out.

And so we always do.

So shouldn't they stop saying it?

That beings are of the same species if and only if they can produce fertile offspring of each sex.

From which it follows that beings are not of the same species if and only if they cannot produce fertile offspring.

But it has been known for some while that Homo Sapiens and several other species of humans have produced fertile offspring.

Actually, no know downside for the offspring, at all.

So, are these different sorts of humans different species, or merely different varieties?

Tracing the tangled tracks of humankind's evolutionary journey

By triangulating the common ancestors of modern day populations, scientists can show that the ancestors of African and non-African people alive today converge at around 60,000 years ago. 

As these ancestors travelled across continents they would have encountered a motley assortment of other archaic human species, including the Neanderthals in Eurasia, the Denisovans in Siberia, possibly a dwarf species known as “the hobbit” (Homo floresiensis) on the Indonesian island of Flores and probably other species that we do not yet know about.

. . . .

[G]enetics shows that the ancestors of everyone outside of Africa interbred with Neanderthals, probably more than once. 

There was also interbreeding with another archaic group called the Denisovans. 

We don’t know much about what these other ancient cousins looked like as their fossils are so fragmented. 

But from a finger bone found in a cave in Siberia, scientists were able to extract high quality DNA belonging to a Denisovan girl who lived about 41,000 years ago.

Intriguingly, Denisovan DNA shows up only in modern day Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans, suggesting that their ancestors must have met the Denisovans on their way across the globe, probably somewhere in south-east Asia.

Emerging complications in the tale of human evolution

New species of ancient human discovered in Philippines cave

A new species of ancient human, thought to have been under 4ft tall and adapted to climbing trees, has been discovered in the Philippines, providing a twist in the story of human evolution.

The specimen, named Homo luzonensis, was excavated from Callao cave on Luzon island in the northern Philippines and has been dated to 50,000-67,000 years ago – when our own ancestors and the Neanderthals were spreading across Europe and into Asia.

Florent Détroit, of the Natural History Museum in Paris and the paper’s first author, said the discovery provided the latest challenge to the fairly straightforward prevalent narrative of human evolution.

It was once thought that no humans left Africa until about 1.5 million years ago, when a large-bodied ancient human called Homo erectus set off on a dispersal that ultimately allowed it to occupy territory spanning Africa and Spain, China and Indonesia.

Then, according to the traditional narrative, after a few hundred-thousand years of not much happening, our own ancestors dispersed from Africa about 50,000 years ago.

“We now know that it was a much more complex evolutionary history, with several distinct species contemporaneous with Homo sapiens, interbreeding events, extinctions,” said Détroit. 

“Homo luzonensis is one of those species and we will [increasingly see] that a few thousand years back in time, Homo sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth.”

. . . .

It is not known whether the new species, along with the ‘hobbit’, represent earlier dispersals from Africa than Homo erectus, or whether they are descendants who later shrank and evolved new anatomical traits.

Fear of death is a phobia

Like fear of heights or enclosed spaces.

And how would that make sense, evolutionarily?

Indigenism

Indigenism is a hoax.

Human beings are native only to small parts of Africa.

Everywhere else they are an invasive species.

The description "Native American", like "indigenous peoples", is a politically motivated and racist hoax.

Apollinian art

"But Dan Wilgus setting type on proclamations of rebellion, and Buck Titus distributing them at night on a motorcycle, may be as romantic as Xanadu . . . living in a blooming epic, right now, but no Homer come up from the city room yet to write it down!"

Musings of Doremus Jessup.

Epic elevates the sordid realities of human life - specifically, of political life - into dignity and beauty.

Even the lives of us vulgar, contemptible, and bug-ridden, naked apes.

Not racist to picture him as a chimp?

Oh, right.

He's not black.

It's an alpha male thing: what dominant chimpanzees and Donald Trump have in common

What nature wants

It is only too obvious that in all successful species of animals of which it seems right to predicate desire and aversion, pleasure and pain, nature has sculpted desire in subordination to reproduction so far that these three, far from being equivalent, fall asunder: individual interest, happiness understood hedonistically, and satisfaction of desire.

Sexual desire

It appears that men are more lustful than women and more prone to promiscuity, though, shall we say, the variance is considerable.

It also appears they are notably less engaged with or satisfied by parenthood.

And it seems that, as is appropriate for the breastless and stronger, they are much less accepting of the tasks of infant and child care.

A truly satisfied house husband, as a housewife may be, is a rare thing, even something unbelievable.

Nature has no more interest in what is politically correct than in what is moral or Godly.

Or in our individual interests, happiness, or well-being.

Reality mucks up "Out of Africa" story

Humans in Asia '20,000 years early'

Another "existential threat."

Pope Francis to the UN: environmental degradation threatens ‘the very existence of the human species’

The human species won't last forever, anyway.

Not even all that long.

It will eventually go extinct, and some people - mostly but not only a narrow sect of environmentalists or moral philosophers - urge the sooner, the better.

Though I am not among those folks, I am not interested in any sacrifice to delay an inevitable event that is of no concern to myself or anyone who considers well what events, in the world, truly concern him, anyway.

Always assuming that I, like the vast majority of humans who by then will ever have lived, will be already dead before the extinction event.

Probably very long before.

Varieties of human

Neanderthals had outsize effect on human biology

These were not different species, of course, but only varieties of human, though they are believed to have been more different, one from another, than the modern races.

All but one eventually disappeared.

A liberal paper engaged in moralistic finger wagging quotes a pedophile enabler

Gates’ warning: The Boy Scouts must treat leaders equally, too

The Boy Scouts of America should allow gays to be troop leaders before a judge orders it to, the group’s president said last week in a bold speech. 

Former defense secretary Robert M. Gates is right: The minority of Americans who still oppose equal treatment for gays “must deal with the world as it is,” not as they wish it to be.

If they were not the ridiculous hypocrites they are, how could the people who gave us sexually integrated military units and college dorms and then complained about "an epidemic of rape," blaming it all on young men, insist they are the ones who want to "'deal with the world as it is,' not as they wish it to be"?