Month: September 2023

My youngest son Julian bought a Tesla for 35 thousand dollars cash (and I mean he gave the guy a bag of cash!) and I took a ride in it with him. Lately it’s been upgraded to drive itself with no driver control whatever, if that’s chosen, on any street. It scared me by seeming to dart around too rapidly—but I learned after that my son had programmed it to go 20% faster than any given speed limit (yes it knows all the speed limits wherever it is). It navigated successfully but it was all quite eerie. Has a bullhorn feature where you can set it to amplify anything you say from the car to the world so I yelled a few rude comments at random that echoed down the street from the Tesla. Comments included, “Fuck Trump!” The Tesla can be programmed to “aggressive” or a sort of meek self-driving. I much dislike Musk, who’s gone totally far-right and antisemitic, and who is oppressive as a boss, so I wouldn’t have a Tesla. The self-driving cabs being tested in San Francisco are appallingly problematic. But I would purchase a self-driving car of some non-Muskian origin IF it were shown to be really, truly reliable and safe. Thus far–they aren’t.

We, like all organisms, are designed for planned obsolescence. Aging seems built in, no accident of nature, and I suspect it’s not just for population control, but serves the general interests of the perpetual experiment that is evolution. The churn must keep churning. This means more births, and removing earlier variants, in a perennial, persistent way, to produce newer experiments in evolution. DNA seems to be varying itself, yet carrying a message into the future.

A passenger jet taking off, 200 tons of steel, plastic, vinyl, & fuel, sucks its way into the sky, the real lift provided by air pressure. It’s an oxymoron: an ordinary miracle.The passenger feels the atmospheric density kicking in as lift, remembers that air–which we stride about in as if it’s nothing–has weight. Remembers windstorms; remembers that destructive floods are held in the sky as fluffy clouds, before the air lets it fall, soft water become a hammer swinging to knock houses away…

Used to be that if you didn’t vote for Democrats you were creating a vacuum filled by conservatives. Now if you don’t vote for Democrats, locally and nationally, you’re permitting the takeover of fascists. The choice really is that stark now. I hear anarchist & Marxist friends saying, what about us? What about our systems and non-systems? You can have anarchism or socialism–locally. You can create communes and communities, and demonstrate locally how it works. A display of that alternative. Meanwhile vote against fascists. Register to vote and vote for Democrats. Then work on starting your own political party and building it up.