Spacedust

( ... is not an option ... )
(from the archives ~1985)

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Earth enlargement by the accumulation of spacedust won't work. It's a tempting idea if we think of the planet accreting from planetisimals and that infall is just a continuation of the same process that got the planet together in the first place, but it fails on simple mass considerations.

If we could roll the entire crust up like a carpet (or a cigarette), including the crust of the ocean floors, and shove it down into the mantle, it wouldn't make one whit of difference to the size of the planet. That is, everything that ever fell, together with all redistributed sediments, as well as carbonate precipitates, volcanic extrusions and intrusions, and granites derived from the Earth's interior (which really shouldn't be counted at all) , ..the whole lot, .. from the Archaean to the present day, it would hardly make any difference to the size of the Earth. Even if all of it were cosmic dust it would make no significant difference whatsoever to the size of the Earth. So there's no way dust accumulation from cosmic infall could have anything to do with the growth of the planet. Case closed.

Unless...

Unless the base of the crust is being resorbed into the mantle at the same time as stuff is falling on the top. But that can't be either, or stratigraphic sequence as we know it (right back to the Archean) would not exist. As things are, we do have continuity of stratigraphic sequence to the Archaean.

Nevertheless there's a certain logic in it that's appealing. Stuff needs to come from somewhere. And it needs to be added. So, what if we're just looking at the wrong scale? 

Could it be that cosmic infall is in the form of elementary atomic particles that are somehow swept up directly into the core of the earth, possibly via the magnetic field ? 

The Earth with its iron core rotating in the electromagnetic field of the sun's radiation is like a big electromagnet after all. And the atom comprises mostly space. And it is said that the size of particles to the size of the atom is something like the size of peas to a football park, ..or like the size of planets compared to the space between them. So the Earth is not as solid as it appears. At that scale there is plenty of space (theoretically) for particles to find their way through the Earth's interior even though matter seems impenetrable to us.

What is the interface that the stuff of matter must cross in order to have mass? What if once it has crossed it, mass is created out of mass? In other words, if mass 'grows', by a kind of cell division? We have seen how mantle material is added at the (=>) spreading ridges by cell division, ..So..?  [added 20170821- Or, .. created with time.]

But even though we might speculate on the process in relation to the mass of the Earth today, it has to begin at the beginning, and if we're going to have a mechanism to make the planet grow, then it has to be at least considered that it could be somehow related to the same process that created the Earth in the first place. And if for one planet, then for others too. This means that planet Earth cannot be considered in isolation, but as part of the family that includes the Sun and the Gas Giants. And we might as well throw in the Moons as well. It really gets to be quite a can of worms, once we start thinking about it.

Not only that, but it leads us into re-considering the way that material organises itself, from sub-atomic particles to atoms to molecules to crystals, and the part played by structured symmetry in growth.

What is the nature of the 'interface', the 'bridge' between electrical force that binds the atom and the force across atomic interface to molecules that organises mass into such huge lumps of stuff as a star? If we're looking for a mechanism for the creation of mass then it makes sense to consider how the particles that make up 'mass' (in whatever form we consider that stuff) come into being, and to clearly recognise and understand the realms of scale of the interfaces at which different sets of processes operate [ = the 'interface' effect - the scale at which stuff stops being what it was before and becomes something else instead, .. like water and ice, .. like some 'electrical plasma soup' called magma + gas (= "rock" when it loses its heat.]

These are not questions that can be answered within the scope of geology, but there is something about the 'immaculate conception' ('creationist') model of planetisimal accummulation/ formation, where an invariant mass of 'stuff' was there in the first place - always was and always will be, imbued with the mass and rotational characteristics we see today, that seems very iffy. The increase in the size of the Earth that is empirically observed yet for which there is no known explanation, is making it clear that some hard questions need to be asked of quantum mechanics and astrophysics if  'science' as promulgated by "real scientists" (with their measuring tapes) can rise above their extraordinary capacity for being masters of the college ( with their view that what they don't know isn't knowledge), and consider the evidence staring them in the face instead of ignoring it - that the Earth is getting bigger. The evidence for, lies in the creation of the ocean floors (and all other Earthly parameters). The evidence against? .... lies in the hubristic assumption by scientists that this cannot possibly happen. Properly stated this should carry the riders "there is no known way," ... and "within the bounds of understanding", because when it comes to answering the really big questions we are still as babes in the wood, goggling with fixed curiosity at our surroundings.

Back to the future, flat Earth, and geocentrism.

Semantics

"Building consensus makes you free .. "

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What is a mountain?  Is easily answered.   What is 'mountain building' is a more difficult question and confronts 'experts' with some serious oxymoronic contradictions, because ("Hello, sailor") there is no such thing.  No 'mountain building', no 'orogeny', and no tectonics (in the sense meant by Plate Tectonics) - only the inexorable, relentless collapse of the crust as it is made to adjust to the changing curvature of the Earth as it gets bigger.

["Mountain *building*?"]

(" Whenever ideas fail, men invent words," ~ Martin Fischer)

 

Figure 1.  Contemplating dandelions and the Gaia principle.  (Not exactly a mountain, .. but ..)    Investigating the Vedas - Earth, water, wind, and fire - and the 'void', .. and finding life. And mountains.  But not 'mountain building')  [Image source [1] [2] ]

 Between the sun and the seed there are many things in the Vedas, including mountains.  But "mountain building" is not one of them - despite the authority of 'experts', ..

USGS "mountain building" = About 140,000 results
NASA "mountain building"  =  About 189,000 results
Google scholar "mountain building" =  About 23,800 results
... and just "mountain building" by itself = About 423,000 results

... thus showing that the general public has more common sense than all the experts put together, .. because as everyone knows (including children if prodded with leading questions by the teacher) mountains are not "built".  They are products of erosion. Nowhere can anyone point to mountains getting 'built' (unless it's a volcano - forged in the fire).

"The only mountains that get built are volcanoes"

 So what's going on?  Why does this meme, this mantra of 'mountain *building*' mesmerise people so, even to the exalted level of the 'expert'?  Well, it's quite simply the 'flat-Earth /round-Earth' thing in another form.  Plate Tectonics is getting its sense of proportion (=/commonsense) screwed up, and (in the fine tradition of "the more you get to know the more you find you don't"), is providing an excellent example to aspiring young scientists how to let all this 'not-knowing' and lack of commonsense hang out.  Unashamedly.

The appropriate scale is not being addressed.  And words are being used to conceal a clueless deficit.  It is a classic example of the hubris that will be around for a long time before it is written out of the history books. It's already inexplicably survived for half a century beyond its use-by  [See note :- 20181105]  which was the date of its birth (~1967).  Geologically speaking, Plate Tectonics was still-born.  An invention /contrivance to milk the trough of government funds. It should never have got up.

In the never-ending story of Plate Tectonics everything is upside-down and round the wrong way, and so back-to-front and inside-out that it makes it very difficult to work out where to begin to fix it.  A bit like those wonky mirrors we look in to see ourselves as we really are.  

On examination we find this has more to do with the language, the 'management-speak', being used than the thinking behind the science.  You have to pull the whole thing apart in order to find a suitable thread to follow, and then, finding all the ones you've already pulled lying all over the floor in disarray, you have to work out how to put it all back together again to make some sort of sense, knowing even when you do that the facts and the logic won't cut it (because they never do).  Because when people,  particularly those thinking they know most have their ideas and beliefs, feel threatened they become even more militant in their views  - exactly as Carey found .  (Paraphrasing here), "Structural geologists were not getting the big picture because they were working at the wrong scale and off flat-map projections, when what was needed was to look at the Earth as a whole - 'in the altogether round' so to speak."  (=>)

But the fact that we don't see much evidence of this 'round' approach in the academic literature says that maybe it's not so easy as it looks. [Pre the launch of Google earth in 2005 I can vouch for it.]

The reasons are firstly that Plate Tectonics is a consensus, and secondly that to go against consensus is academic suicide. 

Robert Dean Clark :- From 1930 to 1960 a scientist who supported it knowingly committed academic hara-kiri. S. W. Carey of Tasmania, a major figure in igniting the revolution, could not get his papers published in reputable scientific journals in the 1950s. "He had to run them off on a mimeograph machine and distribute them himself," Wilson says. (link)

Sam Carey: "Through the 30s and 40s and 50s if you dared to propose this sort of thing in America you'd be laughed at, you're a ratbag flat-earther. And there was no chance of getting a job if you had that kind of idea." (link)

For Carey, three books on the subject in twenty years didn't cut it.  Even though Earth expansion accommodates more of the facts than Plate Tectonics, and connects all of Plate Tectonics' inventions in more economical ways than P.T. itself does, and demonstrates how P.T. is unsupportable, it makes no difference, leaders in the field hunker down and become more entrenched in their positions and the herd follows, feeling themselves also under attack.  Change has to happen in such a way that will let others see (because experts certainly won't) that the lynchpin of their thinking is only part of the story - then see that it is really quite a minor thing, so minor in fact that it comes to be seen (with time) as insignificant, .. then with more time, as irrelevant.  With more time still, it becomes acceptable to write the 'lynchpin' out of the history books entirely. Thus is the smooth transition of science "by teams of researchers discovering .. for the first time " ("going forward" when it is mostly old hat reworked) assured.

 A concerted enterprise that increases momentum with time is required to combat consensus, which is not a job for one person in the face of a worldful of experts who have learned their rote-lessons well, and have built careers and reputations upon them.  (No small thing in the academic world.)

So (dear newbie, hoping to make your great discovery and mark in the world of science) beware of 'experts', especially when they come at you in "teams" ("for the first time").  They mean business, .. and not of the scientific sort.  

Thus does the lumbering gravy train of 'science' with its knobs bells whistles lanyards and measuring tapes, and bright-and-bushy-eyed rabbit-tails and the advance guardians of media and consensus peer review, work their way towards going forward, contriving as they do so to not notice all the collateral damage of dying and sweeping under the carpet that must happen before any 'progress' can be claimed.  Even so it must recognise and acknowledge that such a claim might well be one leading to stagnation from which there is no chance of further 'advance' at all.

Further (therefore) it must ensure that the back-up point for some possible future system-recovery is clearly defined.  It must clarify the doubt and its underpinnings, as Holmes did with his big "IF" , but as the Big Ship Plate Tectonics (crewed by geologists under the captaincy of geophysics however) did not.

And so geologists, under the tutelage of popular media  are only now beginning to waken up to the nonsense of "mountain building" that Nasa, the USGS, and a worldful of scholars have been promulgating, and are now holding wet fingers to the breeze to see which way it is blowing in case there is a 'something in it' (for them).  How long it will take for them to work out that whole concept of so-called crumplecrust, orogenic, tectonic "mountain-building uplift" is simply a non-starter when it comes to contesting erosion, is anyone's guess.  The monsoonal torrents of Cherapunjee mentioned in that video (in case you missed it)  , and the grain of sand that gets bounced on to the side of my bucket whenever it rains (and the Vedas that make both possible), render the whole notion of "colliding plates and mountain building" not implausible, but impossible, .. and Plate Tectonics a derelict cadaver.

(read more? => )  (Why not. It's good deserving fun painting holy cows black.)

(What's that?  .. Show them some love?  Are you kidding?  They need held to account - for half-a-century of deliberate misadventure.)

The meme machine

 A virus-like exploit of common sense
( .. that had its apotheosis in the 1930's - and since the 1970's in the conflation and almost rythmic concatenation of 'plate' and 'tectonics', more recently in 'climate' and 'change' (/'global warming') etc.

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Meme.   [1]  A unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. (~ Wikipedia)  [2]  An emergent, virus-like self-replicating piece of 'cultural software' that arises to exploit individual subconsciousness. (~Me.) (Doesn't work on you/you of course, but it does on me/me.)

Shameless name
Nameless shame
Which?

"When *I* use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is,"said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - - that's all."   (Alice through the looking glass ~ Lewis Carrol ) 

A meme is an exploit that works us, more than we work it.  All propagandists, advertisers and merchants of spin know this - that certain words, phrases and images have, by people's common experience, communicative power far beyond their literal meaning. They are the tools by which societal sentiments, attitudes and mores may be sculpted and manipulated because of the way they insinuate our consciousness and neutralise our capacity for independent thinking.  Pithy phrases that come to mean all things to all people are best, especially among people who share a common experience.

Science is not immune from these 'Sultans of Spin'.  How else to explain Nasa's succumbing to the term 'Mountain Building' (228,000 results 20171023) .. and people's zombie-like trusting to "global warming" as 'climate change' rather than the El Nino effect,  and geologists' blinkered acceptance of the irrational 'Plate Tectonics'.

'Continental drift' (which became 'sea-floor spreading'), the 'geological cycle' (/'orogenic cycle' /'Wilson cycle') (which are not particularly different), 'plate collision', 'subduction zones', 'spreading ridges', 'slab pull - ridge push', .. 'crumpling crust', .. all of these are terms beyond rationality, pulling on our reason and reducing it to enervated goo, that has no capacity for independent volition.  

And so "Mountain Building" happened to be coined.  But by whom? 

No-one.  It arose by itself, .. like elm die-back, 'bootlace fungus' (so tough it literally can be used to tie your boots), .. pervading both the soil and the structure of general awareness.   Not even by geological awareness did it arise, .. which to call by any other word (like 'thinking') would be an oxymoron.  

Well, .. wouldn't it?  It just seems obvious that mountains are "built" ['tecton' - Gk; 'build']


Like a virus, memes mutate.  With each transfer from one mind to another they change ever so slightly, morphing to accommodate the experience and knowledge of the colonised victim and creating a will o' the wisp that is impossible to pin down.  Everyone knows what the words *are*, but there is no common agreement about what they exactly mean.  When questioned, only the words themselves are found, turning their inscrutable face to understanding like massive steel doors, omnipotent sentinels guarding the subterranean labyrinth of communication.

And so meaning reduces to jargon and the fog of management-speak, .. never explanation.  

Thus a successful meme becomes personalised to mean different things to different people, .. and the less it has real substance, the more successful it is.  Like that tune that goes round and round in your head it is almost impossible to exorcise. Slogans rule. And indeed that is their purpose, with no mandate other than what people care to place on them, and by massage of mutual proclivities, accept.  

Polyspeak, .. a triumph of government (another 'House that Jack Built'), is used mercilessly and shamelessly.

In Earth science (it would be unfair to call it 'geo-logy') the term 'Plate Tectonics' has become King of these Reprehensibles.  Each of its pillars ('Plate' and 'Tectonics') is entirely without foundation. There *is* no meaningful 'plate' (repeat link).  And there *are* no 'tectonics' in the 'mountainous' sense meant by that term.   'Tectonics' [from late Latin 'tectonicus', and Greek 'tecton' = building'], and its doppelganger 'orogeny' [Greek oros for 'mountain' plus '-geny' /'genesis' for 'creation' or 'origin'] are without substance (as well as foundation).  Plates do not "collide".  Mountains are not "built". =>

 And erosion, which *is* the origin of mountains, is not orogenesis".   

And now these days, just as way back then, when geology borrowed 'mountains' from people and joined it to 'building' (also from people), so the media machine has allowed itself to be colonised by "tectonics shifts" in this, and "tectonic plates" of that,  thus succumbing to the insidious imperative of the meme to seal the reciprocity between science and mythic societal mores, .. e.g., [1]

So who is going to tell everybody that all this 'respectable kudos' (and the reputations that underpin it) is (and let's not mince words) "*bullshit*" (as well as silly).   Who will tell Nasa, that while they might know what both words 'mountain' and 'building' mean, they are dummies for trying to conflate the two?  Or climate changers, who don't know what climate change on Earth means. 

" We talk about climate change in terms of years, decades, and centuries. Scientists study climate to look for trends or cycles of variability, such as the changes in wind patterns, ocean surface temperatures and precipitation over the equatorial Pacific that result in El Niño and La Niña, and also to place cycles or other phenomena into the bigger picture of possible longer term or more permanent climate changes.  (Link)

Scientists are not the arbiters of what climate is, and the evidence for change is in the geological record.  And one-and-a-half degrees in a century-and-a-half in an open-ended fluctuation of four degrees every ten to fifteen years on an arbitrary and unspecified baseline average is meaningless, especially  when El Nino means different things to all climate monitoring stations anyway.  How long,  for example, might it be reasonable to wait to discover that the climate is not changing at all, and that everything is back on track.  Where I am the Jackaranda trees and the grape vines seem to be getting the hang of it and are tooling up for their usual annual blossoming - though maybe a bit late. 

This is where memes get heavy, .. spilling over, .. working their creepy woe into other fields till we are given to wonder exactly where this emergent 'fenomina' and 'dna convergence', and the power they exert, all stops.   

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Meanwhile, .. (speaking in memes that all women understand) ... 

"You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir," said Alice. "Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called 'Jabberwocky'?'
"Let's hear it," said Humpty Dumpty. "I can explain all the poems that were ever invented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet."
This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:
"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe." 

... which had Humpty the Dumpty absolutely stumpty, proving yet again that the femenima of the world are a meme all to themselves without help from any Humpty.

  Memes - and the "everybody knows one", ... (and the "mountain building" one in particular) = repeat link = Gormless gobbledegook!   

"Mountain building is not obvious.. "

 Certainly isn't .. (Hi Andrew).  [*Link death noted 20170919*.]  . 
( .. But what keeps making the Earth flatter (and smoother) than it used to be, is .. )

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"Building"? .... What is it about mountains that gets 'built'? If mountains are really eroded plateaus (link.) and volcanoes, why does the term ["mountain building"] pervade the literature so to describe these landforms?   [56,200 - 20170919]

Fig.  1.  Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa.   A classic example of the way in which rock layers of one sort and another are piled one on top of the other to build mountains. No? That's not how mountains are built? ..

(More? .. )  =>

house  malt  rat  cat  dog  cow  maiden  man  judge  rooster  farmer  hhh

View from Alice's Tardis

(20170706-24) :-

Gravity, and the relentless imperative of flatness.

AGNEW, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Western Australia's experience of The Great Regression = the time when the inland seas and lakes ran of the land into the developing ocean basins leaving in their wake - The Agnew Pub, .. which according to legend has been there forever.

C&P to Google Earth search bar < -27.952608°, 120.393448° >















(Agnew, Western Australia) [Picture = Agnew pub.]


Compared are two erosional surfaces that developed over Archaean granites. Note the very pronounced incision that can result from very slight topographical differences.   One surface is flat-as-a-tack, and only slightly lateritic (duricrust; darker brown in the upper central part of the figure) developed as a veneer on eroded, partly intrusive granite that formed a basement to inselbergs of tightly folded 'greenstones' [marginally submarine lavas, chert, iron formation and shaly and arenaceous sediments.] which form low hills out of the frame.

 The other surface is the more recent drainage cutting into the underlying lighter-coloured saprolite. The land drops about thirty metres over the step of the breakaway and a further thirty metres in seven kilometres towards the lower boundary of the figure .  The Yellow Pin marks some highly degraded sand dunes of indeterminate age on the older surface (possibly even partly older than the younger drainage radiating off the high ground?).The breakaway offers a good profile through the saprolite.

Not quite sure though what to make of the topographical contrast as regards climate variability.  Laterite forms in tropical and subtropical climates implying high rainfall.  Very selective chemical weathering is reflected by stony and spongy laterites being almost exclusively developed only over the more iron-magnesium rich greenstones which in the general area rise little more than fifty metres over the granite plain and are virtually absent over the granite duricrust.  The flatness of this granite surface is remarkable and is distinctive in having virtually no drainage.

About 10-15m below this laterite surface and slightly out of the frame is another, characterised by very broad open drainage (Link).  Two lateritic surfaces therefore.  Three, if that over the greenstones is counted, and all of them being cannibalised by the younger erosion of the present active profile.

Both surfaces (counting the two laterite surfaces as one) reflect a climate that was much wetter than today.  Despite today's rains being quite heavy on occasion and very quickly forming a sheet of water over the flatter parts of the landscape when it does rain, I personally doubt whether they could have caused the erosion apparent, which would appear to me to be much more likely due to the waning phases of that sub-tropical climate represented by the laterite  - when Australia (and Antarctica) (and Africa) were located much further north (closer to India)  [An old landscape indeed.]

 By its continent-wide distribution and extreme flatness, the lateritic duricrust is a surface of virtually zero erosion potential, .. as close to 'beach' and sea-level as it almost possible to be.  Not the sea of today however, but the anastomosing epicontinental 'seas' and lakes that covered the land before the breakthrough of the mantle of the Southern Ocean, remnants of which remain in the southward-draining, ennervated lake /river system of today.  The lighter-coloured, more recent aggressive fluvial incisison represents further reduction in response to epeirogenic (continent-wide) 'uplift' of the land outwards from the core [drop in sea-level].


(The Agnew pub?   Just a blast from the past, ... Visit it before any planned vacation to Mars.

One for the Hillbuildies

 .. The footsoldiers of Plate Tectonics ..
( .. "..snoring away like Rip Van Winkel" .. )

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Even if midplate earthquakes are far less frequent than those on plate boundaries, if they have continued for any length of time they should have shoved up some hills."   (Shawna Vogel, p.165, "Naked Earth - The New Geophysics, 1996.

"Uhh?  ... Should have shoved up some hills.." ???

Well, ..why not?  Stands to reason, ...doesn't it?  Mountains can't just suddenly 'appear', .. ready-built, as it were, can they? They have to get pushed up by colliding plates, ...moving across the surface of the planet at the rate of centimetres a year.

That at least is the litany handed down by the Church of Plate Tectonics:  "Plates collide, crumple the crust and push up mountains."   So it's logical that before there are mountains there must be hills first.  (You have to laugh, ..little hills, .. sprouting like cabbages all over the place, ...getting pushed up and growing into mountains. If erosion doesn't get them first that is, and rub them all back down flat again.  In which case they would never get to be mountains. )

But (according to Plate Tectonics) they *do* get to be mountains.  Big ones, ..  Like the Himalayas.   The problem for Plate Tectonics however is that nowhere on the planet can anyone point to hills that are growing into mountains.


Read more ..

Truckies

(20170517)

Looking at things differently.

After a life of working (on and off) (mostly off) in the Australian bush I have an uneasy relationship with that particular example of natural environment.  The things that impress me most are the same things that (according to their diaries) impressed the early settlers who arrived on the beach in Western Australia in the early 1800's, culturally compromised by their pianos and the legacy of the mother country.  (Must've been tough.)  Those things are (and you can flick them on the fingers of one hand) :-  heat /flies/ dust /monotony and isolation.  Set them against the enervating monotony of the bush (arguably more grey than green), unrelenting blueness (sky&sun) and the fiery redness of the Earth and you get the picture of the heartland of Australia.  Nice, isn't it? (framed by the computer screen).  And it is too,  in winter.  Try it in 40-50 degree heat in the summer in 360 degree reality whichever way you look, while trying to catch a breath between every one of them.  (Any softness in it derives from relief from that experience of summer when it fries you!  Till you get used to it an any rate, and are thus prepared for the '"She'll be right, mate" signature statement of the Ozzie Cockie - the gate, (Bruce, I'll be bound)  [and the cocky ozzie with the ozzie cozzy) ("don't you wish your beaches looked a lot like mine"] .. held together by so many bit of wire it's like there's  more tumblers in it than the locks on the Bank of England.  Combine the heat, the gates and the language to go with both and you have the signature statement of white Australia colonisation.  (Why do I get this picture of the one-legged noble savage standing by, spear in hand, asking what we are doing?)

I can honestly say that any natural softness there is in it, of itself, lies (in my limited experience), in its indigenous people.  I find it odd, therefore, as to their choice of the sun (as "giver of life") as the centrepiece of their flag when surely water would would be more appropriate.   [I do struggle a bit with the sun (in the summer), giver of life or not.]

Flag.  As for the black (for the aboriginal nation)?   Something then about resilience and pride I guess.  But you know what they say about pride, so maybe we can settle for just some, and call it self-respect, but it's edgy, .. edgy.  Sounds to me the dominoes are a little bit round the wrong way in many things, particularly when one overshadows the other and refuses to budge.  Anyway, sun and water, .. we can split it, sun above, water below.  Or maybe left and right doesn't matter, .. surely both have to be in there somewhere as partners in this small matter of 'life' and its meaning in this big brown land - when it comes to nourishing little brown black grey green blue and white 'seeds'.] 


 Yet there *is* beauty in that harshness.  You see it more as you get older.  One I find is when you happen to be driving into the sun just after it has set.  Slivers of cloud just above the horizon divide the sky, .. 'sea' below, sky above, .. while further below the land darkens against encroaching night.  With a flip of the mind the road ahead changes.  The horizon shifts up into the sky, still ablaze in the wake of the sun to the fingers of cloud enclosing a tropical blue lagoon and a harbour of sorts.  You can almost see boats moored, .. or at least easily imagine them, while between the promontories of cloud lies the open sea, .. above the harbour the pink and gold of smaller clouds tinged with grey.

Now the road bends, taking you down to the sea.  The encroaching night and the heat of the day is behind you.  In front lies this glowing sheltered harbour of no ships,  no cranes,  no piles of containers, no gasworks, and no docklands of dystopian denizens. It's a rural fishing village, Mediterranean probably, an ideal in the mind's rosy glow of a simpler time. 

Funny how the mind switches like that to look at thinks differently.  It lasts for about fifteen /twenty minutes before you have to snap out of it and remember that the reality is still hundreds of miles away and night is falling, and you had better switch on lights and pay attention, .. but for a few minutes there is a window to a different reality. 

Truck drivers will know exactly what I mean. Maybe even wonder what it was was that pushed the aborigines away from that welcoming sunset coast and made them wandering souls in the crispy conurbations of bushy vicissitudes.  And the Innuit people of northern climes, pushed likewise into the icy wilderness where Frankenstein and the monster he created perished, abandoned and homeless on the altar of a "young girl's hideous imagination" that every year peeves schoolchildren who have to do it (so they do English rite).   Or for that matter the Wandering Tribes of Israel in the Arabian desert, whose bloodthirsty genocidal family history became the touchstone of  the civilised western world - a bounty that spawned the diasporean Scottish deal-maker, Donald-the-Trump who has invoked those ill-fated perambulations of Middle-Eastern folk (religious? - or just tribal) as a means of exorcising his curse of compulsive electioneering, but alas appears to have been scotched in his plan by the unravelling of his not-so secret dealings with that other card in the pack, Vlad-the-Putin, .. known for the boot when he's not impaling his political foes on poisonous chemicals of one sort or another (Link added) - and pallying up to birds of feathers similar to himself. 

All of which is to say that 'truckies' and different ways of looking at things (or not), the more things change, the more they stay they same.  'Twas ever thus.

An experience in virtual reality

[From the archives]
Tuesday (20160801)


I had one yesterday when I went up to the park.  Don't rightly know what to call it.  Amusing? .. Surprising? .. Puzzling?  Discombobulating certainly. The footpath was packed with people. This is a pic from google images, probably on a weekend, but not so different in impact. How come[?] on a Monday, about 1pm. "Something's going on here," I thought. "Monday isn't a day people flock to the park." Moreover there were no kids, or oldies that could be identified as 'parents, or (more likely being a Monday), grandparents. These were all people in their teens, twenties, and some obviously in their thirties. The weird thing was the way they were all standing about like at some meet, .. sort of moving on the spot, or drifting aimlessly, like stalks of seaweed in underwater camera view. Well there they were, .. all staring at their mobile phones. What's going on? Nobody's actually walking, or strolling in any purposeful way. Just sort of 'being' there.

Then (reality check) it hit me. Don't tell me! (It had been in the news.) Pokemon Go.

Then I had the ^%$^%# !! experience.

"Wha'.. the F^%* !! "

These were grown-ups. 'Pokemon', as I understand it from finding out, is something like collecting number plates on cars, or train names, or footballers from breakfast cereal packets. [Trains, .. Ah, .. what a blow that was to a nine-year-old when these terrifying, rushing, hissing, belching monsters spitting cinders and setting the grass on fire on hot summer days were taken out of service and went diesel, then electric.]

 But still, nine-year-olds versus adults. Why weren't they at work or where/whatever they were supposed to be doing (on a Monday)? (Chasing little virtual cut-outs around indeed? Is somebody pulling my leg? (Another reality check - How much does it cost to play this "game"?) Is this how people "connect" these days? The adult version of collecting cards of footy players? Is this what you get from eating vegemite? At least when you were nine you had to actually make some sort of a "You show me yours and I'll show you mine" transaction, and actually talk to people; maybe even recruit a third to see if their collection could help. I didn't see anybody talking, or doing anything that looked like making a swap. No point I guess, if everybody already has all the 'cards'. So what exactly is the point? I mean other than to test how best to co-opt people's attention. First the hardware, then the software. Yes, I know it's a bit, .. (of me), .. but if this is not a cause for concern over the malleable simplicity of simple people's simple minds, then I don't know what is, .. because it's not only demonstrating what can be done, it's revealing the substrate on which it's doing it.

 Not long ago Google got complaints for changing the lettering on its search page to make it look like a three-year-old's colouring book, and there are increasing comments generally around 'infantilising the public space'. It can't be infantilised, if the potential for infantilisation is not there. Ergo, ..

We've already had a week recently of reminiscing 'Playschool' on public radio in adult prime time, then followed by a week of broadcasts on pokemon, and now (also in the last couple of weeks) (on public radio), 'up-speak' is catching on. Again. Upspeak (/uptalk), .. also known as valley-girl talk, Doesn't it piss you off? It's almost as bad as the craze among yesterday's upper school and university students, of speaking like teletubbies. Sadly for some and annoyingly for many this has left its legacy, particularly among many professional women whose need for security and belonging has proved to be unshakeable.. And not least (and certainly not last), is the detestable proliferation of "vocal fry" - sizzling the vocatives in bacon fat, when they're not being snorted down nasal passages like turkey-gobble. All revealing the nature and the power of social connectors, the age group of their appeal, and what this reveals for the way society is headed. With the score equal at half time (after 2,000+ years) will religion make a come back? .. or will it succumb to the greater power of infancy, as, ..nappies trailing, .. yesterday's cohorts make it into the snuff of old age.

The problem is (in my view) about all of this 'child education' stuff, if you reflect the child back to them on their own terms, peppering it with baby-speak, then that's what you get in the transition to the adult world (teletubbies, bananas in pyjamas etc), .. with some never to make it.  Can't blame them (for standing around like seaweed) (looking at the 'abacus' in front of them - trying to work out what it's all about). It's exactly the same with religion, reflect back to people their own Pride and Prejudice (and fears), and you have them in the palm of your hand. It's the salesman's golden rule; find out something about you and work it so you 'identify'.

Who among us has never been 'souled'?

 [Ho no, .. you'd never catch *me* with *that* one!]

 Religion, ..organised religion, .. is ignorance dressed to the nines with official significations [1] [2] in case people don't get it, .. that it is *power* - enormous power. Born by warrant and the innocence of people it eventually draws to itself the authority to suck their blood in some cosmic sociopathic gyre, eventually presiding over them like some genie, until, held by their common bond (that must not be broken) they find themselves in subjugation, fealty and fear. ("One Ring to rule them all..") ("Kiss it.") [Pope F. seems to be breaking the mold though. Good.]

 A bit strong? Not if you lived five hundred years ago before there was separation of Church and State over 'here', or at the present day over 'there' (where there isn't any).

Here's Len again, with his take on it. [Since Len, protests have caught on a bit, but not a lot.]  I think the idiosyncrasies he's talking about is what musicians would call a 'hook', and it derives from the tribalism of the schoolyard (particularly girls') [Len's right there, about this tribalism being a 'girl' thing, and related to lack of confidence in many cases, but more than that to a need to belong ] but hang in for his last point, he's not so far wrong - in time we'll all be hopping and bopping (or swaying like seaweed) to the same app., with as much confidence as the 'in-your-face' mobile phone you're looking at gives you (however much that might be) which is not a lot, as far as I can see, from the number of people with their heads down, buried in it 24/7).

 ["Lack of confidence" indeed. There's too much (empty) confidence going around, if you ask me. which is why there's all this teletubby-speak, upspeak, and world-weary groaning-speech trying to make an impression. Speech used to be a very powerful means of communication, now all the communication of value is carried in how, not what, (it) is said ("like", .. innit?)

Gotta go. (You got this far?) (Can't be so wide of the mark then.)

 [Hang in for the mark of the Never-Ending Stowee.]

 "Ï'll be back."

 [I see in this update some of the more impressive pictures are either not making it to Google's search, or have been removed.  Read More? ]

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Connecting links  (=> "The Great Regression ")
Globalisation and 'being sold'  ("Sneaker Culture has arrived!")
The increasing infantilisation of popular culture => [1] [2]
(Define who you are by your tatts, studs, and bovver boots.)
[Globalisation (good listen) ]
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