In contrast to Mr. George Carlin, I don’t intend for this post to be funny.  I’m not very good at doing funny.  While Mr. Carlin was adept at poking fun at many things and certainly used a more flowery vocabulary, the only thing I’ll do in his memory is to steal his title.  I recently learned that titles can’t be copyrighted, so, authors out there, go for it.  (My novel, Full Medical, for example, is often seen as some POD self-help non-fiction work.  Unless you’re one of the villains, there’s not much about self-help in it.  But I didn’t steal that title.  Well, just a wee bit, in tribute to Frederik Pohl and his sci-fi classic Gateway.)

We visited the D.C. area this weekend.  Usually a city trying to revert back to the swamp that it was, the humidity was low enough that the heat was tolerable.  A good day for demonstrations, I thought.  No, I didn’t go see Professor Mouth, Mr. Glen Beck, lead his mostly white crowd in their push to establish an American theocracy.  I also didn’t mingle with the mostly black crowd in their nostalgia fix of celebrating Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I thought that was going to be on the Mall too, but I couldn’t find it.  Just kidding.  I wasn’t looking for either one.  But the drive from New Jersey gave me time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

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A new book out, written by journalist Leslie Kean and called UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, will surely stir up that old UFO hornet nest again.  My first acquaintance with serious works on UFOs occurred in 1956 with Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt’s classic The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.  (Yes, I was only ten years old—call me precocious.)  This report seemed serious enough (to my budding scientific mind)—after all, the Captain was the first head of the USAF Project Bluebook.  So what’s this all got to do with Fermi?

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Our social and political rhetoric these days is more of a mindless rant with mostly zero content—emotional, irrational, angry, and bitter.  Perhaps those tweets on Twitter, those writings on the Facebook Wall, and the forums provided by the internet for any blogger with a chip on his shoulder have made it too easy.  We succumb to the notion that we are free to express our opinions, and do we ever!

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I’m not cheering.  I’m wondering how long it will take BP to clean up the mess they made in the gulf.  Two years?  Five?  Ten?  Twenty?  One hundred?  A logarithmic scale seems appropriate here since the spill in the gulf is a multiplier of the Exxon Valdes disaster.  BP is probably counting on the media losing interest (they already are—success isn’t newsworthy), the local people either moving away or quietly accepting what little money BP or the government hands out, and the majority of the rest of the American public turning back to their sports, stupid reality shows, and celebrity watching (they’re already salivating with the Mel Gibson scandal).

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(John L. Betcher, The 19^th Element, 2010, ISBN 9781451521016)

Do you need an entertaining and action-packed book for your summer reading?  This is it!  A very realistically portrayed terrorist attack in an unusual setting provided me with a nerve-wrenching adrenalin rush.  If you’re into suspenseful thrillers, try this one on for size.

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Today’s post is a little different.  It was motivated by an article in yesterday’s N.Y. Times, that old rag that old liberals love and old conservatives love to hate.  I say old because it used to be that you could only go further left by reading Izvestia while to cover all the right you had to read the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and your local John Birch Society meeting minutes.  Now, with the internet, we have a lot of stuff on-line, including the N.Y. Times and O’Reilly transcripts (preferred to his TV rants—again, covering most of the political spectrum except for newsletters from Michigan militias and al-Zawahiri’s al Qaeda fanzine).  This works well for me:  Although I get the Times, by being on their newsletter list they lay out the day’s news for me and I can tell whether I missed something.  I missed this article in the hard copy but found it in the newsletter summary.  (Other evidence for my approaching senility?)

Don’t throw up your hands at the title of the post, by the way.  I’ll explain in a minute what’s going on behind my bushy eyebrows sprinkled with gray.  Let me first talk about the article.  Written by Daniel J. Wakin, it was titled “Need a Job?  Help Wanted at the N. Y. Philharmonic.”  It appears that the famous Boston Symphony wannabe will have 12 openings next season.  Their nemesis will have 10, the Chicago Symphony 9, and the L. A. Philharmonic 7.  I’m not sure whether the BSO count, often high due to their stricter requirements for players and their intense schedule, includes replacing James Levine, who almost single-handedly soured every lover of classical music over forty that attended BSO concerts.  In any case, I’m not about to dust off my trombone and hurry down to Lincoln Center for an audition—to play in any orchestra you need to be well prepared.  Yet the question you might have—just what is going on with all these job openings?—tickled my brain cells too.

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It’s becoming more and more difficult to be supportive of the government of Israel.  How do you understand that crazy government?  You’d think that Israel is surrounded by belligerent governments that would like to wipe the country off the face of the Earth.  You’d think that it’s surrounded by despotic regimes that are envious of a democratic state whose citizens can work together to turn desert into productive land and mom-and-pop industries into a modern industrial powerhouse.  And you’d think that it’s surrounded by countries run by incompetent rulers that can’t even manage their oil riches wisely, if they have them, instead using them to widen the distance between the poor and the ruling classes.

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The sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge (more fi than sci), known for A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (two entertaining but unscientific Hugo award winners), and others have postulated a singularity in technology where machines attain sentience and the next stage of human evolution will see humans become part machine, or vice versa (presumably the human part attains sentience also?).  Vinge’s contributions to this theme lie mostly outside his fiction.  The idea has enough popular science interest that most of an IEEE Spectrum issue was dedicated to the subject.

In fiction machine sentience appeared some time ago in sci-fi lit.  There were Asimov’s robots (no one can deny that Daneel Olivaw is sentient).  There was the computer in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I believe his name was Mike).  Greg Benford’s Galactic Center series maps out Man’s fight with a machine civilization.   Humans becoming part machine is a sci-fi theme from Heinlein’s hero with the toolkit arm to the GigaRAM bottling of the hero in Pohl’s Gateway series, i.e. from prosthetics to complete assimilation.

But there is another major sci-fi theme that bears relevance to the world of men.  I for one believe that we are seeing another approaching singularity, one where a small group of individuals, even just one, well meaning or otherwise, can bring about a world damaging, catastrophic screw-up.  Chernobyl came close.  The BP oil spill may come closer.  Sci-fi writers have treated this theme for years.  They just didn’t call it a singularity in human affairs.

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I don’t have much sympathy for those British folks that have retirement funds hinged to BP.  For me BP still means British Petroleum.  Hiding behind a name change doesn’t hide the pain and suffering British colonialism has unleashed on this world.  British Petroleum has been a part of this for sixty years and continues to this day their multinational policies of greed and environmental indifference long after the sun has set on the British empire.

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The question for the day:  How can all those (fill in the blank) be so fanatical in their thinking?  Your cultural upbringing and/or emotional reaction to current events will often determine what you fill in the blank with at any given time.  This is human nature.  Some will fill in the blank with “Muslims.”  Others might fill it in with “Jews” or “Zionists.”  The advantage of the internet is no matter how much you want to, you won’t be able to throw stones at me.  (I suppose you might try to spam me but there are filters for spam.)  So let me first go out on a limb and fill in the blank with “Christians.”

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