Long Earth review

Raining today, so no work.  Came to Tim Hortons before the rain got hard, I will have to leave soon or the rain will get worse, or I can spend the day here and write and read.  And drink tea.  Watch people.  

How about a book review?  I have been reading.  Not a lot but some.  Currently reading the fourth and Final? Long Earth book.  One of the authors is dead, but he was prolific and there may be more books in the can.  I find them to be okay, but just okay.  

The benefit to this setting, a Long Earth, where a string of different Earths exist in a long string of billions is that anything could happen on any of those worlds.  So one science fiction idea has the seeds for hundreds.  The first Long Earth was interesting, it explored the possibility and the thrill of having another world an instant to the left and the right.  Undamaged, unexploited and unchanged, where humanity never happened.  Which is the divergence from the other stories of its like.  No humans, but the same.  No humans but ever slightly more different, ice ages, no ice ages, different climates, diffent evolutions, different extinctions, different geological histories; more differences further to each direction.  Extinct civilizations.

The second book dealt with a war.  War between the Humans and war between the sentients discovered in other worlds.  What if dogs were sentient?  What would a Dog Civilization look like?  How would it react to humans, a great ape civilization?  

The third book explored the fragility of our world when a natural disater occured on a human damaged world and there was no cushion to absorb the effects of the disaster and how fucked that world was, except they could relocate to any of ten worlds on either side and save the people.  Something that if a similar horror happened here, we could not do. Reality check Humanity!  There was also a space program in a distant Earth where Earth failed to form, ie easy trip to orbit and they went to Mars and explored the alternate Marses a paralel of Disaster Earth. 

This last book explored alien invasion of Earth, but not our Earth, one 175M iterations away where humans had spread, a world of paradise with few enemies and world spanning forests filled with easy meat prey year round availible fruit and warm one season climates.  What is the most likely alien visitor?  All answered. 

What is the end?  It I think is the end, this book has been in the can for some  nine months and one of the authors has been dead for six of those months.  Perhaps the story will continue.  This was likely Terry Pratchett's last book.

There have been other books with this theme including Charles Stross Merchant Prince series.  Humans trading between worlds for technological differences to get wealth.  Exploring that between worlds with severe tech differences like that between present day society and a middle ages kingdom what would the low tech world see of value?  Weapons.  The jumpers between worlds were initially these low tech cousins and their values and morality reflects their selfish ideas and ideals.  They seek to solidify their power over their own people where they are most comfortable. 

Later in the series anther world is added, one that is middle of the road between the two and a the two groups see different ways to exploit the new world, the modern society seeks to get wealthy by 'inventing' new technology and holding the patents, the manufacturing and the sales profit.  A steam age world brought up to a modern world in a few decades bypassing the industrial dirty stage almost completely.

Interesting, but the novels start to get stupid.  It happens in all series that go on too far.

Sliders the TV show from the 90s interesting but are all human centered worlds, the opposite of the Long Earth.  

I like the Long Earth because it went along major geological and evolutionary changes.  What I did not like was that it was only two directions to travel, East and West.  I would have added Up and Down (future and past variations of e theme), North and South, (different historical choices like what if it were Hillary Clinton as president instead of Obama?) and every other variation, North-West and slight slope down, Hillary Clinton instead of Bill in a Female centered world where none of the recent Human variations went extinct; five sentient races, female dominated and google has not been invented yet . . ..

Update -choices

I have decided to leave Little Smoke.  I am not sure where too.  My options are three, Smallville, Big Smoke or somewhere else.  I am not sure.  It comes down to the same thing as always: happiness and loneliness.  

I am not happy and I am lonely in Little Smoke.  I have a good job, I am being paid more than I have been paid in a long time, my boss compliments me and I like most of the people I work with.  Some of the clients act like human beings too.  Most of all, my boss is not an asshole, really how often does this happen?  This year my boss approached me and gave me a raise, a full dollar an hour.  And when I told him that I was leaving, he actually asked me if I was staying for the Winter and when I said no, he asked if I was leaving, he asked me not to go and then a couple weeks later approached me with a very sweet deal: wage increase of a dollar an hour and a company truck, all paid for gas and insurance.  It was tempting, but not.  I am 43 and I work landscaping.  Also, work starts at 6:30am and ends in the Summer past 8pm.  That last bit is why I have to go, oh and I am 43 in landscape construction.  What is landscape construction? — manual labour, sometimes with machines, but mostly with old fashion wheelbarrows, shovels and muscles.  When you spend your days lifting 100 pound rocks all day long or barreling loads of concrete you really begin to feel it.  My only consolation this year was the 26 km of biking I did on top of that everyday… I am pretty sure I am in good physical shape because of the additional workout before and after a long day.  Also I lost a lot of weight — about two pounds a week, less but more than 1.5.

What are my options?  Smallville.  My parents live there.  At least one friend lives there who has not been in the practice of running me down every-time we talk and a job that I am good at, even though the boss is an asshole, never compliments and when he does it is backhanded, raises are incremental and a lot of the people I work with are lazy good-for-nothings.  But I won't be as lonely as I am here.  I love my friend GardenerGuru, I wish it were more, but not as much as she thinks I do.  If she slept beside me on occasion, cuddled occasionally while I theoretically looked for sex from other people, I would be happy, ecstatic actually.  How far my goals have fallen.  Perpetual loneliness does that.  I wonder if that was all I sought from every potential lover in the last five years, MagicEyes, MPTR and SuperGirl, if I would not be with them all right now.  Probably not.  I don't know if I could live with just being a cuddle buddy to a bunch of women who would be getting sex from other people and not me.  

This brings up another subject: Polyamory.  I have been drifting that way for years, not actually, but drifting.  This constant loneliness has made me wonder if people are running from me because I am not a good prospect, for various reasons, but might be a good part time lover, a secondary or tertiary lover.  Maybe that is what my life has been telling me all these years when I was chosen to be someone's lover, I have been their second choice.  Perhaps, women have looked on me as someone to be around but wait for someone better.  This sounds like self pity even to me, but it IS what I am hearing; a nice guy, but not a great catch.  Could I be a secondary lover for a few, or a tertiary lover for many.  Maybe that is what my role in life is.

I digress

BigSmoke.  I have a half dozen Meet-Up groups subscribed to, but have not attended any due to work, distance and well work; 70-80 hours a week deserves two mentions as reasons.  There have been other Meet-Ups suggested, one for polyamoury.  One thing that I have gained this year is confidence and I am confident I can get a job in landscaping in Big Smoke.  Mostly because I am regular and despite my age, strong with staying power and less hobbled by injuries than most landscapers two thirds my age.  I like BigSmoke.  I find the neighbourhoods relaxing and comforting.  I like the diversity of people and ideas.  My year in BigSmoke five years ago was filled with loneliness, but less loneliness than all the years in Smallville and this last year in LittleSmoke.  

In any case where ever I end up, I have been offered a place with GardenerGuru for the Winter, because she is a friend foremost and has realized that she too is very lonely and needs company in the Winter most of all.  Also my parents want to go away for the Winter and they want me to take care of their dog and/or their house for a month.  I can't tell you what kind of hell it would be to live in there house for a month alone in the middle of the winter with no transportation except my winter bike.  It is so quiet that after you have gotten used to the sound of your blood rushing through the blood vessels in your ear you can actually hear the sound the snow makes when it falls…

Then maybe…

Then maybe I am facing reality that my days of sex are completely behind me.  Maybe I am only worthy to be a friend and not a lover.  I am really good at being just friends when I know that nothing is going to "happen".  I had sex three times this year, it cost me $480 and I did not get my money's worth, but I feel that they did.  I am tired.

A more fallen Exalted World

In a world more broken.  The overthrow was more complete.  Of the three hundred Solars and the three hundred Lunars only fifteen Solar shards and half of the Lunar shards escaped eternal imprisonment in the Jade Prison.  The fifteen were the key to the state of the world and its more fallen state.  One of the Solars, a Night caste, had uncovered the plot to overthrow the Solar rule.  The counter plan was to let it happen.  A few of the Solars were thus prepared.  The rivalries of the God-Kings though were great and most of the Solars were not informed of the coming coup, and we're like children before the onslaught; rivals eliminated by the hands of the usurpers.  A few had hidden in the confines of a hidden fortress, but most were destroyed utterly.  Even those that came to the battle prepared fell, but the ruin they left was more complete than it would have been had they not been so prepared.  It was the younger Lunars that died with their Solar mates, compelled to the massacre as servants to their mates; the elder of their kind fled the abuse of their masters and thus saved themselves.  

The destruction was more complete.  Legions of Dragon Blooded and Sidereal warlords died when Manse Fortresses unexpectantly destabilized and exploded, obliterating them and the surrounding city and towns; only a few cities escaped such fates.  The Lap sits as it did in the headless lap of the great artifact known as the Penitant Monk, the consul that regulated the flows of energy in the entire South, destroyed.  The loss of control altered Dragon Lines, moved some and every manse and demesne in the south weakened or strengthened seemingly randomly.  Manses on stronger demesne than they were designed to handle, exploded while others produced less essence and other none at all.  For generations the people that survived were nomadic and avoided all cities as buildings were considered unlucky.  It was so for centuries, until the invasion of the Wyld forced them there for mutual protection.  The entire south to this day is as well populated as the North and the West.  The North coast is controlled completely by the Realm with only a few exceptions.  Paragon grows and prospers, a city that formed well after the troubled times.  Habourhead, the nation that is nominally ruled by the priesthood of Ahlat.  

However, there is a few good things here.  The scant opposition in the south to the Wyld invasion meant that the influence on it was more pronounced; Shadowlands being the antithesis of untamed potential were wiped clean unless they were very big.  The shattered remains of Chiaroscuro are more shattered, there is only a few undamaged towers, they are all in Grandmother Bright's domain, all other towers are blasted down to a few stories in height or in the central region, melted off at that height.  The central core of the city is a barren field, the site of the former powerful Manse once stood, obliterated during the Usurpation.  The city itself is small and like the city splintered into factions, under the leadership of the Trikhan government in the the hut community in the central fields.  

In the East, things are more stable and populous.  Cities are larger and more numerous.  The Bronze Age seems to flourish here, there is great distruction of in the old centers: there is no Factory Cathedral in Lookshy, the First Age buildings are shorn off partway between floors through Nexus.  The walls between Creation and the Underworld are thinner everywhere, but with the larger populations and the more fertile land, the people are more vigilant about stopping up the threats of minor shadowlands.  The Hundred Kingdoms are more wide spread to the North and to the South.  A more prolific Terrestrial Exalted population has resulted in many more smaller nations and a few larger stronger nations.  The Immaculate Philosophy is wide spread here too as it serves the Manifest Destiny of e Dragon Blooded.  There are more Realm Outposts dotting the lands, but the local Exalted play them, due to their greater strength of numbers and the distance to the Realm.  

In the West, there are more people.  The seas are plentiful with life and the many islands support many people and Dragon Blooded too.  There are many floating towns dotting the seas, barges and ships lashed together for protection; they roam the seas as self sustaining communities, trading for things they cannot produce.

The North is bleak and a mix of Wyld and Shadowlands.  The in-between places are weak and are holed easily.  The human stead fasts hold it all together but they are far apart.  

The Realm itself is diminished.  The core of the Old Realm, the center of it all.  More manses were destroyed here, more carnage.  Greatest City of all Meru collapsed sooner and more thoroughly in the initial fighting during the Usurpation.  Great city blocks rained down upon the surface after a fall of ten thousand meters and impacted the surface, the great power grid failed here completely and the destruction was near total.  Only the defense grid escaped damage and then it was years before the Dragon lines sorted themselves out enough to defend Creation.  

After the Usurpation, the Millions strong Dragon blooded aegis had been reduced to a ruinous few thousand.  The rebuilding process began at once and  in the five hundred years between the Usurpation and the invasion of the Fair Folk, the numbers were increased to tens of thousands and lesser wonders were restored to Creation.  Manses were rebuilt, demesnes capped to a maximum of three; the art of greater geomancy lost.  Demon hordes were summoned to clear the debris of the successful attack.   

The Contagion was a surprise; it swept through the mortal populations and Dragon Blooded like wildfire, one in ten lived.  When the Fair Folk invaded, the population of exalted was tired from years of labour and the bring down of Solars who escaped that Final battle and lastly that great plague. From less than one hundred thousand lesser exalted, a few tens lived.

When the smoke cleared from the Wyld plowing of Creation, the Dragon-blooded were scattered and reduced to a few hundred.  Lone individuals in the West and the East, military units nearer the center.  From these Creation was reformed.  The Realm and Lookshy, the individuals carved out small empires and bred with the mortals.  Carful population management in the Realm and Lookshy allowed the Dragon Blooded empires to build and control more and more of the region.  While only a few Exalted in the hinterlands were able to do the same.  

After more than three quarters of a millennium, the Realm controls half of a great host of a hundred thousand Dragon Blooded, Lookshy a fifth of what remains while the unrestricted unmanaged breeding elsewhere has resulted in the remaining crop.  Given a few more centuries, the hinterlands would likely outnumber all of the Exalted of the Dragons in the Ream and Lookshy combined many times over.

Lando Calorissian

Lando Calarissian from the Empire Strikes Back was the frenemy.  He opened his arms to friends and then betrayed them.  But did he?  No, the empire showed up and told him that he was going to help them or lose everything and if he helped them his friends would be safe.  He then carried out his side of the agreement and the Empire reneged and changed the rules, and then the situation changed so that his friends and his city were all lost.

About eighteen months ago I was asked for the third time to move down to e city and live with my friend and family.  I accepted.  They had two years to reneg on the first offer and time to think about it and all that sort of things.  I loved his family and they were offering me a place in it.  On the surface it was a very generous offer and I treated it with all the gravity that I thought it deserved.  I took three years to make sure it was really something they wanted and not just a whim.  

They said that they would either sell and buy a house with another bedroom or finish their basement and let me live there.  I was going to have my own bathroom a private bedroom and that was all that I wanted.  It looked like things were looking up for me.  I had my own place, a two bedroom apartment, three if I pushed it, with a sunroom in the summer, a bathroom and a kitchen and storage.  I lived a kilometer from work.  I hade a couple friends, but I was very very lonely.  I would lose a little, and I would gain a lot; I would lose my loneliness.  

My place cost me about $1100 a month for food and utilities and rent., I was told that my friends would charge me $750 inclusive of everything.  I committed to this arrangement.  The loneliness was the big thing.

Over the next few months they got closer to completing their end of the arrangement and I became more and more committed.  But the deal also got worse and worse too.  First the bathroom disappeared.  I was okay with that, using the bathroom to clean up two flights of stairs was okay and realistically three full bathrooms in a house is stupid.  Then the walls disappeared.  Which is manageable, I would put up a bookcase and that would serve as a good wall and limit the space to an opening and it is in the basement, so more private.  The place gets finished and they have their end done, less than it was, but it has everything I really want, the end of loneliness.  I had to sell/giveaway almost all my books and furniture.  I was fine with that, after all, do you own things or do things own you, right?

It was time to move in.  There was a bed, I had to buy a mattress, but luckily I had a mattress from one of the beds I had to get rid of.  So that was that.  But there was no wall.  The bookcase they provided was see through.  There was a table, that they said I could move and use my own.  But that never happened, mine was put into storage.  The bookcase I wanted to set up, did not fit their decor and they insisted that I purchase furniture, and that it fit their decor, not mine.  They like dark wood to put in their dark basement with two very small windows.  There were lights in the ceiling for the whole basement.  When they were turned on, they came on in my section too, and the switch was not in my control.  And my 'room' was an extension of the family room.  But the rent was less and I was not lonely.

There were complaints that the space was not my space, that is I had to keep the space as they wished and not as I wished.  After about a month I was told that I have to change my life because in a years time I would be out on my own in my own apartment.  It was understood that.  It was understood by them that I was going to be out of their house in a year.  But they never mentioned it to me.  They also let me know that food was part of the deal, if I ate their food, that they made.  That is, my vegetarian ways would have to end if food was going to be part of the deal.  So I had to buy my own food.  The common foods that both sides used became my responsibity as they stopped using them. 

In order to live there I had to make steps to change my life, or it would become a six month stay and not twelve.  That is what it felt like.  I got a job with very long hours and a course that I never had any time to devote to it and I lived in a house that I had no control in, that had new rules in it every once in a while.  New rule— I can't shower in the morning, I must shower at night, after the kids.  New Rule I have to be extremely quiet every morning when I leave, but when I am trying to sleep, they can stomp on the floor overhead of me.  New Rule — because I spend alone time at home in my 'room' I am now to be called Troglodyte.  New rule: complain about my vegetarian food as smelling like shit and stinking up the whole house for hours.

Lando Calorissian abandoned everything he had to save his friends.

I got rid of substantial independence to get rid of my loneliness and in the end what I have is a place that I sleep where anyone can enter when every they want, where I do not feel welcome, with expences that are in excess of my old place.  I have no one I can talk to.  I tell everyone that everything is great so they won't worry.  At least I am not lonely, right?  Wrong.  More lonely.  I am spending all my time away from the kids, working, avoiding, eating out every meal.  I have learned the quickest way to get mocked is to tell my friend anything.  So I don't say anything.  I question the word.  He thinks he is being my greatest friend in the world by doing all this for me.  

What have I done?  Why is it Everytime I try to better myself in some way, my situation, it always does the opposite?  Why?  The solution must be that I should kill myself— do the worst thing possible to myself and everything will get better.

Seventh and final

And then it ended.  I have de-friended Seventh. Or Seven.  Named for her religion, Seventh Day Adventist.  I have deleted her from Facebook and I am excising her from my life.  She has my number and she will preside in my heart forever, but I just can't do it anymore.  Two weeks ago she came to Big Smoke for a month to visit.  Last week I asked if she was free, we could go out and do something, look for mushrooms in a park, find lunch visit parts of the city she had not been to seek out fun.  Bring her baby, I did not care.  Two friends having fun.  And she was excited.  And then it happened again.  Again.  Every-time she is on the verge of having fun with me she thinks about it for a few days and then spoils it.  Invariably it is her religion that does it.  It is inappropriate that she, a true believer, should hang out with an atheist.  It is inappropriate because I am luring her away from her belief that the world is coming to an end in 5-10 years and everyone will be judged based on their associations and piousness.  This time it was different.  It was: it is inappropriate for a married woman to hang out with a single man and have fun without her husband present.  To chaperone her, because obviously she still has feelings for me and might act on them in public, because that is what immoral atheists do.  Nevermind that I am the only person who was in a sexually heated situation with her and did not use it to my advantage and respected her wishes.  She confided in me and told me private things in her life, which I will not share here ever, because it would set a bad precedent and they were told to me in confidence.  I love this girl more than anything, but I won't rape her, like more than half of the people on her list did.  I love her so I respect her wishes.

I love her so much, but I can't bare making more plans with her to have her crush them because her stupid doomsday religion says so.  I won't be friends with someone who sees my company as some trial that needs to be resisted.  

I am tired giving everything into a friendship and getting nothing out of it.

But you see, why should it stop with just her?  Why not delete the rest of the people in my life. 

Working with Latinos two -Face

When was studying History in University, ancient history, I uncovered an interesting factoid.  People in the past, who shaped history, had a public ally shared 'Cult of Personality'.  As long as Alexander the Great won battles, he had friends and he was Great.  As soon as he lost, he only lost one battle, he was a loser and his empire disappeared.  Over simplification, but after he lost that one battle, he got sick and died, and his great Empire shattered.

Throughout history we have had these cults of personality that have ruled the world.  Kings and war leaders.  People who made changes in their life on the world that did not survive their demise.  Genius Khan, Napoleon, Julius Ceasar etc.  And Latinos.

It is like they all have Face and the person with the greatest Face rules.  Face is something like personality and you get it through a few ways.  You get face because you are the leader.  You get Face for being right all the time.  You lose it if you are wrong.  If you lose it you are dead.

This week my boss took away my Face.  He did it without knowing that he was doing it.  If I explained it to him, he would not understand, because it is stupid; the entire concept is stupid.  But as soon as it was gone, my effectiveness as a foreman evapourated.  

Let me set the scene.  We had a job to do and the boss was on site.  We were moving large stone slabs to make a floor for a building.  Big.  Four to six people required to move them, hundreds of kilos apiece, one weighed 350kg (I saw the invoice).  They were layer next to each other and cut so they fit closely.  Then the boss had to leave to do boss things and I was left in charge.  The purpose of the job was to cover the entire floor as quickly as possible with large slabs and then to cut smaller pieces to fill the holes.  You bring in a new stone and look at it and see we're it fits best with as little cutting as possible.

AWM69. If the piece fit with little cutting it was good.  The unspoken thing was that the pad was to be laid quickly; less cutting means less stone used, less cutting means less time spent there, which means lower cost for my boss and greater profit.  Look at those characters.  The first one is narrow at the top and wide at the bottom.  The next is reverse to that and the next and the next.  The pattern is incidental, coincidental, but once seen, the Latinos took it as a pattern, the Law of the job.  They persisted in remaining ignorant of English for all their years working in English speaking Countries.  One of them worked building houses for CenTex Homes in Texas for seven years and knows scarcely any English.  Once the pattern was discovered, it was the LAW.

So the next stone went in and there was a small cut needed to be done to make it fit perfectly and I told them to do it.  They did, unquestionably.  Then I went to get the next stone.  I came back and they told me that it did not fit the 'Pattern'.  I told them there was no pattern, anything they saw was accidental. They insisted that the stone had to be reversed and major cuts made to fit the 'Pattern'.  I told them that they were wrong.  I told them what the goal was and the reason and that the pattern they saw was not important.  I had to call the boss to ask him what I knew was not there, the pattern, when I got done explaining to him and then to them, they refused to place the stone.  They out numbered me.  

The boss came on site and they came back to me and told me I was wrong.  My boss told them it did not matter, they had turned the stone around and he told them to cut it to fit it and get it done.  He just wanted them to stop wasting time.  The boss then told me what he wanted me to do the next day.

The next day came and the Latinos treated me like shit.  I told them that the boss wanted one stone here and three stones there, so they did the opposite.  I told them that the boss wanted an edge four inches from the edge, so they put an edge of six inches.  I told them to do things and they treated me like I was lying to them.  I was not angry with them as much as frustrated.  I was angry at my boss.  But how can you be angry at ignorance?  You can be angry, but it won't get you anywhere.  So I was not angry at anyone, just deeply frustrated. I am deeply frustrated a lot lately, more on that later.  I was told to use stencils mde of cardboard that day for the small pieces, but they would not listen to me and insisted making stones their way.  We picked up seven stones in the morning to fill in the gaps.  We had to cut them on the truck, because three people were not strong enough to move them.  They insisted on using one large stone to make one small stone and cutting it so that the rest of the stone was now useless.  I told my boss that they were not listening to me and ignoring me. I wanted to leave.  I made one stencil, cut one stone and it fit perfectly in place without any fiddling.  I gained Face again and they started listening to me a tiny bit.  I took pictures at the insistence of my boss and they saw this and they must have thought that maybe, the boss actually was comunicating through me, and that is why they let me make the stencil.

The next day they allowed me to show them that we could get three stencils on one stone.  Three!  The novelty!  Even then, they ignored what I suggested on other things because they KNEW that they were right and I was a stupid Gringo.  They would say, see we tried what you said and it did not work, so we will do it our way.  And things got worse.  I reiterated, when you did half of what I told you to do it did not work, you had to do it all.  When they did it all, the stone fit.  

Face is gained very slowly and is lost easily.  It is based on something stupid, but it is something at the unwashed masses use to determine who to follow.  That is the stupid thing.  It is based on stupid traits, like how much stone you can lift, on how well you fight and the size of your dick.  It is lost by equally stupid things like making a mistake or because other people are impatient, like my boss was.  If my boss had been patient and knew or cared how they think, maybe the second day would not have gone so badly and the third day could have been somewhere else.  There is a discussion, informal, at work whether there is any cost savings hiring Latino workers at all.  The plus is they show up for work everyday, the negative is everything else.

Results Election 2015

Politics.  I was quite unhappy with the results of the election on Monday.  Almost everyone I know was happy, but almost everyone I know does not recall what happened longer than what happened five years ago, politically.

The results.  

The Liberals won a landslide majority victory, with less of the popular support that the previous government did, but that is okay, because We won this time.  Who is this We?  Less than forty percent of the voting public elected a comfortable cushion majority.  People swallowed their personal convictions and voted for the guy that was not the best person in their opinion and voted for someone that was not Harper.  

You see there are two Generation Parties in this country, the Conservatives and the Liberals.  Both have their core supporters, people who would not change their vote if you held them under water and told them to change their vote and they can breath again.  These core would rather drown than change their vote.  For both of these parties, this segment represents about thirty percent of the eligible voters apiece.  Before there were more than two parties, one or the other would win and then after a time the other would win and they would flip back and forth periodically.  These political parties grew up beside each other and they are essentially the same, except one is more liberal than the other and the other is more conservative.  No other difference.  Over their history they have even championed each others causes and when this was so, the other party opposed that previously held cause.  For example, the Liberals used to be the supporters of Free Trade, until the Conservatives took it as something they wanted.  Effectively these two parties are the same, except they hate each other and will shout at anyone that makes that observation, just like any brother and sister I have ever known.  

Fear.

The other forty percent of the voting public are more or less liberal/conservative than those parties and vote for other parties regularly, like the NDP, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party etc.  When the chips are down they vote for these parties.   But when the political balance swings too far in one direction they vote to restore the balance, the Right Wing parties join up with the Conservatives to end the Tyranny of the Liberals, like they did ten or so years ago when the Reform and the Progressive Conservatives dropped the progressives, who formed the Bloc Québécois many years before that anyway.  The resulting alliance of conservative values resulted in a meaner, more selfish party of personal gain. And with the Left Wing parties splitting the vote, the less popular Conservative party, less popular than their combined support anyway, won the day.

So, this election, the core Liberals refused to vote anything but Liberal, but the other Left Wing parties whose supporters felt had suffered more from year of absolute rule by antithetically aligned people, switched from their normal true support to the better of two bad situations and voted Liberal.  I am guilty of this.  I held my nose and voted NDP, I normally vote Green.  With the name Greenpsychopomp, would you really expect otherwise?  Aside.  They woke up in the morning and were elated to find the Conservatives out of power, but unhappy that there was an even more massive defeat of the Left Wing.  True, the leader of the Liberals is more like his father, a closet New Democrat through and through, but his party is not.  The core of the party is identical to the Conservatives.  Back room deals, coercion of the populous, courting big business for personal gain, stacking the appointed Senate with friends and supporters making sure that when they are defeated, they can extend their reach into the next Alternate Party's life.  The engine that elected them is the one they helped create.  Change will only be superficial.

What we lost when the Liberals won a majority government, with less than forty percent of the vote, was a chance at true change.  We lost the chance to elect a minority government where one of the parties had election reform as an important issue.  

Predictions.

Marijuana will be legalized.  The Liberals will uncover horrors that the Conservatives have been hiding: 1) social programs that the were being funded by the last government have not actually done anything, the moneys earmarked for them lies unspent. 2) Environmental projects and claims, like the Alberta Provincial Conservatives, were false and because of government gags on employees, no one could tell the public that they were not occurring at all.  There will be a great show and dance about changes that are made, that there are so many, but they will not change them all; some of them are not politically expedient for a 'Liberal' to make, but since a 'Conservative' did it, it just won't be repealed.  3) Omnibus bills that the Conservatives used, will not go away, 'the changes to our society by the evil Conservatives, have to be righted quickly, after-all'; there will be things hidden within, parts of hated laws kept, but kept quiet.  4) There will not be enough time to enact reform in this mandate, "but you had better support us, because if you don't, the devil will return to office and wreck all the progress we have done in the past four years", four years from now.  And it will work because people remember five years politically, but not more, the conservatives will look less evil and the Left will be through with the Liberal Party again.

It makes me want to throw myself off a bridge, or build a bomb and blow up the House of Commons when it is in session.  —That comment will get the NSA in a tizzy and get me arrested, I hope.

Wait for it…

I feel like I have been away for weeks.  I have been away for weeks.  I only get to write on Sundays and the occasional Saturday.  And I have been busy.  Not doing the stuff I would like to be doing.  I have lots of different things to say but I don't want to burst and spill and miss what I want to say– perhaps I should write shorter smaller posts?

Hodgepodge

So this week I encountered more willful ignorance.  Willful science ignorance.  The first instance was a Facebook conversation that I encountered, I know Facebook the one thing is guaranteed to set people off.  I have very few FB friends, about 60, but they are varied and truthfully I am looking to delete a few people who I added because they asked and I was being polite.  But they are varied.  I have a Libertarian acquaintance who I have talked about once before or twice.  They posted last week that a scientist resigned from his position back in 2010 because he thought that the entire scientific community had bought into a bunch of malarkey about Climate Change and that all the money was being invested in that point of view and it was wrong!  

I did some basic, very very basic Internet research, that none of the friends of Libertarian did, because the story matched their point of view.  I looked up the scientist on the Internet.  A simple google search.  I got his Wikipedia entry.  Hal Lewis.  Resigned his membership in the science community.  Was he a very famous and prominent Climate Scientist?  Was he fighting the good fight for years and had unquestionable proof? No, No and No!  He had been retired since 1991.  He had no proof, only suspicions.  He may have been prominent in his field, back in the 80s, which was NOT climate science, but nuclear reactor science.  No proof, no basis, no leg to stand on, but he supports the view that climate change deniers support and that makes him and his ideas truth!

No response; I did not expect any.

The other instance of ignorance came from a coworker.  Nice guy.  In the same way that Hitler was a nice guy to his friends.  This guy is skirting the public's ideas about Neo-Nazis.  He thinks Swastikas are cool and that Jews are responsible for most of the worlds problems.  Other coworkers are oblivious or complicit.  I think he feels comfortable because I don't react externally to his views, thank you ASD.   Anyway, this week it was climate change is stupid and other stuff I will get into.  His father is a lawyer and he is a history major at University, which he has dropped out of.  He has only the compulsory sciences that he had to take in high school and has forgotten that, as it is useless.  He knows what he knows and it is the truth, because he knows it is the truth.  He admits that his science knowledge is poor, but he gets all he needs to know from his girlfriend, who is in Neural Science, ie human brain biology.  

He knows that climates are affected by cycles and it will all work out in the end.  He also thinks that the Polar Bear should die if it can't adapt.  Also that Polar Bears are adapting by diving deep under that water to hunt.  He knows that the Media takes pictures of emaciated Polar Bears and blames climate change on the state of the bear when to him it is clear they have taken a picture of a sick and dying bear to pass off the 'story' of climate change.  

We pick what we believe and we trust what we pick to believe.  This is what we call a bias.  We all have them and even the non-partisan sources are essentially politically aligned.  Political alignment need not be explicit, but it is there.  For example, politics:  a left leaning person gives you the facts and lets you make your decision based upon those facts.  Typically they will omit some facts that don't support their views, but then fell guilty that they are not giving the full story and put them back in.  The idea is that you will make the correct choice if you have all the facts.  Liberal media sources do the same, they give you the facts and they don't omit details for their benefit.  Right leaning people, give you their opinion.  They are right, so listen up.  Seems simplistic, but that is the way it is.  Fascist governments thrive on an undereducated populace, and a communist, in the truest sense of the word on an educated populace.  The Communist governments in the pasture not true communist political situations, they were in the beginning but got co-opted by strong dictators, essentially right wing individuals.  True communist governments fail because they constantly educate each other and fail to govern.  Social democracies are a better form.  I digress.  My point is that some people prefer not to think and let other people do their thinking for them.  They listen to news sources that tell them the way to think and they never stray to other places.  People trust the people that have similar world views and they don't change; they are not open to change.  They will not hear of it.  Unless they trust you.  I suppose if someone who they trust changes their mind, that might help change others minds, but I suspect that people would just start no trusting them.  

Some people thought Rob Ford was doing a great job, and they supported him until the end.  Their support would not flag even though he was shown on video doing questionable things, he was accused of doing a lot of questionable things, but his supporter still support him.  If Rob Ford is incarcerated for anything, they will still support him.  That is the nature of Right-wing politicals. 

What I have noticed, sadly, about the direction of Canadian politics over the past 30 years is that it has changed.  It has slid down the political scale from the center to the right.  Canada has changed from the Canada that people still think of when they think of Canada, that it is nice and polite, to a different Canada, a meaner Canada.  

People outside this country have noticed.  Canadians still believe that they are the World's Peacekeepers and that we deserve a seat on the Security Council, but we don't.  Not now, maybe not again.  Not until we Canadians become World team players again.  Ask not what the World can give us, but what WE can give back to the World.  We need to pull our heads out of our asses.

Climate building, World building

Climate of one planet with one Sun and multiple bodies of water and mountains is hard enough to calculate.  Add two more Suns and what does that do to the climate?  They are further away though, but they are bigger too.  Three stars though, they are not stationary, they orbit each other.  They dance the celestial dance.  One is stationary, relatively, the two others orbit it and they orbit each other; the center one wobbles, but it is in significant compared to everything else.  The two suns, one green and one red orbit each other once every nine days, or rather the space in-between them is orbited.  They orbit the main star, a blue star, once every Earth year.  The planet in question orbits the blue star once every twenty-five years, but that is where the complications start occurring.  The sidereal year is twenty-five Earth Years (EY) and the sidereal double stars orbit in one EY, but the combined effect as relative to the planet is that the double stars orbit the center twenty-four times in one year.  Now, humans have a poor understanding of time in the truest sense, so the planet's year would not be the actual year even though the axial tilt is the greatest effect on the climate changing and the seasons, but seeing the double stars get larger and brighter and then dimmer and being eclipsed by the central star, might make a better stamp on how they perceive a year.  So the planet's year according to the sentients would be closer to the orbital time of the double stars, but instead of 360 days they see the stars eclipse every 375 days.  

Complicated?  Consider that we humans have known for thousands of years that the year was 365 days, and for a couple thousand years, 365.25 and for a few hundred years 365.24.  Now consider if you choose a fixed and distant point, like another star, the Earth rotates 366.24 times in those 365.24 days.  See the world is a little more complicated than it first appears.  

According to the astrologers on the Planet, there are twelve houses that rotate into prominence every year and do not precisely get repeated for twenty-five years.  

Each season lasts six of their years, or about seventy-four Earth months.  A nine day week makes sense, the two visible stars swing around each other and eclipse each other once every nine days.  Forty-two weeks in a year.  The word for month comes from our word for moon.  Must cultures have a lunar like month.  There are six moons in this system, three large and three small.  Tides are very complicated.  There are three different orbital directions for the moons too travel, rather I have made it so that there are three different orbital tracks; in science there is only one orbital track for a moon or any longterm orbiting body, around the equator, the rest are unstable, but not here because there is magic.  Two moons travel equatorially, two have polar orbits and two along a 45° orbit.  The moons are actually a uniform size but because they orbit at different heights and have different orbital periods, they appear different.  Moons do not effect the climate, unless they reflect enough light to do that.  

With seasons that last 6EY apiece there are some real effects.  The climate would change very slowly seasonally.  A larger world would mean at the climate would vary quite a bit less than it does here.  The tropical, sub-tropical, temperate, sub-arctic and arctic zones would be larger and would move less over time as the season change.  On earth you need to travel about 110 km north or south to pass a degree of latitude.  On Caranus the trip would take much longer, things are still fluid in my mind, but between 300 and 1000 km to make the same latitude change.  How would that effect the climate?  If the Jet-stream moves less then less variation, if it moves the same then it would move slower as it has more ground to move over.  

There are lots of questions to think over.  The climate could be just how I make it to be and the physics explain why.  Or I could try for realism.  I want to do realism.  I know I am over thinking it, it is what I do.  How do rolling Prairies change from green grass to yellow to purple or red over thousands of kilometers?  How is the land different because there was no ice age?  What is the biodiversity like?  I know these answers I know the sciences.  Add radiation, add magic, mix the three: plants that think and eat people, cute bunnies with a killer instinct, birds that bully bigger birds and get eaten.   Dragons.  Elves.  Dwarves. Orcs.  People–they all are and add humans.  Peppered with oddities, a forest nation of dryads and fairies.  

Election 2015

Politics in the 2015 Canadian election.  It really sucks.  Two weeks to go and the Conservatives are heading for another majority government. And here is why:

Attack advertisements.  They work.  They attack the integrity and the character of the target in the ad.  The Conservatives have been attacking the Liberal leader telling people that 'He is just not ready yet'.  

Not speaking, Not engaging.  It is working.  You see there is a lot of things about the Conservative ideology that most people find vile, but if their candidates don't talk to people, they will never hear about these views and people will think they are good people.  It is working.

Focusing on non issues.  Racist issues.  It is working.  There is, unfortunately, a lot of closeted racists in this country and the Conservatives have found a way to let people express their racism and shroud themselves in a cloak of Women's Rights— which they don't technically believe.  It is working.

Details.

Justin Trudeau is in fact my age.  He is 43.  Stephen Harper is 56. Thomas Mulcair is 60.  Harper was Prime Minister at age 46.  It is quite clear from this information that either three years is a lot, or that Harper was also not ready.  Trudeau is young, but only in comparison to how people compare him.  He is not his father and that is good–his father is dead and that would make him too old.  He is younger than a lot people in this country, the median age in 2011 was 40.6. So for the record, if you are calling a 43 year old not ready yet, you are calling half of the people in this country note ready yet too.  But really age is the last factor that people should use to select a leader.  Leaders are just the head of the Party, they have a whole Party behind them with all the experience that they need.

Not speaking or engaging.  It is something they started doing from the first.  They gagged the government scientists and the librarians, and everyone who gets there checks from the federal government.  Leading edge scientific researchers not allowed to talk about what they researched and found out.  World Leading People gagged.  If you can't control Physics, you can control the people who figure it out.  Throughout their reign they have been quietly shutting down science stations and science projects and gagging the scientists affected.  The excuses have been the same, the programs cost too much money, and/or the services they do are redundant and the data they get is redundant.  Typically, these projects are environmental in nature and they are inexpensive and unique to the world facilities.  Like the Experimental Lakes research area.  And the High Latitudes High Altitude testing project— the data was used all over the world to monitor changes in the atmosphere; it was cheap (less than the cost of an ad campaign) and was unique.

Carry on to the election, individual candidates are unavailable for comment, unavailable to participate in debates, interviews and unsanctioned party events.  They reason is clear, Conservative candidates are being controlled to prevent them going off the official Party Line script.  When they go off the script is when we see who these people are.  We saw that the Conservative Party attracts people who pee in customer's mugs and then rinse them out and put them away when while they work, instead of using the bathroom.  We see that in their off time they post videos on YouTube making fun of people with physical disabilities.  We saw that when Conservatives want to be nominated they use bribery and political strong arming to get their way.  These examples are things that we see from before the election, but we don't get to see what they are like during.  If they are elected, they are required to sit on their bench and tow the party line and be quiet.  But their strategy is working, except for the two videos of two candidates, there have been no scandals and apart from the one public scandal, a year before the election, we know nothing about how the people who are running got there.  They all do it.  Theoretically.  Only the Conservatives and the Liberals have been caught bribing and controlling possible candidates.  

Niqāb. 

All women in some Muslim countries are forced to wear head coverings.  It is a human rights issue and it is a women's rights issue.  It is wrong.  The reasons that men give when they do this are also wrong.  They say that seeing a beautiful face will cause men to want to rape them and stuff like that.  Rape is high in those countries despite the niqāb.  Seeing a woman's face, makes them human, not seeing it makes them objects.  The niqāb is just a sign of the issues that these women face, it goes along with other issues like being property and not having rights that men have.  The niqāb itself is really not the problem, it is just a piece of cloth; it is the ideas that are surrounding it that are the issues.

When people come to this country they are alone.  Not really alone, but before they were around people that were the same as them and everywhere.  When they get here, everyone is different and they may feel lost in the tide.  Sometimes they grip hard on something that provides a cultural identity.  They become more religious, they hold stronger to cultural affectations, or they keep an iron grip on some aspect of their former land language and marriage beliefs.  It is one of the pluses of a multiethnic society that we can accept these things and allow them.  Because what ever they are, it is their choice to use them and have them except that as Canadians they also have rights and freedoms that supersede these cultural artifacts.

A Canadian cannot be discriminated on the basis of gender or sexual preferences, nor on cultural practices that do not affect other people's own rights.  This is not true in practice, people are people and they discriminate on gender, sexual preference and culture, but these people who are discriminated can seek redress for that discrimination.  And they do, and they succeed.  Sihk men are allowed to wear turbans as part of their uniform as policemen and other jobs.  Sihk men can wear a Kirpan, a ceremonial knife.  Jewish men can wear a Kippah.  Christians can wear a cross.  Women can wear a niqāb to citizenship ceremonies.  And that is the issue, their face is covered and you don't know who it could be, except the actual paperwork/meeting is in private and the person's face is uncovered, drivers licenses and passport photos are uncovered— and the women do not object to that, but in public they wish to be covered.  And the courts say, that this is fine, more they say that it is their right.

I heard two interviews recently.  One was a politician, who culturally hails from the Middle East.  He said that 95% of women in Canada from his background do not wear the niqāb and it is not an issue, but some do, and that should not be an issue.  Hyperbole aside, he suggested that most women do not want to wear a niqāb.  Most cultural affections disappear in Canada after a generation and some people chose different things to grab hold of.  And the niqāb makes sense for our Winters, maybe everyone should wear one then.  The second interview was with a white woman who decided to convert to Islam and decided she wanted to wear a niqāb.  A unique perspective, she can tell you what sort of discrimination people have in their hearts, because she never had it before.  She described that the abuse came in two forms, active: spitting on her, revving cars and jerking cars at her on crosswalks and verbal abuse, passive: where people avoided her out of fear.  Because every woman with a face covering is a suicide bomber.  Suicide vests can fit under any coat these days, people must be terrified during winter.  Hockey bags can carry almost every kind of assault rifle and most modern weapons of mass destruction, but we are not afraid of them.

They look different.  That is it.  No one is forcing them to wear a niqāb unless they live at home still and their parents tell them they have to, but then if this were a crime we would have to arrest every parent that had ever said, "You are not walking out that door wearing that!"  Well I guess we are going to start discriminating women wearing a sari.  Men who wear kilts.  

To be clear, Conservatives are not opposing the women's right to wear a niqāb because of it is oppressing women, they are opposing it because they and a lot of people are afraid of people who are different and it will get them votes.  And the discussion of women wearing cloth face coverings deflects people about how Canada has had the worst growth rate of all the G8 nations during the time that they have been in power.  It is deflecting from their environmental record that seems to be identical to the former Alberta Conservative Government's Environmental Policy: Tell everyone that we have the best policy, that we have an integrated renewable power infrastructure, without ACTUALLY having one.  Does Canada actually have an environmental policy?  The people implementing it can't talk to us do to gag orders, so for all we know, they have a made in Alberta Environment Plan.  

There are issues that people want to know in this election, but one Political Party won't talk to us about them, when it does talk it is about running down other people's image or about issues that have nothing to do with the actual running of the government.

Remember when you vote on October 19th, 2015 are you voting for a Party that won't tell you anything except everyone else is incompetent and we are doing a good job.