If we get the leader we deserve, we can start calling him “President Trump” right now.

We are a world entirely plagued by form over substance: there is nothing more worthless than a marketing campaign. Why? Because it’s all about sizzle and not steak. We are dedicating more and more energy to being less and less– soon we will disappear up our own asses.

We can’t go to the moon or Mars, or even build a decent bridge; but boy, can we build a pretty “app”. And we can get people to “get” it for the latest iShit(tm) device, too!

All last night during the Broncos game (my one and only sports vice), I kept hearing about the “NBC app”. For Christsake, now we not only have a hollow shit-fer-brains TV network, we have an app to “follow” it.

I hope someone comes up with an “it’s time to wipe your ass” app, or there are going to be a lot of people out there who will forget to.

As you may know, I love Frank Zappa. He has a song that takes up a whole album side (remember album sides? No? Embryo!), it’s called “Gregory Peckary”. The (anti-)hero of the tune (G.P.) works for “Big Swifty and Associates, Trend Mongers”.  “…and what might you ask, is a Trend Monger? A Trend Monger is someone who dreams up a trend. Like ‘The Twist’ or ‘Flower Power’…” and then uses clever devices to make people identify with it.

We are stuck in Trend high gear, folks. There’s no there there, or here here or anywhere. Everywhere is nowhere. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. And substance is a bore.

Zen has won and we are the prize. Our nothingness has become the pinnacle of our society.

Which brings us back to election 2016.

It’s either about nothing at all or something entirely imaginary. Donald Trump believes that immigrants (or muslaimiacs!) are our biggest problem, while Ben Carson believes that our biggest problem is that we need to get ready for the apocalypse. Ted Cruz thinks our biggest problem is liberals. Rand Paul thinks our biggest problem is that not enough people identify with a book of fiction he masturbates to (Atlas Shrugged, if you don’t follow Mr. Paul). Jeb Bush believes that it’s his turn.

So, let’s sum up the fantasies:

• Illegal immigrants who do the shit jobs Americans are too good to do and send all the cash home to their families are coming here just to have anchor babies so they can take over America!
• No wait! Jebus is coming back and we need to be ready for his divine judgment!
• No wait! Liberals just want to make us all homosexuals and take away our gunz!
• No wait! The free market as described by this really bad writer of fiction is under attack by “takers”!
• No wait! My dickhead brother was president, which means I’m next!
• No wait! <insert made-up fantasy here>

After all, believing in nothing or something non-existent is easy while believing in something, in anything, that is real is the hardest thing there is. And half our voting population believes this shit.

We are doomed.

The Cardioversion therapy I underwent was a success. It looks like I will be around for a while to continue to pump out more (largely ignored and pointless) drivel.

Whoever picked “he makes it” in the pool can collect their winnings. Those who picked “strokes out” do not have to pay out yet, I still need to climb on a bicycle and try to get back in shape; but anyone who had money on “kicks the bucket” need to admit defeat and cough up their bets. Goons will be dispatched to collect on welchers.

I say that a lot when someone stridently believes something to be true, but has not convinced me of the fact. It is an affirmation of their belief to end the argument insofar as their conviction is obvious; but that does not mean what they say is true.

The statement is by no means meant to construe that I give any credence whatsoever to what they are saying; but that I am tired of listening to the person’s assertion of fact without proof. Essentially, it also means that I don’t (yet) completely discount what you are saying, but require more proof.

I am a programmer, so I get to say it a lot when someone says “this is why that code is broken” or “that code you wrote does not work.”

I also get to use it with my conservative friends and other people, like climate-change-deniers, who make wild assertions with no proof, like “global warming is just a conspiracy by the communist Chinese to get us to slow our economic development.” If that was their plan, all I can say is: too late– we lost economic supremacy when Walmart, the outlet for all unnecessary junk made in China became the one place to shop for rednecks.

What we are is perspective, and little more (and you know that can’t be bad, yeah, yeah, yeah…)

We are allotted a certain amount of time. There is a popular modern myth that about 200 years ago a man aged 40 was old. This is entirely untrue. The average age up until about 150 years ago was 40 years. This does not mean that 40 years of age was old, but that an awful lot of children died, pulling the average age downward.

My grandparents had 14 children, they lost their first 2, leaving the infant and child mortality for their children at 14% from 1925 to 1950, the years over which my grandmother had children. When those two girls whom my father, the 7th born child never even knew, died the national infant mortality rate was about 15%.  Now, go back 100 years before that and consider that 4 in 10 children (40%) died before they reached their 10th birthday. Imagine 1 in seven children dying before their 10th birthday by 1937, or 4 in 10 before 1860.

Throughout history, if you were lucky enough to reach your 20th birthday, your chances of reaching your 80th were damned good–over 60%. According to the oft inaccurate; but frequently quoted bible, the time allotted man (and woman although she is often ignored in the narrative except as a doormat) was 4 score (80) years. That number has hardly changed at all in the history of our marginally noble species. It’s not much more than 80 years now, there are just a hell of a lot more of us reaching it.

We live in a brief bubble of time in which we enact our petty desires and perceive the results in the limited scope of the time given us– those 80 years. We are pretty much incapable of imagining time spans much larger than that.

The Universe (“God”, if you will) is a narcissist. Our lives, our pitiful and paltry 80 years, are an attempt of the universe to grok itself. The universe needs and desires a mirror by which it can understand and perceive itself– there is an intelligence at work here; but we can little understand it except for its reasonably intelligent desire to understand itself, which all intelligent beings possess.

That self-examining entity the universe uses the only vehicle available to it: other intelligences (us) and our selfishness, our desires, our occasional charity, our loves and hates, passions and slovenly indulgences to see itself. We are the mirror.

“The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition“, a treatise on life extension, is among the worst books ever written (along with that pile of absolute shit “Atlas Shrugged” and its abridged version “The Fountainhead” by Ayn(us) Rand). In it, the author describes the scientific process of transferring our thoughts to a machine, so that we can live forever. Its premise is that we can live far beyond our 80 years– even forever if we so choose, by transferring our memories and wishes to other hardware than our meat bodies.

The premise of its dim-witted author is that if we can be a machine intelligence, we can “back ourselves up” and if the machine our intelligence “runs” on goes bonk, we can restore our last backup on a new machine and rumble boldly on.

But let’s look at that a moment. Why would I consider such a notion idiotic? Well, the thing that makes up “You” or “Me” is more than just our collected memories and experiences– a program for playback. We are the machine, too. We are part and parcel with the hardware.

So, let’s consider a more popular representation of what makes up You or Me. Think about the TV series “Star Trek”. Maybe you don’t like the series, it may not be your thing, but you’ve probably heard of it and are likely familiar with some of the devices used in the show– the phaser, automatically opening doors, warp engines, and of course, the transporter.

The transporter is something that takes a person who stands in it, breaks them down into an energy pattern that represents them  as information, transmits the energy pattern to a target destination and then reassembles their body in that distant location.

Consider the premise that when a person’ (person-prime) is “broken down” for transport, they die– it is part of the disassembly process. That “incarnation” or bundle of perceptions that was person’ before transporting is killed as part of the dis-assembly process (you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette).

After transport when the energy signature taken from person’ is reassembled, the entity that occupies the resulting physical body is not really the same, it is a replicant– call them person” (person double-prime). That reassembled person” has all the memories of person’, will behave in an identical manner, will believe (because of their memories) that they are person’, but person’ is dead.

Furthermore, there is no way that person” can ever be proven to not be person’. If the transporter is ever invented, and this situation is acceptable to you, be my guest, jump right in. You go first. “You” will be killed and someone who looks and acts like you, has the same wishes and desires as you– the whole shebang. That replicant will take your place and do what you wanted, but it won’t be YOU. They’ll fuck your wife or husband, love your kids, go about their business, but they are the start of a new vector.

That’s my theory.

Who knows? At the quantum level, it may actually be You who are brought back, but there is no way to know if what is You survived transportation. It can neither be proved nor disproved that you body is occupied by you or a newly-spawned entity that for all practical purposes to the outside world appears to be you. You might have died or you might not have. Like I said, you first, buddy.

And now I will use a spooky word because I have no other word that fits: Soul. You are your memories and abilities, all the “state” that represents your learning, desires, all of that. But there is something else– the animus that moves you: your will, your “soul”, that spark of energy that moves your meat puppet through each day.

So back to the Mambo Chicken. The supposition here is much simpler than the transporter. A doctor will slowly probe your brain, gathering your thoughts, your memories, your desires and how you feel and “encode” this information as data. This copy will be saved to be “booted up” on a more reliable piece of hardware than the human body.

In the Mambo Chicken book, the process is destructive, in that your brain will necessarily be destroyed to gather the data (remember: broken eggs => omelettes).  It may not be necessary to destroy the brain to get the data, but there are complications (some of them legal) if you are not discontinued in the meat existence. One of the difficulties is that you would periodically have to go back and be brain probed.

Maybe all this could be done with some sort of brain scan device, but regardless, this copy of your brains state is a snapshot– if you go on living, you’ll gather more information that will have to be backed up sometime before you physically die.

Sooner or later, you croak. Or if you made the big leap and are already running on “the new non-meat hardware” and it (as all devices do) goes belly up, your last recorded backup state can be dumped onto a new machine and started up. But it’s not really you. Each new “boot” from a backup is a new incarnation; but it’s not like waking up in the morning– it’s still the same you that went to sleep last night when you wake up.

Each crash is another death, each boot on new hardware a new birth (albeit starting from a state other than from-scratch as a baby does). It is a new animus at work, a new soul, if you will (or won’t), but it ain’t YOU.

If a backup of a person’s state is not really that person, it’s not really extending your life when it’s booted up on another device. After all, how could a backup of your intellect be you? It could be booted up on two separate devices, after all, that each claim to be the person who was backed up and that the other is an impostor.

“Two men say they’re Jesus. One of them must be wrong.”

So, would you be happy with that condition? Your memories and desires go on, but YOU don’t. If you are satisfied with this outcome, you’re going to like the future– or not because either way YOU won’t be around to enjoy it.

And that’s OK.

It’s scary, but it’s true.

That great philosopher “The Amazing Criswell” once said: “The future is the place where we will be spending the rest of our lives.” Unfortunately, there’s not much time left in our lives. Your lifetime will seem like a summer’s vacation when it’s over. Even Jesus wanted just a little more time. Did he get it? No.

But what about that remaining time? How should you fill it?

Let’s take a little test. There are just two questions both of which can be answered only with yes or no, so it won’t take long:

1. Do you have children? It does not matter whether they are yours by birth, adoption or marriage.
2. Are you over the age of 40?

If you answered ‘yes’ to either of these questions, it’s not your world anymore. The future does not belong to you, and you should behave appropriately. It belongs to those people who answered ‘no’ to both questions.

Those people are children– at least in spirit. They are ready and willing to embrace the future and the new things it brings. They have not abdicated their futures to their offspring (yet), and they are in the first half, the learning, expanding and enjoying half of their lives. To them, the end seems a long way off.

Many people, most of them old, have come to the conclusion that it’s not their world anymore on their own, maybe not directly, but they suspect it in their hearts. A lot of them are bitter. Some of them get very angry– they want the future to belong to them and they would really like it to be the same or similar to the past they’ve known.

These people are resentful of the young. They dislike new things– new music, new shows, new ideas. “New” is a bad word to them, a frightening word that holds no promise, only threat.

I have friends who have become crotchety, and are very proud of it. I have trouble being around them anymore. They find gay marriage threatening somehow, in ways they can’t articulate; but the recent decision by the SCOTUS is not for them– it’s for the future they won’t occupy, at least not for very long.

They watch Fox News because they find something that reinforces their fears oddly comforting (I have no idea why): “you’re goddamned right you better be afraid! Here’s more stuff to scare the shit out of you that should not bother you at all! Here is a group or a person who will make a good target for your fear and anger, despise them!”

They have become spiteful and hateful, spouting strange “facts” that have no basis in reality– easily disproven if their minds were open to reason; but they sadly are not. To them, I have been ‘turned’. They also seem to be very “in-your-face” about their beliefs, almost proud of being uninformed and belligerent at any attempt to enlighten them.

I had always hoped that people would grow wiser with age, less easily deluded, less gullible, more difficult to convince of falsity, more open to reason. I find among my peers and older people that the opposite is true.

Global warming, for instance.

The difference between my friends’ stance on man’s contribution to global warming and mine is that I hope they are correct, because it may already be too late to do anything about it. They had better be right at this point, they’ve claimed there was nothing wrong all the way through the time we could have been doing something about it. They honestly can’t accept global warming because it threatens not their children or the future of our planet, but because it threatens their world view.

How crazy is that? The threat is not to the future or the world, but to their belief system and therefore has to be denied. And that’s just global warming– the same holds true with every other progressive thought that comes their way: civil rights, income inequality, systemic racism, healthcare– you name it. Real threats are nothing compared to imagined ones.

Doctor Who (yeah, I’m quoting Doctor Who– get over it) said in the episode “The Brain of Morbius” that death was the price we pay for progress. Think of it, if the old did not die they would constantly wish to preserve an idealized past, fighting any progress away from it.

There is no place in the future for the old, and the foolish old especially.

Thank god for that.

So, Ted Cruz is running for President.

Or is he?

He doesn’t strike me as genuine. I think it’s an act– he saw what Sarah Palin was doing and thought to himself, “there’s money to be made here…”

The guy does not believe a word he is saying. It’s all a scam, just a way to make cash and be popular with a group of people that will happily pay to see him speak for many years into the future. Sort of like Sarah Palin, only without the sincerity (she is a true believer) or (we can only presume) vagina.

Yes, Sarah is just stupid enough to believe the mean-girl motivated shit she is peddling. She has never left high school in her mind, and when the whole mean-girl vibe started working for her she saw no reason to ever put it down. And what better way to keep it alive than to peddle the no-forehead nonsense she does that she just knows will piss off the smarter kids. That right-wing hate mongering stuff really works when you want to irritate anyone who has a brain. Just ask Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin or any of the skirted shit hydrants on Fox News.

But Ted? No, he doesn’t strike me as stupid or mean, just a guy who is looking for a captive audience and intellectuals are so fickle… the extra-chromosome crowd is where the money is at. Pick an extreme position, fake a religious bent (announce your candidacy at Liberty University)– the rubes will eat it up.

Trust me, the last thing TC wants is to be President: the White House would mean he would have to work, and that is something he has handily avoided in the Senate. Fortunately, Cuz is from Texas, where the standard of value is inversely proportional to effort (yeah, I’m talking about you, Rick Perry).

He has not done one goddamned thing other than point fingers as a Senator.

Mark my words, Ted Cuz will be around for a long time as nothing more than a lay-about firebrand.

Funny how many layabout firebrands are running for president from the right now-a-days, ain’t it?