Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
In the years, I’ve spent commenting here at Professor Turley’s blog, I have presented myself as an honest person, sensible and with humane beliefs. Many regulars think of me as sort of a blog “elder statesman” and one who has a rational view of the world. There are of course others, fewer in number I assert, who think me a fool and a knave, which shows you can’t please everyone. Professor Turley himself has expressed fondness related to my tendency to be honest and open about myself personally.
Yet through all of these years here, I have harbored a secret belief that I’ve avoided mentioning for fear that the esteem in which I’m held, will disappear in an avalanche of ridicule and disappointment. I have to admit that to a retired old guy on the wrong side of sixty years, my place here has provided comfort to my self-esteem and certainly the feeling that I can still find things in life to accomplish. To those who haven’t realized the obvious yet from my writings, I have my vanities and indeed my insecurities, so being a guest blogger has stroked those needy aspects of my ego. Since I’ve received much gratification from this, I have been loath to be completely honest about one of my more deeply held beliefs. I came across an article that impels me to break my silence and reveal this belief here and now. While in the eyes of some reading this blog, it might lower their opinion of me and expose me to ridicule, I must finally admit to you my dirty little secret.
Ever since the first nationwide “Flying Saucer” sensation began with the first “official” UFO sighting on June 24, 1947 by pilot Kenneth Arnold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting#Skeptical_explanations Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s) have been a phenomenon lasting for the past 64 years, with most governments ridiculing the people making the reports and dismissing the entire idea. This is despite the fact that many pilots have made sightings and indeed many people in large communities, such as WashingtonD.C., have seen UFO’s in their skies over a period of nights. I personally believe that UFO’s are indeed alien spacecraft and that the possibility of this being the case is narrowed by the unfathomable size of the Universe, its age and the trillions of stars that exist. I further believe that the governments have covered this up to prevent what in their minds is public panic and to deny the truth that if UFO’s do indeed exist; our technological capacity could not deal with them if necessary.
This article in Huffpost on 6/17/11confirms my belief in governments covering up the details of these sightings and ridiculing anyone claiming to have made a sighting: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/uk-releases-ufo-files_n_927351.html “The former Ministry of Defense (MoD) UFO Project chief [Nick Pope] is openly admitting to being part of what he claims was a U.K. policy of ridiculing UFO reports and the people who reported them.
“What’s abundantly clear from these files is that, while in public we were desperately pushing the line that this was of no defense interest,” Pope told The Huffington Post. “We couldn’t say ‘There’s something in our air space; pilots see them; they’re tracked on radar; sometimes we scramble jets to chase these things, but we can’t catch them.’ This would be an admission that we’d lost control of our own air space, and such a position would be untenable.”
My interest began in 1953, reading a book by Major Donald Keyhoe, USMC Pilot, Retired. In it he described the various documented incidents and the explanations given for them by the Department Of Defenses “Project Blue Book”, that was established seemingly to investigate the phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Keyhoe . Among others, Keyhoe had interviewed Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, who had been head of the Project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Ruppelt
What I found so compelling was that perhaps 20% of the incidents could not be adequately explained and that distinguished observers, such as veteran pilots, were supposed to have mistaken everyday phenomenon, like weather balloons and Venus, for UFO’s. As my interest grew, it became obvious that our government would respond to any new sighting by first ridicule of the person(s) making the report of the sighting and then responding with explanations that were not credible. In the D.C., sightings in 1953 a mass of objects were not only detected by eye, but by airport radar and yet dismissed without adequate explanation.
What added to the government’s ability to ridicule were the so-called direct contact cases, first made famous by George Adamski: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Adamski and later by Betty and Barney Hill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Hill . Since the “contactees” in these cases seemed mainly to be self-serving individuals, they muddied the waters by being conflated with people who were seriously looking for explanations, or who had made direct sightings. Considering what the Huffpost article cited as details about the British Government’s policies, ridicule replaced research as a tool of institutional government investigation.
In further revealing my dirty little secret, I was for a time, in my teens, a dues paying member of The “National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (or NICAP). It was a civilian unidentified flying object research group active in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NICAP
While I never lost interest in UFO’s, my interest waned as my puberty began to assert itself and other things in life became more important. However, I have read enough about the topic to be certain in my own mind that there is much more to it than merely misidentification of known objects, moneymaking schemes, and public hysteria. In fact, an article in yesterdays Huffpost shows that the amount of UFO sightings has increased in recent years: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/26/ufos-pilots-history-channel_n_935847.html
As someone interested in ancient history some of the writings of Sitchin, Velikovsy and Von Danniken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitchin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
also, attract my interest and tie in with my feeling about UFO’s. I am keen on the possibility of Alien visits throughout human history and the possibility that they have affected our history and progress.
So there you have it. I’ve exposed one of the final embarrassing secrets about myself and opened up to your possible ridicule and/or opprobrium. Since we have so many people here who are qualified to comment, given their knowledge of science and other erudition, I would enjoy your comments. In any event, I feel much better having gotten this off my chest and while I’ve exposed myself further as someone with quirky sensibilities, I feel a certain lightness and freedom in making my confession.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Slartibartfast, I would not have thought you would have been a party to shooting Buster out of an e-cannon, that’s just harsh. 🙂
I like The Myth Busters when I manage to catch them. Their ‘Christmas lights can burn down your house’ show from a few years back was one of the funniest things I ever saw on the TV.
They wanted to see if stringing too many strands of lights on the tree and leaving it unattended would short the lights and cause an electrical fire or generate enough heat to set a dry tree and/or flammable ornaments on fire. Fair enough.
They got a tree that was so dry it was brittle and loaded it down with every kind of paper and flammable ornament they could find. They strung on line after line of lights plugging them into each other to overload the circuit. They made sure there was contact between the lights and ornaments and they lit it up! And left it. And nothing happened. It just glowed in a nice Christmas-y manner.
After some time, hours I think, after a cut-away, they decided that if they upped the amperage on the lights (to simulate a power surge?) maybe something would happen so they did, and nothing happened. The ‘speriment then took on a life of its own. They were going to make that tree burn (or suck all the power out of the power grid trying) so they just kept amping up the power.
They were reading off the steadily increasing amperage and wondering, marveling really, that nothing was happening. Their voices got tight and high, the wires on the bulb strings started going soft and then melting in spots, the ornaments were unburned, the lights were blazing with the light of 10 suns- so bright was the light that the film they were using to film the thing was flashing in the negative with the overabundance of light! !!!!! A tone of hysterical disbelief crept into their commentary.
I was laughing so hard I couldn’t make a sound, nor breathe, I thought I was going to wet myself. Finally, finally the darn tree caught fire. The boys weren’t sure if their experiment was a success or not. I figured it was a bona fide Christmas miracle. It was a stupendous episode, should have won an Emmy.
AY,
100 geese inside of an airliner is just a really bad flight for the passengers – 100 geese on the outside and you’d better hope Sully is at the stick.
Karl, Thread-jacking on such a lovely day (here anyway) and such a refreshingly innocent thread is not appreciated.
One small quibble Karl, two actually:
Everything can be turned into a religion if one views religion as a palliative for a wounded mind or heart. The invasion of our planet by reptilian et’s and their shape-shifting assumption of leadership positions the world over is another common theme in the UFO literature. All of the bad thing that have happened from the excesses of the Nazi death camps to the excesses of Wall Street, are their fault. At least to the folks that can’t conceive that we are actually that bad to each other and at the business of civilization.
Being an old Wobbly I tend toward the belief that such bad things are just a variant on the ceaseless class war. Then too, the ceaseless war against women plays into that, women being the first oppressed class.
Thing is, I don’t make a religion of any of it and neither does anyone here from reading their postings for a couple of years. If everything has to come back to your religion that’s your problem, make your point and be less personally insulting.
Regarding what you refer to as “New Age fantasies”, They are really quite old and cover a multitude of phenomena, natural and unknown. Where some see a multiple lightening strike or ‘bad’ mushrooms in the luncheon gruel, others see an early record of an alien abduction:
“And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.”–2 KINGS ii. 11
And then of course there’s this:
Ezekiel 1: 1-28
1 Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth [month], in the fifth [day] of the month, as I [was] among the captives by the river of Chebar, [that] the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.
2 In the fifth [day] of the month, which [was] the fifth year of king Jehoiachin’s captivity,
3 The word of the LORD came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar; and the hand of the LORD was there upon him.
4 And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness [was] about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
5 Also out of the midst thereof [came] the likeness of four living creatures. And this [was] their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.
6 And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.
7 And their feet [were] straight feet; and the sole of their feet [was] like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass.
8 And [they had] the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings.
9 Their wings [were] joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward.
10 As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.
11 Thus [were] their faces: and their wings [were] stretched upward; two [wings] of every one [were] joined one to another, and two covered their bodies.
12 And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; [and] they turned not when they went.
13 As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance [was] like burning coals of fire, [and] like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning.
14 And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning.
15 Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces.
16 The appearance of the wheels and their work [was] like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work [was] as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.
17 When they went, they went upon their four sides: [and] they turned not when they went.
18 As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings [were] full of eyes round about them four.
19 And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.
20 Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither [was their] spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature [was] in the wheels.
21 When those went, [these] went; and when those stood, [these] stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature [was] in the wheels.
22 And the likeness of the firmament upon the heads of the living creature [was] as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above.
23 And under the firmament [were] their wings straight, the one toward the other: every one had two, which covered on this side, and every one had two, which covered on that side, their bodies.
24 And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their wings.
25 And there was a voice from the firmament that [was] over their heads, when they stood, [and] had let down their wings.
26 And above the firmament that [was] over their heads [was] the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne [was] the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it.
27 And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about.
28 As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so [was] the appearance of the brightness round about. This [was] the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw [it], I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.
ET’s baby, hiding in plain sight, perhaps they drop in occasionally to see if we’re so gullible as to still think them gods. Sorry ’bout the probing Zeke. 🙂
AY,
Hey, it might just be preseason, but I’ve got some numbers:
3-0
Detroit 34, New England 10
Matt Stafford 158.3 passer rating
It took over half a century, but we’re back, baby!
pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…pleasedon’tletstaffordgethurt…
Yea right Mike:
1968 Chicago was a peaceful protest until a “police riot” broke out, as an official government report called it.
To blame the victims there for Nixon illustrates only the poverty of your philosophy.
I was only 7 but still remember the sting & smell of the tear gas, so I could hardly be responsible for anything.
As far as idolizing Cleaver & Rubin, that must be a freudian slip referring to your own political trajectory since Eldridge died a Republican and Jerry was killed after being hit by a car on Wilschire Blvd. in front of his $5k/mo. penthouse apartment.
Slarti,
The title of this thread could be the title of most lions fans…..
AY,
Luol Deng once apologized to me for a bad game and Chris Duhon thanked me for cheering for him and I was once at a party with a Nobel laureate (Oliver Smithies and I were at the UNC pathology department Christmas party – according to a charming emeritus chemistry professor and his delightful wife, he’s the nicest, most humble, Noble laureate you’ll ever meet, but I didn’t get to put that to the test [it would have been trivially true in any case]). Also, Cal Ripken, Jr. says I have a good handshake – so I got that goin’ for me…
Plus the brother of my cousin’s wife coaches the Cleveland Browns (I’m sure that rooting for the Browns is exactly what I need after the last decade as a Lions fan… ;-))
Rafflaw, “I was promised that there would be no math!” I feel your pain, srsly.
I have broken bread with Gibson and gotten snucker with Smoltz…Talk about disfranchisement…oh that is not right, one is back as a sports announcer and the other is a manager for an expansion team.
Lotta ^..^,
I’ve heard of the Casimir effect (as opposed to the Kashmir effect, which is something completely different… ;-)), but that was the first time I’ve heard it described (you did a good job – thanks). I looked at the Wiki page and it is real science (unless they just made up all of those references to Physics Review Letters, et al.). I wouldn’t get my hopes up on being able to use this effect to raise the speed of interstellar ships just yet though… time dilation is going to be a much better way to “make time fly”, so to speak, for the foreseeable future. (although the think about breakthroughs is that you don’t really see them coming…)
Raff,
I told you before, I didn’t make any stinkin’ promises – and even if I had you would have been naive to believe them. That’s my nature. (cf. “the scorpion and the frog”)
Besides, this was mostly science and the only equation I used was a joke (did you get it?).
I was promised that there would be no math!
Elaine,
To answer your question about mass, I had the gang do some relativistic measurements on Buster’s mass (buster was riding along in the spaceship… ;-)).
If we set Buster’s rest mass equal to 1, then we get the following data for his relativistic mass:
0.75 1.5 x rest mass
0.99 7.1
0.999999 707
Finally, Tory fired buster out of the ε-cannon at 0.999999 c while the ship was going the same speed – remember that this gives him a speed of 0.9999999999995 c from Kari’s perspective – and his relativistic mass was 1,000,000 times his rest mass.
Lotta ^..^,
You’re looking at it all wrong – all you need is a ship that can produce enough thrust to accelerate at 1 G for three years* and you can go anywhere in the universe you like. Slower than light travel may take a long time, but, due to relativity, it sure doesn’t have to seem that way…
* A trip of ANY distance at a constant acceleration of 1 G (deceleration on the second half of the trip…) takes about 3 years to complete subjectively (the engines would also burn fuel in subjective time). Hops between stars are pretty much one-way, but they are certainly doable…
Elaine, Your question is a good one and goes to the heart of light-speed travel. If Einstein is correct then mass will increase and progressively greater amounts of energy will be needed to move the ship forward. This has been the great, universal limiting factor regarding propulsion toward the speed of light from all of my lay-person’s reading on the matter. And depressingly so. It means that as far as we are concerned we are trapped here or at a distance that is impractical for single generation flight. All outbound flights would be one-way and of no value for the homeplanet even with suspended animation technology. The only value would be the possible need for a forced migration.
There is postulated though a method of travel that could short-circuit that problem, a true warp drive that warps space around an essentially stationary ‘ship’. A device that would stretch space in the ‘back’ direction while compressing space in the ‘forward’ direction. Space would move relative to the ship, the ship would, by remaining stationary, not be burdened by the energy/mass limitation.
A mechanism to do that would rely on negative energy and an effect called the “Casimir effect”.
***
“…To show that this energy exists involves a rather simple experiment– take two metal plates in a vacuum, put them close together, and they will be attracted to each other. This is caused by the energy between the plates only being able to resonate at certain frequencies, while outside the plates the vacuum energy can resonate at pretty much any frequency. Because the energy outside the plates is greater than the energy between the plates, the plates are pushed towards each other. As the plates get closer together, the force increases, and at around a 10 nm separation this effect (called the Casimir effect) creates one atmosphere of pressure between them. Because the plates reduce the vacuum energy between them to below the normal zero-point energy, the space is said to have negative energy, which has some unusual properties.
One of the properties of a negative-energy vacuum is that light actually travels faster in it than it does in a normal vacuum, something that may one day allow people to travel faster than the speed of light in a kind of negative-energy vacuum bubble….”
***
I saw the device used to prove that there is a Casimire effect and heard an explanation of it’s weird properties and potential a few months ago in a documentary but I have no idea how far-fetched the possibilities are. As fetching goes though they seem pretty far out. The information in the Wiki article down toward the bottom of the page under the heading “Repulsive forces” is interesting. If it can be scaled up, taken from a liquid medium to air and brought from the mostly theoretical to the practical one would have a device for levitation. Ummmm, not in my lifetime I’m thinking.
Maybe Slartibartfast or anyone with an actual understanding of such magical things can give this untutored layperson a short “No, that’s all SciFi carp” or ? in response to my enthusiastic but nonexistent understanding of the Casimir effect?
http://newyork.ibtimes.com/articles/189882/20110731/the-universe-space-sun-earth-energy-black-hole-strange-things.htm#page1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
“I’ve broken bread with people as diverse as Cesar Chavez & Dolores Huerta to Gloria Steinem & Madelyn Murray-O’Hare.”
Tit for Tat Karl I won’t do, except to say that I’ve had my share of close experiences with famed radicals and I ran for President of the most radical Union of its time in the US, SSEU out of NYC. As for strike barricades I’ve led many a strike and work action. Here’s the problem I have with you and with those like you I met, hung out with and worked with in the 60’s and 70’s.
Marxists of all stripes bore the shit out of me, not because their analysis is so off, but because they are so self impressed that they are simply boring to be around. That is also their fatal flaw. The common theme among the CP’ers, PLP’er, Trotskyites, etc. I met was Organize!, Organize, Organize!. They were so intent on seeing the world only through their particular party line, that they were unable to organize the masses of people to come to their banner and so obnoxious in the process that they turned the mass of people off. Chavez and Huerta were exceptions to this in the farmworkers cause, but unfortunately that too ran out of steam as the excesses of supporters outside the movement became conflated with their efforts and thus undermined them.
As for Steinem, Ms. Magazine fast turned into a corporatist apologia finally equating liberation with the duty of women to rise in the business world.
Murray-O’Hare had guts, but was so shrill in her presentation that she pushed away potential allies. I’m sure they found you splendid, worshipful company.
You problem is an obvious one. Here I write a rather lighthearted piece, meant to engender discussion of an interesting topic and you dismiss it by
using economic analysis. Boring, smug and may I add silly.
“and was gassed by Mayor Daley’s cops in ’68 as a latch key kid growing up on the streets of Chicago.”
I too went to every major anti-war rally in D.C., but was smart enough not to go to Chicago. This wasn’t because I was afraid, but because I recognized it for the fiasco it turned out to be. You Chicago types didn’t have the guts to go to Miami beach, because then they really would have kicked your collective asses down there in a bloodbath that would have made Chicago seem tame. What you accomplish was electing Nixon President and absolutely assuring the wars continuance for 7 years and they death of
perhaps millions. You took a viable anti-war movement and destroyed it in your zealotry and party line thinking. Read “Nixonland” by Perlstein for corroboration. however, I doubt that you’d get it because it doesn’t coincide with your “heroic” view of the past.
That is where we differ, Karl. I learned from my past and you learned nothing but continuing to do the same thing and think the same thoughts over and over. We don’t differ so much politically as we differ in humanity. I
see and have worked closely with the pain of people and I will not participate in using them in some game of political theorizing, in order to maintain the chimera of doctrinal purity.
Obama is little more than an old fashioned centrist Republican, but McCain given subsequent events would have screwed things up to a much greater degree. From your doctrinal perspective this would have been good as laying the groundwork for revolution. From my perspective the only way your hoped for revolution goes is into a more Feudal/Fascist State.
I’ve unfortunately digressed far too much off the topic you’re trying to derail in service of your own petty perspective. You bore me and your hubris annoys me. When I see the life path of some of those you probably hero worshipped in your youth, like Eldridge Cleaver and Jerry Rubin I am reminded of the Dylan line, which you probably will never get:
“Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters.”
ekeyra, If you haven’t seen the documentary “The Spirit Molecule” which documents a scientific study of DMT effects, I highly recommend it. DMT is an amazing substance which I, unfortunately, will probably never get the chance to try.
A delightful posting/thread…
We “humans” are very limited, but it makes us feel better about ourselves to think otherwise… to pound the old chest and make serious, definitive pronouncements about all manner of things… and then, quite suddenly, the universe surprises us, turning knowledge on its head and revealing something that, heretofore, we thought impossible…
I’m light enough Mike, except perhaps in the waistline, and although you may be 15 years older there’s no way your experience with organizing the oppressed matches mine.
I’ve broken bread with people as diverse as Cesar Chavez & Dolores Huerta to Gloria Steinem & Madelyn Murray-O’Hare.
I’ve been on more strike barricades & social struggles that encircle the globe than you’ve probably read about; marched in every major anti-war demo in DC from ’67 to ’07 and was gassed by Mayor Daley’s cops in ’68 as a latch key kid growing up on the streets of Chicago.
The decimation of an organized working class in the US, oweing primarily to the class collaborationist politics of the trade union bureaucracy, is the materialist basis for erstwhile left liberals like you dabbling past puberty into New Age fantasies like extra terrestrial visitors.
Talk about being ineffective. All your putting your “career on the line” and “working with people oppressed by this society” still didn’t prevent you from voting for a corporate shill warmonger like Obama — even though his being a creature of the banks should have been obvious years before his Presidential ambitions when his 1st major vote in the Senate was directly against his constituency, siding firmly with the odious credit card companies in draconian bankruptcy reform legislation.
I do however concur with you that you’re not much of a poet.
Hi Elaine! – let’s go to school… 😉
If you’re driving down the road at 50 mph and throw a bowling ball forward at 50 mph, the bowling ball appears to be going 100 mph to an observer on the roadside and 50 mph to the driver. Mythbusters showed that if you throw the ball backwards at 50 mph it drops straight down from a roadside frame of reference. They did not, however, account for relativistic effects. So, in Mythbusters tradition, let’s ramp it up…
Sorry, I never really got the hang of fanfic…
I’ll add some bonus material and answer Elaine’s question about mass after dinner…
There once was a blogger named Spindell,
A non believer in Heaven or Hell,
He let his mind wander and wonder,
“Impossibilities” he deigned to ponder,
He did it for fun, he let his mind run,
And shibboleths he cast asunder.
There once was a man called Karl
A human being of serious demeanor,
His mind couldn’t play, nor could he take larks,
Since all prospective thought he must filter,
Through the perspective cant of Karl Marx.
Lighten up Karl, unless you’re my age, you haven’t done half in your life that I’ve done in my work with people oppressed by this society, nor have you put your career on the line as many times in that pursuit. People who can only see the world via the entirety of their political views are not only boring, but ultimately ineffective, since real people find it hard to relate to or be led by them. By the way I’ve always been a lousy poet.