Karma can be such a total bitch!

It occurred to me just this AM, as I shook off the early morning vapors of departing sleepiness and vaguely contemplated what promises to be yet another excessively hot day here in this heat-sink known as the Suckatoe Valley (that also, in addition to the vibrantly sonorous political sucking sounds it produces, is also happenstancely the capital of Californica (sic)…or perhaps alternately, ‘Calipornia’), I am engaged in a culture war!

Last night, as I fought for sleep with all the windows open, trying to milk the last vestige of cool ‘Delta’ air that flows in to us almost every night from the San Fornicato Bay Area’s heat-healing Coastal Marine Layer, the jarring sounds of endless macho muscle-cars blared forth at us from nearby Interstate-5. In the midst of my frustrations with this, I was suddenly struck by a flash-back to Ray Bradbury’s famous 1950s short story in The Saturday Evening Post, titled ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ (later retitled to ‘The Fog Horn’, made into a popular ‘horror movie and also one of the chief inspirations for Japan’s…ugh!...endless ‘GODZILLA’ series of movies).

In this engaging tale, the plaintively deep bass moaning of a coastal fog horn awakens an ancient primordial creature, whose animation has been suspended deep in the oceans for millions of years, that awakens and surfaces, attracted to the lighthouse’s melancholic bellows that in his teeny-tiny brain he mistakes for a mating call.

Although not half as aesthetically pleasing as either the output of a classic, steam-powered F2T ‘diaphone’ (foghorn, such as used on San Francisco’s Golden gate Bridge, back in the 30s and 40s and the deeply soothing sounds by which I used to go to sleep every night in my early childhood) or the penetrating but equally nostalgic blare of an old diesel locomotive, the aggressive snarling of all these obnoxiously loud, high-performance street machines out on the freeway are a recurrent, aggravating major annoyance.

But let me elucidate a bit, here. Over the course of the pandemic’s past year-and-a-half, our main streets and highway arteries have been transformed from public thoroughfares into an aggregate ‘Speedway of the Clueless’, who gain I-5 access on the nearby Seamus-Fruitridge Avenue, from the low-lifer residential parts of Sacramento’s Barrio (that part of the ‘other-side-of-the-tracks’ south-and-southeast-side neighborhoods that contain most of the Hispanic gangs, druggies, poor blacks, homeless and white trailer-trash refugees) to get onto I-5. From there they pretty much carry on as if that highway is their personal Sears Point Raceway (presently named ‘Infineon Raceway’, in keeping with the naming perk granted to whomever purchases the track; it shall always remain ‘Sears Point’ for me, just as Monterey’s famous old WeatherTech Raceway shall always be ‘Laguna Seca Racecourse’ by my reckoning).

These hopped-up, overly-horsepower-displaced and essentially mufflerless pseudo racing specials that they drive are the inevitable result of California’s regressive law enforcement response to the crazed ‘woke’ ‘defund the police’ movement that has made all the already-semicrazed Progressive Leftist loonies so happy, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (also known to some as the ‘Barely Logical Minds’ movement and related social protest movements of 2020 and 2021). Since these leftist whackos have so effectively created the impression among our perceptively narrow and socially myopic young elements of the ‘woke’ hoi poloi that ALL police and their agencies are racist, fascist brutes, the already latent violent tendencies of emboldened shit-for-brainers (hereafter referred to as SFB) have been encouraged to the point where gratuitous acts of extreme violence against law enforcement officers (LEOs, in the common parlance) are almost a commonplace hazard our law enforcement officers now face.

So many California Highway Patrol and City/County policemen, in fact, have been shot during traffic stops that the policy among the various departments is now that “…only under extreme and unusual circumstances will ‘routine traffic stops’ be made by officers”. This radical sea-change in attitudes has not been missed or overlooked by the ‘SFB’ low-lifers, who have seized upon that state of affairs as an excuse to essentially ignore virtually all California Vehicle Code imprecations and regulations (examples of which are include strict smog regulations that ostensibly prevent and forbid ‘illegal’ smog system modifications, as well as public nuisance codes governing ‘needless, excessive’ noise…and there are many in both existing city and county regulatory codes).

Furthermore, what used to be a highly dangerous (and just plain stupid) violation of the law (i.e. red-light running) is now not just common practice by many younger drivers but practically a challenge to low-lifers to flaunt ANY regulatory or public safety guidelines whatsoever on our streets. Speed limits, heretofore taken semi-seriously by the vast majority of ‘mature’ drivers, are now blown off with a shrug as many drivers (both older and younger) now regularly ignore limits and drive at 15-20 mph OVER whatever speed limits are posted. This hazardous practice is blatantly obvious on just about any city street as well as on highways, where both posted speed limits and ‘Caution! Speeding violation fines in construction zones will be doubled’ warnings no longer even register in the peripheral awareness of most highway users.

Given the widely announced (by our broadcast media) policy decision by LEO agencies to not stop (owing to exponentially increased officer risks) offenders in many instances, our major highways have become (after about 10PM, but especially in the wee hours of the morning, when highways are far less used), with overstretched and over-tasked LEOs probably off nursing coffee and doughnuts somewhere, essentially private racetracks for these SFB scum-suckers in reference.

In addition to the 4-wheeled muscle-cars there are also substantial numbers of high-powered sports superbikes, whose operators often push their high-revving engines well past redline limits of prudence. The sounds are, of course, proportionate to the degree of psychotic mental breakdown those poor abused bikes are thus undergoing! As a rational, sane and responsible ADULT sportsbike driver myself, the sounds of those pathetically abused, to-be-pitied two-wheeled machines screaming out their nightly mechanical agonies gives me a distinctly unpleasant chill, right down my back. And it also keeps me awake, as I can’t help but brood on the monstrous social irresponsibility occasioned by these SFB drivers. Consequently, it takes both a long time for me to drift off( and a fading away of these obnoxious noises in order for me to finally slip into my usual light, restless sleep-state).

Surely, I can’t be the only person who thinks these thoughts, every night? I readily admit that I worry excessively about subjects like this, but only because I tend to be a highly reflective thinker by nature and one who always takes the well-being of others into my overall awarenesses.

The creation of noise, or rather the thoughtless generation of excess amounts of it, is a topic that has been covered in countless books and essays over the past 50 years and although the average SFB scum-sucker regards excess noise generated by his machine to be a useful, nay COOL!, macho weapon in his quest for a modicum of personal identity (within the frame of his IQ limited reference), he is, after all, simply saying, non-verbally, “Hey! Look at me! Pay attention to me! Give me a sign that I EXIST!” More sophisticated and more highly educated individuals don’t have to revert to primitive hormonal, ritual displays of personal strength, power and/or status (like creating excess cacophony with outrageously noisy vehicles) since they have a far broader range of personal assets from which to choose in promoting themselves or their best interests.

In the cauldron of the modern, endemic ‘social anomie’ (misidentified as ‘social media’) we all float within, everyone nevertheless wants to stand out, to be recognised as somehow being distinct from the crowd. Primitively developed people (e.g. the modern American equivalent of ‘OOG’, the Neanderthal) revert to primitive means of self-advertisement. Gorillas in the wild thump their chests: three-brain-cell human morons in high-powered cars gun their motors around pedestrians, hospitals dog-walkers and the elderly. It’s their crude way of saying “I may be an intellectual insect but I can still irritate the reactive hell out of you!”

This is also precisely the very same Pavlovian mechanism behind problematic excessive dog-barking behavior: ANY attention paid to a dog that persistantly barks to get our attention (for treats, meals, walks or whatever) serves as a positive reinforcement to that pup that will encouarge it to further persist in this annoying habit. [Canine behavioral experts tell us that the only truly effective response we should employ is to completely ignore him. This same rule essentially applies to dealing with our less-than-gifted, obnoxious young rebels-without-a-cause and it is interestingly the same advice our parents (those of us with more 'involved, concerned parents, that is) gave us as kids who are being bullied or picked-upon by peers. Thus, effectively speaking, it ultimately becomes a matter of patience, perseverance and stoic forbearance to see who comes out on top...the dog (kid) or the owner (parent)...in the observance of this particular bit of applied wisdom.]

Sadly, perhaps tragically, the popular diversity mindset that automatically spews out the ‘Diversity is a blessing’ mantra fails to distinctively differentiate between those ‘diverse’ populations that have a socially responsible, positive and contributory (all-inclusive and TRULY altruistic communal) nature from those who simply seek to mark themselves off from the herd by employing cruder means (like the noisy automobile driver, who uses annoying car noises and recklessness to force an involuntary response from you, thus prompting your ‘recognising’ his individuality and yielding to him this pathetically half-baked surrogate of what he perceives or defines as ‘respect’).

But this is all merely an explanation of the dynamics involved in filling an otherwise reasonably quiet void with ‘irritating’ noise, in a confined social setting. Sadder still, all this is symptomatic in a far greater and more pervasive context of the sort of deleterious mechanisms B.F. Skinner so famously studied and wrote about.

So narcissistically myopic have we as a nation become that most of us no longer regard ‘noise’ as a non-essential, non-requisite in our daily lives and we have been progressively conditioned to regard high levels of ambient noise as merely part and parcel of the ‘scientific progress’ we Yankee capitalists embrace as our chief secular deity in America.

I address here our society's ‘ordinary’ run-of-the-mill proles…those who, probably also younger, have both higher levels of auditory health (good hearing) and the higher tolerance margins (for sonic discomfort) that attend youthful good health.

As a medical person and also as someone naturally given to meditation and reflectivity who was brought up to revel in and worship the vast silences of our natural resources, landscapes and natural areas, I am far more well versed in the potential impact and/or damaging aspects of unhealthy sound levels that exceed those regarded as ‘safe’ (that is, that don’t by their very volume pose health risks) than most. Of course, I am also afflicted by latent ADD, which makes noisy environments FAR more annoying and problematic.

Additionally, two years ago, due to an unfortunate ‘fluke’ circumstance I experienced involving the discharge of a handgun in close proximity to me while not wearing ear protection, I sustained a certain degree of traumatic high-frequency hearing loss. Loss of higher frequency discernment in the audible sound spectrum imposes some notable liabilities, among them a decreased ability to listen to and appreciate the full dynamic range of music…which to me, as a musically inclined individual, is a tragic turn of events! I so used to enjoy listening to good music (yes, that ‘white racist Northern European music’ so often sharply criticized by today’s ‘woke’ SFB harpies, that I call the Baroque and Romantic ‘classics’).

Furthermore, higher, shriller sounds are more difficult to fathom and understand. A good example to illustrate this is the vocal pitch of young females, whose high soprano voices all take on a frightfully irritating tone (something experienced especially while watching news media broadcasts, since young women have practically taken over commercial mass media these days as news anchors, reporters and so forth).

These are just some of the liabilities that naïve ignorance of the healthy limits of excessive sound generation provokes among so many of our thoughtless younger individuals today.

At any rate, for all of the foregoing reasons I find myself (like it or no), after due consideration, involved in a sort of ‘cultural war’ against all forms of ‘woke’ social and anarchistic social deviance in American society.

Further reflection as I amble down this particular trail of reflective thought...[Caution, kids! Don’t try this at home! It might make you more socially responsible and aware (perish the thought!)]…prompts me to harken to the fact that I am a product not just of hated ‘Racist White Northern European’ (LoL) culture, but an inheritor of certain strong Germanic cultural traits that place an extraordinary emphasis on social and communal harmony, the common weal and collective civic stability. These are, coincidentally, all basic Germanic values: they stress promotion and exercise of personal responsibility so as to recognise and protect the rights of others in any shared environment. It’s this sense of values that prompts people of German cultural heritage to actively encourage order (a tendency often severely criticized by those who have the least possible sense of exactly WHAT that is) and communal cleanliness/hygiene and/or health/safety.

Today’s rebellious youthful social anarchist considers, functionally speaking, this sort of collective value-set as repugnant and antithetical to personal freedom. We’ve seen excellent examples of this in the sort of rampant rioting, disorder, and gratuitous material destructiveness that accompanied the BLM protests, this past year. Witnessing that sort of behavior on media coverage, I can assure you made my blood run cold, as it would any responsible person of European extraction. Fortunately, we ‘Northern-European-Americans’ are a bit more rational and equanimous in our problem solving these days than we were, back during the days of the brutal, violent ‘Thirty Years War’ that so devastated Europe, as Protestant and Roman Catholic adherents fought each other for socio-religious hegemony. Or even during the days of the ‘Third’ Reich. [Lest there be any doubt in anyone’s mind, that greatly feared Leftist Progressive ‘boogeyman’ the ‘woke’ waste so much time denigrating and warning us about (e.g. the ‘extreme right’, who are as wacko as those on the extreme left), constitute a painfully small percentage of the overall American population.]

But of course, today’s youthful social anarchist is still experientially wet behind his ears, never having had to either directly cope with and survive under any of the excessively brutal socialist regimes of the past years (prior to his birth) or even study them objectively in school. Had he done either, he would have realised all too well that socialism, like Communism (and after a fashion even the sort of materialist consumer-Capitalism disease we Americans are afflicted with, to be fair), and most all other forms of social organisation and/or government are equally doomed to fail! But especially so socialist and Communist regimes, since regardless of how egalitarian their rhetoric, sooner or later they succumb to the age-old ‘power-grab’ dictator game (show me a single one, ever, that did not!). Instead, as ignorant of history as our young revolutionary is, and as full of romantic, idealistic youthful convictions as he fancies in himself, we find him trying his best to tear down and destroy whatever social order we may have at present, eternally unmindful of the fact that no system is ever perfect. But that doesn’t mean we should give up entirely and tear everything down, bereft of a better system to resort to, in order to start anew.

America is, despite all its myriad faults, its pimples and blemishes, and its low moments, all we have and it is worth not just preserving that tradition of both freedom and ‘correction of ills’, but constantly trying to use our reasoning ability, our integrity and out social awareness to improve our admittedly somewhat flawed system!

It is all of this, along with another element in particular, that has led us to continue to be a nation of rebels without a cause in our collective daily lives. And here I refer to the past 76 years of American economic life elapsed since the end of WW2, that singularly unique-in-all-history period of unbridled prosperity that has not just resulted in our present grossly, inadequately distributed prosperity but also in turning us (both young and old alike) into a nation of ‘soft’, coddled, spoiled and supremely self-centered, self-focused and physically weak individuals who seem to have completely lost the merest vestigial fragment of awareness of what it is to come together as ‘Americans’, rather than as a horrifically factionalised, disunited aggregate of unbounded, unregulated ‘rugged individualists’.

The traditional American worship of rugged individualism, which stood us in such good stead as we opened-up and ‘subjugated’ the formerly wild, wide-open vastness of what is today’s American nation (tragically simultaneously subjugating its indigenous peoples at the same time), served its purpose but today that ethic of ‘me first’ that prevails in opposition to ‘the collective good’ is both archaic and terminally obsolesced. That is NOT to say that the philosophic governing philosophy of socialism is an adequate substitute; rather that we need to develop…collectively and cooperatively…new means and methods of solving pressing problems that affect us all.

Anarchy, socialism and Communism have all shown themselves time and time again to be highly destructive systems and ultimately…no matter how seemingly promising…they are all destined to fail. Our younger people fail to realise that, QED.

The sort of collectivism that is needed instead, is more of something stemming from a ‘personal quality’…one that will enable us to humanely recognise and benefit the pursuit of our common needs effectively on both a national and a local level. Part of that can start with the awareness that such things as ‘noise reduction’ (preservation of naturakky occurring silence, whenever and wherever possible), observing rules and regulations, observing speed limits, etc., etc., as are all ultimately intended to help us mutually ‘enjoy’ that spirit of ‘diversity’ that the leftist progressive gives so much empty (or distorted) lip service to!

Lots of things to think about here, to be sure, but speaking from a strictly personal basis, you can REALLY help me out by refraining from inflicting the unmuffled roar of your hyper-modified (street-illegal) car on our ears at night, when we’re all trying to sleep! If you want to make loud noises, knock yourself out…but PLEASE go to a sanctioned racetrack or somewhere away from urban population centers to do it! [I speak here as someone who engaged in my share of ‘sanctioned auto-racing' as a member of the Sports Car Club of America (San Francisco Region), racing cars at Laguna Seca and Sears Point, so I do have some greater awareness of that which I refer to, here!] Been there, done that!

For those who still persist on engaging in this sort of puerile behavior for kicks, be advised that I have been told that Hell has a special place where youthful miscreants who insist on creating an excessively annoying ruckus, late at night on our local freeways, are physically strapped to a table with mega-bass, high volume speakers aimed directly at your ears and mere inches from your head, blaring incoherent speeches by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi! And it goes on FOREVER (also spelled: ETERNITY!

Be forewarned, kiddies: Karma can be such a bitch!...

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Unrelated Postscript:

I try not to watch commercial media television, as a rule, but when I do (this is beginning to look like a meme, isn’t it?), I often resort to the ‘mute’ bottom on my remote, since watching all the anchors, reporters and whomever is flapping their gums soundlessly is SO much more amusing than listening to the audio feed (or being forced to listen to the attending advertising ‘messages’).

This sort-of ‘disarms’ the carefully constructed marketing messages that are the cash-crop product of millions of dollars of consults with psych firms, rendering them delightfully meaningless and absurd. I can’t think of a better, more satisfying way of getting back at advertisers (who regard us, all, the consuming public, as little more than a bunch of retarded 12-year-olds).

Lately, however, I’d had these fantasies about devising an AI filtering-circuit on my remote that automatically cuts the audio (and perhaps even the video feed) whenever an advertising message cuts intrusively into a program. After carefully observing and analysing today’s typical ‘ad’, it has become quite obvious to me that the current advertising message MO promotes the use of a distinctive pattern of image cuts-and-clips, in-and-out takes, by the camera. Typically, these consist of a few 'header' scenes or images that are shown for about 4-5 seconds, followed by about 6-8 quick cuts of other images, again followed by a 4-5 second image…and again followed thereafter by the same in-and-out quick image clips. This is apparently such a universally adopted ‘school of media advertising’ mandate that no matter what station you are watching, all the ads follow pretty much exactly the same formula!

This is likely the result of extremely expensive and careful corporate-sponsored studies of viewer viewing characteristics that (I am guessing) indicate that quick, almost subliminal images are basically all that our modern youthful media sudience is capable of registering and retaining. [Another term for this phenomenon is ‘attenuated attention span’, which characterises a great part of our population, who have been progressively socialized to think (that’s the wrong term, obviously…a better term might be ‘react to‘) in short, quick takes, rather than with more lengthy reflective processes requiring rational analysis.] If you watch television media advert segments carefully, you’ll quickly see what I refer to, it’s SO very obvious.

Be all this as it may, given this clearly formulaic predictability, it should be easy to devise an AI audiovisual sensory feedback circuit on your typical remote control (linked directly to the mute button) that instantly detects and differentiates advertising content from regular program content, thereby automatically switching to ‘mute’ mode whenever an ad begins! How delightful that would be. I’ve no doubt that should such an AI device ever be developed, to help us block out the nauseatingly smarmy commercial hard-sell pitches we must all suffer through otherwise on TV, it would make some bright individual a very wealthy ‘next-gen’ Mark Zuckerfuc*er media personality!

And remember folks, if such a device ever appears on the market, you heard about it first here!

[By the way, you can spare me your arguments that ‘someone has to pay for (e.g. ‘sponsor’) programs, since they aren’t really free’… What I object to is not advertising per se, but rather the manner in which it is crudely thrust upon us (i.e. the callous, insensitive manner in which corporations toy with our powers of focus and concentration by suddenly interjecting commercial drivel so disruptively right in the middle of what otherwise may well be thoughtful or serious content). It is NOT necessary to do this to sell stuff, folks.

There are several ways that commercial entities can alter their advertising methods to better suit our reflective abilities/sensitivities. One of them you commonly see employed on broadband media, wherein a brief message appears in the upper left part of the screen during a movie, advising us that ‘commercial message break will commence in...’…and then counts down the seconds, so you can react accordingly without sustaining a disruptive derailment of your train of thought.

Another is to do what BBC used to do, a few decades or so ago, and that is show ALL commercial messages at the end of the broadcast day, one after the other in succession; I grant you corporations wouldn’t like that a whit, but since they regard us so cavalierly, as merely a bunch of what a friend delights in calling consumer 'sheeple', why the ^%$.* should we care about their tender corporate sensitivities, eh?