June 15, 2010 archive

A Diary was posted earlier on asking questions on subjects like “What is the Universe?”, etc. My response was a little lengthier than the typical “comment”, so I wanted to reframe the question below.

For awhile…

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I have actually given this question a bit of thought, and come to reject conventional thinking about the problem, which is why all the so-called accepted answers just lead off into more unresolved questions, and/or reverting to Centuries-old myth-making.

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Recall that Albert Einstein proved that Time itself was not linear, but in fact curved and flexible. This makes me think that we have to abandon conventional “linear” thinking about the Universe itself.

Recall also, that matter never disappears..but it is simply transformed into something else. For example, water evaporates and appears to be all gone, but really the matter itself still exists (just in a different form).

So therefore these questions about when did the Universe begin, how was it “created”, and such, are all moot, and not the correct approach to the analysis.  

The Universe always was and always will be….only the form is changing, and it is changing constantly, (expansion, contraction, etc.).

The matter will never either go away or be “created”, only the form will change.  

As for human beings, we are just one more mutation of matter, and an unpleasant one at that. I think human beings are destined to go the way of the Dinosaur — with all the Wars, the mass-violence, the mass-poverty, and all the Environmental damage borne of our own making.

As comedian George Carlin once said, Planet Earth does not need saving.  Planet Earth is going to be just fine.  It’s human beings that are f**cked.

There is no God.

There is no Universe.

There is no linear Time.

There is no Justice.

There is no Heaven.

There is no “Afterlife”.

There is however an unlimited supply of matter and mutation.

And there surely is Hell, for we see it all around us each and every day

of our tragic lives — and Hell always wins (just ask Dick Cheney, the dead Kennedys, or an oil-soaked pelican).

Now you know the truth, and can put down The Holy Babble, for it is written.

From Waxman’s letter to Hayward of today (June 14th) :

We are looking forward to your testimony before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Thursday, June 17,2010, about the causes of the blowout of the Macondo well and the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As you prepare for this testimony, we want to share with you some of the results of the Committee’s investigation and advise you of issues you should be prepared to address.

The Committee’s investigation is raising serious questions about the decisions made by BP in the days and hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. On April 15, five days before the explosion, BP’s drilling engineer called Macondo a “nightmare well.” In spite of the well’s difficulties, BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure.

In several instances, these decisions appear to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP’s own personnel and its contractors. In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.

The whole thing is a blast at BP :

http://online.wsj.com/public/r…