Monday, March 7th 2022

It’s 3:00 a.m. and I’ve been up for about an hour. Why? Who knows. I could talk about an exceptionally large dinner. I could also talk about how the temperature reached minus eight yesterday before finally warming back up. This was in the evening when I was trying to relax. I finally found a combination of drinking hot tea, playing 6 minute guitar improvisations and the temperature finally coming back up to fight the cold. But now I’m up and my mind has nowhere to go.

Video number one is about military spending for the last 150 years.

We know the winner already. But if you consider fascism to be an integral part of thinking and the money spent on military power being the most important thing on this planet, perhaps we understand why we are in an ecological crisis. We are not spending money on food but on death. We are not spending money on education but brutality. We are not spending money on science but on ways to destroy each other. Technically, I think this means we waste our money.

Are there countries in the world that do not spend money on the military?

Google does not seem to want to answer this question well. But I did find out while looking at this website that Panama and Costa Rica have abolished their armies. According to the website though, they are not seen as having a very high quality of life. But I guess that relates to what we consider a quality life. I mean, what if quality of life simply meant the absence of violence? Or what if it meant the absence of slavery? What if a genuine quality of life means the absence of technology or the absence of noise pollution or the absence of fear generally?

What are the least polluted countries?

You have to search a little bit here but the general answer seems to be that Puerto Rico has the cleanest air. I think this has something to do with being relatively unsupported by the US government and being an island. People are still driving cars though. It’s just that the air gets cleaned because the pollution gets sent away from the island itself. In European lists, it seems that Norway and Sweden claim to be the greenest but again, they are high tech, people own a lot of cars and so this all would be rather relative.

What countries have the least gun violence?

The answer to this question seems to relate to gun laws. Countries with extremely strict gun laws have the least amount of gun violence and of course, vice versa. The logic here would relate to the fact that gun laws that restrict the amount of guns actually do work. Therefore the American argument in which they enjoy using the fallacy argument “you can’t get rid of all the guns so therefore we cannot restrict guns” means simply that there’s too much money being made on selling guns to agree to stop selling them. 

What countries have the longest history of peace?

There are a couple of places that seem to be showing up again and again on these lists. The website visionofhumanity.org seems to be a good place to hang out. Iceland, Denmark, New Zealand and Portugal show up on this list. And these countries are really interesting because they seem to be the countries with a history of the most progressive laws and laws that seem aimed at quality of life. Canada makes these lists too. I guess I have a bit of a bias for these first four countries. 

A little further down on this page there was a comment from The New York Times about years of human history without war.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history. How many people have died in war?

I guess I could Google this but I wonder what the definition of the word peace is. Let me take a stab at it myself and then I’ll look for the general vote. Google doesn’t know these answers but it takes a mathematical look at everything that’s on the internet to come up with its answers. The University of Google works.

I don’t think there’s one answer so I’m going to try for a list. This is in no particular order, it’s just the answers that come into my head.

• The absence of war
• The absence of violence
• The absence of laws restricting freedom
• The presence of a wide spectrum of education
• The presence of public discussion and universal voting rights
• High instance of people taking a vested interest in their communities
• Respect is highly valued
• Acceptance of diversity
• The importance of maintaining ecological balance
• The lack of economic insecurity or the presence of food, clothing and shelter security.

I feel pretty good about that list. Perhaps I could have added a lack of egotism or a lack of corruption. When you get down into the nitty gritty of it, the best you can hope for is too much food. If there’s definitely enough food but you’re not destroying the world around you to have it, there’s no reason to fight over the last slice of pizza. 

What is the definition of peace?

1. freedom from disturbance; tranquillity.

“he just wanted to drink a few beers in peace”

Similar:

tranquility

calm

calmness

restfulness

peace and quiet

peacefulness

quiet

quietness

quietude

silence

soundlessness

hush

noiselessness

stillness

still

privacy

privateness

seclusion

solitude

isolation

retirement

freedom from interference

Opposite:

noise

irritation

2. a state or period in which there is no war or a war has ended.

“the Straits were to be open to warships in time of peace”

Similar:

law and order

lawfulness

I don’t know whether I have been trained by Google to think like I do or not but they seem to go with my argument that it is the absence of problems. I really like this list that includes quite a few items about noise pollution. The second one has an interesting note to it in that it seems to point to the fact that war should be considered illegal. It doesn’t really matter if the leader of the country tells you to go kill someone or not. If the law states that we don’t kill each other and that murder, rape, theft and disturbance of property are wrong, it doesn’t matter who says that we abandon these laws.

Then we have the concept of who makes these laws and maybe this is where the flaw in the ointment is. Perhaps we need a set of laws for humanity and no longer give the right to countries to write and rewrite their own constitutions and laws to suit their own needs. If you’re not allowed to murder your neighbor, you’re not allowed to murder your neighbor and this means everyone.

There’s just one other video that I looked at that kind of got me started on this tirade. It’s a video from veritasium about how mathematics is flawed because there are some ideas that simply cannot be proved.

This argument seems to be at the heart of most oil business/conservative governments these days in that they tell us that the ecology doesn’t matter because the history of the world means something. Because there is an economic bias, nothing that you see on the internet can be believed. If news services exist to make money, they automatically wish to be the most dramatic possible and so you can’t believe what you see in the news. Because of these elements, nothing can be believed and therefore everyone is free to act chaotically.

I learned something about what they call “Russian mentality” from my daughter’s mother. What she used to do was to come up with any explanation that disallowed blame to fall on herself. It didn’t really matter what the situation was, as long as she could think of something to say, she remained free of guilt. I used to refer to this as the game called “who’s guilty?” and blamed Stalin for creating this type of nervousness.

I’ve since seen this everywhere from the president of the Republic of Belarus to people I know and meet around town. My daughter is amazingly good at this and she can just say something very quickly to relieve herself of any responsibility for anything at all.

I think another way to describe this is what we call spin.

To report or relay information to someone else in a way that makes their interpretation or understanding of it more palatable, acceptable, or favorable.

I think this is also referred to as putting a twist on something. Ironically, in the game of billiards when you put spin on a ball to change how the object ball moves after it’s been struck by the que, this is also known as putting English on it.

Fair enough.

I personally believe that this argument is justifying my current life situation very easily. The truth is that I’m lacking a few comforts that perhaps they enjoy in the city and certainly, this is a deterrent for a lot of people wanting to come stay with me. But as this is not a matter of voting, I think I’m quite happy with the result. If I live in a place that not too many other people want to live in and I personally enjoy it, I guess that makes this bloody Paradise. I don’t have a lot of voters standing around giving me their opinions. This would be the absence of noise. And on that list of synonyms for the word peace, there were an awful lot of words that had a lot to do with quiet.

So the truth is, when I look at my home, I have three loud abrasive and horrible neighbors and almost no problem with anyone else. Most everybody here lives a very quiet life. I don’t know why I ended up being so lucky to be surrounded by people that don’t understand the word peace.

Maybe it’s because these three families are not pensioners. The pensioners are pretty quiet. They mostly keep very accurate gardens and just go about their days quietly puttering around. The three families that continue to work seem to need an awful lot of noise and a lot of machines and they all love gasoline powered motors very much.

They are also the only ones here who are deaf. This means that they are completely insensitive to noise or literally, have evolved to believe that the world lives at 100 decibels.

Only one anecdote comes to mind about this noise business. My friend Losha, the electrician who just stopped by the other day, has a son who is a very talented hockey player. I always call him Gretzky because he scores two or three goals every time he plays. My ex partner and I went out to watch the kids play at the hockey arena and really enjoyed the game. They had broken the ice into two sections and had two games simultaneously going on for the kids. Our team, the team with my friend’s son, was very proud that they were the loudest group in cheering for their kids. And really, they were a good team, Gretzky scored I think 3 goals and we were ready to sign up as supporters.

They play these hockey games at the new ice Palace that the president constructed here in town and a little while later we saw a sign on the door advertising a hockey match. The name of the team was the same as the kids and we thought that this was their next match. It wasn’t. It was the local town team, the team that plays for the championship Belarusian one of its divisions.

This turned out to be a really big mistake.

Firstly, the place was packed with security, armed security, and we had to enter through a phalanx of soldiers and policemen. Secondly, they played the music in this rather tiny stadium at such a ridiculously loud level we couldn’t even stay past the first period. They never stop blaring the music and it felt like sitting under a tank or something like that. We both felt shell-shocked. And if you can imagine expecting to watch your children’s hockey game and ending up in a war, you can see why we haven’t been back since.

I guess I don’t really know what else I can say. I hope I’ve made a point here. It was pretty quiet yesterday. There wasn’t really much noise at all and I didn’t spend a lot of time reading news about the war. I think I heard something about a ceasefire. Maybe I should look.

Has the war ended in Ukraine?

No. I guess that’s all I really needed to know.

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I’m a fan of Saturday night live and this from Kate McKinnon was aired this weekend. It’s just a moment talking about a new law passed in the great state of Florida. Seriously, there is something very wrong with that state.

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