Plants, they have decided they would prefer not to, there with the climate change. And so, they are slowing it down.

The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries. It is called "Greening of the Earth and its Drivers," and it is based on data from the Modis and AVHRR instruments which have been carried on American satellites over the past 33 years. The sensors show significant greening of something between 25% and 50% of the Earth's vegetated land, which in turn is slowing the pace of climate change as the plants are drawing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Just 4% of vegetated land has suffered from plant loss.

This is in line with the Gaia [hypo]thesis promoted by the maverick scientist James Lovelock who proposed that the atmosphere, rocks, seas and plants work together as a self-regulating organism.

It is really rather odd, how Lynn Margulis, she has become an unperson. Margulis, together with Lovelock, they developed the Gaia hypothesis. But Margulis, she has since pretty much disappeared from the Gaia discourse. These days, it is Lovelock only.

I suppose this is just another manifestation of The Hairball Effect. In which women are creatures of duality: they are either shit, or penis receptacles. That's it. And visionaries? C'mon. No way. No way at all.

Trust that creepy, sinister vampire, the unholy onanist Zed Crud, to find himself a woman who is even more of a maniac than The Mad Bomber.

That would be Star Trek Head. Whom Crud says shall be his vice-president—if there happens to be something like a cataclysmic pole shift, and Crud thus becomes the president.

Michael Dukakis, last seen denouncing American foreign policy as dumbkopf-driven, he describes the Crud selection of Star Trek Head as "incomprehensible."

"Is there anybody in the United States that thinks Star Trek Head would be a first-rate president? I don't think so. Maybe there are five people that do," he said.

"I don't know of anything that qualifies Star Trek Head to be President of the United States, frankly. She's hardly had a distinguished career in business. She had a lot of problems. With all of the great women we have in this country, why would you go to Star Trek Head?"

Actually, Star Trek Head, she is not even a woman. As anyone who has watched the true-life documentary series Star Trek well knows, Star Trek Head is in truth but a fearsome projection, and of a chubby little eight-year-old boy. Clint Howard. Brother of Ron Howard. Who was Opie in The Andy Griffith Show. And there became so terrified, that Barney Fife, he was allowed to handle a gun, even with just the one bullet, that Fife had to keep in his pocket, not in the gun, that all of Howard's hair, it fell out. After which, They, felt Sorry for him. And so allowed him to become a film director. In which trade he has since proceeded to melt all of our minds. With absolute drivel like Grand Theft Auto, Ransom, and Rush.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SycxTpgVFk0]

Eight people were shot to death in rural Ohio, the perpetrators are as of this writing unapprehended, and the Barney Fife of a local sheriff, he says, "if you are fearful, arm yourself."

Right. That is just what the world needs. More people, in fear. And with guns.

These, they are the people of The Hairball.

Dave Duringer is a Laguna Hills attorney with a concealed weapons permit. He shouldered a "Don't Tread On Me" flag at the rally, wore a bulletproof vest and said he carried pepper spray as well as two pistols.

Duringer said the previous week he attended a Costa Mesa Hairball rally visited by gang members. "Given what happened, I think it is important to remind people how hot things can get because Herr Hairball is seeking real change. Gang bangers need to be warned, and ralliers need to be prepared."

The Hairball, he lost himself a voter, when Jakob Wagner, the kid who shot up the Wisconsin prom, he was dispatched unto the big sleep, by responding police officers.

"He was bullied a lot," said Emily Fisher, 19, who graduated from Antigo High School in 2015.

Fisher said students ganged up on Wagner, called him names and may have been violent toward him, in part because of poor hygiene. The bullying occurred since at least middle school and persisted through high school, although to a lesser degree, Fisher said.

Fisher said she was not good friends with Wagner, but that she had given him some car rides home. They also were in the same art class during their senior year of high school.

Wagner would talk about guns and weapons, and made replicas of them in art class, according to Fisher. While she said an interest in guns is not unusual in Wisconsin, which has a strong hunting culture, Wagner's behavior was concerning to her.

"Ever since we were younger, he was one of the kids you kind of watched out for," Fisher said in a phone conversation from Menomonie, where she now lives. "If someone was going to shoot the school, we thought it was going to be him."

Right. "Who would have thought?" Until it happens. And then, it develops, that just about everybody. Thought.

As they just stood aside. And watched. The bullying. For years and years and years. And then the careful crafting, of the replicas. Of the guns.

how would you feel
if the world was falling apart all around you
pieces of the sky were falling
in your neighbor's yard
but not on you

wouldn't you feel just a little bit funny
think maybe there's something
you ought to do

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOg8pY9G1AI]

Plants, they do not have guns. But they do have prions. And with these, they do not, as do the humans, get Mad Cow Disease. Instead, with prions, the plants form memories.

Lindquist's team already knew that yeasts use prions as a form of memory, and suspected that plants might too. Unlike in Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human equivalent of BSE or "mad cow disease," where prions multiply in the human brain with terrible consequences, prions in yeast are beneficial. They can help the organism use different nutrients and grow in new places.

Crucially, this ability persists over generations. "It could be a state that only lasts for 50 generations, or it could last for thousands and thousands of generations," says Lindquist.

The team applied techniques developed for finding prions in yeast to Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering mustard plant. Their method involves using specialised algorithms to search the full complement of proteins expressed by the plant. The researchers found four proteins involved in flowering that had portions that resembled prion-specific sequences in yeast. Next, the team replaced the prions in yeast cells with the prion-like protein sequences from Arabidopsis, and confirmed that the three of the four plant protein fragments did indeed behave like prions.

Or so, the Science Men, they think. About the prions, and the memory part. Refreshingly, one Science Man, he admits, that the Science Men, they, still, really don't Know.

"We don't know what it's actually doing in the plant. So we are trying to be cautious."

A more benign form of Mad Cow Disease, in the humans, it doesn't actually kill them. Instead, it causes the white people, to get tattoos, on their foreheads.

I have had to learn a fair amount about tattoos. Because many of the clients, they have them. And the police, the prosecutors, and/or the probation officers, they recurrently claim these tattoos, they are sinister—beacons of bad behaviors, that mandate these clients go to the prison. And so, I must needs assert, that this is not so.

Occasionally, I will run across a tattoo that stumps me. Like this one meth person, who had, on his back, a tattoo that read: "Heel Your Bitch."

What, I asked him, is that about?

He looked at me like I was bone-ignorant. "You know," he said, exasperated, "heel your bitch. Like, sometimes, you'll be walking, and your bitch, she'll try to walk right up next to you? Instead of behind you? Which is where the bitch belongs? Then, you need to heel your bitch."

Oh. Okay.

This fellow, he had been convicted of several crimes. Which it was my task to "mitigate." When I quizzed him about these crimes, it developed that, according to him, they were all the fault of some bitch or other.

He went to the prison. But not for long. Soon he was out, and then leading the police on a merry high-speed car chase, after which he ditched the car, and disappeared into the woods. That was the last I heard of him. Until I saw, in a tube, just the other day, that, at last, he has found his true calling. He is now the Northern California co-chair, of The Hairball For President campaign.

So I am reading this book. And it is called The Incredible Book Of Useless Information. And I realize, that the title, it is a Lie. Because the book, it says that "one-half of the human body's weight is oxygen."

And I am remembering about the obese humans, about how they now constitute one of every eight of the humans on the planet, a number which shall become one in five in 2025, and thus, by the Laws of Math, by the end of the century, every human on this earth, shall need to wheel around in a fat-cart.

And I am thinking that, if the obese humans, they each lost, oh, say, 100 pounds, that would mean 50 pounds, from each human, of oxygen, would be released back into the atmosphere. Since half a human's weight, is oxygen. And this oxygen, released from the slimming obese people, it would combine with the oxygen, that the plants are pumping out, as related at the dawn of this piece, above; and so, working together, the plants, and the people, of this here Gaia, they could really retard, climate change!

Gaia! By, gumby! See! She shall surmount this thing! Just like Lynn Margulis. She said!

The probation officers, they periodically go to these special schools and seminars and classes, where they learn new ways to put the clients in the prison.

A number of years ago, the probation officers, there in their reports, they suddenly started identifying the clients as "sociopaths," and/or "psychopaths." And therefore recommending that the clients, they definitely, needed to be put in the prison.

We knew, then, that the special schools and the seminars and the classes, they had instructed the probation officers, to begin so reporting. And thus it was my task to, as Edgar Allan Poe would say, ride, boldly, ride, to learn about, this sociopath and psychopath business.

What I learned, was that such humans—"sociopaths," "psychopaths"—they are actually exceedingly rare. There are almost none of them on this planet. The usual person, they can live their whole life, without encountering one. This is set forth, for instance, for mass consumption, in the true-life documentary film, Girl, Interrupted.

But oh no. In the years since, the sociopaths, and the psychopaths, they have gotten loose, from the probation officers, and they are now running utterly wild, all over the land. Every time one opens a tube, these days, some new great swath of humans, has been definitively classified as sociopath, or psychopath. CEOs. Politicos. Tubes people. Your boss. Your neighbor. Your cat. You.

I remember, years ago, a woman on Daily Kos, who used to haunt the Criminal Injustice diaries; she had read some living-in-fear tome that shrieked that one in every ten humans is a sociopath. And thus, this woman, she was firmly convinced, that all of the people in the prisons, they needed to be there. Else they might, some night, come, and sociopath her, there in her bed.

Now, today, the sociopath/psychopath, living-in-fear, it has spread, from fearing the prisoners. To fearing all, and every.

This sociopath/psychopath bollocks, it is just another Science Man fad. Which, in the course of things, shall inevitably recede. Into something resembling sanity. Like the Science Man fad, that the earth is flat. That maggots, they spontaneously leap forth, from meat. That, using mirrors, it is possible to write on the moon. That the "four humours," they are the fount of all Medicine. That "bleeding," it is the root of all healing. That the surface of the sun, it is cool, and is inhabited by aliens, with really enormous heads. That all women, they suffer from "penis envy." That black people, they are all dumber than monkeys, and should therefore be sterilized. That animals, they do not feel pain, and so it is a-okay to vivisect them, and all the live-long day, and well into the night. That human infants, they, too, do not feel pain, and so it is alright, to rip off parts of the penis, from the male ones, shortly after birth, and without anesthesia. That there are no other planets, in all the universe, but this one. That it is not possible, for consciousness, to travel faster than the speed of light. And that there is no life, anywhere at all, in all the universe(s), except on a modest little soundstage, tucked away, behind the palms, in Burbank, California.

And that it is an easy thing, to triumph, in the summer's sun, and in the vintage, and to sing on the wagon, loaded with corn; that it is an easy thing, to talk of patience to the afflicted, to speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer, to listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season, when the red blood is filled with wine, and with the marrow of lambs; that it is an easy thing, to laugh at wrathful elements, to hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan, to see a god on every wind, and a blessing on every blast, to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm, that destroys our enemies' house, to rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children, while our olive and vine sing and laugh 'round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers; then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill, and the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field, when the shattered bone hath laid him, groaning, among the happier dead; that it is an easy thing, to rejoice in the tents of prosperity; thus, could I sing; and thus, rejoice; but it is not so, with me.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-97XNCyAm5c]

In the meantime. We shall endure. Bollocks like this. That creative people, they are psychopaths.

Researchers at De La Salle University in Manila believe that psychopathic traits might actually be key to creativity.

The researchers, who examined 503 participants with gambling tasks and questionnaires, believe that impulsive risk-taking—a psychopathic trait—might be key to creative people's success.

The researchers said, "We argue that emotional disinhibition, in the form of psychopathic boldness, is actually integral to some creative personalities and functionally related to the creative process.

"Generally then, a creative field might not just shape a person into a more arrogant or dishonest personality, it might be actively selecting them, not for the sake of having disagreeable traits, but because such traits meaningfully co-vary with creativity itself."

This should certainly be heartening news for the Russian government. Which is fed up with Artyom Loskutov. Maybe, now, with this, the Science Men determining all the creative people, they are psychopaths, there is, at last, Reason, to shove Loskutov, into the psychiatric hospital. Like in the Old Days.

A creative person, a performance artist, Loskutov is today completely against the law in Russia. His very person, it is a violation.

Because, beginning in 2004, he inaugurated, in the Russian-occupied Siberian city of Novosibirsk, a May Day "Monstration," to mock, in absurdist terms, the clinically insane May Day parades, of Thanatos weaponry, through Moscow's Red Square.

Because everyone knows these government parades are both stupid and insane, Loskutov's annual Novosibirik Monstrations, they have, each year, attracted ever-more adherents.

But then Luskotov moved to the big no-no. Suggesting—politely, absurdly—that the Russians, maybe should get their occupying asses, the hell and gone, out of Siberia.

Loskutov has, in the years since, been eternally recurring in and out of various Russian pokeys. He is a man who awakes, each day, not knowing if this is the day that the occupiers will, again, take him away. For uttering such perfectly reasonable and sane remarks as, in the wake of Russia's reabsorption of Crimea, "they decided to tell us how great it is when some republic moves for self-determination. Okay, well let's apply this to other regions. Can Siberia allow itself this same rhetoric? It turns out it can't."

He has also faced the big house for selling Pussy Riot t-shirts, and placing icons of the then-imprisoned musicians out and about. Said icons, which equated the Pussy Rioters with the Virgin Mary, foamingly condemned, by the 10th Century Orthodox Church longbeards, who have brutally raped their way, with serene government approval, into every orifice of Russian life, as "desecrating venerated symbols."

Loskutov's planned August 2014 Monstration, which was intended to, again, publicly raise the smoke-signal of a Siberian Republic, was not only disallowed, but Russian authorities threatened to kick the BBC right out of the country, if it reported on it. The Russian government then further told the BBC to bung down the memory hole an interview with Loskutov. While meanwhile heaving into the hoosegow domestic Russian journalists who had spoken to Loskutov.

The Russian propaganda portal Sputnik News was in this melee deployed to try to subsume the BBC crisis, claiming Luskotov had emitted to the BBC words "which contained extremist views and calls for mass riots."

This was simply a lie. But then the nature and purpose of Sputnik, it is to lie. Sputnik, it is run by the babbling 12th Century baboon Dmitry Kiselyov. Who believes gay people who die in car accidents should have their hearts and other internal organs burned or buried, so as not to be inadvertently transplanted into The Normal People; that in the libertine homo-overrun Sweden "at age 12 there is already child impotency"; and that a 22 year-old murdered Russian, in coming out as gay, "provoked" his own slaying.

Knowing all this, President Vladmir Putin in December 2013 nonetheless personally appointed Kiselyov to head the 2300-person news agency Rossiya Segodnya, which includes Sputnik.

Yeehaw.

Loskutov is these days meanwhile still regularly revolving in and out of the prisons. He was last in the cooler in May 2015. His crime then was "an estimated 5,000 monstrators chanting nonsensical slogans and wearing bizarre brightly coloured costumes."

Loskutov is, in his place, in his time, so complete, so powerful, so right, that "[i]n 2013, Loskutov was informed by Russian authorities that he is no longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist."

No longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist.

He is, to them, that scary.

No longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist.

People, here, in these United States, they sure can talk tough. Let them, really, be tough. Let them be someone

No longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist.

The 2016 Novosibirsk Monstration, it was initially debarred, on the grounds that it would "pose a threat to public order and safety of citizens, generally accepted norms of morality, and religious values ​​of the Orthodox inhabitants of the city."

The Russian Orthodox longbeards, swinging their incense-reeking mircopeni, nauseatingly to and fro, again.

But then it was determined—once Loskutov had removed his name as one of the three petitioners for the Monstration; he is a non-person, don't you know—that the Monstrators, they would be permitted to march, but only wholly enveloped in the ranks of the newly-created, by the government, Vseshestvie, a pathetic cohort that attempts to co-opt Monstration, consisting of a "fresh look at May Day," where, like, the region's Young People, they can, you know, "go it alone, or the crowd in suits or without, with streamers, balloons and all that comes to mind."

What the government, it has here created, with its Vseshestive, is the equivalent of Spiro Agnew, in 1970, marching in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration, shyly flashing the peace sign, and chanting, every now and again, "right on."

It doesn't matter. The Monstrators, they are already triumphant. They have won. Already happened. The Russian government, it is over. Like all of the governments. There are, today, May Day Monstrations, in more than 20 Russian cities. Where the people bear signs, reading sentiments like "You Can't Paint The Seals In Purple." "Peace! Work! Meow!" "We Have The Right To Call An Avocado." "It's All Because Of Old Spice." "Forward To The Dark Past." "I Carnivaled This City." And "We Did Not Watch Fifty Shades."

These, are my people.

I remember, many years ago, the white people, there on Daily Kos, furiously arguing, over days and days, about whether it was the socialists, or the communists, or the anarchists, or the mainline union people, who first came up with the May Day labor holiday.

And I was like: who gives a shit? Whoever they were, they were totally Wrong. And should go in the corner, and sit there, under the duncecap. Because, May Day, it is not about some horror and anathema and mind- and soul-killing death-breath like working. May Day, and for millennia, it has been about fucking.

Details, they vary. In some places, particularly in the Celtic realm, this day was known as Beltane. Sometimes a woman and a man, recognized as particularly sympathetic to or skilled in the magic arts, would, representing the goddess and god themselves, couple in a ritualized ceremony, either observed or alone, and most often in a freshly seeded field.

Very often, "[y]oung couples were encouraged to test their fertility with Beltane trysts, and any babies born from Beltane were believed to be blessed by the Goddess herself." Pretty magical. Such witch children.

The traditional maypole, this represents the phallus, and the ribbons adorning it, they denote the labia. Christians, when they came to infect the world, they knew this, which is why they worked like twelve bastards, to get rid of the things. The medieval church tried to rename Beltane, calling it Roodmas, and urging people to shift their focus from the maypole to the cross. Didn't work out too well. Nobody, today, knows what the hell is a Roodmas. While everyone knows, what is a maypole.

When Protestants, they invented themselves—because Luther, he wanted to kill more Jews, and Henry, he wanted a different-one wife—May Day, it filled them with fury. "Men doe use commonly to runne into woodes in the night time, amongst maidens, to set bowes, in so muche, as I have hearde of tenne maidens whiche went to set May, and nine of them came home with childe,” grumped one Puritan. Another complained that, of the girls who go into the woods, “not the least one of them comes home again a virgin.”

Where they could, Puritan-type people commenced a crackdown—declaring maypoles illegal, dousing the traditional bonfires, stomping on those fetching and flirty garlands of flowers, wading in to put a stop to all that dancing, posting dour guards, to prevent any persons, with throbbing loins, from sneaking into the woods or the fields.

Such suppression is the reason why relatively little is really known about this day, and its once and future meanings and ceremonies. People had to keep quiet about it. For a long time. But the spirit remembers. And so does the body.

As it is written, "ancient peoples believed in sympathetic magic: that practice of a small, symbolic action representing a larger one. By making love in the fields, human beings believed they were helping make the earth more fertile, blessing it with their own activity of producing new life and abundance."

For many centuries, Science Men scoffed at such notions. Human beings, fucking in a field: they couldn't possibly have any effect on any crops planted therein! What dunces, those idjits were!

Except, even the Science Men, they just aren't so sure, about that, anymore. As Robert Anton Wilson observed:

Marcel Vogel has been studying plant consciousness and vegetative "telepathy" for ten years now. In one experiment, Vogel and a group of psychologists tried concentrating on sexual imagery while a plant was wired up with a polygraph to reveal its electrochemical ("emotional"?) responses to their thoughts. The plant responded with the polygraph pattern typical of excitement. Vogel speculates that talking of sex could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy, such as the "orgone" claimed by Dr. William Reich. If this is true, the ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly seeded fields might indeed have stimulated the fertility of the crops, and the shamans are not as naive as we like to think.

"Well," as a lover once murmured to me, as we lay, conjoined, in a freshly furrowed field, one fine May Day, doing our best, our part, for and of and with and from and being, Gaia, "what do you know."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0sd8lML-S8]