On Monday the Science Men announced that there is seasonably flowing water on Mars.

Remember when the Science Men said there was no water, anywhere in the universe(s), except on Earth, because Earth—just like the Religion Men also did say—was just so Special?

They are so cute. The Science Men.

Today we know water is everywhere. There are at least 60 billion planets with water. There are stars pouring forth, every second, a hundred million times the water, that is flowing through the Amazon. There are moons pregnant with water. And, as Muhammad correctly said: "All that is created, comes of water."

Which is why something needs to be done about these maniacs like Elon Musk. Who has already decreed Mars is "a fixer-upper of a planet," that needs to be continuously bombarded with nuclear missiles, so as to make it more of a planet like What He Wants.

No. Instead Musk should be given a brain scan, which will reveal he needs to be placed in a Home. And Mars should then be left alone. No nukes. No humans should go there. And the probes need to be stopped, too. Because as this wise woman this week observed, "ultra-sensitive space instruments and their associated electronics [a]re now made of materials too delicate to withstand heat sterilisation." And thus they are sent into the great wide open contaminated with earthly detritus. The equivalent, then, of the Spanish smallpox-conquistadors, who devastated, destroyed, depopulated, the American continents.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjptgWBr2n8]

Arthur C. Clarke, in his short story "Before Eden," recounts the journey of a couple of humans to Venus. Where they encounter a flowing crimson carpet, which they realize is alive. All excited, they climb back aboard their ship, for the return to Earth. But they leave behind a little garbage, tightly sealed in a plastic bag.

For a while nothing moved in the greenly glimmering, fog-bound landscape; it was deserted by man and crimson carpet alike. Then, flowing over the wind-carved hills, the creature reappeared. Or perhaps it was another of the same strange species; no one would ever know. It flowed past the little cairn of stones where Hutchins and Garfield had buried their wastes. And then it stopped. It was not puzzled, for it had no mind. But the chemical urges that drove it relentlessly over the polar plateau were crying: Here, here! Somewhere close at hand was the most precious of all the foods it needed—phosphorous, the element without which the spark of life could never ignite. It began to nuzzle the rocks, to ooze into the cracks and crannies, to scratch and scrabble with probing tendrils. Nothing that it did was beyond the capacity of any plant or tree on Earth—but it moved a thousand times more quickly, requiring only minutes to reach its goal and pierce through the plastic film. And then it feasted, on food more concentrated than any it had ever known. It absorbed the carbohydrates and the proteins and the phosphates, the nicotine from the cigarette ends, the cellulose from the paper cups and spoons. All these it broke down and assimilated into its strange body, without difficulty and without harm. Likewise it absorbed a whole microcosm of living creatures—the bacteria and viruses which, upon an older planet, had evolved into a thousand deadly strains. Though only a very few could survive in this heat and this atmosphere, they were sufficient. As the carpet crawled back to the lake, it carried contagion to all its world. Even as the Morning Star set its course for her distant home, Venus was dying. The films and photographs and specimens that Hutchins was carrying in triumph were more precious even than he knew. They were the only record that would ever exist of life's third attempt to gain a foothold in the solar system. Beneath the clouds of Venus, the story of Creation was ended.

Clarke was good with end-of-the-world stories.

In "No Morning After," kind aliens detect that Earth's sun is about to go nova, and try desperately to telepathically contact humans, to assure them that they can cross, courtesy these aliens, over to a human-survivable world, and before the Big Fry, in 72 hours, arrives. But the only person they succeed in contacting is a morose man blind-drunk. Who believes he is imagining them. For two days he's so hungover he can't properly remember the contact. On the third day, he's just too busy, fucking. And so, on the fourth day, the world is no more.

In "The Nine Billion Names Of God," Tibetan monks contract with an American computer firm to ship a machine out to their remote monastery. The monks, for three centuries, have there been dedicated to compiling all the "real" names of God, in an alphabet of their own devising. They reckon there are about nine billion of these names. And the computer will cut down the compiling time from 15,000 years, to 100 days. A couple of white boys are sent out with the computer. And, as the machine nears the end of its run, the head monk tells one of them—as he relates to his fellow white boy—that when all the names have been compiled, "the human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won't be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy." The monk, asked if this means, "the end of the world," replies: "It's nothing as trivial as that." The white boys, afeared the monks will have a freak-out, when the computer spits out the last of the names, and nothing happens, ride down the mountain, ahead of completion-time. Which, when said time is reached, Clarke describes through their eyes: "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

And in "The Star," Clarke puts a priest aboard a spaceship, traveling way out there, into the far cosmos, to encounter the dead ruins of a warm and wondrous civilization, all its members perished, as its sun went nova, to provide what on Earth was regarded and recorded as the Star of Bethlehem.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBPJEBL06U]

Proving, once again, that the United States does not have a monopoly on allowing nutbars and nutbags to serve as elected officials, Russian legislator Vyacheslav Nikonov this week wildly ejaculated that NASA deliberately timed its Mars-water announcement to Interfere with Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech before the United Nations.

"Putin's speech was, of course, the central element of the UN General Assembly session," State Duma Deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov, who is the chairman of the legislature's education committee, was quoted by the state-run TASS news agency as saying late on Monday.

"It is no coincidence that the United States took such a significant and unprecedented action as [holding] a NASA news conference where the discovery of water on Mars was announced at the same time as Putin's speech," Nikonov said.

"The discovery of water was, of course, a major global event for all English-language media," Nikonov said. "This means that Putin's speech had to be killed by something very serious," he said.

It is true that both Vladimir Obama and Barack Putin spoke before the United Nations Monday. Below is a video of their speech.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wstIBq2H0z8]

Here, we are now, slowly, entering the season of fire. Fire, as in the wood stove. Rather than in the outdoor air temperature. Or racing across a hillside.

I certainly hope newspapers don't die before I do, because I appreciate them as firestarter. When fire season comes, I gather up free newspapers, from here and from there, and I glance through them, as I feed them into the Fisher.

The other night I was perusing, as I burned, this thing called Senior Plus Lifestyle. And I was startled to espy in it a headline reading "Simple Homemade Bath Salts."

What the fuck? thought I. Why are these geezers teaching their fellow walkeroids to brew up synthetic psychosis?

But then I studied the text. And discovered it referenced old-fashioned bath salts. The stuff you dump in the tub to help with the arthritis and rheumatism, and whatever else it is that old people get.

This, I realized, was a real generational divide. Young people, if any happened to stumble upon this story, would be sorely disappointed, that it did not present the hows whys and wherefores of cooking up the sort of toxic sludge one is inclined to ingest when it is deemed Necessary to go completely out of one's mind and thereby start chewing on some stranger's face.

There are now 70,000 "official" ways to get sick and die. Including having your face chewed off by a bath-salts sufferer. And the US government has catalogued all of them. I am glad Joseph Heller is no longer alive. He tended to obsess upon ailments. The weirder and more obscure they were, the more he would go, fascinated, into The Fear. It was thus probably inevitable that he would eventually actually be struck with a non-ordinary affliction, Guillain-Barre syndrome. Anyway, if this list were around when he was alive, he probably would have spent so much time in it, he never would have found time to write.

They have found a sea turtle that glows in the dark. When the power goes out, you could wander around the house with this creature, searching for your flashlight.

Russian artist Irina Romanovskaya paints portraits of Russian President Vladimir Putin. With her breasts.

"Using your breasts to paint is more complicated, it's labor intensive, and slow," Romanovskaya says. "Any mistake can mean you have to start all over again."

The artist has also breast-painted portraits of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, fascist buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and a St. Petersburg football player known as "Hulk."

Romanovskaya says she hopes her breast-work will encourage politicians to recognize "the role of artists in society."

"I would like the politicians to pay attention to the artists because nobody pays any attention to artists.

"They are on their own doing something. I would like the authorities to pay attention to them and then somehow start helping them."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn003zWQTUY]

Putin has been known to publicly appreciate breasts, so perhaps Romanovskaya's art meets with his approval.

In its ongoing jihad against Wrong Food, the Russian government maintains a "hotline" to "receive messages about illegal imports and sales of banned products."

The hotline service is technically for reporting the commercial sale of prohibited food, and the ban isn't supposed to apply to foreign products brought into Russia for personal use. Still, packs of jamon and jars of caviar have reportedly been confiscated at Moscow's airports, and at least one keen-nosed (and, reportedly, drunk) citizen of Vladivostok already called the police on his neighbors after smelling the aroma of someone cooking an illegal Polish goose.

The government has destroyed a total of 738 tons of Wrong Food over the past two months. As it meanwhile considers a US-style food stamp program.

To deal with an economic shock that has spurred inflation into double digits and pushed 3.1 million Russians below the poverty line in the first quarter of this year alone, the Industry and Trade Ministry this month submitted a proposal modeled on the U.S. food stamp program to help low-income and out-of-work people.

Deputy Minister Viktor Yevtukhov said on Thursday: "The number of potential program participants, according to our calculations, is in the order of 15 to 16 million people." RIA Novosti quoted him as saying that according to preliminary estimates the plan would require 240 billion rubles — or around 15,000 rubles ($225) per person.

State statistics agency Rosstat said in July that 22.9 million people — about 16 percent of the population — were below the poverty line at the end of March, meaning they had incomes of less than 9,962 rubles ($150) per month.

There are no food stamps in US jails. As sometimes there is no food.

Five Florida law jockeys have been fired for bribing juvenile inmates to attack other juvenile inmates. The bribes were food. Some of the attacked children, are dead. Dead because their fellows do not get enough to eat. So that they can be bribed into violence. With a $1 honey bun.

Elord was booked into the Miami lockup on Aug. 27 on charges of armed robbery. He left on a stretcher four days later after being jumped by as many as 20 other detainees, authorities said. It is not yet clear what led to the melee in which the teen was injured. But in the wake of Elord's death, lawyers for delinquent children, as well as Elord's former foster mother, have told the Miami Herald that it has been common practice for officers to use treats as an inducement for detainees to punish other kids.

The Herald first learned of the alleged connection between honey buns and beatings the day after Elord died, when his short-term foster mother described the practice in detail to a reporter, who then asked the public defenders in Miami-Dade and Broward counties if they were aware of it.

The next day, an assistant public defender told Osborne, his boss, that detainees at the Miami lockup—most of whom are represented by their office—had disclosed being offered honey buns by guards looking for someone to hurt another detainee.

"When I asked [the lawyer], 'Why honey buns?' he stated these kids are incarcerated, so they don't get anything like that in here. In here, a honey bun is like a million dollars," Osborne told the Herald.

"Sometimes it’s Skittles," Osborne said. "It's not always honey buns. Sometimes it's Snickers. If they really want a child hurt, and they really want to ensure a kid will do it, the big treat is any kind of fast food, like a cheeseburger."

Clients of the Broward Public Defender's Office have told their lawyers that officers will order a pizza or Chinese food and offer leftovers to kids "who are willing to do their bidding."

Part of the problem, [Broward County Chief Assistant Public Defender Gordon] Weekes said, is that the teenagers in DJJ custody seldom are given enough food to gain the caloric intake their bodies require. "These are teens, and all they want to do is eat and eat and eat and eat, because they're growing," Weekes said.

The use of rewards for kids who fought with each other sticks with Osborne to this day. "I've never forgotten that moment," she said. When she asked one youth why kids would so readily beat up other kids, his answer haunted her.

"You don't know," the youth replied. "You'd do a lot for a Snickers."

That was quite a meal, set out for Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House last Friday. Wild mushroom soup with black truffle. Butter poached Maine lobster with spinach. Shiitake and leek rice noodle rolls. Grilled cannon of Colorado lamb with garlic fried milk and baby broccoli. Poppyseed bread and butter pudding with meyer lemon curd lychee sorbet.

No honey buns.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E16YpPFa79k]

Sorry. I should have warned that, for that one, you would need Medicine.

Guests at the Xi dinner had delivered more than $18.9 million to US politicians over the past eight years.

Years ago I was leafing through a Chinese cookbook, and I came upon two seemingly unrelated passages that, together, elegantly expressed why there had been revolution in China.

The first noted that great masses of Chinese people sought to subsist, day in and day out, year after year, on rice, soya, vegetables, and sometimes a little chicken. The second reported that, meanwhile, the fucks, they commonly consumed "light" meals of some 40 courses, while dinner always featured well over 100.

Yeah. That's the sort of thing that will do it.

Of course, these days, the fucks, they are again in the ascendant, there in China. Because that's just the way it goes. As the big wheel turns.

In Shanghai, on New Year's Eve 2014 into New Year's Day 2015, dozens of people were trampled to death when crowds went wild in avaricious stampede attempting to grasp US $100 bills floating down from a nightclub. The money, it developed, was "fake"—resembling US currency, but bearing the name of club M18. Stacks of the stuff had been placed on tables as festive party favors. Someone got the bright idea to shower it upon the people. And so, the people died.

That the people died stampeding for fake American money was first widely reported by the Chinese themselves. But the government quickly decided this story was ungood, and so it was removed from Reality. For the government did not want this deadly public spectacle, vividly illustrating the sorry truth that this allegedly "communist" nation has devolved into a disgusting dung-heap of money-grubbers. The place now infested with more billionaires, and nearly more millionaires, than any country on earth. And, as Shanghai demonstrates, inhabited by people who will actually trample one another to death, to get to money. Even phony money.

The Shanghai money-snuff occurred at the feet of a statue of Chen Yi. Chen Yi didn’t do money. When, 80 years ago, Chen Yi tied himself to a tree, so he wouldn’t shake with the pain, when he poured herbal medicine into a festering bullet wound in his thigh, it was not so his nation could become a putrid septic tank of billionaires, where people celebrating a New Year's that is not even China's—Chinese New Year occurred this year on February 19—would kill one another in a maddened scramble for phony dollars from Yankeetown.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc1KsSmsGdo]

I used money yesterday. I bought a tree.

I tried to pay in shells, but the nursery people aren't ready for that. Yet.

It's a birch tree. I live on a Birch Street, so I figured there should be a birch tree here. It's a European white birch. Which apparently is known throughout much of the world as a silver birch. Because nothing can ever have just one name.

At the nursery, it was neglected. It was shoved behind a couple quaking aspens, which were laughing at it. It had clearly been there for some time, because it is well over 25 feet tall, but the nimrods had never moved it out of a five-gallon container. As a result, even as it is yearning into the sky, its trunk is wee. When I rolled it up to the counter, the nursery man was Ashamed, and knocked a third off the price. It will be delivered next Friday. That will give me time to dig a big hole, have a heart attack, go to the hospital, there be treated, and then released, to receive the tree's delivery.

It does not want hot, dry soil, which is what I have here, it wants cool, moist soil, which I do not have here, it is sensitive to even short periods of drought or heating of the soil, which is what we now have here, as California transforms into Mongolia. But I don't care. I will site it down a little from the pear tree, under which is the old-style metal pail, from which the birds and the squirrels drink. Every morning I have to empty, clean, and refill this pail, because in the night the raccoons come and muck it up with their grubby paws. So, after I do that, I will turn the hose on the birch, and thus will thrive this bog tree. It likes to live in Siberia and Xinjiang, two regions currently occupied by imperial powers. It is thus right and meet that it grow here, in a region similarly occupied.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_y3mSXcbE]