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No doubt this is the question on everyone's mind these days! Or, I am a conceited bastard who thinks everything is about me, and the bans applied to me are really about me, and not about the random imposition of power!

Whence aristarchus? Interesting, my recent experience with mod bombing had my karma reduced to almost single digit. Now I am not privy to the inter databases as someone like The Mighty Buzzard is, for some reason, but I could tell that perhaps several of the spam mods (-10, you know!) were not called for, were in error, and should have been rescinded immediately. This was not the case, and after a campaign of posting "no comment" to current articles, either my spam mods were rescinded or my fellow soylentils responded to my mayday call, and restored my karma. But since my spam mods were not immediately rescinded, I felt it was apropos to spam mod the most visible face of the right-wing bias, and although I have no evidence to suggest such, the spam modder of me, The Mighty Buzzard.

  Those of use who are mere Soylentils get some idea of how things go down. If I rip Runaway1965 a new one over some stupid thing he has posted, I can expect to get several down mods, in that or other threads. Same thing if I have to, once again! correct the obviously rebutted khallow. Now, I am not suggesting, and I do not know, that these fine Soylentils which whom I have obvious disagreements, are down modding me just because I disagree with them. But the pattern persists.

So, after we have entered upon the "Spam mod aristarchus four times", and "aristarchus spam mods The Mighty Buzzard once" situation, things have been, well, "fluid". My karma has gone back up to the max. But curiously, it does not stay there. I seem to dip in to the low 40's, and then back up to 50, depending on where the sun is shining on the earth. Well, that is as may be. But if a majority of Soylentils are so opposed to my posts, I can only assume that my time here is wasted. Except, of course, my education of khallow and insulting of Runaway, and dismissing of jmorris, and . . . spam modding of The Marginally Brossander! Well, I was workig on a real journal on Ethics for Soylentils. It may not see the light of day, if the current tyranny of the spam mod admins continues.

Aristarchus, out. Love you all, authentic Soylentils!!!

Sebastian Gorka, you're fired! You say you quit, you didn't quit. You quit because you were fired. And you were fired because you're a bigot. You hate Jews, you hate Muslims. Disgraceful! You're a disgrace to your race. And to the Nazi movement. You're not a Nazi, you're a fake Nazi. Wearing your father's pin doesn't make you a Nazi. No matter how much you wish it did. No color, no religion, no nationality should come between us, we are all children of God. Mother Teresa said that, and it's my watchword. Which I've always, always lived by. There's no room for bigotry in my administration. Stay away from me. And from my daughters. #ProTrump45

The Saga continues. I submitted a lot of very fine articles on Charlottesville, and its aftermath. Many of these were disallowed, which is fine. But that all of them were seemed a bit of a bias on the part of the editors. So I started a brief campaign where I posted "No Comment" to new articles. This got me spam-mod-bombed (hey, a new Soylent word!), and my karma fell to depths I did not know were possible. So far, so good.

          So, I made fuss, or a journal entry, explaining the situation, and calling all good solylentils to come to the aid of their site. And come you all did. Some actually said they would mod me up, for no reason, which while nice, seemed a bit irrational. Appreciated, nonetheless. And so my karma has recovered. Some of this might be due to admins revoking the spam mods that were place on me. But they give no notification, and if the post in question has fallen off my "info" list, I really have no way of checking.

    And then there is the question of punishment. If someone spam modded me, and it was not a fair spam mod (and I assure my fellow soylentils that I would never spam you, in any pure and simple sense), then they should have been put on probation, having their moderation privileges revoked for a month. This has probably happened to us all, it happened to me, when I accidentally spam modded something, was banned, and made the case the the "spam" mod was too close to the "troll" mod, and so was restored. But this leads us to the topic at hand: what the heck is a spam-mod?

    So, as the drama about the spam-modding of yours truly was being played out, the Celestial (sorry, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 just hit Redbox) The Mighty Buzzard took it upon himself to adminsplain what constitutes a spam mod-able post. Yes, crass commercialism is spam. Rushstatus https://soylentnews.org/~kapilsingh/journal/ is spam. We all have no problem with this. But the other part of the guidelines for what is spam is decidedly subjective.

Spam can come in many forms, but it differs from a troll comment in that it will have absolutely no substance, is completely undesired, are detrimental to the site, or worse.

The Mighty Buzzard kept suggesting that my protest posts fit this category, so I had no choice but to mod his assertion of this as spam, since it had "absolutely no substance, was completely undesired, and was detrimental to the site, and worse". So I spam modded The Mighty Buzzard. He had it coming.

      Wait a sec, and think about this. I spam modded one of the admins of the site. I am a lowly soylentil. I barely can remember my password for the site. And I spam mod the person who seems to be, by his own admission, responsible for rescinding spam mods? Is this anything but a symbolic action? To TMB's credit, he asserted he would not do so, but left it to the editors. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=21277&page=1&cid=559394#commentwrap Nice reclusal, but only in the confidence of the exact same outcome. And his confidence was confirmed.

    So now the Mineorgy Bacculumard has succeeded in having me mod-banned. As I said, my karma is restored, and perhaps higher than ever (another thing admins never let us see), but I am banned from moderation for a month, just when TMB, in a typically random attempt to fix the moderation system, upped the daily mod points to 10! And even worse, both Eth and Runaway made posts that, for almost the first time, I would have modded up! Oh, the irony! So where do we go from here?

    The suggest path is that I email admin, and explain how my spam mod was all a mistake, which admittedly does happen. But it did not in this case. TMB was repeating the basis for suppressing certain viewpoints on this forum, and I must maintain that this does constitute a post of "absolutely no substance, was completely undesired, and was detrimental to the site, and worse". We pretend to be a site that values free speech above all. But when TMB can make his own subjective determination as the the value of another soylentil's post? He needs to be spam-modded.

    So I am non-violent philosophically, long existence on earth will kind of make that point to you, but if anyone else feels like living dangerously, you could spam mod The Mighty Buzzard, just to make the point. Would not have any effect on his ability to do the wonderful coding he does to keep us all up and foaming at the mouth, but it might make the point that we, the few, the proud, the Soylentils, came here because we wanted a site controlled by its members, not some corporate entity or administrative elite. I, for one, do not want to think our volunteer editors have become exactly what we fled when we left the other site.

    Welcome your comments, but I will not be able to mod them up, so take that as a given, if I could.

Yours,
aristarchus of Samos

Americans #PlanAhead, #winning big league against #Harvey! We have an all out effort going, and going well! So far, so good! Experts are calling #Harvey a once in 6000 year flood! They've never seen one like this! #WOW! But no match for the most resilient nation on Earth! #USA pic.twitter.com/tpXmOK70ug #TrumpTV #RepealThe22nd #RepealThe25th

Space travel is dangerous. We all know it. How did the old joke go? NASA == Need Another Seven Astronauts.

One of the big issues that space agencies have with manned space flight is getting folks to the target, perform whatever tasks (e.g., search for evidence of life on Mars, explore the oceans of Europa, build a temporary moon base on the surface and survey for lava tubes, water ice and other resources for a permanent base, perform geological surveys of asteroids, etc., etc., etc.) are required and returning those same folks safely back to Earth.

But what if we took a different angle and weren't so concerned about returning people safely? We could send older folks, those with terminal diseases, those with spinal cord injuries (who needs to walk in micro-gravity?) and those who just want the glory and adventure of advancing human knowledge and helping to make humans a space-faring race.

I'm 50 and in relatively good health. I don't want to die, nor do I want to throw away my life, but I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars, the moon, the asteroid belt or the Jovian satellites, even knowing it was a one-way trip.

Given that even Martian gravity is just 38% that of Earth and anywhere else we might go is much less than that, physical strength isn't so important. A space-farer would just need to be healthy enough to survive the acceleration (~3Gs) to get into orbit. After that, acceleration to reach other points in the solar system (given current technologies) would be much, much less.

So I'm going to set up a straw man for argument's sake and ask if you soylentils feel as I do, or are you just cowardly pussies who care nothing for adventure and advancing the knowledge and reach of the human race?

I, for one, would welcome the opportunity to die doing so.

(Photo of the "waves" is here)
        I’d been eagerly looking forward to this event since I first heard about it—Illinois was going to see its second total solar eclipse in its history as a state, and no one alive had ever seen an Illinois total eclipse. It happened in 1869 and totality passed right through Springfield, the state’s capital. Then, as now, people were very excited.
        I heard more and more about it, like totality was passing through Carbondale. Carbondale is about a hundred miles from St. Louis, which is about a hundred miles from Springfield. Ozzy Osbourne was slated to hold a concert in a tiny town thirty miles from Carbondale, and play Bark at the Moon during totality.
        I was stoked; it was reported that the stars come out during totality and there are other strange things, like wavy lines on the ground that scientists couldn’t explain.
        At first I was planning to meet my daughter Patty, who lives in Cincinnati, in Carbondale, but Carbondale was where everyone was talking about. It was going to be a madhouse, I was sure, and decided to visit my mom in Bellville the day before, a Sunday, then go to my friend Mike’s in Columbia to cook pork on his Weber and drink beer. I planned on crashing on his couch and heading south early the next morning.
        Then I found NASA’s interactive eclipse map. Mom and Mike were right on the edge of totality, and the center of totality passed right through Prairie du Rocher, about thirty miles or so south of Mike’s house. Patty watched from the Shawnee National Forest, camping there the night before.
        I set out south Sunday morning, and traffic was thick. However, it always is on the weekends, which is why I usually visit during the week. As is my usual habit I set the cruise control to five miles under the limit to make for a stressless drive. But I knew traffic was going to be worse the next day.
        I visited my mom in Bellville, then headed to Mike’s, where we grilled pork steaks (well, he did) and we drank beer and bullshitted. I crashed on his couch, as planned.
        Patty texted me, excited that they had found eclipse glasses for ten bucks apiece. She was thrilled. I thought she had been ripped off, as Mike’s wife had five pairs she had picked up at the library for free. I just heard today when I picked up tacos at George Rank’s that they were selling them on the internet for $150!
        I’d planned on not using the glasses, not trusting them; there are some really evil people in the world who don’t mind blinding people for money, or even killing them. I wound up looking through them once or twice, anyway.
        Monday morning we got up and drank coffee, and headed south on Bluff Road for the middle of the umbra, the part of the shadow that is in totality.
        Bluff road is a little-used two lane highway that you can often travel without seeing another vehicle. We turned on to Bluff Road, and joined a parade of cars and truck headed for the best view. Traffic moved briskly, at the various speed limits on the way. It took about forty five minutes.
        On the way we saw a roadside stand selling eclipse glasses for twenty bucks apiece. Mike cursed the ripping off they were doing; they’d gotten theirs for free from the public library, donated by a veteran’s club. It was indeed a ripoff, because it would have probably cost less than a penny apiece to make them. But better than a hundred and fifty, at least.
        I wished Mike had driven rather than me, because there was some enchanting scenery on the way, as well as an eagle’s nest. The magic was beginning hours before the sun and moon met.
        Mike has a grandson who lives there, and we had a hard time finding the address of the house in the tiny town. His wife had told him that if he asked google for the address on Bluff Road it would lead to the wrong house, as his address was Bluff Street.
        Stupid Google kept giving directions to the address on Bluff Road, and it was even more maddening because we were surrounded by bluffs and the cell signals were nonexistent to very weak. We’d brought no refreshments, so stopped at a restaurant for soft drinks and directions to bluff street.
        When we got out of the car, the very humid heat was oppressive. The place was packed, inside and out. We had a hard time finding a parking spot. We were informed that the streets were the same; Bluff Road became Bluff Street for a while.
        His grandson lived in a house trailer right up against the bluff. We got out and it was even hotter and more humid. We went in, and it was perhaps five or ten degrees less hot than outside; the trailer had only a single one-room air conditioner. Every time I went outside, the heat started getting to me. My hands shook and I could barely walk; I was starting to suffer from heat exhaustion. Mike and his very young great granddaughter went up the hill exploring.
        “There’s a cave up here!” Mike yelled down to me, so I staggered up the hill. There was a cool breeze coming out of the cave.
        It wasn’t cool enough, so I got in the car and started it and blasted the air conditioning. It really helped, and I was in the car several times before the eclipse started.
        I saw something I’d not seen since I was a kid—a toad. Then another one. This hellishly hot day was really cool!
        Finally, some time between twelve thirty and one it started. I finally looked through the glasses once, and afterward made a pinhole viewer out of my fist. When the sun was a crescent, I saw the “wavy lines” science couldn’t explain and I had no trouble at all explaining them. It was the multiple crescents moving around the gravel. The tree was causing multiple pinhole viewers. The way the breeze moved the leaves did look like wavy lines on the ground as the crescents moved around the gravel.
        There were clouds which sometimes covered the sun, and I feared the clouds would cover it during totality, but they didn’t. I hear clouds occluded the totality in Carbondale. I hope they didn’t cover the sun in the forest where Patty was.
        I’d brought my big tablet, thinking I could use its front-facing camera to watch the eclipse on it and maybe make movies, but I feared the glare on the screen might harm my eyes, so that was out. I tried to take a photo with my phone, and I got a picture, but it didn’t show the sun as a crescent. The only halfway decent photo was the tree shadows when it was still partial.
        Then the sky gradually changed colors for about ten minutes, after which it took seconds for it to become dark and for all the streetlights to come on, and the screams and cheers and applause of the thousands of people in town for the sight were very loud, from half a mile away. Mike kept saying “Wow! Man, that’s the neatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” Nobody could help but agree.
        It did get very dark, about like under a full moon. But I saw no stars, although a friend who was in a different spot in totality told me he saw two or three stars right by the corona, which I only glanced at. Around the corona it was indeed pitch black. but the horizons were like dusk. Obviously light was being reflected from places that weren’t in totality. It’s hard to explain what it looked like.
        Darkness lasted maybe two minutes, give or take a few seconds. I was way too busy taking it in for photos, and it was too dark for my phone’s camera to work without a flash, anyway. I should have bought film and brought my Canon 35mm SLR I’d bought half a century ago. Yes, film is coming back. They now sell and develop it again at Walgreen’s.
        When it was over I was again in distress from the heat, then we headed back to his house. Mike, who knew where we were going and I didn’t, was too busy watching the scenery to see a turn we needed to take. We got all the way to Red Bud before realizing our mistake, and highway three was in gridlock. We didn’t want to go that way, anyway, and turned back around.
        The little-used Bluff road was full, but traffic was moving at a reasonable pace. I’d planned on crossing the river for cheaper gasoline, but was still heat-distressed and decided not to. We went to his house, where I drank a copious amount of water, and we ate leftover pork steaks, but eating was making me hot. They say “starve a fever, feed a chill” and the reason is that eating will warm you up, unless it’s ice cream.
        I left Mike’s about two, planning to stop by Mom’s house on the way home, and changed my mind as soon as I got on I-255. Traffic was at a crawl. The normally ten or fifteen minute trip to Bellville took nearly an hour. I drove right past her exit, because I could see this was going to be a long drive and I didn’t want to get home after dark.
        Not once did the speedometer measure over 30 mph on 255. Getting off 255 to I-55 is a nightmare in normal traffic because of the idiotic interchange design, so I decided to bypass it and take Collinsville Road to I-55. Traffic was heavy, but moving briskly, far faster than the interstate. I stopped for gas and a soda and got on I-55. I was really glad I’d bypassed a bit, probably saved myself half an hour or even more.
        I’ve never seen traffic that heavy outside Chicago in my life, and never saw traffic that heavy that stretched that far. My phone rang three times before I reached a rest stop, just past the I-70 interchange. I had to pee, I had to get my tortuously aching back out of that car, and I wanted to see who was trying to call. I figured it was my mom, who I’d told I’d probably visit again on my way home.
        Two of the calls were from her, worried about me, and I ignored the other one, because I don’t answer calls without attached names. If you’re not a spammer, scammer, or pollster you can leave a message and I’ll call you back and add your number to my address book.
        I’ve never seen an interstate rest area so crowded. Cars parked where they didn’t normally, and so did I. This wasn’t a normal day. I reassured Mom, walked quite a long way to the rest room, and walked back and resumed the arduous journey.
        Four and a half hours after leaving Mike’s I’d traveled fifty miles. Past Staunton I had it up to 55mph for a short time, and hit sixty past Mount Olive. Five miles from Litchfield, traffic was stopped again.
        Past Litchfield traffic thinned somewhat, and you could usually do forty, but it was almost in Springfield before anyone could do the speed limit. There was simply far, far more traffic than that highway was designed to handle.
        Which makes me wonder how bad it will be if a nuclear missile is headed to a major city whose occupants have only half an hour to escape.
        The trip was finally over about eight, just as it was getting dark. It had been a seven hour journey with an average speed of 14.3 mph. But it was well worth it! I’m really looking forward to the one in 2024.

In case anyone has not been paying attention, the events in Charlottesville have revealed the true nature of SoylentNews. SN sides with the Nazis. Now, like the TMB, this is done under the cover of "free speech", so that, I guess, Nazis can express their side of the violence they do against Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, the developmentally disabled, and jmorris.

Aristarchus has been extraordinarily targeted. After submitting a HUGE number of submissions, I have been pilloried, and subject to at least four unjustified spam mods, and now my karma is so low that I cannot even come back as Runaway1955! Truly a sad state of affairs! And, I also did not realize that after a certain level of karma, one can no longer mod negatively, only positively, and certainly not spam mod in retaliation. Neat system. To suppress free speech!!!

Well, I said long ago that if we did not control the alt-right influence, the promise that was SoylentNews would be lost. Now, I am quite convinced that it is. I have started a "no comment" campaign, so that when the editors fed us stories that do not reflect the true interests of Soylentils, we can register our objection by making note of the fact that we will not comment. And comments are what could have made this site. And I said, I will not leave, but, I also will no longer comment.

Not sure what this all means, but we have gone from BuckFeta to SuckOylent, for sure.

Daniel Kammen, you are a schlemiel, a shmuck, a schmoe, and a #TOTALLOSER! But I have to say, you were smart to quit. That was a smart move. Because I would have loved to fire you. I promised my hard-working coal miners I'd bring back their jobs. In Youngstown, Ohio. In Detroit, Michigan. And in Pittsburgh, Pa. And getting out of the Paris agreement, which we all know is farcical, is a big part of that. I'm keeping my promises. And neither you, nor anyone else, will stand in my way. Screw Paris, screw your VERY CHILDISH hidden messages, and above all screw you. With a rusty pitchfork. Never darken my door again, you're dead to me. #JOBS

Interesting fact that nobody bothers to mention about solar eclipses. It feels about twenty degrees cooler during totality than it does half an hour before or after. This is a good thing during a Tennessee summer.

Tune in to my very important speech NOW! #TrumpTV