Update from the Firestone Migration; Goose-Shredder says What he Wants

With my chief expert on the lam and only commenting on the things he's most interested in, I've had to go over his head and contact Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's sociologist colleagues myself for news on the Firestone migration. According to eyewitness scientists, the leading edge of the massive human migration is currently 400 km north of Mexico City in the province of San Luis Potosi. The mass crossed the Mexican/American border over the last week of April and had shockingly few hiccups going through the process of 2 million bag checks and questionings. The scientists did observe one couple from Maine who were dismayed to find they had forgotten their passports and had to turn back. They'll probably snap out of their passive-aggressive monotone conversation around Tennessee.

The bottle-neck created by the border crossing has broken the migration into towns, each consisting of a couple thousand people. Breaking up the migration into smaller chunks of humanity is putting less strain on local amenities like restaurants and truck stops, and is generally making the travel more enjoyable for those involved. Further divisions beyond the towns are noted, as there are neighbourhoods of people sharing resources and utensils, but the neighbourhood divisions are harder to pinpoint and tend to shift from hour to hour. When you start tracing the associations through individuals, it's hard to say where one neighbourhood starts and another ends, as all borders drawn are borders crossed.

Along the roadsides, makeshift vendors and soup kitchens are set up by folks in front of the Firestone migration who want to help the acolytes but don't want to fight a broccoli-headed bio-weapon themselves. The soup kitchens will set up and begin doling out food to as many people as they can until they run out, often causing the family providing to go hungry for a few days. It's the kind of goodwill among humans only a common enemy can bring about. The sociologists think this is why there are so few issues throughout the Firestone migration. Pack together 2 million people in a stressful situation without a common goal and things will get dicey in a hurry. But if at the end of their journey they will have to rely on the stranger beside them in potential life or death combat, they'll make sure they don't offend them on the way to the battlefield.

And now on to the things Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is most interested in, namely people calling his colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson a philistine. The backlash against Tyson is because he said people should avoid pondering “deep” questions with no answers on the Nerdist podcast, and a bunch of philosophers stopped pondering questions with no answers long enough to get riled up about it. The following is Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's e-mail. I've changed a few pronouns so he addresses the wider public, instead of just me.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is taking entirely too much shit from philosophers. It's shitty to watch someone with such stellar answers taking flak for the questions he didn't ask. He still ended up a scientist and a humanist. Leave Neil alone. He's doing fine. He just told other people how they could do fine like him. See? Everything's fine.

No matter what, curiosity is the evolutionary feature that keeps all species exploring and chasing ideas. To say that a person could not ponder deep questions without answers is impossible, we can't avoid it. We're relentless ponderers. Why a scientist and a philosopher can't see that this is a useless argument, that curiosity will go on spinning us out beyond the fringes of our answers regardless of anyone's opinion of it's merits, is kind of perplexing. You're both equally valid. Just chill and operate as you will. Neil can do fine not philosophizing, and other people can do whatever the fuck with their philosophizings.

As Massimo Pigliucci noted, this isn't the first time Neil has talked some smack about the Philosophy of Science. What Neil mentioned previously, and what is probably his main reason for derisively mentioning the philosophy of science, is that the field has not made a measurable contribution to physics since the 1920's, and no one has a rebuttal for that. If you're interested in results, Neil kind of has a point. If you want everyone off your back while you think the thoughts you want to think, I'll shut up now.

With love,

OGS

James Betty Seizes Editorial Control; Declares Everything Awesomer

In a stunning turn of events, James Betty has stormed the PAJ mainframe and cut the editorial staff out of “their property” and his first decree as Lord of PAJ is that I can stop writing everything like a god damn news brief. Can't I just tell a story like a person would, instead of hammering facts into a standardized format that conveys beautiful experiences through the stammering of an informative robot? Oh jesus, it took me two sentences to start sounding like a righteous wad. Ditching the sober second thought might be one of the worst ideas I've ever had. I'd love to make a crack about what happens when you turn off the autopilot here, but it's too soon. It's also a bad sign that I'm not even through the first paragraph and I'm already parroting the voice of the old master to subdue myself. Sarte was right about this freedom thing. It's going to take some courage to stick with this change, and it's more than just shouting down my own doubt. Those quotes up there are real. “Their property.” Lawyers said that. I'm countering a fairly legal letter with two crossed fingers and hoping the PAJ editors will realize spending money on lawyers to regain something that makes them zero dollars isn't a good investment. That letter they sent probably cost $300. Hopefully that's all they're willing to lose.

Working in journalism will gain you a few contacts in high places, and those contacts are especially handy when they have known about Heartbleed for years. Caligula Goonsquad and I are not especially friendly, in fact the extent of our relationship is him reading my e-mails and me not trusting him, but when I mentioned to Ovaltine Goose-Shredder via e-mail that I wanted to stage a coup d'etat at PAJ, Caligula gave me the username and password of the blog almost instantly. At the risk of ratting on Caligula after he did me a huge favour [not his real name, btw], I want to go on record saying I have someone doing favours for me inside the NSA. Hopefully the prospect of running into someone who is above the law will scare those lawyers away. They'll have better luck putting a t-shirt on a fish than sticking some consequences to an NSA agent. And I probably don't need to mention this, but I will anyway: Caligula Goonsquad has a malleable relation to morality. They're clay. They're molded into whatever his country needs. He's a good bureaucrat in that respect. Sometimes he molds them himself, but nothing's ever set in stone, and that makes him unpredictable and dangerous. And don't take me exposing him as a guarantee that he will turn against me, you don't know what that man is capable of.

Over the years there have been a few things the editors of PAJ and I have clashed over, but the fact is they've been pretty good about giving me leeway in the format when I asked for it. They've been good to me, and I don't forget that, but when they decided they wouldn't let me post a eulogy for Karen by telling me PAJ doesn't have an obit section, I knew I was done working with them. The format of the blog can be whatever we want it to be, so don't tell me you won't post an obituary, that's obviously not the reason. The only question left was what to do about striking out on my own, but before I could quit writing for PAJ Caligula handed down an answer from on high. Even though I despise everything about him and what he does, keeping the continuity with my past body of work was too big a plus to ignore. So I stole a website. Hear me out before you judge, or just don't judge.

Ovaltine Goose-Shredder introduced me to Karen seven years ago. We were quick friends and I loved her like I love anything that makes the world feel like a balanced place. Goosie I've known since high school. I didn't know there was a force on this planet that could bring his manic energy onto an even keel. The peace that followed Karen around almost made Goose-Shredder practical. Almost. I'm glad I saw the effect she had on the world around her. I'm glad I know her example. It gives me hope that I will see more of her likeness in the world in my later years. As the world's first human to be brought back from a lengthy death, Karen faced challenges both existential and personable that those of us without mechanical two stage pumps for a heart couldn't even imagine, and she stood up to these challenges with the grace she carried everywhere in her life. She will be missed, for real and forever this time.

PAJ will be back to reporting next week, only from now on it will be Awesomer. Welcome to the new shape of the news.