R-344 Aura

A Stop, Drop, Shoot Aura Selfie Of Me Blogging And
Apparently Expressing An Inner Desire To Have Nice Tits

Look, this isn’t a statistics blog, and there isn’t any math here, it’s just something that I wished more people noticed, is all.

It’s called a variety of names, but can be understood best (to me anyway) as a “biased sample”, the result of a “local sampling error”. That’s when you take a sample and find out there is a huge effect size for whatever you’re measuring or, alternately, no effect at all. You begin to operate your experiments (or, as we call the grand experiment, your life) according to that finding and shortly discover that, no, it just isn’t so, and you begin to wonder whether you’re an outlier (i.e., outside the normal curve, special or especially cursed, one or the other).

Consider the concept of an “aura”, that magical life-glow that supposedly surrounds everyone and which only Special People (e.g., frauds, charlatans, chiropractors, teen-aged girls with Ouija boards) can see. What would you think if you didn’t have one that even the frauds could find? I mean, none at all? 

Based on that experimental finding, it would seem that you’re comparatively a miserable, deprived, barely (if at all) alive chunk of useless protoplasm. You might well spend your time bitching and moaning about it on blogs (the “Woe-Is-Me” version of Eeyoring) or trying to acquire an aura through the usual methods (e.g., frauds, charlatans, chiropractors, teen-aged girls with Ouija boards) which is likely to produce the “I’m Not Worthy” Social Justice Warrior who spends their time blaming everyone else for it and/or spinning their wheels to make up for being otherwise uselessly aura-free.

There is a fictional character who has no “aura” whatsoever so far as anyone can tell. It’s a kid named “Adam” from Neil Gaiman’s “Good Omens”. None of the various psychics, witches, and whatnot he ran across could see any aura whatsoever, so he was totally disregarded as — well, anything — when in fact, he’s the most dangerous/powerful human alive. (No spoiler there — that’s not the point of the book, which, incidentally I recommend 100%).

"The Nice And Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch"
(From "Good Omens")

His aura is in fact so large that it covers the entire British Isles and beyond. Needless to say, not even the most powerful 14-year-old sleepover-seance Ouija-board operator in the entire country would be able to see it at all, even if they were standing next to him. ESPECIALLY if they were standing next to him.

All this came to me when reading the blog of a blogger I'll leave unnamed who’s prostrate with despair because he’s:

“…having to watch corporate entities like space x and jeff bezos scramble for a piece of the infinite vastness of our universe while we’re all down expected to toil for their gains, live in an age of widespread sickness where we can’t be granted healing or rest without a profit, have every single piece of our lives cut up and dressed for sale like a butchered animal, from basic human needs to human expression…”

…and my first response is “Oh, fuck you, you whiny turd. Let’s stick you out in a tin shack in Calcutta or diseased-ravaged hovel in lower Congo or being chased around by alternating teams of psychotic child-army assholes and brutal government soldiers in Somalia for about a month on a mouthful of maggoty rice per day and see how your sad-sack Western life looks THEN.”

‘Cause in fact THAT’S how MOST of the world works now, and has for nearly 100% of the last 200,000 years of human history. I have seen it with my own eyes, smelled it, heard it. I have burned unrecoverable boots and clothes marinated in it and spent days trying to figure out if I stank of it or if it was just stuck in my nose. I don’t even notice it anymore.

My sample is worldwide.

Everyone bitches about the 1%. But because of the local sampling error, the biased sample that he’s taking from his sad-sack neighborhood which is in the middle of the gigantic aura of the last 100 years of Western civilization, he doesn’t realize that out in the real world he IS the 1%, that even HIS bitch-and-moan modern Western life exists in what amounts to the absolute pinnacle of flourishing in human history.

He can’t see the aura because he’s in the dead-assed middle of it. Or maybe he does, but noticing it would no longer allow him to be a “poetic” drama-queen.

He’s wailing about rich-bitch people putting up satellites and blocking his view? Millions of children can’t get enough Vitamin A to keep from going blind (not least because of elitist Western anti-GMO shitheads, but that’s another story).

He’s bitching about being “granted healing or rest”? Millions of parents are working themselves and their starving families literally to death on less-than-subsistence farming, and count it as a good day if, when their kid steps on a landmine while turning the rocky dirt, it doesn’t kill the family water-buffalo, too.

His whining is like being in the middle of a Kinshasa ghetto hospital prostrate and screaming over his hangnail. Just despicable is the only word I can come up with.

So when my bitch-and-moan blogger wraps it all up with:

“…and now that same mantra comes to mind, but now instead of a cautionary warning it sits in my chest and my throat bc it has gone from a warning to a certainty. they will steal even the skies from you…”

…my lip curls in disgust for their lack of the first clue. I mean, we ALL bitch and moan — it’s a human condition. But DUDE, REALLY? Get a friggin’ grip.

Modern Western society has sinned, and continues to sin and may have much to atone for. On balance, I doubt it, but who knows. Another argument for another day.

But for my money, its most egregious sin is that it’s so successful and has so much extra-everything that it even allows for the rooting of clueless, useless, hot-house flowers like this who, for practically the first time in human history, flourish and pretend to be someone instead of being ruthlessly exterminated by the first intrusion of the frost of the real world into their otherwise noxious, oh-so-cleverly-distraught lives.

So, whiny blogger dude, you don’t even have to live under some local warlord in a tin-roofed shack to figure it out. Go wear Kevin Carter’s shoes for a couple of months and see if you’re still bitching about your tough life. Kevin was a photojournalist who took this picture of a vulture waiting for a child to die in Sudan in ‘93, one of probably a thousand pictures, many of which are worse:

"The Struggling Girl" by Kevin Carter

…and which won him the Pulitzer Prize. Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the toddler’s fate^§, he committed suicide three months later. 

Kevin Carter, Killed By A Picture

This is a guy who has legitimate room to bitch about the world and his place in it, and I’d bet some safe money that not a single petty whine of the comparatively-in-human-history astoundingly wealthy blogger, posted on equipment that didn’t even exist 30 years ago and even now is worth a couple of years' earnings in most of the world, would be in Kevin's litany.

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FOOTNOTE:

^{§ [The child was thought to be a girl but turned out to be a boy named Kong Nyong. Nyong survived the incident and later made it to a U.N. feeding center, according to an interview with his father in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Nyon died as a teenager in 2007 due to "fevers." So, yeah, there's the third-world's version of a lucky break.] [Back]}