Feast for Thought

" Kipple  is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around,  kipple  reproduces itself. "  Kipple seems to be a combination of entropy and capitalism. I don't think past civilizations had the resources to produce so much packaging to hold our stuff until we buy it or consume it. Don't forget the First Law: "There's the First Law of Kipple…'Kipple drives out nonkipple'." Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more. No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot. From  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , by  Philip K. Dick . P...

(image: news.bbc.co.uk) Ridiculous? Incredible? Mind-boggling? Flabbergasting? Indecent? There is probably no single word to help convey all that the obese(!) US national debt figures will eventually mean to humans alive now and to several future generations. So the counter ran out of digits , did it? Where did it all go?  We should surely be able to see where -  - in glass fronted sky-high edifices?  - And among the debris in Afghanistan and Iraq  - in over-obese consumers' frames?  - And in the hollow eyes and malnourished, bloated underbellies of the world's poor children  - in vulgar luxury infrastructure?  - And in dried-up, empty farm lands - in over-stuffed homes?  - And in laid-bare forests  - in gleaming and overflowing supermarkets?  - And in grotesque landfills and toxic oceanfills  Entropy - even as the word occurred in the mind, I felt that this term fills in where other words fail. In the field of thermodynamics , ...