Alex Ness
June 22, 2026
Blogthoughts... I gain courage to post about things that suck, and
then I think about it as choosing between vanilla or chocolate while
others starve without a thing. It is called a 1st world problem. And I
am sure it is. As such, I need to be more specific in aim and language
used to address it if it is important, but I write here because I am
using this to write what was on my mind.
As this blog is about ideas rather than specific media, I want to discuss some important ideas and things that don't fit elsewhere. Not because I feel an urgency, I tend to cover ideas in my poetry, aimed at the world we live upon. I also aim at central ideas when chatting specific medium, so it isn't as if there is something that I am dying to write that I've left uncovered.
But my subject matter is my own, not an agenda to uphold, nothing specific to change the "world". I know that I am going to keep writing about sorrow as long as I remember who and what I've lost. Sorry if that isn't of interest for you. This blog isn't to cover "important" subjects. I cover what moves me, wounds me, or causes change in the world today.
Two pics of my beloved Katya in 2026 January. Passed too soon, despite being nearly 18 years old. She was what is called a rescue, through an animal shelter. Crossroads Saying she was a rescue is false. She would have been adopted by others. She and her litter mate Sophia both rescued me. They both did save my soul, but Katya was a constant gift to my being, as she gave me stability, hope, affection, love, and so much.
MILITARY FICTION and NON FICTION ABOUT THE FUTURE
We have arrived at a time when calling a subject and setting being future oriented is a challenge. That is, most everything at this point in time is so deeply different than the last Global period of war (WWII) that it all seems bizarre. The concept of pushing a button and killing from remote control used to be offered up as a horror of humanity's violence become ever more impersonalized.
The most primal and ancient of fighting styles was even less violent, despite being hand to hand. The two groups about to fight often taunted one another, made ineffective aerial warfare attempts, but the battles would be fought between a champion from both sides. Whoever won that duel, won the battle, winning the war. It is of course likely that such a behavior wasn't the original state of violence, but it suggests that thousands of years back, humans saw a need to draw up ethical ideas about how to kill another person. In the present, the only ethical concerns seems to be to only kill people who are fighting, and do so beneath a different flag.
The books shown below offer some wonderfully written works, Alan Dean Foster's The Damned are my favorites, but Elizabeth Moon and Robert A. Heinlein shown works are fantastic in quality. Starship Troopers is often called problematic, since he seems to be promoting war. This is found in how he equates citizenship being worthy upon one's willingness to fight for the state. I just think it is a version of his verisimilitude. Alongside the fiction works, there are academic and everyman non fiction considerations of war as an evolved technique or practice.
BEAUTIFUL, REVEALING, AND PHILOSOPHICAL: Photography, Events & Temporary Movements, & The Architecture of modernity and how we arrived here
I am not a particularly talented photographer, although I've taken some nice pics. But the people who move me the most in photography were important, emotive and elite. Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange helped end the Internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. They photographed the camps, and revealed a people who were hardly alien, and represented the best of Americans. They enemy alien concept was disproved by the normal existence and the American ideals found in the Nisei, first generation Americans. Masahisa Fukase was a brilliant photographer who captured moments of power, emotions, and abject sorrow. His own life mirrored such images.
Sean Martin wrote histories of people, events, practices and movements, differently than others, He focused on the matter at hand rather than wrapping it in the ways of doing things of the day, and keeping the subject before the reader, rather than locating it within the majority of works and historical analysis.
I have read that people who teach about or train themselves in hard forged ideas, such as Logic, Ethics, Philosophy, all sorts of Math and the various social sciences of Academia, find books or documentaries upon Architecture to be similar to art for others. That is a long sentence yes, but it is totally what I mean to say. Architecture functions as a philosophy, an art, a practical training and a way to bring a better way to do things to the public. The books shown are all really good, but my favorite is by Hugh Ferriss, who creates beautiful and unique styles that he perceived the growing cities of the future would adopt. It didn't happen the way he suggested, but if you view Star Wars Episode 2 with the scenes in Coruscant, you will see application of some of it.
These books are serious but might be called "Fringe" subject matter theories, but not all of the writers are crystals sharing meditating hippies. Robert Schoch, Robert Bavaul, Graham Hancock, David Hatcher Childress, and Charles Berlitz all wrote about different aspects of human culture, and the events outside of our planet, inside the stories of human culture, and strange happenings. Professor Robert Schoch is by far the best of these, since he is more or less asking questions to arrive at answers. His concepts of disasters molding the earth, solar flares repeating in cycles, and humans crossing various oceans led to the world we have. If aliens exist or not, he doesn't deal with ideas that can't be tested.
Others suggest that the answers are just outside of the range of normal science or normal academic consideration. Graham Hancock does offer a good alternative to some ideas. Rather than accept the fringe concept that aliens have visited, taught humans great matters to consider, astronomy and more, he suggests there were/are phases of human culture. And that disasters, climate events, asteroid impacts happen at such a time interval, that the human species came from numerous culls, and we are the inheritors of the generations that came before.
A friend of mine in the high towers of education in hard sciences is driven a bit nuts by the fact that I read and theorize about things considered by the authors of the books below. But I don't believe most of what you will find below. I think the people arriving at each concept, though, may have studied more than I have, and I want to gather enough information to make my own decision. I always prefer questions without answers than answers that cannot be questioned. Always dig into what you can find, others will do your thinking if you let them. Test every theory. Question everything. We don't know everything and we might never, but it is by far better to ask why or what or how, than to assume we aren't allowed or destined to know these subjects matters.
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