Degringolade

I have come to the conclusion that Substack has turned into a huge pile of garbage.

I suppose that if I were a nervous Nellie, right now I would be beside myself, but oddly enough, I can't really say that I am all that worried about things.

I am currently in the area of a flood watch. Since it has been bucketing down rain lately, the Willamette is pretty high and the creek that feeds into it (1/4 of a mile from my place) is as high as I have ever seen it, this would seem pretty normal to me. The folks here are treating it like the ass-covering by government officials that it is. There isn't a house that is threatened, the worse that could happen is that in a couple of places, folks might have to detour around some water on the road while on their way to the grocery store.

Look, the government should do exactly what they are doing...I really don't want to keep them from warning people that things are "different" for the moment. But like all things, such warnings should be tempered by the populace keeping their "twitterpating" over-reactions to a minimum. That seems impossible to a fair percentage of the population. So here in Stumptown (yet another Portland Nickname) there are folks demanding that the government "do something".

Nope, I have no fix. People will be people. Bad shit happens and sometimes folks get in the way of bad shit. Luckily for me, the whiners this time are a very small minority and I don't have to listen very much. But I just wanted to point out that this kind of thing happens at all levels and that you really have to look outside to see if the "crisis" that folks are whining about is real or just someone somewhere crying wolf.

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I have worked hard over the years to get over my doomer self. I think that the systole and diastole of civilizations and cultures is a real thing. Simply put, "Laissez le bon temps rouler" isn't a way to run your life 24/7.

But you see, here in the West, we have come to the point where the party is over and the taps have run dry and it is time to go home, sleep it off, and go back to work tomorrow.

It isn't the end of the world. Your individual opinion of what we should be doing isn't particularly important to the folks running the show who have bet their already fractured reputations on the idea that the party can and will go on. These folks are in the process of losing their bet, but that process isn't one amenable to a news cycle, so be patient and watch whatever peculiar haruspicy works best for you to try to stay a little ahead of the curve.

Myself, my methods for adapting to the world and predicting what is heading our way involves reading headlines and maybe the first paragraph of things out there on the nascent nervious system of the world (the internet) and try to stop as soon as they stop reporting facts and start telling me what the facts mean.

This is, at very best, a stupid and low-accuracy means of getting into the bottom of things. But if I am careful, and watch things from 30,000 feet, I can sometimes see outlines that have a slightly better chance of occurrence than not paying attention. Right now these, at least to my readings, show that the downhill slope of this particular cycle is starting to steepen. It doesn't signify the end of the world, it just means that the party is over and it is time to go home.

I thought the picture below fit this piece very well.

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I have been stuck at home for a couple of days now. The current buzzword for "lots of rain" in the Pacific Northwest is "atmospheric river". It has been dumping rain here. I suppose that if I were a real Pacific Northwesterner, I would "damn the torpedoes" and don layers of raingear and savor those rainy moments.

Fuck that!

So I am inside more than is my preference. So lets talk about isolation in the modern world.

At my age, isolation is not the huge deal that it was in my salad days. Truth be told, isolation is preferred about ninety percent of the time. So there is an approximate 2 hour window every day where I do enjoy human interaction. It doesn't have to be much, a phone call or a greeting during a walk or a conversation with a neighbor while getting the mail does me just fine. But serious rain does limit the opportunities for these interactions.

I still kind of wonder about the place of conversations in settings like the one we are reading. I am enough of a geezer to remember sending and receiving physical mail and how important that was in maintaining connection. In the infantry, "mail call" was an important time and letters were cherished (or feared, depending on the correspondent). But they were always an important tie to the outside.

I was (am?) a science fiction junkie. But the sheer number of wannabe science fiction writers. I have been pondering an old Isaac Asimov tale "The Naked Sun". How much of the semi-isolation of communication via the internet is "good" for a person? This simple question then expands into something that was brought to my attention: What are the implications of folks using what is laughably referred to as "artificial intelligence" as a cope for lack of interpersonal communication?

Big can of worms there, I think that it might even require a formal sit down and ponder month.

In the morning following my wake up and my body slowly and a little painfully getting up to speed (and that speed is slow) my process consists of drinking coffee and trying to kick-start my cranial neurons. While the caffeine is taking effect, I usually peruse what is referred to as "the news".

Today was no different. But for some odd reason, a not particularly good song from the '80's wandered unwelcome into my brain while I was perusing the antics that constitute "the news". I think that this trite little title is the core of the matter. While everyone does, they usually want change in order to cement what they feel is their rightful privilege. You see, that is the root cause of the problem.

I am going to ponder this for a bit. In the end, it all comes down to what you feel is the critical core of human society. I tend to think that the vast majority of folks out there feel their individual needs are that core.

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Got out and about a little bit yesterday. I am working on getting out after a period of being a sluggard, I suppose that mentally I usually take a while to mentally adapt to the days growing ridiculously short. This set of blah's is set into overdrive by the change in daylight savings time and then a couple of weeks after that I manage to claw my way out of the doldrums.

So I am getting ready for a 10:00 AM start of a brisk waddle around the neighborhood. This activity is helped along by caffeine and raingear. Maybe today I will wander down to the local bagel stand and see what they have in the day-olds. They aren't the best bagels in the world, but they are better than the ones that come from Walmart. I would be happy if someone here in puddletown would actually make boiled bagels, but the uppity white people here would probably turn up their noses after being fed the fiction that the mini bread rolls with a hole are actually bagels.

That's the day here, I got nothing else exciting

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I suppose on of the things that annoy me about any "serious" post concerning "serious" subjects like finance or weather is that the persons writing the piece treat the graphs like sales tools instead of means to accurately convey information. Simply put, they use the Y-axis to make a sale for their way of thinking by limiting the amount of information conveyed/

Consider this little post over at Twitter (BTW, I refuse to call it X: to understand see this post).

Look carefully at the axes. The 36 month X-axis makes me suspicious in the first place. Why was this period chosen? If we are attempting to place where we are in the decline of the preferred human environment, The first CERES satellite was launched in 1997. I think that a a three year period out the the nearly 30 years of data collection is suspect.

The Y-axis is even more interesting. Again, you have to consider this in relationship to the X-axis, Is the left end of the graph a temporal Maximum and we are working from there. Or has it been a steady decline over the 28 years of data collection? For that matter, what datasets are being actually analyzed?

Look, I am not saying that the data is wrong, but it really seem to me that the data is incomplete and presented in a way to support a claim (read here: Sales) rather than giving the reader a full understanding of long-term climate trends. Three years and 0.65% might be significant, but I cannot make a judgement from the data presented.

I am convinced that climate change has an anthropomorphic element. But unless the people trying to educate start giving complete and accurate information, their current cherry-picking of data and deliberate efforts to frighten will allow the people with different opinions to further undermine decisions.

(Side Note: I cropped the photo below, both X and Y-axis. But I did so to show the goddamn squirrel trying to guilt me out for inadequate peanuts, you don't need my window frame to convey that. It is not dissimilar from that which the "scientist" above did with the data presented but I felt in this case you needed a unnecessary warning)

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