degringolade

Now, there are folks out there who are looking forward to the shit hitting the fan. I think that is weird.

These kind of folks seem to think that the world going to hell and the current (admittedly corrupt) system is going to be overrun by firebrands and pitchforks which will deliver their shaky prognostications and validate their status as minor prophets. I on the other hand, think that they are just assholes. To be right when being right means that a pretty big majority of folks will be worse off and will need to change their lives considerably for the worse is not a particularly kind attitude.

I suppose for a long time, I was a semi-survivalist prepper type. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time and place (mid to late 20th century America) where the land of milk and honey had nothing on us. After my dad retired and we finally settled down in semi-rural Utah in 1960, the population of that state only exceeded a million in 1966 (I was in seventh grade). It is now 3.6 million. I think that might be germane to our current discussion.

I bring up Utah because of the Mormon doctrine of food storage. Being a strange hybrid of a set of disparate religious forebears and being stuck in the hinterlands of a fairly pervasive religious culture, I got first-hand discussions of food storage in school when my classmates family's finances got a little stretched. The reviews were mixed. But having grown up in a small truck farm kind of family, I was also fully aware of the nearly hundreds of filled mason jars and onions and potatoes in our root cellar.

So, now having established my bona fides, I will explain how I steered away from the prepper community. I will do so by relaying a joke that I thought was funny back in the day:

Question: Do you have your two years supply? (at the time, the LDS hierarchy recommended a two-year food storage) Answer: No, but I have a gun and I know where my nearest Mormon lives.

You see, there are way too many folks out there in the prepper community who think that "joke" is funny. Unfortunately, these are folks who are gunned up and also think that they will use the guns to protect their stash, but the history of guns is to take other peoples stash.

So I continue to make plans for shit not going right. It seems that it is pretty much baked in at this point in time. I might be able to slip out unnoticed before things get really hinkey, but that chance seems to be receding. So I am going with protective coloration and frugality as a plan. I am not trying to maintain what I have, I am just trying to finish out my trip here on earth without too much pain. Most of what I need is quite simple. I just need to continue the process of ruthless simplification.

Consider the lowly balloon. When you blow it up to it's fullest capacity, it will burst when a sharp objects pokes it. But if you take the same balloon and let the air out of it, it takes a lot more push to the sharp to make the balloon deflate and the results are a lot less impressive.

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℉

That is what started a change. Oh, don’t worry, I am not going to go off on a rant concerning the faults/merits of centigrade-vs-fahrenheit. It is an ongoing discussion of the means that is used to write every day.

I have been pleasantly surprised about the ability to use Dreamwidth’s “post by mail” function and now, upon mature reflection, find locating pictures at the bottom of the post instead of the top gives me warm fuzzies that people will actually read rather than just look at the picture and leave. You may chalk this up to vanity, and you probably won't be wrong.

But using the email post doesn’t allow much in the way of formatting. Like it or not, I believe that the way that a piece looks on the page does have an impact on the transmission of ideas. We in the west tend to think that the words alone convey meaning. But I tend to think that is not the case. How the words look on the page/screen seem to draw and hold readers.

So now I am just going to noodle around with finding the limits of methodology and drink my coffee.

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Look, I realize that climate change is a real thing. But the truth of the matter is that climate change has been the state of affairs for around 400K years. I suppose that it is a matter of making this definition clear. Climate change is normal, and the way of the world since the beginning. It is just since we hoomuns have started paying attention that it is a big deal.

I suppose that the reason I am stating this straight up is that today is the first day that the temp here on the periphery of Portland dipped down below 40℉. Since we have had a couple of pretty gentle years of weather here, it is about time for a shitty winter. I hope I am wrong.

The environment is out of our control. It has never been in our control. Us hoomans have an effect on it, but I seriously doubt that we can do that much damage in the long run. Oh, we have certainly changed the climate, but being able to tease out the direct effect and quantify it against the measured changes is more of a political process than a scientific one.

I suppose I giggle at the term "anthropomorphic" when used in conjunction with "climate change". Of course we have an effect but trying to tease us out and then make the presumption that if only we change and become virtuous, we can return to the climate optimum that we feel is our due.

Nope, like I said, I have a hopefully incorrect hunch that the weather in my neck of the clear cut is going to be turning nasty this winter. I will need to break out foul weather gear more than I wish to.

But there will come soft rains.

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TO BE A EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN (the rest of the world might be forgiven for thinking) was to build ships and sail them to any and all coasts not already a-bristle with cannons, make landfall at river’s mouth, kiss the dirt, plant a cross or a flag, scare the hell out of any indigenes with a musketry demo’, and—having come so far, and suffered and risked so much—unpack a shallow basin and scoop up some muck from the river-bottom. Whirled about, the basin became a vortex, shrouded in murk for a few moments as the silt rose into the current like dust from a cyclone. But as that was blown away by the river’s current, the shape of the vortex was revealed. In its middle was an eye of dirt that slowly disintegrated from the outside in as lighter granules were shouldered to the outside and cast off. Left in the middle was a huddle of nodes, heavier than all the rest. Blue eyes from far away attended to these, for sometimes they were shiny and yellow.

Now, ‘twere easy to call such men stupid (not even broaching the subjects of greedy, violent, arrogant, et cetera), for there was something wilfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter in the center of a dish. Yet as Daniel, in the tavern, tries to rake together his early memories of Trinity and of Cambridge, he’s chagrined to find that a like process has been going on within his skull for half a century.

QUICKSILVER. Copyright © 2003 by Neal Stephenson.

It is probably around 1980. The location is what was then called the "New Biology" building on the second floor and the class was Avian Biology. I cannot for the life of me remember the Professor's name and I have no intention whatsoever of going to try and look it up. This is the flash that came to me when I had a text chat with the Brother and Son.

The nugget that suddenly came out of the swirl was a class discussion in that long-ago. One of the other students (a very attractive young woman named Susan who had the good sense and excellent taste to keep me at arms length) mused that the birds were singing because they were happy. The professor gently told her that when she heard birds singing, it was probably only for two reasons, they were either looking for a fight or a mate. At the time, being of the mistaken notion that saying something in a discussion labelled you as intelligent and perhaps a prospect for mating I added perhaps the birds were singing to announce their success.

The professor pointed out that my statement was just a description the fight/fuck duality that he had stated. My stock with Susan went down considerably.

Where this all is leading is a conversation via text with my brother in law and Son the other day about birdsong. There is a super spiffy program called "MERLIN" that you can download on your phone that listens for birdsong and identifies what it hears. I started the conversation with the family with a gush about the number of birds I heard (and a few that I saw). Then Carl (an excellent source of realism) sent this.

That led to me recounting the class interaction in a text conversation with the son and brother in law. The bro stated that, upon hearing the professor's description concerning the meaning of bird behaviors made him think that the name Twitter was quite appropriate for that particular platform.

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Yesterday I went over some old photos that I found. I forgot how many pictures taken with film cameras aren't worth a shit. There is a stack of about three inched thick where maybe a half inch are in anyway meaningful. So this morning I went through my google photos and culled out 408 pictures that were worthy of the word trash.

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I go to Cash and Carry (Now US Chef's store) for my cheap meat. You gotta buy in bulk (about 15 lbs) but you can split it up an freeze it and you are pretty set. I have a 3.5 lb boneless pork butt roast that it going to be cooked on Friday so today is prep day.

Gotta make the dry rub.

Ingredients Amount Paprika 3 tablespoons sugar 3 tablespoons Garlic powder 2 tablespoon Onion powder 2 tablespoon Salt 2 tablespoon Black pepper 1 tablespoonCayenne pepper 1 tablespoon Cumin 1 tablespoon

Cut the roast into chunks, put into a big bowl and made certain that each piece was well coated, then back into a big ziplock and it will stay in the fridge until Friday (Wednesday write-up)

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entropy/ĕn′trə-pē/

noun

For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.
The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.
A certain property of a body, expressed as a measurable quantity, such that when there is no communication of heat the quantity remains constant, but when heat enters or leaves the body the quantity increases or diminishes. If a small amount, h, of heat enters the body when its temperature is t in the thermodynamic scale the entropy of the body is increased by h ÷ t. The entropy is regarded as measured from some standard temperature and pressure. Sometimes called the thermodynamic function.
Ameasureof theamountofinformationandnoise presentin asignal. Originally a tongue in cheek coinage, has fallen into disuse to avoid confusion with thermodynamic entropy.
Thetendencyof a system that is left to itself to descend intochaos.
(communication theory) a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition •

I suppose why I am peeling away from politics in America even more that my former sullen, perceived duty based norm is that people who talk about politics take it passionately. This is the biggest and most dangerous mistake one can make.

Look, the politicians just reflect who we are as a country. And let's face it, as a people we are no great shakes. We aren't god's chosen and we aren't creatures from the void. We are just an agglomeration of people who inherited a country.

But the factions of American politics each have the certainty that their side is the way of God. Any one who doesn't agree with their crowing about the nobility of their programs and the their complimentary opinion concerning the utter depravity of the opposing point of view needs to be cast into hell. And remember, this is a certainty that pervades both sides.

Look, there just aren't any more good answers available at the moment. We are in decline. When you are in decline there is going to be have's and have-nots. Relatively speaking, when you examine the list eight (seven?) presidents, all any of them were doing is laying a thumb on the scales so that one side got a little more than the other. But the thing to remember is that no one went without.

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Yesterday I saw that Trumpy was spouting off about handing out guv'mint money. I stopped reading there and wrote yesterdays post, stating my hypocritical stand that it is a stupid idea but I will take the money.

Then today I spent more time than I should reading what is happening in politics and the world and it certainly isn't looking any better. Now dumbass (read here: Trump) is spouting about how a fifty year mortgage is going to make things better. I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to pull up a mortage calculator and do the math yourself (Hint: It ain't a big deal).

Now, I think that what this tells us is that Trumpy is noticing the corner that he is painted into. A lot of you out there who hate him will harp on about how it is his fault. Well, that is only partially true. Trump's first term was a mess, but truthfully no worse than Obama, Bush or Clinton. We are in a hole we have been digging for over thirty years (you could make an argument for fifty years, but at least Jimmy Carter tried).

Nope, what Trumpy is doing looks to me like desperation. Time will tell, but his announcements don't give me a bunch of hope.

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So apparently the Trumpster is going to be handing out $2,000 checks.

If they actually happen will take mine and not complain. I am just going to point out that the only time the guv'mint starts handing out money is when shit ain't going right.

Just sayin'.

Look, everyone who reads this knows that I am a JMG fanboy. To a lesser degree, Ugo Bardi is right up there too.

But these two are complete doomers. It seems that they have partnered up to explain how the laws of thermodynamics means that we are doomed, doomed I tell you. Well.....no shit sherlock. Now, I am not disagreeing with their predictions or their analysis of the past, but I think that things there are a little broad brush in my opinion.

I am not completely certain that anyone "knows without a doubt" how things were in the distant past. All the data is derived from indirect means. Long term temperature (>2000 years ago) are derived from ice cores and tree rings. These aren't "bad", but they do have margins of error that make their truth less than "absolute". I also have a sneaking hunch that the farther back you go the dicier the data. But in truth, it is the best we have and we need to use it.

Ugo is currently on a rant on how CO2 is the most terrible-ist thing ever. Well buckaroo, while it ain't great, it is just another thing that our grandchildren will have to curse us for. JMG longs for a past that never really was.

Mostly I just figure that we are just another species. We have memories of the past and predictions of the future. We have hunted species to extinction and rail against other opportunistic species. But we have also watched species die out when we had nothing to do with it.

Look, the world is constantly changing. I suppose I am a "evolutionist" in the sense that the world will be different in the future, but that happens. I see no reason to get all atwitter because things are changing and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it.

But today is a nice day. I am going to forget the problems and visit an old lady.

P. Dropped by last night on the way to one of his innumerable meetings. Had a nice chat, except for when the chats briefly and mistakenly veered into the realm of politics. We managed to pull away in time, chastened by a near-collision.

The people who should avoid politics in private discussions are old men. To a slightly lesser degree, old women. This is because not that these discussions aren't useful to some people, but oldsters tend to forget the mass of compromises that necessarily come with anything political.

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So I spent time the past couple of days chatting with a friend. I think that the amusing part is that we really don't have all that much different about our views of what is happening here in 'Murca, but we really don't at all see eye to eye about what made up the "before" and what will constitute the "after".

We got Donald Trump, because he was inevitable and truthfully, he is what we deserve. We have spent the last fifty years living through a rough version of Ayn Rand. We have decided that rents going to the wealthy and panem et circenses to distract the masses from the disembowelment of industry and it replacement with a casino stock market was a good idea.

Some folks came out of this paradigm sitting pretty. Some folks think that the paradigm is a good thing. The folks who lost are ignored, because the paradigm only has space for winners.

Oh granted, what is now ridiculously referred to as the "left" are a major contributor to the problem. They see the "guvmint" as an unending bowl of largesse. It never has been. There never has been a free lunch. But the "right", with its obeisance to the idea that only winners matter are equally odd.

Trump is what we deserve because he represents only money. And Citizen's United made sure that justice can bought by the rich. That little problem is the source of 90% of our current predicament. But until a majority of folks come to the idea that the greater the wealth, the greater the responsibility, and are allowed to ignore or undermine that moral imperative, we will continue to be a country of Gordon Gecko wannabes.

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OK: I have been noodling around with the post-by-mail function here in Dreamwidthland. It appears (see previous post) that you can post photos using the post-by-mail function. Excellent news (well, not really news, it is just what happens when you spend the time reading the FAQ's.)

If you read this, and you see a picture below, then I can use the email function to post the pictures that I took recently. This is a test message to see if I understood what the FAQ said. As with all FAQ's and technical manuals, they conform to Captain Barbarosa's observations:

"First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate's code to apply and you're not. And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.

So here goes, if you don't see a picture below this, then I don't understand the guidelines quite yet.

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I think that the main reason I sort of stopped putting pictures at the front of every post is twofold. The first is that dashing of a quick post is much easier when using the “post by email” option that Dreamwidth has so kindly provided. Maybe I could use the email posting to post pictures, but the thought of researching that just doesn’t appeal to me. So, If you see a “diary” post with no pictures, I am just dashing something off while drinking my coffee.

The second reason that I don’t is the awkward and semi-hostile relationship that I have with my fucking cell phone and the corporate structures behind it. Look, I got an iPhone because I get great little movies of my grand-daughter. But, like it or not, it is a great camera. Hell, even the old Motorola android that it replaced had a great camera. My actual camera collects dust. It is even quite a good camera (Olympus TG-6), but it is a descendant of the concept of “camera” which involved post-processing. This is where I am having some issues.

I suppose it is a vestige of the concept of “ownership” that I struggle with. I am not a commie, but I am fairly certain that a mortal human being really can’t “own” anything. When your luck finally runs out and the road to your long home is shown to you, you can’t take anything from this mortal coil. But for some reason, I have attached my concept of ownership to things like the images that reflect what I see around me.

For some silly reason, the places that these images are stored and the corporate entities that provide the storage service. I am not comfortable with the simple concept that these pictures are out somewhere on the internet and I have no idea who is seeing them. Now, the simple truth is, the chance that someone cares about what I see on my walks is miniscule. But for some reason, I chafe against the possibility.

The same thing goes for the writing. I like Dreamwidth because they remind me of small town hippiness which is my ideal for “internet”. But the writing interface is clunky along with the image storage. But that is a price that I am more than willing to pay for the deliberately out of the way backwater that it has created. But when I am feeling lazy and don’t want to go through the gyrations of uploading pictures and writing on the clunkiness, I sneak over to Google Docs and write stuff out there, inserting the pictures and then cut and past the whole thing into Dreamwidth’s interface and voila, a nicely formatted piece of internet ephemera.

So really, what people are observing when my posts aren’t as “pretty” as I would like is an odd combination of laziness and a crotchety old man raging against the structure of a world that he has no real control over. I just need to get over it, realize that the concept of privacy will always rub up against Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and the real history of the internet is how society deals with the reconciliation of these two ideas.

So the end message is that I have to figure out Dreamwidth's picture embedding. It can't be all that hard and it might well be even simpler than embedding graphics in WordPerfect 4.2 that I mastered back in the 80's

I do listen to folks, so I will start plugging in pictures occasionally.
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Folks gotta remember, the Tomahawk was first put together back in the 1970’s, in the days of the PDP-11 computers and the yellow pages phone book. GPS was just a prototype satellite. The Abrams tank was still on the drawing board and our M-60’s were still facing off T-62’s across the Fulda gap.

Reach back in your memory. Little Donny Trump, during his last administration fired a buttload of these wunderwaffen into Syria and didn’t even manage to inconvenience the Assad regime. Rumor has it that at the time, most of the missiles fired were spoofed by the godless rooskies and only blew up very inconsequential pieces of desert. Unless my memory has failed me, the airfield that they were fired at was operational the next day. Rumors were also bandied about that the S-300’s that the Russians had sold to the Syrians also did a fair job of bringing some down. My memory is that the military brass shut up and wouldn’t talk about it.

So, when I hear that we could possibly be providing these drones to the Ukies, who don’t really have a great reputation for utilizing equipment we give/sell them anyway, you can understand why the process holds no particular fear for me.

We won’t be giving the Ukrainians the latest iterations of these. They will be the oldest that we still have in stock. We definitely won’t be giving the latest version, because the chance that one of them will end up in a Russian factory for analysis is too great.

Look, warfare has changed greatly. Drones are a big deal and the technology is advancing absurdly fast. The introduction of an ancient model drone will change nothing on the battlefield. But it just might piss the Russians off more so than they are already pissed off.

I can’t really say that it seems to be that great an idea.

Nijubashi (Bridge to the Imperial Palace) from the series Scenes of Last Tokyo

Koshiro Onchi

I have been pondering my visual contributions to this blog. I am going to try and revert to my older practice of skimming through Wikiart and plopping in a work that: 1) catches my eye while I am going, and 2) is in landscape format.

So, I am feeling a touch paranoid today. Not serious, just a realization that the outcomes I was hoping for are not in the realm of the possible currently and while my previous choices have me in a place where I will probably do just fine, the results are increasingly "baked in" and all I can do is watch. I am certain that this attitude will annoy and perhaps even anger some folks out there, but that is the way that I see it.

The outcome of this doesn't change anything. I have long since lost the illusion that outside of a very small circle, my opinion on any matter really doesn't matter. Who I have to deal with is the folks out there who still think that there opinion means something outside of their very small circle.

Our government/culture is in play right now. Samuel Huntington's ghost is having a beer somewhere with a "told you so" smirk on his face. Francis Fukuyama is working hard to explain that what he wrote was misconstrued (and dismally failing).

Trump is not the brightest light ever to occupy the Oval Office. He is not going to change the course of history. He doesn't have the tools, either intellectually or organizationally to effect any change. But the truth of the matter is, there is no one on the horizon who does. The choices left to the leadership of this country are bad choices that will change a lot of peoples lives. Simply put, there is nowhere to go but down.

JMG made a cutesy little phrase back in his Archdruid days that I both love and hate. "Collapse now and Avoid the Rush". Mostly I dislike it because the word "Collapse" is so fucking overused nowadays and "Karen-ish" that the drama applied to it just wears on me. I have been using a phrase for ten years now: "Calibrate your expectations".

Look, we are going to be reverting to mean. Don't get excited and definitely don't believe people who claim that they have a map to any promised land.

I am getting used to the change in daylight. Granted the change is slow. It gets dark before eight and doesn't get light before eight and my sleep pattern change along with my ambition. So I am adjusting. Just like I have done in the past but my psyche is more brittle now and the adjustment gets harder.

As an update to my ongoing relationship to the internet, I have come to the conclusion that my shiny new, semi-cheapo Walmart MacBook M1 is a gaming system only. I log onto it when I want to rot my brain with World of Warcraft Classic. I am not going to use it for anything else.

So I have two screens, only one of which are allowed on the table at any given time. The old Lenovo running LMDE 7 is used for browsing and communication with every security safeguard I can think of running. The apple is tied to the tracking device that calls itself a "phone" which I am working out how to get rid of (or, even more important, is such a thing possible).

There is a bunch of talk out there on the net concerning AI. I don't think that anyone currently discussing this has the mental chops to wrap their heads around what is there facing us. I know that I don't and vanity lets me think that I am pretty up to date on the way the tide is turning.

I don't really have a good sense of the way things are going to be going in the future. Granted that the trajectory of things a couple or four lifetimes past my expiration date seem pretty well set (at least in my humble opinion), the closer the predictions come to current events, the less certain my thoughts become.

Folks in this particular cul de sac of the net seem to be pretty much agreed that the end game is baked in. Beyond that though, the specious and premature arguments (including those of this humble correspondent) are really just coping mechanisms for the author(s). Shit is changing, and we have no clue which way it will go. So write away, bitch about the change, let it out. The society as a whole is moving away from your ideal. That doesn't mean that the movement is wrong, it is just the change.

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A Sorta Public Diary and Comment

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