degringolade | Entries tagged with hexagram 12

Can't think of anything exciting to report. Just enjoying the sun and getting out as much as possible. I am currently trying to be sensible and nurse my right knee back to health, this work is proceeding apace, the biggest trouble that I have is remembering that "toughing it out" and using broken bits before they are healed is how I got to this impasse.

Writing is proceeding, I figure that writing is heavily dependent on reading so I am going over the basics. Mostly reading philosophers makes my head hurt. I figure that, on average, reading a philosopher gives one the following breakdown (all stated percentages are my personal estimates:

30% of any particular work consists of useful ways of looking at things that can be cobbled into a syncretic personal worldview. A lot of this shit is repetitive, found in bits and drabs across many philosophers, so most of what you read in one philosopher's ravings consists of a clever rephrasing of something someone else said somewhere.
20% is usually nasty little digs at other philosophers. As a group, philosophers are petty fuckers. Backbiting and mudslinging worthy of a politician is rife in these serious bits of character and intellectual assassination. What I admire about this is how seemingly civil they are about it. They really do make calling the other person a moron seem urbane. I have to pick up this skill. But at the end of the day, it just appears to be nasty and insulting.
30% appears to be just plain wrong. I suppose that "wrong" might not be exactly the word I am looking for, But the things recommended and advocated usually require that us apes have more on the ball than appears to be the case. I have always heard that "giving the benefit of the doubt" is a kind thing to do, but truthfully, it usually ends up badly.
The last 20% is usually just incomprehensible gibberish. I realize that the problem might well be inside my brain pan, but after you read something five or six times and the meaning is still unclear, and then you ask someone who claims to understand that particular philosopher what the passage means and he cannot come up with an explanation that is not tortuous, then you have gibberish. The hard part about the gibberish aspect is that by asking repeatedly to have someone explain something and then still not get it, the interlocutor usually gets abused roundly and judged as stupid.

Most of all, reading a lot of philosophers makes me think of the days of the early Christian Church and their hatred-filled theological debates. The Monophysites and the Chalcedonians arguing about the hypostasis and prosopon might well be an excellent example. Perhaps the Great Schism, or even maybe the Protestant Reformation. Maybe I am looking at things all wrong, but it appears to me that philosophers are priests of a sort.

So, I tend to try and work with what I refer to as "the least common denominator" method of philosophy. If it has to do with explaining how to perceive the world, then I pay attention. If it has anything to do with to act upon those perceptions, I close the book...firmly.

It is my firm belief that the only thing that you can affect is how you gather information from a fleeting and inaccurate set of sensory inputs. The inputs themselves are transmitted to you in a shoddy and slap-dash manner. the inputs must be processed somehow so that they even have a chance of being useful.

Current Location: Coffee and Laptop
Current Music: A Ha: Take Me On

Impressionism / Theodor Pallady/ Scenă de port (Jeux de boules)

Been reading about inflation lately. Truth be told, I am not all that concerned about it.

Because you see, what inflation is telling us is that we have to do the things that we have been avoiding doing for the past fifty-some-odd years. We have to start taking less out of the pie. Because the pie is getting smaller. To make matters even worse, there are more of us wanting a piece. That simply makes for less all around.

Now I am certain that the rich folks will make out just fine. But “rich folk” in this context is a pretty tiny group. They will be a little less the plutocrats, but their actual lifestyle won’t change other than being made less obvious to draw attention away from them.

The folks that are going to have the hardest time are the folks that the plutocrats use to do their bidding. I have taken up the nomenclature “the PMC” (Professional/Managerial Class). Truth be told, they (we) have had an excellent run of undeserved rewards and poor overall performance. The trash heap that we were so involved in creating by means of our half-assed plans is not looking at all stable.

But the saddest part about all that is that the folks who actually did the dirty deed are shuffling off into the sunset with their 401-K’s and their vacation houses. Their successors in the PMC are probably getting a little frantic seeing as the mess that the previous generation made is being revealed and they, not the perpetrators, are going to take the hit. But the PMC needs a thorough trimming, but there is going to be much gnashing of teeth and squawking.

When this happens, I am super curious about how it will play out. I think that there is a pretty damn huge population of drones in the PMC that have bullshit, high-paying jobs that will be shown the door. But this population has been indoctrinated to the idea that they are leaders, important, and worthy of the coins that they bring down. When they get shown the door it will be interesting to see if they have the gumption to become a revolutionary elite

From what I can read out of recent history, the leaders of any insurrection are folks who feel that they are entitled to the perks of being a leader/rich person but haven’t made it into that class quite yet. It is my understanding that folks who were kicked out of that class by the machinations of history are even more likely to raise a stink.

Post-Impressionism / Meijer de Haan/ A Bunch of Garlic and a Pewter Tankard

OK: I am going to say the seemingly unsayable. Covid is now endemic. If there was a chance to contain it, it is just too late now.

The reasons are many. But at the end of the day, it was always kind of a forlorn hope that we would be able to contain it. Vaccines are kinda not as effective or safe as everyone hopes that they will be. Oh, granted there have been successes in the past, but for the most part it was lucky that they worked as well as they did. We got the idea that vaccines were the be all and end all.

The next spot of bother is the nature of the interconnected world we live in. People move a lot and this will get even worse in the future. The days of volkswanderung are upon us and folks are going to be moving around and their on-board flora will be progressively harder to contain.

Nope, the “pandemic” is now endemic. We have to figure out how to live with it and how to die with it. Because both of these things are in the cards.

The times they are a changing.

Impressionism / Joaquín Sorolla/ Boy in Sea Foam

Place ain’t quite tidy, gonna spend some time getting it that way. Gotta go a-searching for some “Immediate” CBD for a friend and then go in search of some flower that will let me extract and make some gummies.

Actually got a smallish start on the book yesterday. Simple things like the ideas for the characters and the locale and the general plotline are now in my head. Getting them down into pixels on a screen is now the task that needs to get done. So I’ll be bouncing around today, going to try to get home in time to make some dinner and to write for an hour before snoozing.

Going to be another Michael piece today. I am getting close to having this sorted out in my head, at which time I will post it and hopefully folks will teach me of the error of my ways. More and more though, I am coming to the conclusion that we have gone down the rabbit hole and are now seeing the bottom and realizing that we gotta climb back out.

Michael

Here is one regarding the value of self-evidence. A proof always has presuppositions. This is the bugaboo with proofs. Why do humans and animals fear strangers? Because a stranger is a possible source of pain. What do people and animals do about possible sources of pain? They stay away from them. This is all somebody needs to know to see that behaviorists misapply science. There are many books written covering the details of how to do this particular misapplication, and they are all referred to as scientific in their approach.

A fundamental goal related to survival that is shared by humans and animals is to avoid pain. What is self-evident about the way that humans and animals avoid pain? The answer is distance – they stay away from potential sources of pain. I trained dogs to hunt humans and to be aware of the fact that the human they are hunting will try to hurt/kill them. Everything that animals do is about distance. Almost everything they do is related to this simple explanation and can therefore be explained by desire to maintain distance. When you see how behaviorism (scientific theory) is misapplied with dogs, you will see that the theory completely disregards the most self-evident explanations and proposes a theory that must be right because it is scientific.

Realism / Isaac Levitan/ By the whirlpool

Sorry I haven’t been writing that much. Just not feeling it. I really can’t say why, just haven’t seen that much to get all het up about.

I suppose that I could get all het up about any number of things. Hell, if you spend two or three minutes of not too strenuous pondering, I am certain you could come up with a double-digit list of things that offend you and would, if allowed, let you blood pressure rise. You know that it is true.

But I think that I will spend more time figuring out work-arounds to these kinds of things than trying to change them. Seems to me the opinion of a single person, or for that matter, even a small group, has a negligible effect on the working of a society. So, simple put, why bother?

Was reading the news today about the lifestyles of the folks who think they run the place. I see a whole bunch of folks running around with cross purposes and no decent plan for the future other than to feather their own nest. OK. Let them.

The things that I watch are the super simple things. That heat wave is tearing up the chances of a decent harvest this year. Gotta watch the grocery bills. Price of gas isn’t gonna get cheaper. Gotta watch how much I drive. Inflation is here to stay. Gotta watch cash flow.

The idea that the clowns that purportedly ran this mess are going to fix it is laughable. Remember, they are the clowns that got us here in the first place.

I have been harping on how the environment, resource depletion, and living too large for too long is going to leave a mark. Well, the time is coming and the dégringolade is getting some traction. Best be attending to the basics.

Current Location: Kitchen Table

Republic of China (1912–1949) / Ding Yanyong/ Bone Script

Not been in to writing much lately. Can’t really say why, but there you go.

Might be because things are getting even more surreal and I am aghast.

Mostly I am amazed at all the different ways that people can create a contrafactual world within their heads and expect that others will understand, validate, and be drawn into these personal mythos.

The most frequent manifestation of this is that the changes coming will happen to other people.

Post-Impressionism / Vincent van Gogh/ Sower with Setting Sun

Spent time this morning thinking about nothing in particular. Restarting doing my I Ching casts every day seems to be helping things.

Spent the last three days practicing for my retirement. Gonna spent the first three days of next week working on the issue of my tendency toward utter sloth. I am not by any means thinking that gotta get up and get at it every single day, but I gotta be careful of just rotting.

I think that I have to have two different levels of posts. The first can be like this, just kind of a meandering stream of consciousness and one a week or so of a fairly serious effort. I find that in my reading, pieces in the 2,500 to 3,500 word range seem to be best for a in-depth, but not too detailed look at something.

I am pretty comfortable with a 250-500 word output every day under current conditions. I think that I can pull this off.

Current Location: Kitchen Table

Ugh:

Spent the day yesterday playing hookey. Had a good rest, didn’t even bother to leave the cave. I am not ashamed.

While I still am playing the doomsayer, I want to clarify the bilious diatribe that tI threw out yesterday. We are heading into a bad rough patch. Probably the worst that most people have ever seen. I am guessing comparable with 1873 or maybe 1907. Might even go whole hog and challenge 1929 for supremacy.

But what will play out this time is a complete mess that has never been cleaned up, save for the sacred preservation of Wall Street and Corporate bonuses. So we got that going for us.

But, I want everyone to notice that the greater bulk of folks during these imbroglios seemed to have gotten through them. Being of an age where I can remember the oldsters talking about the great depression, it seems to have focused them and became a valuable part of their life experience. Not that they wanted to return to them, or thought of them as “the good old days”, but they did count the experience as useful. I don’t think that there are many or any alive now that were competent adults back then, the best that you have is the gilded memories of the generations following them.

So, we have been going through some shit, and we will survive it. The political class are still clowns and have no ability or desire to rein in the bankers who are our current owners. So this will probably mean that what we will have to do is significantly downshift our lifestyle. This is what people are considering the end of the world.

There really isn’t a need to go all bullshit crazy as I did in the past. It really doesn’t take that much effort to get by on less. Kill your TV is the first step. That is the main conduit for all your manufactured desires and your touchstone for your excess. Get yourself enough food to last a while. 3,000 calories a day aren’t that difficult to maintain when you start using meat as a condiment instead of the main nutrition source (but always save up for a meat binge as a celebration).

I am not worried about electricity up here in the Northwest. The dams provide us what we need. If push comes to shove, I suspect that the long lines leading down to California might start having “Technical Difficulties”. Water isn’t a problem here in rainyland.

You see, what everyone is freaking out about is the idea that all of their purchased lifestyles are no longer going to be available. Well buckaroos, in spite of Hillary’s insistence, we are going back. The free-form lifestyles that we envisioned and that Madison Avenue designed for us will be going away, but our lives won’t.

I think that the best analogy I can think of is an 80’s-90’s kind of cultural reference. We have been living in and our expectations have come to demand that “The New Yankee Workshop” is the way that we want to run our lives. Norm Abram was the best ever. Loved him. He had everything that we wanted. Smooth and sleek and stylish stuff was made.

But the truth of the matter is that we are going to be looking at a future where Roy Underhill is more appropriate. The Woodright’s shop is clunky and silly, but it does things well and uses less to get there. Maybe Roy Underhill should be our role model and Norm just an awkward memory of a wrong turn

Current Location: In front of the happy lamp
Current Music: Fats Waller: Louisiana Fairy Tale

Realism / Isaac Levitan/ The Vladimir's road

I haven't figured out why I am feeling punk. But I have been sleeping a ton and been feeling generally blah. No real symptoms. No fever, no cough, just tired a lot. I am probably successfully (thus far) fighting something off. So I'll lay low and nap a lot.

TGIF today.

Current Location: Kitchen Table:

Rococo / Pietro Longhi/ The Alchemists

One of the reasons that I am super uncomfortable right now is that no one "knows" anything. We have people trying to jam a novel situation into models that kinda-sorta worked before in a different situation. But they are taking that uncertain knowledge and letting go like Jeremiah with blood curdling predictions.

I have an itch to make a prediction. I think that anyone who blogs has the same problem. We write for a small audience and want them to know all about our omniscience. But in this case I got nothin'. I am very much starting to suspect the numbers coming out of the pipe. I am beginning to be suspicious about the way the statistics are generated and the significance of the numbers being presented. I am questioning the basic assumptions made in this mad dash toward being #1.

I have always been a skeptic. Science can never prove anything, it can just disprove things.

I am beginning to think that I smell a rat.

Current Location: happy lamp

Art Nouveau / Kay Nielsen/ In Powder and Crinoline

Not that much to say today. As I have complained frequently in the past, Thursdays are my struggle days.

Cast Hexagram 12 today. Not an optimistic kind of read. It is what I already know. The clowns are in charge and I just have to do the best that I can. Such is life. So I will bang away again today. When I get home I will do a spot of cleaning and airing out. I will take a flyer and trust NOAA and, being is that these solemn oracles say it will be sunny, I will leave windows open to air out the place in my absence.

Time to do little homely things around. I will bottle beer this weekend and maybe I can convince the offspring to come over to this side for a cider making Sunday.

I haven't decided if Ursula LeGuin's rendition of the I Ching is great or not, but it does have its moments.

Raw silk and uncut wood
Stop being holy, forget being prudent,
it’ll be a hundred times better for everyone.
Stop being altruistic, forget being righteous,
people will remember what family feeling is.
Stop planning, forget making a profit,
there won’t be any thieves and robbers.
But even these three rules
needn’t be followed; what works reliably
is to know the raw silk,
hold the uncut wood.
Need little,
want less.
Forget the rules.
Be untroubled.

Current Location: happy lamp and coffee
Current Music: The Cure: Lovesong

I am using music as an escape of late. I like live music and Portland is a hot locale for the funky offbeat stuff that I have come to treasure.

But money and time and energy and too few friends have been taking their toll and slapping me back to reality. Missing James McMurty this weekend. Doing Gary Clark Jr. and Son Volt. Probably missing Parliment. Sigh.

Todays Screed

Overall, I am coming to the same conclusion that Charles Dickens outlined in the "Tale of Two Cities":

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

I sometimes look back at the evolution of my thinking and cringe. I remember reading that fatuous paean to American Awesomeness by Fukiyama and thinking "Yes". I remember lying in the bed in my dorm room in Austin Hall and thinking "Yes" when plowing through "Atlas Shrugged".

To say that now such things are embarrassing is to overwork the obvious. But to say that those works now appear to be the guiding principles of what drives this late stage empire would be equally obvious.

I have no earthly clue what is going on today in the world. Where before I would look to books for my understanding of the world today, I feel that the world has taken a different approach. I think that maybe the world has opted for, in place of books, Hollywood movies. "Wag the Dog", "Network News", "Wall Street", and network being the more obvious suspects (As a self-test: Readers should attempt to come up with three additional movies to relate).

I have been spending time going back, trying to find a written word mental model for the world that is happening to me and which I helped create. So far it is a fail, and the models presented by the movies just depress me.

Current Location: In front of the happy lamp
Current Music: Wilco: Sunken Treasure

I think that my healing is proceeding nicely. I get tired by the end of the day, but getting stronger. Last night I did have a glass of wine and then slept pretty hard for around ten hours, so I am feeling pretty good this morning.

Today's Screed

OK, Now I am going into the last six months of the process of getting ready to buckle down and prep for the world of genteel poverty that most of us boomers will have to deal with. Starting in January, the bills begin the end and get paid off and I am on the road to senescence. I have to decide at the time how to approach the process in a way that will fit into the brave new world we are entering, but I do have six months to think about it and plan.

My friends who have had the luxury of retiring speak glowingly of the experience. But, all of them we pretty well off, with stock options and retirement plans from big American Corporations. Most of us out here in the land of the proles don't have this kind of thing avaialble to us. Even those who played the game well and had Unions and retirement plans and thought they were set up for the golden years are finding themselves getting their expectations reset (see here the current sorry state of the Miner's and Teamster retirement funds). I kinda wonder how long it is going to take for the Government (Federal, State, and Local) retirement funds to start getting traction on their overpromises.

Nope, genteel poverty is what one should plan for. I need to spend the next years reducing debt. Student loans and the residuals of surreptitious supplements to Mom's memory care facility did set me back, and leaving the high-paid corporate whore status ten years ago put me partially behind the eightball. It is all do-able, but provisions must be made.

I have got to get back to mad monk status. The short foray into whoop-it-up and partying was both undignified and expensive.

Current Mood: 停頓
Current Location: Looking out at grey skies
Current Music: Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Homeless

Sitting down after finishing up some astonishingly boring regulatory work. It brings $$ in through the front door, but I am getting the feeling that that particular cow will be going dry soon. I hope it doesn't, but I gotta buckle down on fiscal discipline in case the cow does run dry.

Apropos of nothing, going to switch gears here and talk about the pot industry up here in the great Northwest. For the consumer, life is as good as it gets. Every ex-hippie wanna-be entrepreneur went into the growing of pot. The market is glutted.

So, if times are good, you get suspicious, so I went into the local pot shop (and don't kid yourselves pilgrims, pot shops have horrible service: The employees always seem oddly distracted). So after the other stoned customers were serviced by the stoned clerk, the clerk wandered over to talk to me. I chatted with him aimlessly for a by (quite pleasant young man) and asked him about the prices. This obviously set off a worry string. He stated that the prices keep going down. An obvious oversupply.

So I browsed. 7 grams of 34% THC flower was 20 bucks. 7 Grams of 29% "shake" was 10 bucks. It appears that everyone in Oregon with a garden plot is trying to get in on the show. This can't last. The whole reason that the law was passed allowing legalization was that the tax revenues would go up and the enforcement expenditures would go down. Prices at this level will remove half of that equation. But as any self respecting crooked politician will tell you, revenue is better than savings. Can't offer bribes and inducements out of savings.

So, what to do. I think that I need to do some research on extraction and shelf life. If high THC pot is this cheap, the cost per milligram of extracted THC goes way down. Tinctures and extracts are shelf stable to a much greater degree than flower, and I am losing my love of smoking anyway. Homem

Current Mood: 停頓
Current Location: In front of the happy lamp
Current Music: Booby McFerran: Don't Worry, Be Happy

Gotta give the workaday world credit for one thing. It always gives you a reason to be grateful when the workweek is done.

Full moon today. In a hospital, such a thing is quite significant. When working around a gaggle of women, such things become frighteningly significant. One doesn't monitor this situation at his own peril.

So I am grateful that I will have a couple of days off here. I will be doing the great gummy bear experiment on Saturday after picking up final supplies either tonight or Saturday. Extract will need be measured, calculations made and verified, dry run recipes made to generate proper proportions in a recipe using a alcohol extract in gummy bears.

So this weekend is going to be just a hair science-y and that is the way that I like science the best.

Current Mood: 停頓
Current Location: In front of the happy lamp
Current Music: Waterboys: Where the Action Is

The long twentieth century that began in 1914 is looking to be coming to its overdue end. Like it's predecessor (1776 to 1914), it started late. Truth be told, when I say "coming to an end" I am not saying that I am even certain that it will be in my lifetime, but the slope of the line/curve is definitely negative and will soon pass through zero of the x-axis.

I tend to think that things will begin to accelerate soon. Ugo has convinced me that the Seneca Cliff is ahead of us and that mean bad shit may well be getting shittier in the none-too-distant future. But what is the time frame for "None-too-distant"? That is the $64,000 dollar question.

Why I tend to think that the timescale is in the five-ten year range is fairly simple: It can be traced to my barometer of everything bad that is happening to the country and by extension the world, the institutional Democratic Party here in the United States. Now, in my salad days, I was an unabashed Democrat. For the longest time, one of my main wall decorations was my McGovern for President 1972 poster. I felt that I was a member of that party and that school of thought.

I deserted the party when Bill Clinton became President. I worked hard for Ross Perot and almost voted for Pappy Bush to keep fuckface out of the White House. I think that my decisions have been justified. The Democratic Party has become the Party of well-off liberals solely intent on their vacations, their status, and their continued privilege.

So, back to the point. Diane Feinstein showed the world about how the future of the planet and the health of the future generations must be subordinated to the privileges of her well-off-liberal base. This right here is the reason that the end of the century and the beginning of the new is coming a lot faster than I would prefer.

I want to blame the Dems for everything, but that dog won't hunt. The Republicans are even scummier. My loathing of the Democrats is the loathing that one gives a turncoat. The Republicans are just an opponent.

I am seriously considering working toward an independent Cascadia. The boyos and their friends can run the place, I will be gone by then, but the process has to begin.

Current Mood: Sad
Current Location: Kitchen Table

Cervantes wrote one of the great novels of all time. The madness of the character and the truths and falsehoods that that Hidalgo went through in the course of the story are cruelly appropriate.

Metaphors are cheap in the world, accidental role-models are usually discovered too late. I spent a great deal of life acting in roles that tried to mold me into something I am not, surrounded by things I don't really want. Now I am pulling away from things and taking less. It is harder than one would think.

Current Mood: Friday Stalwart
Current Location: Kitchen Table
Current Music: None