Degringolade

Looking out my front door

Blue sky and sunshine are the order of the day today.  It is hard to be a gloomy doomer on such a lovely day, so I don’t think that I’ll bother.

So today I will spend some time discussing the sorry state of the world and my place in it and the tendency of folks here on the internet to seize upon and inflate the “we’re all fucked” meme.  

Surprisingly, my man crush JMG came out with a warning yesterday that he teased out of the mundane astrology side-hustle that he has going.  I am a little to this side of ambivalent when it comes to mundane astrology.  I think that personal astrology is a bunch of nonsense, but I do think that there are hints to be garnered in mundane astrology.  Please don’t ask for further explanation, it is just a feeling and I only ascribe a 50%-65% correlation between mundane astrology and reality.  And that estimate of correlation is drawn directly from my nether-regions.

I kinda feel that the correlation between what JMG came up with and the sorry state of affairs here in the land o’ the free might well be up in the 80% range.  Since this is higher than my usual estimate of efficacy, I pay more attention than usual.

So, I took the time to break out my overpriced and flimsy Knapp-Hall Tarot cards and pulled a single card while thinking about the current shitshow and JMG’s take on it.  I pulled the King of Swords.  Not a terrible card, but one that emphasizes the qualities that the current political elite (and that includes all parties and candidates) seem to be short on.

My I Ching today tossed out Hexagram 64.  

BEFORE COMPLETION. Success.

But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,

Gets his tail in the water,

There is nothing that would further.

The conditions are difficult. The task is great and full of responsibility. It is nothing less than that of leading the world out of confusion back to order. But it is a task that promises success, because there is a goal that can unite the forces now tending in different directions. At first, however, one must move warily, like an old fox walking over ice. The caution of a fox walking over ice is proverbial in China. His ears are constantly alert to the cracking of the ice, as he carefully and circumspectly searches out the safest spots. A young fox who as yet has not acquired this caution goes ahead boldly, and it may happen that he falls in and gets his tail wet when he is almost across the water. Then of course his effort has been all in vain. Accordingly, in times “before completion,” deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.

So, my take on the whole thing is that the conditions for change are in place and now we get to go through the necessary pain and suffering to arrive better on the other side.  

This doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to suck. But from what I drew, and coupled with what JMG came up with in his research, it looks like we will get the changes made and there are going to be some unhappy people.  

Oh, and it will probably suck big-time, but it’s been a long time coming.  

As we used to say back in the day when I donned helmet and shoulder pads, “Keep your head on a swivel!” you never really know when people are going to try and knock you on your ass.

Expressionism / Fikret Mualla Saygi/ Yellow Dress

Had a great weekend bullshitting and partying with the posse.

https://youtu.be/QA4DG804VuI

I sent the crew a link yesterday.  I think that it had a bunch of relevance to our ongoing conversations here and in e-mail.

 https://peterludlow.medium.com/the-varieties-of-bullshit-5edd5b0aff4e

Now, I think that there needs to be a clear definition that what was done while smoking dope and drinking did in fact constitute bullshit, but it is the Biggie Smalls flavor of bullshit.  This form of bullshit is how males bond and reinforce friendships.  I consider this to be a good thing.

What I am proposing is three domains of bullshit.  

1. Domestic Bullshit (as described above):  This is the largest domain and the least harmful.  It is the realm of armchair generals and recliner head coaches, and monday morning quarterbacks.  If they actually offered the ability to make real the opinions/theories held here, the purveyors of such would likely run the other direction as fast as their feet would carry them.

2. Workplace Bullshit:  This is hierarchical bullshit.  It usually involves work that has no real purpose other than assisting one’s supervisors efforts to shove their nose up the upper management’s ass to improve their chances of joining those hollowed ranks.  It usually is fluff and administrative nonsense that allows the supervisor assigning it to prove that they can kiss ass with the best of them.  (Note:  In the actual workplace, both domestic bullshit and workplace bullshit, but they merely coexist in a particular spacetime locus.  Care must be taken to differentiate).

3. Academic Bullshit:  This is the smallest domain.  It is folks somewhere, somehow, having the time and energy to sit down, and to the best of their abilities, set down the nature and direction of a complex world in letters and number on a sheet of paper or a tragically inconvenienced stream of electrons.  The range of potential subject matter is inexhaustible and the ability to understand and express the full range of nuance required for conveying the vagaries of a complex world are pretty thin on the ground.

This is only a first (and most likely last) attempt to categorize this ephemera we call bullshit.  It is a valid term with any number of uses and covers a broad swath of humanities actions/communications.

I will probably think about the knock-on effects of bullshit over the next couple of days.  I am thinking that there is some meat here to explore prior to putting out more bullshit here in this cul de sac of the internet.  

Pop Art / James Rosenquist/ Off the Continental Divide

Starting this the day before posting while on duty.  Lots of time to write during the day so I will spend some time talking about “science”.  

I think that the mythology of science has taken over from the day to day grunt work of actually being a scientist.  This is never a good thing.  What this brings to mind to me is the mythology of the “discovery” of DNA by Watson and Crick.  

I am of two minds on this one, and to be truthful their getting the Nobel was  a bit of a stretch and will forever be in question due to the presence of Rosalind.  They figured out the double helix and figured out that it contained instructions.  But really, how much of this was their work and how important the simplistic discovery was has always been kind of beyond me.  

But they had the press behind them and Watson was always a ruthless self-promoter who made every effort to reinforce the idea that he was the smartest guy in the room.  I had the joy of spending a week or so at Cold Spring Harbor in the eighties and had brief glances at a towering ego and was grateful to retreat to my no-name lab in the wasteland.  

What always amazed me was the way that Oswald Avery and Marshall Nirenberg were frozen out of any prestige.  Oswald showed DNA could produce inheritable changes in 1944.  Marshall did the meticulous and soul-crushingly boring day to day work of figuring out how the genetic code worked.

All Watson and Crick did was to interpret pretty pictures taken by someone else.

So, let's talk about Fauci’s little gaffe that I spoke of yesterday.  

“It's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous,”

I think that science today is more like the renaissance papacy than the purity of Popper or the rigor of Einstein.  In a sense, Fauci, with his statement saying that he “represents” science is no different than the long term assertion by the Papacy and the anti-conciliarist movement of the doctrine of papal infallibility.  I think that it is surprising that anyone can allow a single man to claim to represent the “truth” of a particular faith.  But Fauci has been in the position of the Doctor-Pope for quite a while now.  The NIH is the source of funding for way too many research projects and being chosen for funding is a sign that you have bought into the orthodoxy.  Oddly enough, the quote from a off-brand piece of tentacle fiction by one of my favorite authors seems to be extremely appropriate here.

“Most fields of study have been through the exact equivalent, whenever a few prominent scholars and their allies come to dominate a given branch of scholarship, and control access to the important journals and the sources of grant money. The result, invariably, is intellectual stagnation.

The role the Fauci and the NIH have played over the past thirty years have tainted the way that science works.  The funding and the control of direction of research engendered in the actual funding process keeps the focus of research tight, and the atomization of the publication process doesn’t allow a broad view of the complex subjects that need to be explored if we will have any chance of getting out of this mess.

Nope, like the medieval church, the church of science has been corrupted to its core.  

I don’t know how this will play out.  I do know how the renaissance papacy played out.  

From: 

Principles of Research

address by Albert Einstein (1918)

(Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's sixtieth birthday)

IN the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

Expressionism / Jacoba van Heemskerck/ Harbor Scene

Most everyone I know is having a spot of bother.  It seems to me that the world is stripping away security from folks who have spent their whole life chasing security.  I feel bad for folks, because it looked as though folks might be rich and their lives planned out enough that they could coast.

Just kinda seems to me though that coasting is only an option on flat terrain where you have worked up a head of steam.  It is also possible if you are on a gentle downhill.  

The current forecast seems to me to be a serious downslope for the next little while.  Now, let’s use a bike as a mental model.  Coasting is possible on the flat when you have built up a pretty good head of steam.  But if the terrain is flat you gotta start pumping again.  

The best is a gradual downslope.  Work your way up to the crest of the hill and see a long slow downslope and you nearly always get a smile on your face.  You get to put some serious mileage down with a minimum of effort.  The breeze cools you, life is just fine.

But let's say for a moment that you come around a corner of what appeared to be a pleasant session of coasting and you see a sign announcing a steep and curvy section coming up.   20% grade and curvy.  Well backaroos, I don’t know about you, but that is a butt-pucker in a serious way.

Kinda makes you want to keep an eye peeled for signs, Doesn’t it?