Patience

This comes out when spring gets serious

High clouds today with a good percentage of blue.  Barometer @30 and Temp in the mid-fifties, Air is still.

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I think that I am coming to the realization that, like all good ‘Murcans I want things tidied up within a period of time roughly equivalent to the length of two or three of the news cycles that I grew up with.  Now, since I am old, the news cycle for me is the length of time between publication of the Atlantic back in the day when it wasn’t a screechy, self-indulgent, journal of posturing.  So I cling to the oft-disproved idea that three months of attention to a problem is how things should work…….sigh.

I have been alive through five direct participations (wars and embargoes) and a couple of efforts where the opposition was teeny tiny and things worked out.  The big ones always took time and left a mark.  Over the years the sad little profession of history twists the periods into simplistic morality plays that best suit the folks who paid the price using other people's money.

So I am figuring that the whole dustup in Ukraine has a while to go.  Now that I said this out loud there is a solid chance that it will end tomorrow, but my money is on two years (minimum) to go.  That time will be spent rationalizing the inevitable retreat and making certain that the Eurotrash knows that we don’t in fact have their backs.

We will start developing the strategies for China in a serious way after that.  But remember the strategy will be a financial strategy which will choose the weapons and strategy that will best profit the arms manufacturers, they will have nothing to do with actual needs of the upcoming conflict and how to defeat the opponent.

Flow Restriction

Nonsense in a way

Blue sky with big puffy clouds.  51℉ and 30.2 in/hg.  Getting to be consistent and I am happy about that.

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The above picture is the current source of my angst concerning the American system of government.  We tend to focus on the media-driven, corporate-centric clusterfuck at the apex of the structure but when you look at the base of the structure, it seems to be decaying away to nothing.

Five election contests, four of them single candidate.  

One candidate for the Educational Service District, The ESD runs a $115,000,000 budget.

Two candidates for the Fire District.  Budget = $94,000,000

Two candidates for School District, The school district makes you beg for a copy of the budget, I’ll have to get back to you on this.  My guess that it is the biggest of the bunch.

So my best guess is that the three government entities together will administer around a half a billion bucks.  

I am thinking that a lot of the funding comes from non-local state and federal sources.  

I wonder if there were candidates who didn’t run who didn’t because they realized that the taps were being turned down?

Green Hot Sauce

Four days fermenting

Blue sky and sunshine, 55℉ degrees and looks to be going up to around 80℉, No wind, Barometer at 29.9 in.Hg.

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Hot sauce is essential.  Good hot sauce is ridiculous. A five ounce bottle of Green Tabasco is nearly $4.00.  

Equipment

𝆩1 x 2 quart wide-mouthmason jar

𝆩Clean flat rock that can fit in the opening of the jar, or you can be fancy like me and buy a glass weight

𝆩Inner lid that has small air hole punched in the middle or buy a fancy airlock like me

𝆩Screw-on part of the lid

𝆩Bandaid

Ingredients

𝆩One (1) head of garlic

𝆩One onion (diameter of the opening of the jar.

𝆩About 25 jalapeno peppers

𝆩Three (3) tablespoons of kosher salt

𝆩One (1) tablespoon of sugar

Directions

Scald the bottle

Add sugar and salt to the jar

Slice the onion

Peel the garlic

Chop up the jalapeno into chunks

Garlic goes on the bottom

Jalapeno chunks next

Onion slices on top to keep the jalapeno from floating.

Add water until everything is covered

Put a clean lid on on invert to get all the salt and sugar into solution

Put the clean rock or weigh on the top of the onions to keep everything underwater

If you are using the cheapskate method, put on the lid with a hole and cover it with a sterile bandaid.  If you have the fancy schmancy air, use that.

Wait four weeks.

Reserve the fluid and blend it all up as fine as you can make it using the fluid to make the consistency the way you want it, bottle how you want to and keep it in the fridge.  

Onion  ≅ $0.40

Jalapeno ≅ $4.00

Garlic ≅ $1.00

Total ≅ $6.00 for a yield around 55 ounces

This will give you a cost-equivalent of $0.54 per five ounces

Pondering

Seriously Pink

Beautiful Day, 51℉ 30 in/Hg, blue sky with a touch of breeze.  

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I spent years here on Dreamwidth doing a daily I Ching.  For some reason I stopped.  Maybe I will start again.

Message from a Shoe-Shine Boy

Homemade Cider and Current Reading

Blue Sky and sunshine returns. The temp is a touch lower today (cloud cover is a great insulator) at 45℉ with humidity pretty stable at 30.2 in/Hg.  There is a whisper of a breeze.

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I have always been suspicious of anything that comes out of the collective mouths of major governments or media or humanities professors.  Experience has taught me that by the time these folks have worked up a rationale for action that will benefit one subset of the population at the expense of another subset, the actual physical characteristics of that action will be so shrouded in hand-waving and false advertising that I have to grade them, oscar-like, on the quality of their performance rather than the truth of their utterings.

I do spend time every morning (≅ 1.5 hours) going through a series of websites to try and get a bare breath of the winds that day.  I can’t for a minute say that any estimate is all that accurate, but I do flatter myself that by reading different discussions my overall accuracy goes up (I figure that any single “article” tells you around 30-35% of the entire picture.  When you read different POV’s, you can usually manage to get up to around 50-60%.  You will still be misinformed a substantial percentage of the time, but you have a better chance of a better (but imperfect) understanding and will thusly be better equipped to make accommodations in the truly minor part of the picture that is your individual life.

Reading today about all the folks in major capitals talking about war and making preparations for such leads me to think that this is hand waving trying to distract you from the fact that the economy is in the toilet and a hand is on the flush lever.

For a while there (2018 to late 2024) the gloomy/doomy economic types were in the background bleating half-hearted beats.  The bezzle was going to well for them to make much a fuss.  But lately the bezzle has been tapering off and they have ramped up their “reporting” to enhance their wallet thickness.

Now, this does not contradict my suspicions, but it does increase (in my estimation) that the dollars and cents aspect of my life might start looking more tenuous.  

All I am saying is that all the shouting is just about the simple fact that you may well be living leaner soon.  It might well behoove you to make provisions for that decline in choices.

The Memory of Mrs Lake

Long ago and far away in Isan

Another gray day.  Same as yesterday (52℉ and 30.3 in/Hg) no wind to speak of.

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Mrs. Lake was my high school English teacher during my senior year.  She had a moderate success in instilling a love of the language, but she did lead me to understand that I only liked poetry and literature when it was written in my own language.  Reading translations of Dante and Dostoevsky that were assigned by Mrs. Lake  was my first experience with “furriner writin’” (How does one use nested quote symbols anyway) and my position on this opinion has only hardened in the decades that have followed.

I was quite surprised and pleased when JMG announced that he was going the spen the next little while going over Yeat’s book “A Vision”.  Yeats is the only Poet that I have ever spent money on.  And to this day I still say that he is the only poet that I have allowed the dubious honor of enjoying most of the published works.  Now there are some other poets that have rung the bell occasionally, but Yeats has by far (>75% by best guess analysis) of poetry and prose worth reading.

So I am going over the first three “chapters” of that book and trying to sort out what I should be learning/understanding and trying to sort out what other people are trying to learn/teach/propagandize.  The Internet Archive has a text and scanned and OCR’ed versions available, but the OCR is riddled with OCR errors.

So I am going through the OCR and correcting the errors that I find and I will be publishing chapters as I complete them.  But, heresy of heresies, when I find something that I don’t understand (Like where is Rapallo), I am going to stick in a wikipedia link.  

Since I am completely blasé about my current coursework at the local diploma mill, I am going to take advantage of JMG and the internet to maybe learn something.  You get to watch my struggle.

Choices

One of the fond memories from my working days.  On the way home

High gray again today, temps is a little low (46℉), barometer is the same (30.1 in/Hg) and it looks to be a bog-standard gray spring day.  Sigh.

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The current foofooraw concerning “artificial intelligence” has made me sit back and think about just what the fuck people are all het up about.

This in turn got me thinking about what and how I write here on the internet.  Then I got to thinking about what my expectations for this seemingly pointless activity are.  All of this made me question why I am so damn paranoid.

I consider what I write here to be more of a diary than anything.  I do expect that someone will drop by but I don’t presume to charge them for the effort.  I think that isn’t all that unusual, but there on the edges of my brain, I occasionally hear a quiet voice whisper to me “charge for it!”.

But somewhere in the mess of changing technologies and competing corporate skullduggery, I needlessly switch things up and every couple of years I go haring after a new platform that meets with my latest half-baked moral imperative.  

I have been pretty content with Dreamwidth as a service.  I have been “screeding” here for the past 7+ years and it suits the purpose just fine.  But I only moved here in a fit of pique concerning how Blogger changed things to make the process more idiot proof and I had to learn different ways to do the same thing.  That and I was (am?) a JMG fanboy and decided to be a copycat.

But the last couple of months have got me thinking about my motivations and my reasoning and mostly I am not impressed with the quality I see there.

The world has changed since 2005 when I started blogging.  Blogging has become sort of passé though it hangs on with a devoted fan base.  

I will be playing around with the publication medium on both Dreamwidth and Blogger.  I suppose that right now I am thinking that it might be easier to just publish on both.  Google isn’t going anywhere but is a problem in terms of its power.  Dreamwidth is free, but I went through a couple of small internet service providers a long ago and Dreamwidth is trying to maintain a niche business which is always dicey during bad times.

Been a while

I published here for years and years, I really do need to sit down for a day to figure out how to download everything and move it over to another site. I will spend time on this pretty soon. But not today

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim. People appear to wanna think too damn much about subjects over which they have limited actual knowledge and even less ability to effect. I think that folks have somehow managed to believe the new-age nonsense that their opinion matters and that their voice should be heard. This might work at the elementary school level where an adult is in charge of the difficult process of corralling and teaching a bunch of eight year-olds, but from what I have seen, it doesn’t work all that well even there. I am forever indebted to Terry, the foreman of the cleaning crew that cleaned the O.R.’s where I used to work. Terry had a saying that he used to use when anyone came up with an idea to “make things easier”; If it was a good idea, he would give it a trial run and see. If it wasn’t a good idea, a lot of the time he would repeat the idea back (replete with the “make things easier”) and then tack on the postscript “for you”. There are going to be winners and losers in the headlong slide down that our country is experiencing. What is happening in the political arena is the decision making process trying to choose who is going to get screwed the least. Because buckaroos, we are all going to get screwed a bit.

Control Myths

 

I do love me a conspiracy theory.  

I think that this is an offshoot of my love of fantasy novels.  Good, simplistic fairy tales where sides are clearly delineated and plucky good guys go through some shit on their way to Mordor for the win.  I love fantasy as a reading genre and I won’t give it up, thank you very much.  

The science fiction novels are merely a specific form of fantasy (I love them too, but they are losing ground and quality since science itself has been underperforming of late).

I sometimes feel that the “news” that is peddled out via all of the media types need to be included in the “fantasy” category.  

Right now the American Unordnung is amazing to watch.  The theories are coming fast and furious, seemingly with less in terms of evidence than usual.  You know that things are weird whenever mention of the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commision are rising in the media.  If the 9-11 attacks and the WEF coverage begin to surface in the discussion, you can rest assured that it is time to break out the popcorn.  Evil masterminds abound, nefarious plots are hatched, all done in the name of the true religion.  Choose your sides.  

It is difficult enough to get a valid and consensus explanation of something as simple as a tree that a couple of people are directly observing.  Try it some time.  Grab a beer and a friend and try to explain a seemingly simple phenomenon in a manner that is detailed enough to explain the simple while directly observing.  When you get a completely polluted and contradictory set of inputs such as the third and fourth hand interpretations of real world events that are being bandied about on the ‘net, the chances of you having the ability to construct an accurate model of what is going on is almost nil.

De-Fatting

 

So I am still trying to lose my winter weight.  As always, the first pounds come off fast and then I hit a pause.  I am in the middle of the pause now and the whole process seems mildly annoying.  But if I manage to gut (hahahahahaha) through the process, the weight will start coming off again in a couple of days.  

Watching a Soap Opera

 

Cape Horn Road

I have been through 13 presidential elections that I have been involved with. 

At the end of each of these elections, the next day turned out to be just like the day before. 

People who get caught up in this shit really have to start realizing that it doesn't have that much effect on your day-to-day life.  The only way that this will cause a direct and rapid effect is if the decisions begin a shootin’ war here in the land o’ the free, then all all bets are off.  But the chances of that are pretty goddamn small, .09% is my guess.  I don’t sweat odds that low and I don’t expect to win the lottery. 

If a person gets elected, he/she will spend at least a year or two trying to position their policies to make a minor impact. What people don't realize is that impact will not be to them as an individual and will take time to happen anyway. 

My advice to folks is to calm down and start figuring out what to jettison that isn’t important, because you can rest assured that the folk who pretend to be the leaders are doing just that.

Devil Anse

 

I have been pretty good at my daily walks.  Yesterday I took a break.  I figure that after nineteen days of >6000 steps I could take a break without having to fill out my guilt/I am a bad person card.  

So I probably spent too much time trying to get a sniff of what is happening in the halls of power.  As usual, I came up with nada.  These last two weeks really haven’t changed a damn thing.  I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised.  I know as well as anyone that the country is run by one or the other tribes of one trick ponies.  Us down here at the plebe level don’t have a say and the bosses have no intention of giving us one.

I suppose this kind of talk makes me a “conspiracy theorist”.  So be it, but I don’t really think that I am your bog-standard conspiracy theorist (granted, all conspiracy theorists think that they have a unique take on the truth that is transcendent).  My conspiracy theory is that the folks that claim to be in charge and who are engaging in the sissy-boy-slap-fest that is American national politics are stupid and venal and don’t have a clue about what they are doing.

So, when I read the media of any sort concerning the state of politics here in the land o’ the free, I am reading a certain fantasy. The system is too complex to be defined by any individual writer/presenter. Simply put, they portray a hypothesis that is unsupported by a full set of facts.  

The presidency itself is not so much an election of an individual, but instead is an election of a caste.  Right now the two castes have been intermarrying for so long that they are indistinguishable.  But that intermarriage has gotten to the point of inbreeding.

I think perhaps there is a historical precedent for what is happening in America today:

The Hatfield–McCoy Feud involved two American families of the West Virginia–Kentucky area along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River from 1863 to 1891. The Hatfields of West Virginia were led by William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, while the McCoys of Kentucky were under the leadership of Randolph "Ole Ran'l" McCoy. Those involved in the feud were descended from Joseph Hatfield and William McCoy (born c. 1750). The feud has entered the American folklore lexicon as a metonym for any bitterly feuding rival parties.