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.

Yogurt as relaxing trivial task

 

So I took my ultimately ugly mickey mouse themed InstantPot out for a yogurt making spin.  It worked great this first time.

Super easy.  I bought a half gallon of milk, poured it into the InstantPot, put the top on and then pressed the “yogurt” button a couple of times until it read “boil” and then walked away.

When the thing beeped at me I pulled the pot out, covered it with plastic wrap, and let it cool for a couple of hours.

When it hit the right temperature Between 95℉ and 110℉, I peeled off the plastic wrap and put the pot back into the maw of mickey and messed around with the “yogurt” button until it read 8:00 and then pressed “+” until the magic number 12 (twelve) came up. (Editorial Note:  People who complain about “tangy” yogurt are losers IMHO!  Yogurt should be tangy)

Then I stirred in some yogurt from a brand I like (Chobani), whisked it up a little to mix, and hit the start and went to bed.

The next morning I had two quarts of yogurt which tasted just fine.  I am fond of “greek style” yogurt, so most of it went into a strainer lined with cheesecloth and covered with the plastic wrap and back into the fridge for an overnight stay.

The next day I was rewarded with around a quart of solid greek yogurt and a couple of cups of whey.  Tastes pretty good.  Mission accomplished.

EndNote:  I used the whey to make my oatmeal that day.  Excellent.

Offline Call

 

So apparently today in the world, there was a pandemic of the “blue screen of death” out there in the realm of inconvenienced electrons and server farms.  So as a lark, I decided to turn off my wireless and see if I could spend the day away from my installed link to the grand Illusion commonly referred to as the “Internet”.

Mostly this is just going to be an “internet fast day”.  Kinda like Lent but only for a day to decompress a little bit and to get a feel for the nature of a forced absence.  I am obviously still typing and still doing my daily diary entry, but the immediacy of looking something up or seeing what is happening in the moment is removed.

I am wondering just how much of my incipient paranoia and my malaise concerning the state of the world is due to wallowing in the news cycle?  My morning routine is about a half hour of skimming the news feeds that I find to be marginally accurate in order to get an idea of the direction that the world is heading.  The trend is obviously down.  

I am unsure about what to think about this.  I have always been a news and politics junkie.  It is one of my worst personal failings.  The internet allows me to spend about the same time every day trying to figure out the direction of a system that is well outside of my control.  

So this leads me to ask myself a couple of questions that are difficult to answer:

 Is the world actually heading downhill, or am I just behind the times?

 Has the actual quality of the information I receive any differrent than the quality of the information during my salad days.

 Does the medium from which I obtain have an effect on my processing of the information?

There are a bunch more questions, but I think that these three are enought for today.

---

Circling back to my initial premise of working offline.  This might well be the way to go.  I need to do a little more research and figure out how to minimize being connected to the electronic monster.

They are not our friends

 

This post is kind of embarrassing to write.  It is just my opinion and a distillation of my experience over the past fifty some-odd years and probably points as much to my insecurity and self-image problems as it does to what I see as facts on the ground.  That being said, I don’t think that what I am saying is untrue.

Let's talk about our relationship with the motherland.  Europe.  Now, a lot of you will remind me that the US has many different and varied cultural forebears, but the truth of the matter from my point of view is that the elites and the policy mavens are working as hard as they can to ape the image and the beliefs of the Europeans.  

It is my honest feeling that Europe does not respect us either as a country or as individuals.  This is following more than a couple interactions over the course of forty-plus years.  The Europeans use us to make certain that they don’t have to spend money on things and can maintain their tottering and ancient quasi-imperial systems of privilege and resource looting at a cut rate cost.

Americans want to be European, I can’t understand it, but there it sits.  The Europeans consider us heavily armed barbarians who they buy off with trinkets and fashion and get all bitchy-huffy whenever we don’t do their bidding or follow their oh-so-obviously superior cultural direction.

I think that we should work out how to deal like adults here in this hemisphere and let the Euro-trash deal with theirs. I am unsure about how to deal with the countries West of here.  When I come up with a decent idea, I’ll tell you. 

I am an isolationist when it comes to Europe.  Pure and simple.  Fuck Europe.  I say let them hang and let's pull our resources and money back here to fix our own problems.  Let Europe take care of itself.  Leave NATO.

I think that we really need to remember that our ancestors, for the most part, left Europe for a damn good reason.

Tough Business

 

Why did the duck cross the road?

What pisses my buddies off about me is the simple fact that I understand that my opinion really doesn’t matter and neither does theirs. I am beginning to think that this simple fact is indicative of the mindset of the system that is running us into the ground.

I am beginning to come to the conclusion that the individual and his personal desires and beliefs just aren’t important.  The real hard part about all this is that the more important the individual considers their beliefs the less useful and important a part of the world that person becomes

We live in a country with a population north of 330 million in a world population greater than 8 billion.  Just how important do you think you opinions and beliefs are when put alongside numbers like that?

Our system here in the land o’ the free is a putative democracy  The sales pitch is that your vote matters.  But like all sales pitches, it doesn’t tell the whole truth.  You aren’t voting for a person that will fix things.  That idea is a bridge too far.  You are voting for a person who will hopefully wrangle the reins of government more to your liking than the person opposing him.  

But it is the reins of government themselves that are at the core of the problem.  The President as a position is not in a position of power.  He is like a Boeing CEO, he directs funds to entities that no longer serve their original purpose.  The metrics that he has available, the current mission of the entity, and the goals he wishes to accomplish will not be aligned.  The presidents policy goals are attempts to align these three functions.

I think that the extraordinarily difficult path the the president has to walk is to convince the subordinate entities to align themselves with his goals.  The left has the problem of the tail wagging the dog.  The entities call the tune.  The right is trying to force the entities to capitulate and sing a different tune.

Deus ex Machina

 

God in the machine.

Here in the good ol’ USA, we keep expecting someone to save us from ourselves.  All we get instead is a couple of power structures that control the political discourse, neither of which knows how to do anything except throw money at the problem and write laws that focus money at specific targets.

It is my feeling that this kind of thing is described pretty darn well in that horribly written mound of poorly thought out garbage named “Atlas Shrugged”.

I am not for certain that the large scale power structures that run the US really have any idea of what they are doing.  They think that they control the “levers of power”, but truthfully, all that it appears that they know how to do is spend other people's money to hire other people who claim that they know how to do the job.  

I begin to see why actors and entertainers are becoming more important in our country.  They have the same shallow and self-absorbed sense of omniscience that we have gotten used to in our politicians.  

But the country is heading into a place where no one wishes to go.  Every individual is cringing about the direction we are heading, but there is no workable consensus concerning how to even slow down the train.

I am beginning to think that the problem doesn’t have a solution.  The punch is on its way and there is no way to avoid it.  

I think that it is time to re-read Tainter.

Maybe a side post here

 

Well, Since I am getting better at posting everyday and the world out there appears to be getting weirder, I think that as a backup, I will begin to post my dailies here as well as over at Dreamwidth.

I'll see how this goes, it is just a backup kind of thing.  I still like my place over at Dreamwidth, but it is a tiny fish in a huge pond that publishes a lot of pretty interesting stuff from some pretty fringy type folks (Which is exactly why I like it there).  But, this is the real world and one never ever knows when the predators will be around

Does anyone stop here

 Just wondering

Places to Vent

It is hard not to be angry.  I really try for weary resignation, as that seems the most appropriate, but I keep getting angry.

I am trying to understand the world and that does nothing but set me up for failure.  Because when you spend time trying to understand the world, it seems to be putting all of its efforts in the task of being beyond my comprehension.  This is unfortunate to say the least, ashere I sit on the down-slope to being a septuagenarian, with all the attendant physical and mental challenges therein, and the world just seems intent on fucking with me.

This one here is going to be be one for the record books.  Democratic party has been built around the simple idea that screwing the bottom eighty-percent of the country is "good for the economy".  What they don't add to their core value statement is the necessary statement "of the 20% of the population that matter".  You might hate Trump, but these folks came out of the abortion that was the Clinton Administration.  Biden was the Clinton's water carrier in the 90's.  Folks, look at the core pieces of legislation that got us exactly where we are now.  I ain't gonna spend time enumerating, but his record is there and he is one of those whose decisions in the past landed us exactly where we are now.

Not only do we have a President who is, shall we be charitable, of questionable competence, his platform and his base simple idea that the Now, I can't for a minute say that fuckwad's policies are good for more than the top 40%, but in relative terms, I think that he is a smidge better to the "non-elite".  He hasn't started any wars and the body count being racked up by his erstwhile "administration" is the lowest in decades.  It is kinda like Falstaff became president.  Bluster and reality are a strange mix and he sure doesn't inspire any kind of confidence.  I don't think that he has broken anything that wasn't broken anyway, the poor dumbass just wants to be in charge and will preside over the fall.  Not an enviable position, but from where it looks from here, the situation isn't salvageable anyway.

Shit.  I am not part of this.  I'm taking some days off and not going to bother thinking about this.  Maybe I'll see you Wednesday