Bye-Bye google

http://www.desgringueler.com/degringolade/

The new blog is up and running on a server farm somewhere, it isn't perfect, but until I can get my own server up and running, it will just have to do.  It appears to work just dandy so far.  So, I think that I will just put up a link here for a week or two and then just go over and stop posting here.  I'll leave everything up here, as a archive of things past, but I have also moved the old posts over to the new place.

The only bummer is that I haven't been able to figure out how to bring all the comments over.  I have the most recent fifty over there, but that is it.  All of the comment will remain here so they won't be lost.

I am hoping that the folks who link to me will notice the change in venue.  Needless to say, I am going to send them the new address so that those of you who exhibit the poor time management skills necessary to take to time and read this screed  can find me again.

Even semi-celibate old men are stupid

Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. I wish it wasn't so, But the fact just sits there.  Mute embaressment all around.

I have the good fortune to work in an area with a heavy population of attractive and intelligent younger women.  These youngsters have adopted me as one of their own as I speak with them as adults and don't openly try to chase them.  The reason that I don't chase them is the somewhat unwelcome realization that they probably aren't attracted by my aging, obese, scarred and broken body.    

However, certain parts of my body resist this charitable description and insist that, if I would only get off my duff, a little procreation is there for the taking.

Idiots, as I stated before.

I wonder when they will shut up?

The train has left the station

I have no problem with the science behind global warming.  You can scream like a little girl and believe some dope somewhere who has taken his finger out of his nose long enough to tap out a claim to have "disproved" the science behind it, but it will not get you anything.

It is happening, and its effects will persist for centuries.  It will pass, but not in your lifetime.  And you know what else?

It doesn't matter if you believe it or not.

You see, global warming is the kind of shit we hate here in the good old schizophrenic USA.  It is complex.  It has multiple causes. it behaves in a non-linear fashion, replete with feedback loops, attractors, oscillations, and all kinds of crap that make the average Joe clutch his temples and wish fervently he had paid more attention back there in middle school where they tried to introduce him to algebra.

But on top of that, it is our favorite kind of problem too.  The kind where we really don't have any control over the issue, but we feel we have to do something about it.  Makes for great political theatre and grave pronouncements, but the truth is that there is really nothing that can be done and all the pronouncements are just kabuki theatre, being performed to piss off one side of the argument or the other.

We'll adapt.

Our grain belt will move north.  Canada will get fairly nice.  It will absolutely suck living in the Maldives.  Maybe England will be able to make some decent wine.  Maybe the Sahel will continue getting green.

But, you won't adapt if you ignore it or deny it.  You gotta pay attention and make the adjustments.  If you don't, I'm even cool with that.

'Cuz you see, if you and your little group of inbred piglets aren't capable or seeing the facts and adapting to them, you/they will die off, along with that odd strain of DNA that makes up the natural experiment we refer to as "your lineage".  And if that happens, there will be more for me and mine.

Magisteria

This post is a bit of a blather...forgive me in advance.  The plot wanders about a little too much for my taste, but right now I really don't give a crap, and I suspect, neither do you.  

Anyway;

I am getting very bored by folks in the doomy-financial blogosphere ranting about how crooked things are now.

Huh?

Look cherubs, the game has always been rigged.  Has been since the time of Gaius Gracchus and probably hearkens back to Solon.  What happened in the last fifty of so years is that there was enough disparity in money, energy, and military power between us folks here in the good ol' USA and the rest of the world that the Bon Temps did in fact roullez for everyone here in the USA.

Well cherubs, it was never meant to last.  Once the rest of the world got off of dead center after having had the crap kicked out of them in the second world war, things were going to have to come a little bit back to balanced.

Now, if the forever upwards folks are right (and the data doesn't look too good for their side of the argument) then the rest of the world will just catch up with us and we will all move together into a golden future.

Those of you who read me regularly now which side of this issue I am on.  We here in the good ol' USA have had a nice party while the rest of the world was getting up.  The rich folk took a respite from butt-fucking the poor folks here and went throughout the world screwing the poor folks there.  Gave us low-lifes a nice breather and we managed to catch up a bit.  Burned through a lot of energy stocks during the party and lived comfortably large.

Then the nineties happened and scuzzy bastards such as your humble correspondent started taking apart US factories and productive capacity and moving to not quite third world countries so that the "Shareholders" could reap rentier income from the unwashed masses here in the US by paying ten cents on the dollar to little brown folks who were truly grateful for the jobs.

The "aughts" (2000-2009) brought around the uncomfortable realization that the growth that we were getting used was little more that burning through the planets stored resources at a mind-boggling pace.  The end conclusion that lots of folks seem to be coming to is that perhaps the party is over and we might have to deal with a touch of a nasty hangover.

So, now it looks as though the game is up.  The median wage here in the US is being painfully adjusted to the rest of the world's standards, and the Hoi Polloi here are getting a painful education in how the world usually works.

I expect that during the next little bit we will see some right-wing populism, some left-wing populism, some corporo-fascism, some syndico-anarchism and a whole bunch of other 'isms coming out of the woodwork.  These will be dusty and malformed at first.  Living large has shut down our collective political intelligence and allowed sloppy and self-serving thought to predominate in the limited political spectrum that we have remaining.

'Cuz you see folks, our current stunted and corrupt political system isn't up to the task of reforming itself.  There has not been any thought placed into the political system we now inhabit, only pandering to the "core" and self-aggrandizement.  The elected officials are now merely the servant class of the wealthy.  They have the power and we don't.  What is going to happen is that the full spectrum of political thought is going to be trotted out and chewed over by the country as a whole.  A new set of political goals and constraints is going to be put in place.  This is going to remarkably ugly and painful.

Americans, in the next while, will be dusting off old thought systems and trying to find new ones to recover the political system from the asshats who dominate it now.  The first couple of efforts will be pretty sorry, but we will get the hang of it.

Adrift

I cannot shake the thought that the cold times are coming. The feeling of malaise now doesn’t seem to want to leave. I cannot say that I am depressed as I am about as happy as I have ever been, but the sense of foreboding around me just seems to deepen.

More and more I am thinking that there is a reckoning coming. Not just for my pathetic excuse of a job or my less than excessive lifestyle, but for the society that I swim in. There does not seem to be any sense of accountability, spin rules all. But the reckoning will be a spasm, and the really hard part will be to weather the storm and wait until things settle down.

The real issue is that there is no concept of restraint. The zeitgeist is that there can be no constraints on the individual. But this allows too much room for the flawed vessels that make up our race to move in. We consume and consume, unwilling to take less or to save because there is no future, only the infinite now.

We rationalize the things we buy as necessities, somehow different from the self-serving opulence of the past. But it is all the same, subtle differentiations of class and power designed to make those around you aware of your status.
When we come to the reckoning, we will be in a crisis, because all that we have built is a reaction to the past.

We are the new puritans, creating a set of oh-so-carefully crafted mores and enforcing them with a puritan’s zeal. But there are no roots to what we have created. We threw out the baby with the bathwater. So the past can provide us no guide to find our way out of the morass, and the sad set of rules we have created will not be up to the task.

So we use up our finite resources because we don’t know what else to do. We spend energy extravagantly to fuel our mobility and freedom and our drive for the cult of the self, and by doing so have shackled the future to less.

One of the paths which we strayed from

This is a very good message for what I have been talking about. How dependent are we on a system primarily controlled by large corporate interests? How much of the internet is controlled by large companies and barely disguised quasi-governmental entities. How easy would it be to shut down communication on the net.

The net was designed in the beginning to be robust in the case of an attack.  Now it has been reduced to a advertising medium.

Think really hard after watching this.  See what is possible.  Yes, it blew apart, but the lessons are there should anyone pay attention.

I think that you should seriously consider the discussion at minute 18:30.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3145680396796021272&ei=QEuJS8bMO5TMrAO_o7yMBw&q=fidonet&client=firefox-a#