Old Grumpy

Busted is heading to a new home.  Apparently, Blogger is getting too much for him and is decamping over to a back up over at Wordpress.

I can't say that I blame him too much, I have done the same in earlier days.  I came back to blogger because in my earlier days, back in '06-'08, I had more readers and a bigger ego.  When I made the move, readership went down, the ego became depressed, and after a time I moved back to where I thought that folks read me.

But alas, my readership never returned to the level that it achieved earlier.   Where the levels used to be approx 300 uniques a day, it is now around forty to fifty with an occasional spike.  So it would appear that it is my writing, not the venue that was the problem.

Should I decide to leave town for greener pastures, I would hope that you all will still come and visit.  While for the most part this is a journal for my thoughts, It also allows me the conceit that someone feels my thoughts are good enough to devote a portion of their day to reading.

It OK guy!

Busted just took off on a rant about Blogger.

Huh.

Well, I'll see if it screws up here.

Google looks to be getting set to start forcing ads onto our pages whether we like it or not.  Now the "advertise products" is out there prominently where you can see it.  Care to make a wager as to when it becomes the default and then part of the use requirements.

I use blogger because I am a cheapskate.  Probably keep doing so.  But folks, none of us pay a dime for using the service, and google has been very firm about their desire to dominate the net.    They most certainly are not going to let us continue our free ride.  Most of us don't do any advertisement on our pages.  Those who do probably get a pittance.

I'll still use the soapbox.  Just remember that the labels will be getting larger.

Whining

I gotta get another job.

Loyalty to a subordinate has always been a dicey thing. The larger the organization that you work for, the smaller the chance that such an anachronism will be shown. Locutius just spent 25 years working for a large corporation. He did quite will by himself, but at no time in our friendship did he let me think for a second that Boeing held any special love for him.

Working at the fedguv ranch makes me feel the same way. Minions are just that. I am one of the little people, I bust my ass and it gets me squat. Yes, I get a paycheck. The truth of the matter is, I am well enough paid for the work that I do. I shouldn't bitch all that much. I got a little pissy a year ago and they gave me a temporary raise for a year to shut me up, but now that is running out and they forgot to do what they promised, which is to make the raise permanent.

What galls me the most is that my peers have are a full pay grade greater than I am. They were given the grade back during the days when the government got into the habit of overpaying people for the same job that folks in industry paid less for. Receptionist/clerks tossing off 40k/year. Janitors getting paid $17.00/hr. Paper shufflers pulling down 50k.

No, my bitch is a relative thing. When folks who dial it in get paid better than I do, it pisses me off. I can't bring myself to the morally deadly choice of not doing my best and lowering my standards to my co-workers standards.

I gotta get another job.

Soggy Evening

Went to the younger's track meet last night.  Stood around in the rain and watched teenagers gaggle about and occasionally do something.  Track meets, like their close cousins wrestling meets, are ungodly boring.

It did get me thinking about sports in general.  All the parents are certain that the big money will keep flowing into the big time sports like football and basketball and the smaller sports will be left to die on the vine.  I think that the other option might be equally probable.

Let's look at sports here in America.  Football is in the process of devouring itself.  The athletes are too big, too fast, and too well armed.  The sport itself has a long history of leaving half-crippled men in its wake.   Revenues are going down, costs are going up.  Owners are testosterone-patched viagra addicts with greed and power issues. Something is going to give.

Basketball is becoming increasingly marginalized as the players become ever more self-absorbed and greedy.    The owners cupidity and the costs to the fan are becoming absurd.   The game itself is becoming boring, it moves fast granted, but rather than a team sport, it seems to be degenerating into a one on one competition with a couple of people on the court watching.

Baseball is an enigma.  The only people who seem to like it are the folks who believe in the gold standard, the American dream (circa 1965) and apple pie.  They are lost to the past with a booorrrriinng sport as their standard.

So, I encourage the boys in their off sports.  Good healthy competition.  Not too many parents about.  The kids having fun by themselves.   Oh, the young one will play football, but I think that I like this better

Empty

Don't know why I have spent the couple of days trying and failing to
write anything. It seems as though the writing thing is getting a bit
stale. I don't know if it is the writing is starting to pall or I am
losing interest the events that I write about.

I call myself a doomer, but I am pretty confident that things will work
out. They probably won't be to my taste, but well enough. If they
don't work out, my half-assed ideas had better be the first things on
the chopping block if things go south.

Life is good right now, the important things are working reasonably
well. Maybe what I am experiencing is a little bit of contentment.

I think that I will run with it.

Best Laid Plans

Locutius is here on his retirement tour. 30 hours left at the salt mines and then he goes off to the land of a lower level of paid workload and higher level of chore workload. We are pleased to have him.

Yesterday he was quite patient with yours truly and my youngest, as we were summoned to a track meet to watch the shot put. What was a two hour plan transformed itself into a five hour reality. The best laid plans and that kind of rot.

So, let us speak of how the current confrontational politics have come about. We earnestly discuss how we wish to have things revert to the "good old days", when politicians came to reasoned compromise and the country moved forward in bliss. While I do question the reality of this (it has always seemed that the politicians have been nothing if not a gaggle of self-important sots), let us assume for minute that things were as folks fantasize and things were better back then.

The "then" that most of us boomer types discuss so fervently are the halcyon days of the 1950-1965 vintage. Ahh...the sepia tones, the vaseline-lensed smoothness of image where things we, for a short time, as close to perfect as has ever been seen in the world. But these homey images had been bought at a price. None of us thought to much of it, but by being the last and only standing industrialized economy, we were so awash in wealth that the citizenry could be easily placated with the amount of money we brought in in taxes.

The politicians in that golden era were politicians who had to work out compromises on how to divvy up a surplus. Now, I am not belittling what they accomplished, but the truth of the matter is that. in the real world, that is a pretty easy job. When everyone gets something, there might be a bit of grumbling concerning the size of one's slice of the pie, but everyone does, in fact, get a slice of the pie. This is a situation where a certain amount of graciousness can be easily drummed up and everyone can be made to look like a statesman, hauling home a share of the pork and talking about the cuts made to others share.

We are now in a state of insufficiency. There isn't enough to go around and the pie itself is shrinking at an alarming clip. So now the ability to be a statesman is seriously constrained. The need to makes sure that your constituency gets more than they deserve is no longer an option for all players in the game.

So really what I am saying is that we had better get used to the idea that our politicians are a bunch of argumentative, petty, and self aggrandizing shits. The excess of money that allowed them to disguise the fact is no longer available.

It is going to get worse

AFK

Just so everyone knows, I am gonna take the next couple of days off. Gotta entertain guests, fix a washing machine, hike and clean house.

Not enough time for this stuff

Agricultural Complexity

  There are right around seven billion people in the world.

There are three hundred and thirteen million people in the US.

Best I can figure, we are getting close to carrying capacity for food production in the overall world, we probably have a long way to go here in the US. We aren't as relatively productive as we used to be, but we export a whole bunch more than we import. I do believe that, if people stopped buying strawberries from Mexico and grapes from Chile, the ratio would go much higher very quickly.

   While there have been doomsayers squawking about the imminent collapse of American agriculture for 30 years, the process is still up and going. Because of the way that we have chosen to structure our society, it is a necessary evil that allows the existence of such historical oddities as suburbia. Without the industrialized production, processing, and transportation of food, the living arrangement that we use here would not be possible. I have been having an internal debate (still unresolved) about the chicken and egg question of what came first, industrialized food production or suburbia?

   This being said, I have been thinking a lot about the back to the farm movement meme that courses through the net on a routine basis. I can't see how this is going to happen without a serious readjustment in dreams and culture here in the good old USA.

   I figure that, short of a big war in the Middle East shutting down access to those resources, we have about 50-75 years to get our shit together and come up with a new model for agricultural production and distribution.

   Now that we have identified the task that we need to begin as the decentralization of the American farm sector, we can start thinking about the direction to go. If you haven't been paying attention, this sector is rapidly industrializing and continuing to do so. It isn't always the big Ag sector that gets rich. The "family" farmer corporations are a big swathe of American wealth. The farm sizes keep getting bigger, with the possible exception of hobby farms kept for horses by rich yuppies who read to much Louis L'Amour and watch too much Bonanza.

 We have a situation that looks remarkably like the latifundia of post-Roman days. Instead of gangs of slave labor working the fields, we have fossil-fueled monsters servicing the fields. We also have monstrous amounts of fertilizer (read here, processed natural gas) and chemicals (read here: processed oil) being dumped on the fields to enhance production.

 But, as the access to feedstock becomes compromised, the prices will go up and the gyrations as to how to proceed will begin. I don't see it possible the middle ranges of our food manufacturing system will go forward in their current format. The big family corporation farms are big enough to produce, but not big enough to ruthlessly monopolize the access to fuel and chemicals that will be needed in the not-so-distant future. They will die on the vine, the victim of death by a thousand cuts as they struggle and fail to compete for feedstock with the corporate farms.

The land that they currently use will be what is in play. If it starts fragmenting into smaller parcels with on site farmers, then we will be heading in the direction that I prefer. If the big ag and other corporations start hoovering up the big family corporation farms, then welcome to the four hundred.

This just won't last for another fifty years. 

Sorry

Thought I had something to say, got halfway through writing it and it fell apart.

I'll try again tomorrow.

Over the top

   I don't know how many of you have either played football at a competitive level or follow the NFL.  I have done both, it isn't a big deal and the older that I get, it becomes even a smaller deal.
   I am fascinated by the current foofooraw concerning the Saints.  Now, Gregg Williams and Sean Payton have been banished to the netherworld for either running or turning a blind eye to or covering up the existence of a pool of money for the purpose of rewarding players for injuring other players.
   Now, the league has decided to keep them in their high dudgeon by upholding the fines and suspensions.  I cannot say that I am either disappointed or thrilled by this decision.  The sport and its players have become too advanced and dangerous to do anything but put a stranglehold on this kind of behavior.  The science, training, conditioning, and motivation of the players are as high as humanly possible.  The equipment turns the players into kinetic weapons, capable of crippling a man for life.  There has to be a governor put on the sport so that it doesn't become rollerball.
   But there is another side of the problem.  Each intrusion of the commissioner and the voices of safety removes something from the purity of the game.  Makes it a choreographed pseudo-sport better capable of producing profits than satisfying a deep-seated need to watch competition and glory in the spectacle.
   Like everything else in out society, the decision arrived at is a motley compromise.  This one is the natural outgrowth of a sport that seems to descend more from the excesses of the East Germans than the more mundane efforts of Whizzer White.
   The decision made is correct.  The judgement is just.  It is just a tragedy that it had to come to this.

Maybe even a better way

Since I am on this bent about posting easily (blogger is ok, but I am not fond of the posting interface), I first have to admit that I don't have the kinks worked out of the posting directly from open office.  So I will talk about posting from Thunderbird instead.

I have been doing this for about three weeks now.  Seems to work fine.  I can imbed links, and add pictures easily.  There isn't much in the way of page layout, and you cannot make text wrap around pictures that I can figure out, but those things don't bother me.

Basically, just write what you want, send it to the e-mail address that you designate under the settings in the blogger program and off you go.  Send the e-mail and it posts. 

I have about four or five drafts sitting in my drafts folder in Thunderbird that will someday become posts.  Works pretty dandy

How to publish using LibreOffice Writer

How to post directly from LibreOffice Writer.

1. Set up your default e-mail program (I use thunderbird) it is under tools'options. You will get a screen looking like this:

2. Write your post. You can set it up with pictures and the works. Just remember when you go to save it, Use the Save As HTML file.

3. The menu will look like this:

When you hit the send button, your E-mail program will pop up:

Give the Subject Line the name you wish to give the Post (For this one...E-mail instructions for LibreOffice Writer:

The To: Line will be the e-mail addess that you can set under Blogger's Setting/Mobile and e-mail tab.

If this publishes, that how it works (with pictures too!!!)

Easter Experiments.html

Easter day is mostly relaxing and waiting for things to cook. My contributions to my odd little family feast this year is beer can roasted smoked turkey (I have a cold smoker, so I smoke the turkey the day before, then finish it off on the grill outside the day of eating), green bean and broccoli casserole, and red velvet cake.

So, I thought that I would take a minute to see if I can post directly from LibreOffice Writer. I refuse to use the overpriced Microsoft crap and it wouldn't work from the system that I am currently running (yes, I am back to Linux, this time Mint KDE 12).

So, I am going to save this as an HTML document, then see if it will post like I think it will. If it does, I am correct. If you don't see, you won't know that I failed.

Re-Posting from back in 2008.

Since Martin commented on my last post, and I had addressed this earlier, I thought that I would re-post it as a conversation thread.

There was a fairly poorly written and intellectually lazy book written in the Nineties named "The Nine Nations of North America".

But the book had some merit. As I have stated before, I don't see the United States in it's current configuration lasting much longer, certainly no more than fifty years, though there it would seem that we are moving fast toward some kind of serious spasm. Joel Garreau at least took the ball and started the conversation, so hats off and many thanks to him.

So this post is just about my neck of the woods, the Pacific Northwest. Garreau had us stuffed into a coastal state of Ecotopia. HA. What really pisses me off is that he lumped us in with those assholes down in California.

Now that I have vented my spleen, lets get back to the task at hand. A true nation is a couple of big cities, an integrated transportation system, a food basket, a resource base, and a reasonably common culture. What I propose (and, let's be clear about this, this is not an original idea, though for the life of me I can't remember where I first heard it. If someone would fill in the blanks for me, I would be very grateful) is that the Northwest United States and British Columbia begin to work on the political structure required to build a nation from the Columbia River drainage.

Just ponder it. The country would have some great cities (Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Boise, Vancouver, etc). It would also have a great bread basket in the Palouse and Idaho (why that idiot Garreau lumped that area into "the empty quarter is beyond me), an great transportation system (river travel and transportation is easy and efficient), excellent natural resources, a pretty fair population with an excellent sprinking of minorities to keep things interesting.

Just a thought

So, what kind of Polis are you having today?

I really can't see the continent-spanning empires lasting much longer, at least not in the format that we currently have with a centralized federal structure and subservient state and local structures.  It just doesn't make sense.  The energy need required to stitch such a ungainly contraption and keep it pointed in a direction (you will note, I did not have the temerity to use the term "right direction") is truly enormous and looking more and more fragile as the months and years pass by.

I have always thought that the US would fragment, I was almost certainly premature in the predictions that I made to Locutius et al in the early 1990's ( I thought that we would be fragmenting by 2012, though Locutius swears I said 2015).   I am very curious about what form the fragmentation will take.   So, let's take a crack at running the process though and getting some ideas about how things may (or may not) proceed.

The first stage of the process may consist of legal challenges to the Federal Government to the roles that it has grasped in the recent past (read here >1932 C.E.).  I am watching the health care debate with great interest.  I cannot for the life of me figure out why this one raised the folks ire on "government intrusion into people's personal lives"  when the Patriot act put it to shame.  But there is the possibility that it will be the peak of federal government power here in the US.

The party system here in the US does have analogies in the Europe of the Ancien Regime.  The Democratic Party more closely resembles a royal court.  With an absolutist monarch being replaced by a Federal government with overweening powers and nearly constant troubles with money.  The Republican party resembles the dukes and barons and counts that resisted the royal intrusion into their affairs, trying to keep the wealth and power in their own hands.  
We are looking at nothing more or less than a struggle for the way that government is structured in the US.  The democrats/blues are striving for centralization of state functions at the federal level to assure that a minimum of their desires for a new order are kept across the country.  The republicans/reds are striving to break the federal stranglehold on power and return to a less-federally dominated power structure.

What I find interesting is the means that the reds seem to be taking for the process.  They seem to be bent on creating an oligopoly instead of the confederacy that the hoi polloi in the mass movement seem to envision.  By stripping the federal government of powers, while maintaining taxes and funneling the money into corporate pockets, the end product appears to be headed toward a modern version of the four hundred rather than a return to the Articles of Confederation. 

 

Blue America: Or, the Kumaya starts here

It sounds simplistic, but no matter how I analyze it, the blues appear to be the discontented leftovers from the 1960's.  As I talked about with the Reds, they are the disgruntled leftovers of the same suburbs that spawned the Reds, they are just the folks that never learned to take the chip off of their shoulder when you look at the crap that middle America dishes out.

So these are the folks that have designed a new world order to take the place of the one that they don't like.   Unfortunately they really don't know what they are talking about.  The world that they have created is one where the sharp corners are padded and everyone wears a safety helmet. 

This world that they create and keep trying to shove down everyone's throat is kind of scary.  Everyone is equal, yet it seems to me that there are as many levels of ability and worth as there are people.  The biggest problem is the triumph of form over function.  Political correctness is just the tip of the iceberg, what is really wanted here is thought control.

They have created this brave new world in their mind.  If they are given the power, they would have no compunctions about forcing it on the country in much the same way that Pol Pot forced his visions upon the people in Cambodia.

But these are usually the soft-science folks, the marketing pukes and the petty bureaucrats.  As a group they are pretty damned ineffective.  The have fed on the leftovers from people who actually do something for a long time now.  The trouble is that when everything has to slim down a little because of changes to the world order and the world economy, their pieces will become correspondingly smaller and they will become like a group of rabid attack wiener-dogs, unable to pay for their Volvos and with nothing left in their ethical investment funds

Reds: A time warp in constant motion

I was born in Ogden, Utah.  Grew up bouncing between a farm (my grandmother's) and a little house in the low-class neighborhood.  I was born and bred to be Red. 

It is a protected place.  Sure there are all the horror stories about abusive parents, and strange men in vans with candy and other such things.  But for the most part it is a safe place to raise your kids and give them something to rebel against.

What the kids always rebel against is the stifling conformity of such a place.  Of fathers caught up in the rat race and mothers sinking slowly into a depression from a wasted life.

But this has as many untruths as truths.  Mostly it is the place where a lot of us grew up and are growing up.  Where people go to church on Sunday and can't quite imagine why the rest of the world doesn't think like them.  In other words, a better off version of the self-centered ignorance that the rest of the world displays when they are at home. 

More that anything the Reds are the American version of keepin' on keepin' on.  The hold the same crude faith as their forefathers and have the same overwhelming desire to shove that faith down everyone's throat.  Their fathers were Buick men or Ford men and they march to the same desire to get a little more than those around them.  Just plain folks.

The Price of Fame

Blogging is my own sad little vice.  I usually don't announce my less-than-pulitzer writings to my friends and I make no real effort to publicize the depths of my personal depavity.  I am always pleased and honored that people drop by to read, but I realize that there are folks out there who think deeper thoughts and write better thought than your humble correspondent.

So imagine my amusement when this popped up.   Now, the Huff post is an interesting little play.  Rich and connected, Ariana put together a media powerhouse by playing her connections against the pathetic need for attention of bloggers.  Bloggers who craved fame ate crap on a plate publicly hoping that someone with money would notice them and give them money.  They sat up late, beating on their laptops in an effort to get noticed.  Ariana never promised them anything but a platform to rage from. 

Now that she has made some serious coin putting together her connections and access to a server farm, they feel that they should get a part of the pie. 

Piss off.  She never promised you jack.  You wrote for her in hopes that someone else would start paying you.  When no one felt your screed was worthy of coin, you went after Ariana.  You are a bunch of dumbasses with limited understanding and aspirations well beyond your limited abilities.  You got everything that you deserved.

Hope you have fun with your lawyer bills

Their Master's Voice

One of the issues with having been on the early shift for the past four years is that, come hell or high water, I wake up at 04:00 and have to take some time drifting back to sleep.  On most days, this is not an issue, but for some reason, when it happens on Sundays, I get a little peevish at the occurrence.

I am staring at the back cover of this week's Time magazine.  I read the rag because it is good to see what the mainstream media are reporting to further the goals of their corporate masters.  This week is odd because I really am equally offended by the cover on the front cover of the magazine and the advertisement on the back cover.  This magazine has obviously fallen a long way from its halcyon days as a significant and thoughtful reporter of the world's events.

Let us begin with the back page and my personal choice for the most insidious and crippling device every foisted on our entirely-too-willing-to-be-led-about-by-the-nose society.  The iPhone.  All the advertisement is is a picture of a shiny new iPhone in a hand, with the caption "I could use a latte".  The iPhone is obediently reporting the results, gathered from the too-obvious tracking of the individual by GPS, and a rudimentary voice recognition software program. 

I used to be repulsed by people walking down the streets, talking into a cell phone to the insular little grouping that they cling to, ignoring the wider world around then, missing the cues of life that are part and parcel of interacting with the full society around you.  People who cling to their cell phone are the new definition of clique, rejecting interaction with the messy and real general populace and clinging desperately to a chosen group who reflect their beliefs back to them in a most satisfying manner.  When you ignore the world in your immediate vicinity and cling to group of chosen friends, you can do without the messy and difficult concept of people having differing views and goals. 

Now Apple has taken it even further.  You don't even have to interact with your friends now, you can rely on your phone and Apple to provide for your needs as soon as they appear.  The Solarians would be so proud.

The society proposed by the back page however, is dependent on time selling the idea on the front page.  The front page reads "The Truth About Oil", and claims increases of oil supplies by "new technologies".  While warning that prices at the pump aren't going lower. 

The increases in supply that are claimed are laughable.  Time claims we import 45% of our oil, NPR claims that we will go down to 36% by 2035.  Canadian tar sands will feed our gulf coast refineries and we will keep our SUV's.  It is nothing but hope.

I guess that time This week shows what is really happening, we are blithely heading down the path to consumer heaven, fueled by oil that will continue to flow because of us working smarter.

What could possibly go wrong?