A question for Ilargi

Now, you all know that I am kind of a fanboy of Ilargi and Stoneleigh over at the Automatic Earth.

I do like the Debt Rattle part of the process there.

But sometimes I would love a little more.....so I am going to ask questions here.

Here is the headline in the "Debt Rattle"

• Saudi Arabia Maintains Spending Plans in 2015 Despite Oil Slide (WSJ)

So, since this is a paywall link to a status quo economic cheerleader , I ignore it and go poking over to the "Grey Lady" and find this.....the applicable quote is:

The Finance Ministry said the "budget was adopted under international economic and financial conditions that are challenging." The 2015 budget reflects an expected cut in revenues of around $88 billion from 2014, mostly due to the slump in global oil prices.

So, the Saudi's dip into the big pot-o-dollars and start spending them.....looks as though they have enough to cover bad oil prices for 6-8 years, which I firmly believe will not be the case.

But what will be the effect of spending all these dollars?  What will spending these dollars do to the value of the dollar as they start flooding the market?

BTW:  Here is a $$-SDR conversion

High School Dayze

Sometimes I get tired of trying to figure out just what is happening in the world. But I am beginning to think that my experience in High School may be the best source for models and explanations of the way that the world works.

Can't seem to get past my lack of trust for the mainstream media. The cheerleaders there are so full of shit that it is extraordinarily difficult to get past their sneering, self-satisfied visages to try and parse what they are trying to communicate. When I do make the effort, what I usually hear is an attempt to present the bad data in a light that keeps the charade going. I suppose that I should be offended, but then I take a stroll down memory lane and remember that cheerleaders cheer even when the team is losing. It is just what they do.

The jocks have turned into the corporate types out there. They have engineered the system so that all attention is on them and they have turned the economy and political arena into their playing field. The cheerleaders come to all the games and cheer.

The environmentalist are the stoners.

Parking lot types are still there.

Band types are middle management.

Now, I will grant you that the parallels are not absolute.  But the correlation  is high enough that it is still an effective means of understanding the society around you.

Just a lazy update on an old issue

The boy that cried wolf is the fable that just keeps giving.

SARS, H5N1....the list just keeps going.

I have a nasty feeling, after living in the lab for all those years that there is a trend among the viral cognoscenti to treat any potential "threat" to the currently distended human population as a call to lobby for billions of dollars to be given for salaries, jobs for college friends, and trips to conferences.

A new virus is discovered and it is a race to the feeding trough for the academics and NGO's that, like any flavor of high priesthoods, try to make the general population pay for their beliefs.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

So head over here

Manipulating the markets, any market, is supposed to be illegal, but don’t count on the bankers going to jail.  Dr. Roberts, who has a PhD in economics, thinks, “The big banks, the big Wall Street money, are essentially agents of the government.  This is why they don’t get prosecuted.  This is why they can break all kinds of laws, commit felonies and settle with a fine.  This is what we’ve been watching in the financial arena.  When these financial gangsters are caught, instead of being indicted and put on trial, they pay money.”

The key phase is:

 “The big banks, the big Wall Street money, are essentially agents of the government." 

More accurate may be the phrase

 “the government, is essentially an agent of the big banks, the big Wall Street money."  

Ugo Bardi is great

But sometimes he publishes things that make me giggle.  The extended whining by Professor Malamud is a classic self-pity-party.

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/12/first-thou-shalt-not-scare-them.html

I wrote a comment and then came over here to chat a bit more.  If the comment gets posted (and I cannot see why it wouldn't, but one never knows) I will add it here.

But the overall tone is, encompassed in the phrase:

since we're hovering on the verge of extinction, but it will leave an interesting time capsule for whoever might come to recolonize the planet after we're gone.

Man...what a douche.

An Ivy league educated English Professor at a State College might see in the upcoming demographic collapse the end of the world.  All we will be seeing is the end of the unnatural life that he is the poster child for.

Given my druthers, I think that I would have preferred being a nomad of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the early ninth century CE to being a spreadsheet-brandishing bureaucrat in the early 21st, or for that matter, a privileged child (Ph.D., Columbia) instructing a new batch of not-quite-as privileged children at a second tier university (Georgia State) in a bankrupt education system of a dying empire.

I have a feeling that the future pastoral nomads of the fifth millennium would find the whining equally amusing

You have to be shitting me

This is an actual quote from a blog that holds some respect in Doomerland.

Like the economy, ecosystems are complex systems.  That means that they owe their complexity and order to energy flows and, most importantly, they are inherently unpredictable.  How they will respond to the change by a thousand rapid insults is unknown and literally unknowable. 

 WTF?

OK asshole.  To say that ecosystems are like economies is stupid beyond belief.  Economies are man made constructs.  They do not support life, they are a simple system of generating symbols to be used in the catagorization of social status among a group.

It is dumb-fucks like you that keep the problem going.  To view the economy as a natural thing, subject to immutable natural laws is the mark of an idiot.  The natural environment is many many orders of magnitude more complex than a system for simpletons to dick-match in

Then to sit down and try to tell your fellow profit-by-doom followers how to make money off this is the mark of a true asshole.

Fuck you

Try this on for size

Wow...sometimes words fail me.

Money is stored labor.  Labor is part of human life.  To devalue money is to debase life itself.

This little quote is part of a greater article.  If you wish, you may read it here

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-29/exceptional-economic-energy-elation 

Some fucked up shit my friends.  Golden Calves are nothing to some folks, just the way things should be.

I may be getting over it

For years, I was a full-on nerd.  Had to buy the latest and greatest box at the first blush of new tech.

Now....I have been noticing that hings have been changing.  My seven year old Compaq is currently back in use (fried hard drive) and so I brought this old dog out and updated my linux.

cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo

gave me these screens:

and 

So a seven year old computer with dual pentiums, 2gb of RAM, running LinuxMint Quiana, a mail client (evolution) a big spreadsheet (LibreOffice) and five or six pages worth of Chromium is loafing along at around 50% memory use and maybe 25% CPU.

There is plenty of there there.  Granted, the beastie has a SSD drive to speed things up, but it really cruises enough for any task.  Around thirty seconds to fully boot from power-off.  Not a crash or a hiccup all week.

What do you use your computer for?  I think that you will find that for most purposes, you can make things last a lot longer than you think.

How much of your computer purchases are driven by the words "new" or "more powerful" instead of "fully functional.

Tell me you aren't a little stoked!

Been a while

My life is proceeding without my incessant worries taking over.

Anyway, that is why I haven't been posting much lately.

Just went in and filled up the spreadsheet on ebola and it is still going up in a linear manner.

Still going up, bad.  Still linear, good.

The public health folks are still screaming, but looks like things aren't going south in a big way yet

Busy Boy

Sorry about the lack of posts.

I am getting the boyos grown up and out of the house.  Lots of work to be done, lots of time spent.

Maybe I'll start writing again soon

respondeat superior

So, there was recently a little hissy fit over at the Electronic Freedom Foundation about how ISP's were dicking around with the encryption of e-mail.

Really.

Now, let's get a couple of things straight.  If you want privacy, you by god have the right to keeping your business your own.   But it is your responsibility.  It is not the default.

The idea that the internet is a good place to do shit you want to keep private is a foolish pipe dream.  Nothing more, nothing less.  The actual structure of the internet is such that it appears to be custom made for open and public communication.  Secrecy is not how it was designed.

My favorite line in this little bit of hand wringing is

In 1991, Phil Zimmerman implemented PGP, an end-to-end email encryption protocol that is still in use today. Adoption of PGP has been slow because of its highly technical interface and difficult key management. 

 So, there is a good, publicly available system for keeping your secrets secret.  The reason that you don't use it is that it is hard.

Well, keep relying on others to keep your secrets.  I'm certain that just complaining about how others don't do it for you will soon be working.

Ebola cases up to 11-05-14

Now it is just looking stupid.

Looks to me like someone is cooking.

My oh My

Here are the latest numbers from the WHO.  Big jumps like this in data makes me nervous.

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/137376/1/roadmapsitrep_29Oct2014_eng.pdf?ua=1

Not time to panic, but maybe time to start asking some really pointed questions about numbers, methodology, viral evolution, vector status, how patients are counted, are new labs coming on line....

The questions are myriad.  The answers aren't obvious.  but if I were you, I would most certainly begin the process of asking

Eppur Si Muove

WHO numbers of Confirmed, Probable and Suspected Ebola cases Worldwide

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

― Robert A. Heinlein

The above chart is from an Excel file I have been keeping.  If you check my back posts over the last couple of weeks, I have been writing about this for a while.

Now, those who know me understand that I am an Eyore.  I not only see the glass as half empty, but cracked and leaking beside.  My first thought when the news started dribbling out of West Africa was not the requisite positive thinking so cherished by the Kumbaya crowd.

So I kept an eye on the numbers coming out of Africa.  The news media was screaming "Exponential", but alas, the the numbers keep coming up linear.

As more data points are offered by the WHO, the R value of the linear curve fit keeps climbing. 0.9911, 0.9931, 0.9945.  I keep waiting for the last number to start driving up past the trendline,, but alas, there has, to date, been no confirmation of a exponential takeoff.

Look, until you start seeing the new numbers coming out on Wednesday and Friday start breaking out above the trendline, the damn thing is linear.  Linear is controllable.  Don't doubt that a lot of folks are working quite hard on this to contain it.  Entertain for a moment the thought that they might be succeeding.

Exponential? (part Deux)

Above is a homebrewed chart of the number of Ebola cases as reported by the WHO.  I ran the numbers out to the first of the year.  If the numbers start going up faster than these projections, then we may well be in a true exponential growth scenario.

Note to readers:  The orange line is the confirmed, suspected, and probable cases.  The blue line is lab-confirmed cases

There is a lot of issues with under-reporting, the ability of labs in a hot zone to deal with samples, governments and peoples trying to skew the data in their favor, bureaucratic incompetence, and other issues to many to number.

But these are the numbers available to me at the current time.

I may have made errors in data entry, this was just for my own edification.

Right now, the numbers show a tight linearity.  R-values above 0.98 are pretty strong.

This is a plain vanilla exponential curve, note the long flat run-up that looks pretty linear

So, a final caveat.  Exponential functions are tricky little bits.  They can go a long way looking like innocent little linear functions.  No need for panic right yet, but with something like this, it is definitely a good idea to keep a weather eye.

What you need to keep an eye on is the series value vs the predicted value in the system.  Right now, the series value (blue dot) is lower than the predicted value (orange dot) if the series values start breaking consistently above the predicted value and start getting bigger as they go, then Katie bar the door.

Add On at 18:38 10/15/14

Here is the exponential curve fit from Wolfram Alpha

I don't find this that convincing.

When I keep plotting in a standard excel chart and push out linear, I get something that pleases my eye more.

Hard core statistical predictions

Figure 1:  Data input sheet from the model spreadsheet

If you are serious about looking at the possible direction and magnitude of an Ebola outbreak, you could do a lot worse than starting here.

http://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/24900

CDC has always been the good guys in my mind. Yes, they manage some pretty impressive bureaucratic foul ups off and on, but for the most part they are as good as you get.  The A-team.

Sit down and play with this thing for an hour or two or even a week or so.   Get a feel for how things move around.  See what happens if another R0 case gets through.

Numbers are hard, but working at understanding them and asking questions, lots of questions, is the only way for you to start figuring out which way to jump.

I am hoping

I went to the University of Utah in the distant past.

Stanley Pons was my P-Chem Professor.  He and Marty Fleishmann were as smart of a set of individuals as I have ever run across.  But they got something stuck in a ringer when they published too fast trying to get the scoop on the "savior of mankind" award.

It was sad though, my buddy Eric took me on a guided tour and put up with a long set of questions while we drank beer and smoked dope trying to understand the whole thing.  The upshot of this little bit of memory-dredging is that I have always thought there was something to what they said back then in the long ago.  They grandstanded and got shot down, but their results always made me think that there was something there.

Fast forward to today's world.

http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf

I think that someone is getting closer to what Marty and Stan were trying for.   I think that these results show more promise than the dicey stuff put out by the University of Utah during its golden years of trying to become more than what it was.

What always shocks me however, is the responses to anything like this being published.  The cheerleaders shouting that the game is won.  The naysayers saying that everything is a lie.

But what really bugged me was the comment over on "RiceFarmer".

This sounds like the savior of the world economy, but basically nothing would change, because — even if it really works — it doesn't change the economic system. It would just goose the global Ponzi and keep it going for a while longer, while strip-mining the planet at an accelerated rate. Although carbon emissions would be significantly reduced, renewed economic growth would more than make up for that reduced environmental burden by spurring other kinds of pollution and contamination. My prediction is that, in the long run, this would just aggravate all our problems and make the inevitable crash all the worse. Limits to growth do exist.

But to bemoan the fact that there may be a potential bridge to a system where we at least have a chance at a thoughtful and planned build-down is the moaning of a failed prophet lamenting the fact that things have a chance of not going to hell.

Hari Seldon was a fictional character

Psychohistory will never get off the ground.

As writers and essayists, the pundits of the blogosphere tend toward being a little more certain of their predictions than they should be.  The cries of it is all going to hell may or not be true, but only time will tell.  The real trouble is, when time does tell, the answers that it issues are so ambiguous that one cannot see the truth (with a capital T) that everyone here in blogoland is trying to grasp.

I read the Archdruid and Dmitry and am somewhat a fanboy, They are my favorites.  They discuss the overarching fate of the society.  Nearly everyone else just bitches that their toys are being taken from them.  But I think sometimes that these two veer a little bit toward the desire to be prophets. They are armed with a solid grasp of history and a firm opinion of the way things work, they boldly go into the future with a certainty that really draws people in.

You see, that there is the weakness.  People such as your esteemed correspondent are suckers for certainty.  They grasp the truth of the past and see the truth of the present, and they use those to show us the way to the future.  I eat that up.

But in the end, I always come back to ground.  Prophecy is a strange thing to grasp at.  Knowing where the future will be is a tempting fruit to try and pluck, but it will always remain out of reach.

I don't know where the financial world will be a year from now.  I can't say that Ebola will fulfill its role as God's RoundUp.  The decline of the West may give way to the renewed vigor of a culture.

No One Knows.

There is no flight to Stars End scheduled.

I really tend not to think this will be the one

Now for the beginning of the article caveats.

1. While I present the numbers as the best available, they are not truth with a Capital T.  They are data sifted by teams of scientists, working in a hostile environment, funneled through a bureaucracy.  They are the best that I can come up with from my warm and dry kitchen table here safe in the Pacific NW.  GIGO is real and should always be considered as a real possibility.
2. This may come off as a means of calming the masses and trying to start a disagreement with the latest post of the Archdruid.  Hell, nothing could be farther from the truth.  I also believe that the shelf-life of industrial civilization is approaching its "pull-by" date.  I just want good numbers to do my own analysis.
3. I do personally suspect that the information that we have is incomplete.  The well documented truth is that that part of Africa seems to be resistant to our western desire to number and catagorize.  The questions being asked by the current public and scientific discussion may be the wrong ones altogether.

Right now, as I spend more time digging into the science behind the current concern re:Ebola, I also want to take a moment to talk about the dependence on numbers and their relationship to reality.

Numbers are dicey little things.  Useful as hell.  A hallmark of science and its corresponding trades.

But they have to be applied back to something concrete and measurable in order for them to have any particular use.  So lets start laying out the confirmed facts of the current outbreak of Ebola.

The latest numbers from the WHO show a total of 4,108 confirmed cases of Ebola. (1)

The best estimate the viral doubling time that I can find is 35 days. (2)

So, we plug the numbers into Excel and we get the following

Now we take those numbers and plug them into a spreadsheet using a 35 day doubling time for the virus.

Now you have some horrific looking numbers.  So lets put it into a historical perspective.  The worst epidemic in current human memory (3) is the Influenza epidemic of 1918 (4).  Nasty little critter. Killed 75 million folks, so lets use that as a benchmark.

So despite all the hoopla, the current set of hard numbers shows a timeline of nineteen months before the current proto-panic even gets up to the "hiccup" stage in human history.
_____________

(1) World Health Organization: Ebola Response Roadmap Update, 3 October 2014

(2) Science Magazine, Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak,  12 September 2014  Gire et al., 345 (6202): 1369-1372

(3) Don't get shitty with me, this is the worst epidemic that anyone alive can remember.  The folks who remember it are over 100 now.

(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

Boom, best case analysis takes another body blow

John Michael:

I must admit, I like your flavor of your prose much better than I like the news you bring.  Not that I disagree with you. I just don't particularly like it.

I just wanted to be one of those "correctors" that plague all blogs. 

Now you posit a twenty-day doubling rate for Ebola.  At the risk of sounding pedantic, per the latest data from Science, August 28, 2014

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full

The doubling rate appears to approximately 35 days.  So, most folks would say to themselves "whew, that bought us some time."

Well buckaroos, sorry 'bout that.

As copiously proved by adherents hunched over their Casio calculators in suburban kitchens across America, if one assumes one million cases of Ebola on New Years day of 2015 and also assumes a doubling rate of twenty days, the date that our buddy Mr. Marburg takes 1,000,000,000 of our family to their long home is July 20th, 2015

Exponential functions are tricky.  I deal with them better than most, when I saw the doubling rate assumption nearly doubling, I did do a little “whew” myself.

But when you plug the numbers into merciless Mr. Excel Spreadsheet, the truth is, they really don’t buy you much.  a thirty-five day doubling time takes you out to December 17th.  One hundred and fifty days. 


Oh well

Doubling time equals 21 Days

Thursday, January 01, 2015          1,000,000
Thursday, January 22, 2015          2,000,000
Thursday, February 12, 2015          4,000,000
Thursday, March 05, 2015          8,000,000
Thursday, March 26, 2015        16,000,000
Thursday, April 16, 2015        32,000,000
Thursday, May 07, 2015                64,000,000
Thursday, May 28, 2015              128,000,000
Thursday, June 18, 2015              256,000,000
Thursday, July 09, 2015              512,000,000
Thursday, July 30, 2015           1,024,000,000
Thursday, August 20, 2015   2,048,000,000
Thursday, September 10, 2015 4,096,000,000
Thursday, October 01, 2015   8,192,000,000

This has always been the hard part for us

We need to be reminded sometimes that things don't always work out in the end.

Mature leaders know when to cut their losses.

I just hope that it won't be like last time, blaming the troops and shunning them.

Epiphany

From a relative non-sophisticate, I am beginning to wonder when the smaller economies are going to start thinking about the idea of large-scale defaults?

Right now, everyone is tied into the basic concept that growth is required and the only way to achieve growth is the unfettered access to western capital flows.  Well, what happens in these smaller economies when the ruling class takes a hard look at the amount of money flowing out of their country to western banks and investors and decide to just say "screw it"?

We can talk about the banks having people by the short and curlies, but the truth of the matter is, once folks decide that paying a huge portion of their limited national income to western banks in order to preserve the right to borrow even more is a losers game.

Argentina has defaulted and will default again.  There are a lot of countries out there that will start realizing soon that the US and NATO militaries cannot enforce payment everywhere all the time. The truth of the matter is, multiple countries defaulting will probably end up in a system of economic flows not transiting New York for their skim of the vig.

It is going to end up there eventually.  One would hope that it begins soon.

Many Attribution

This post came around in a most complicated manner.

The writing started by beginning a response over at "Squeezing the Hourglass".  The post in question was:

Ain't that a bitch 

The last guy at least vaguely understands the reality that he's better off personally by accepting that the world is a racket. I guess oil traders do possibly deserve to earn more money--this one clearly knows to jump off a sinking ship (though sadly, his time horizon excludes even one generation of progeny, which is prima facie evidence of evil to all active parents).

Alistair Darling, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who led the No campaign, admitted that the closeness of the result was a wake-up call. (DD note: I see no further exposition on this in any other sources. To the contrary, I see the on-schedule offensive against those who dared to vote for independence. Source. )“Today is a momentous today for Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole,” he said. “While confirming our place within the union, we have confirmed the bonds that tie us together — may they never be broken.” 

Pubs across the country were staying open throughout the night with customers both anxious and excited to see whether the historic union would be consigned to the history books. 

Greg Waddell, a doctor working in Glasgow, tells TIME that he voted Yes “because disempowerment breeds dependency; because the current extent of social inequality in Scotland demeans every one of its people.” 

Others among the 4.2 million registered voters were less optimistic about prospects for going it alone. 

Nick Allan, an oil executive from Aberdeen, said the Yes campaign promises were enticing, but he voted No as it would be impossible to pay for them — especially not with North Sea oil. 

“The problem comes down to money,” he says. “How on God’s earth are you going to be able to afford all of these improvements? The country will be bankrupt in a matter of years.”

If you really look at it, look at the people they to whom they asked the question and the responses. The responses probably say more about the individual motivations than the quality of the argument.

Doctor, probably working for the NHS, trots out the "social inequality card, greater Scottish government access to North Sea oil income means more money in his pocket.

Oil Executive, cheerfully being well-compensated for his spot at the table sees the losses of revenues and redistribution as anathema. Bankruptcy for the current systems are the order of the day.

At the end of the day, this is the sole font of any "Independence" movement. A struggle between the haves and the have-nots over the control and distribution of resources and wealth.

The next seed came from Ugo Bardi over at "Resource Crisis".

 Few people understand that depletion does NOT mean that we run out of anything. It means that producing a mineral commodity becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer people can afford it.

One of the next seeds came from the Archdruid.  These next couple of paragraphs got me to thinking:

The process that drives the collapse of civilizations has a surprisingly simple basis: the mismatch between the maintenance costs of capital and the resources that are available to meet those costs. Capital here is meant in the broadest sense of the word, and includes everything in which a civilization invests its wealth: buildings, roads, imperial expansion, urban infrastructure, information resources, trained personnel, or what have you. Capital of every kind has to be maintained, and as a civilization adds to its stock of capital, the costs of maintenance rise steadily, until the burden they place on the civilization’s available resources can’t be supported any longer.
The only way to resolve that conflict is to allow some of the capital to be converted to waste, so that its maintenance costs drop to zero and any useful resources locked up in the capital can be put to other uses. Human beings being what they are, the conversion of capital to waste generally isn’t carried out in a calm, rational manner; instead, kingdoms fall, cities get sacked, ruling elites are torn to pieces by howling mobs, and the like. If a civilization depends on renewable resources, each round of capital destruction is followed by a return to relative stability and the cycle begins all over again; the history of imperial China is a good example of how that works out in practice.

If a civilization depends on nonrenewable resources for essential functions, though, destroying some of its capital yields only a brief reprieve from the crisis of maintenance costs. Once the nonrenewable resource base tips over into depletion, there’s less and less available each year thereafter to meet the remaining maintenance costs, and the result is the stairstep pattern of decline and fall so familiar from history:  each crisis leads to a round of capital destruction, which leads to renewed stability, which gives way to crisis as the resource base drops further. Here again, human beings being what they are, this process isn’t carried out in a calm, rational manner; the difference here is simply that kingdoms keep falling, cities keep getting sacked, ruling elites are slaughtered one after another in ever more inventive and colorful ways, until finally contraction has proceeded far enough that the remaining capital can be supported on the available stock of renewable resources.

 So again, it comes down to resources.  And the Scottish, Catalunyan, Texan, and other such sundry "Independence" movements come down to is a movement away from increasingly unstable central systems that are too dependent on supplies of diminishing resources.

The idiot politicians such as Alex Salmond who promise their constituency more than what they are currently getting doing the right thing with all the wrong reasons trotted out to the media as their rationale.

Scotland would have been much poorer should they have split away from England.  But now they will be poorer still and have less a chance of splitting away when it becomes truly necessary.  London will continue to centralize power and will work tirelessly to infiltrate and immasculate any erstwhile independence movement that raises its precocious head.

More and more, we are moving toward a state of events where the center cannot hold.  Scotland might have well provided an example of a "calm, rational manner" for devolution and change.  But now things will get dicey.

Bit of bad luck there.

Show us the way

It ain't the first of May

Labor day in the US is an odd thing.  Everywhere else in the world, May first is the sop thrown to the workers in the rest of the world.   Here in the US, we go with the first Monday in September so that folks won't remember the Haymarket Massacre.

More and more, I think that it important to read history, just to get an idea of the recurrent themes that we have papered over in the past and that keep coming back to haunt us.

The US has a long history of undemocratic abuse of the lower classes.  Of course, we don't refer to them in that manner.

Insensate

I find it amazing sometimes that bloggers and other such oddballs can spend so much time writing and so little time thinking.

Dipshits out there have stumbled across the idea that the "crisis" in the Ukraine is largely our own damn fault.

Now, I won't argue this too strongly, if at all.  It is a pretty good explanation for the things that are happening.

What I can't believe are the clowns that are trying to paint Putin and Russia as the "Good Guys".  WTF?

Look, Russia is a major player with their own dog in the fight.  If you think they aren't in there stirring the pot, you are nothing but a fucking idiot.

Just because we were bastards in this play doesn't mean that the other players are saints.

Look to me like everyone involved is a bit of a bastard

Living in the Past

I think that the most annoying habit that anyone can develop is the simple of act of throwing a couple of number pairs down onto a Cartesian coordinate and then drawing a line using the two points to define the slope.  Lately, there has been little useful work done in the greater bulk of the world of man when this pernicious habit is trotted around.

Now, don’t get me wrong, line segments are fine thank you, what irritates me if the full on line, you know, the ones with arrows on the ends, pointing out toward infinity in either direction.  Those fuckers really bug me.  I am even offended by a ray. 

Now, don’t think that I am angered for a minute by the mathematical concepts.  No way.  What I am annoyed is that every thing that happens in the world is sampled for something that a pair of numbers can be attached to to place the now-polluted concept on the holy grid of Saint René of  Neuburg an der Donau.

These linear heresies are everywhere.  In economics, that bit of masturbatory haruspicy that infects the blogosphere, the line is the mark of the shill.  The price of something (that something usually being a heavily manipulated stock or commodity) is located on the grid by date.  The fell line (or ray) is then drawn and whether the path leads to heaven or hell is defined by m.

Descartes and Newton, Leibnitz and Spinoza.  Gotta love those knuckleheads.  They came up with a system of the world that really stroked our cupidity.  We could control the world and understand it.  The trouble is that the unwashed got hold of the faith and twisted it.  Tried to apply it to arenas where it didn’t really fit.  But it was just too beautiful, and it allowed us a false feeling of control and understanding that we have cherished now for centuries.

I think that the day to day world that we live in is defined by a much different model, there a astonishingly non-linear systems.  Arbitrariness is a daily event and luck defines much.  There are some cases where linearity can be achieved in a range, but there is little in the worlds of politics, economics, and faith where Mssr. Decartes little party trick can be said to be useful.

Just a bit stale

To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.

Robert Heinlein                        

In a way, Phil over at Onery Bastard has the right of it.  Maybe trying to comment on all the silliness and insincerity of the world is just too much.  Maybe one should just keep one’s head down, work hard, and admire the pretty boobies.  Good on you Phil for the anniversary.  Maybe as a reward you should attempt to drop back to six days a week.  Old men like you and I can’t and shouldn’t keep up that kind of pace.

I have every respect for people who can keep up the indignation day to day.  I sure can’t.  I go in fits and starts.  I was rolling there for a while but the situation just kept it’s steady an inexorable decline going.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Who knows what the hell is going on.  Right now the only thing that I find worthy of comment is the current uproar about the state of President Obama’s golf game.  Hell, I can’t blame the guy.  If I were him I would start dialing it in as well. 

The world that we live in is not in a single man’s control.  The world is in that inconvenient and unwelcome time where all the things that we knew would be happening are beginning to happen.  No amount of Presidential bluster and pro-active, hypercompetitive American can-do spirit will change much the trajectory of the not too distant future.

So, I wish the President the best in his ongoing efforts to lower his handicap.  He deserves the time to relax.  He will be the fall guy for a couple of generations worth of over-ambitious and intellectually challenged American politicians and behind the scenes puppetmasters.  He will be blamed for the sum total of the bad decisions made starting around AD 1960, all of which started coming home to roost in his ill fated and poorly timed sojourn in the White House.

Barack, we hardly knew you.  I think that your ambition led you to a place where your ability to control events was perceived by the world as being much larger than your actual power to effect change. 

A punch in the face for the Obama administration

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault

Tainted Love

Now, you may all wonder why, in light of all the "News" flying thick and fast, I haven't been out there commenting on the vagaries of foreign policy, police states, and economic meltdowns.

Well, it is because I think that the MSM, the blogosphere, and the ranting of ninnies on twitter have degenerated into a polluted and contradictory sphere of lies, maskirovka, Madison Avenue spin, and inchoate mumblings that do more to confuse than to enlighten.

The news is now beyond my control.  It always has been, but now the situation is so bad that an old news whore such as your truly will finally have to give up and walk away.

It is sad though.  At one time in my life, I had the warm feeling that being informed allowed me to make better choices in my role in democracy.  All things being equal, I am coming to the conclusion that I have no effective role in the formation of government policy.

However, I do have a role in planting a winter garden.  Time to get cracking.

Whither Windows

I try to not be one of those idiots who incessantly flame Microsoft and its products.

I love Microsoft Word.   Yes, people will tell me "Go with OpenOffice and LibreOffice and you too will become a convert".

Ain't happenin' dudes.  While the Microsoft Mothership of OS sucks big bags, their office software is the bomb.  OpenOffice and LibreOffice are stuck back at Office 95 level of capability.  Not at all bad for a free program.  Actually, it is quite an impressive feat, but LibreOffice still isn't as good as Microsoft Office.

Microsoft has the bad luck to have a marriage like the ones we all have experienced in our lives.  One where the wife is great and fun and pleasant to be around but the husband is a complete asshole.

Windows is the asshole.

Condors.html

The Grosse Politik approach has been used up. Besides, it is misleading because it allows us to rest on the easy illusion that it is "they," the naughty statesmen, who are always responsible for war while "we," the innocent people, are merely led. That impression is a mistake. The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the Great War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it

The Proud Tower:

A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914;

Barbara W. Tuchman's Great War Series

The above sentences have been weighing heavily on me lately.

More and more I am beginning to see the fate of the West sealed in its own inherent weaknesses. It is not the rise of militant Islam, or a resurgent Russia that is the cause of our fate. The root cause lies in what we have become during the last century or so. We have restarted the age old heresy of worshiping the golden calf. That has never went well.

In her books on the Great War, Barbara Tuchman offers up a stew of root causes. The Ubermensch of Nietsche, coupled with the frightened aristocracy of Europe, seasoned with the anger and hopelessness of the poor.

We have a differing set of causes leading us to the next war. The Randite/Reaganite worship of money, coupled with an increasingly segregated and defensive uberklass seasoned with a middle class that is in the process of being systematically sheared of the comforts it has come to view as its rights.

I think that many will find this thought unpleasant, but we seems to be following the path taken by Germany prior to 1914. Granted, the parallels are not absolute, but the theme and the emotion are the same. The German Volk and American exceptionalism are the same coin. We toss our weight around rudely. We attempt to rule the world by edict. Militarism and a false worship of the military.

But the actions taken by our government are merely actions required to keep the largess flowing to the masses here in the USA. Right now, 70% of our economy is consumer goods. Our self-worth and our barometers for personal success are wound around the stuff we own and the oversized and overpriced houses that we live in. The government is doing its job in a democratic system and supplying it citizens with what they want.

And we keep demanding. Oh there are folks out there like Raul (Ilargi) and John-Michael Greer and Charles Smith who suggest that we learn to live within a shrinking system. But they are fringe players, preaching, for the most part, to the converted. But the great bulk of the commentators are trying like hell to sell the idea that one can keep what they have.

This is sad. Because the root of the problem is that we have taken too much. The consumer economy needs to be sheared down to a manageable 35-40% of the economy. The rich need to give up a huge amount of their amassed wealth. The poor need to develop rational expectations. The middle class needs to stop aping the ways of the wealthy.

Lots of easy things need to happen. Houses need to shrink and become radically more efficient. Jetting around the world to attend to either a useless conference or ones own cupidity has to stop. More beans need to be eaten, less meat will become the norm. Cars will become lots less common, gardens will become much more common. Retirements will become less everything.

But you see, no one wants to do these simple things. We are living in a society where the voters and the common man see constant and unstoppable growth as the natural state of things. Upward mobility is a watchword, opportunity and physical accunulation the highest God.

When the reversal of fortunes that lies ahead of us starts getting traction, the masses of Americans will move. They will not ask that the government teach them how to live in a world of constraints. They will ask the government to go get them what they want.

Higgins:

It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

Joe Turner:

Ask them?

Higgins:

Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Goes a long way

This is a cheapo recipe for boy-gut-filling burritos.  Now, as the boys will have to be doing this themselves when they move out, I thought that I would write down a detailed recipe for their use.

You will need:

• Pressure cooker 
• Big stock pot for frying and mixing
• Chef's knife
• Wooden stirring and scraping spoon
• Measuring cups

Ingredients

• 2 cups of dried pinto beans ($0.89)
• 1 cup of uncooked white rice ($0.30)
• 3 bouillon cubes from the grocery outlet ($0.34)
• 1 large white onion, chopped ($0.59)
• 1 tablespoon dried chili powder ($0.06)
• 1 teaspoon cumin ($0.04)
• 1 tube of beef chorizo  ($1.38)
• 10 ounce package of Kale ($2.99)
• Package of Ten Burrito Shells ($2.19)
• 1/2 Pound of Cheese ($1.00)**

Material cost $6.79

Soak the beans overnight.  Drain the water (*).  After they are soaked, you will have a yield of around 6 cups.  Put the beans in a pressure cooker with three (3) cups of water, add the bouillon cubes,  the chopped onion, the cumin and the dried chili's.  Bring the pressure cooker up to pressure and cook for thirty minutes.  After thirty minutes, turn off the burner, leave the pot on the burner, and let the pressure cooker lose pressure naturally

Energy cost = 40 minutes at 1200w (est.) at $0.0816/kwh = $0.07, brings total to $6.86

For research purposes, when the pressure had released, I measured the liquid volume left in the cooked beans, three cups in, three cups out.

Fry up the chorizo and put it into the pot with the rice and cheese and while strring frequently to make sure that the rice doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan, bring the pan up to a boiil, cover with a plain lid, then reduce the heat to simmer and let it cook for thirty (30) minutes.  Make sure that you stir it frequently to keep the rice from sticking, you will have to stir a lot at first until the heat bleeds off of the stovetop, but less at the end when it is just simmering.

Chop up the kale and put it into the stock pot, then pull the bean/rice mixture off the burner and dump it into the kale,  mix it thoroughly and put it back on the burner used to simmer the rice.  Turn off the burner at this point and allow the residual heat of the mixture to cook the kale for 1/2 hour.

Energy cost = 30 minutes at 1200w (est.) at $0.0816/kwh = $0.05, brings total to $6.91

Yields around 12 cups of burrito filling.  

Nutritional Data

Rice = 615 calories, 135g carbo, 12g protein, Fat 0g, Fiber 3g, Thiamine, Niacin, Folate,
Beans = 1470 calories, 270g carbo, 90g protein, Fat 6g, Fiber 90g, Thiamine, B6, Folate
Kale = 142 calories, 28g carbo, 9g protein, Fat 3g, Fiber 6g, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Vitamin A
Velveeta = 640 calories, 24g carbo, 40g protein, Fat 48g, Fiber 0g
Chorizo= 1160 calories, 16g carbo, 36g protein, Fat 12g, Fiber 16g

Filling Total = 3841 calories, 473g carbo, 187 g protein, 69g fat, 115g fiber

A cup of this makes a pretty good sized burrito.

1 cup filling total = 320 calories, 40g carbo, 16 g protein, 6g fat, 10g fiber
Burrito Shell= 180 calories, 31g carbo, 4g protein, 5g fat, 1g fiberFilling Total = 3841 calories, 473g carbo, 187 g protein, 69g fat, 115g fiber

Total serving = 500 calories, 71g carbo, 20g protein, 11g fat, 11g fiber.

12 servings @ $0.58 each.  If you are really poor, this is two days food.

Notes:

(*)   Make certain you soak and drain.  If not, you will fart like you have never farted before.

(**)  When I went to the cheap food store, they had Velveeta on sale. Now, as cheese, Velveeta is less than optimal.  But as an ingredient, Velveeta is the bomb.  It isn't really any different from cheese when you examine the ingredients.  They use some pretty damn tame preservatives, hell, in different products, the stuff that they use as preservatives are touted as electrolytes, stuff you eat all the time.  The only weird ingredient is the sodium alginate, and since that is taken from seaweed and is used everywhere, I think that I will give it a pass here.

Milk, water, milkfat, whey, milk protein concentrate, whey protein concentrate, sodium phosphate; contains less than 2% of: salt, calcium phosphate, lactic acid, sorbic acid as a preservative, sodium alginate, sodium citrate, enzymes, apocarotenal (color), annatto (color), and cheese culture.

LibreOffice Writer Post

This is a test of the ability of my newly minted Ubuntu setup to write within LibreOffice Writer. I wonder if the hypertext comes through.

I do want to test the ability to use different colors for posting.

I also want to test using different Fonts

I wonder how subscripts like F₁ work when you post.

Save the file as HTML

Press the e-mail button

Tacitus

 Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Mature Reflection

Maybe it is just me, but things seem to be heating up around the world.

I think that taking a moment in order to think about the downstream effects from any war idea currently being bruited about by our political leadership would be time well spent.

There is now a greater chance (my estimate still is still less than 30%) that something quite nasty is brewing. If it comes, it won't be a 15 second spot on ABC news.  It will be the only thing there.

Might want to take a moment to review your options.

Instauratio magna

I come fresh from reading the Archdruid and a sadly abbreviated attempt at a long drive to see Locutius.

The drive was cut short by a 15 year old water pump, which has now been repaired.  My abortive adventure to North-Central Washington was ended by an extended ride in a tow truck and listening an ad libitum monologue by the driver of same in which he extensively digressed on his personal work-ethic and the lack of same exhibited by the various and sundry minorities which infest his God-fearing American hometown. Attempts at entering a discussion concerning the Jewish people controlling America were avoided by the simple expedient of Your Humble Correspondent pretending to nap.

I  briefly considered interrupting him and requesting silence, but as I wished to have myself and my disabled vehicle returned to my hometown utilizing his oddly dilapidated truck (odd in the sense that such a paragon of protestant work-ethic and old-fashioned American exceptionalism would allow his non-too-new and none-too-well-maintained vehicle to achieve such a sorry state). More than once I was certain that another tow truck would have to be summoned in order to get the job done.  I whiled away the time spent in the confines of said tow truck conducting a gedankenexperiment concerning the handling characteristic of a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a disabled minivan.  The results were not reassuring.

Got back home late, irritated the driver of tow truck to no end by not offering a gratuity on top of the fee paid to him by my insurance company.  Considerable pissiness ensued followed by a greater than necessary use of force in unhooking minivan from aforementioned tow truck.  Fortunately, my loathing of said vehicle allowed me to ignore scratches in plastic bumper caused by extended, poverty-related hissy fit.

The hissy fit came to a head when driver noted that the garage where we dropped off the bore bilingual signage and a name which suggested an owner with a Hispanic heritage.  I found this odd, since all of our earlier interactions did not suggest a marked tendency toward critical thinking.  When I assured him this was in fact true and complimenting him profusely on his deductions, he became threatening.  Luckily, his deductive reasoning again kicked into high gear and he correctly assessed the probability of a fifty-year old man weighing around 140 pounds and topping out at around 5"-8" inflicting significant harm on a sixty-year old at 2 meters and on the high side of 150 kilos.

Why I am relaying this comedy of errors is to reflect upon the idea of American Exceptionalism expounded by the driver of this ship of fools.  The belief system that being born in a country somehow confers a greater worth than those born elsewhere is bizarre to me.