Four Prediction Challenge

Russian peasant girls using chickens for divination; 19th century Lubok.

I realize that making predictions opens one up to questions about one's omniscience, but I don't see that as a bad thing.  Being old now, when I look back over my life and review the opinions and thoughts therein, omniscience is the last thing that I would use to describe my years here on the Earth.

So, I am proposing that folks sit down with their crystal balls and yarrow stalks, cut open the critter du jour and examine it's entrails, or go outside and consult the moon.  Give me four (4) predictions.  That's all.

Now, the rules.

I think that the predictions have to have a certain amount of specificity.  I am certain that some of my fellow Americans (MFA) would love to posit "Donald Trump will be Yuugge!" as a prediction (there will be an approximately equal number of MFA's who will predict the Donald as being the worst president ever.  Again, not a prediction).

Nope, the prediction will need to have a certain level of specificity.  Now, you can write what you wish, and it will go up in the comments.  In an ideal world, the four predictions will have in internal logic that allows one to get a glimpse into the strategic thinking of the author.

SO...Here goes:

(1)  Saudi Arabia goes through it's own "Arab Spring" problems.  The loss of oil revenues and the "damned if you do and damned if you don't" nature of oil price coupled the on again/off again nature of the shale oil in the US and the complete inability of OPEC to hew to any agreement will make for increasing unrest in the Kingdom.  I don't think that the royal family will go down, but I think that it will have a lot more on its mind at the end of the year than it has at the beginning.

(2)  The Dow will reach 20,000.  But it won't hold it.  While I voted for Trump, I don't think that he is the savior and I do think that he, like Herbert Hoover, will be holding the bag at the end of the process.  I am taking a wild stab at a number here, but I think that a Dow of 16,000 will be in the offing this year.

(3)  Syria will settle down, but Iraq will heat up.  I would guess that Russia, Turkey, and Syria will work out an arrangement and the Takfirs, Unicorns,  Jihadis and such will vanish out of Syria and start stirring the shit in Iraq.  Iran will move more to the foreground and try to stabilize the area with the tacit approval and logistical support from Russia and China.  Saudi will be distracted by it's own problems and Israel will fume, but both will realize that their reach does not exceed their grasp.

(4)  Little Donnie will be under investigation by the end of 2017.  Kenneth Starr on steroids.  Look, the powers that be just don't like him.  They will make the attempt to cripple him.  I don't think that it will go the impeachment route, just an ongoing distraction keeping his eye off the ball.  Can't have a non-member of the Potomac Country Club thinking they can use the front door.  Little Donnie is a servant-entrance-only kind of guy.

Now, I am quite aware of my limitations.  If any of these turn out the way I call them, I will don my robes and announce my new profession of professional Jeremiah.

Please, have at it.

Getting Ready for the New Year

First things first.

I am restarting my beer brewing venture.  Going even more minimalist than before. 

I am also decreasing the batch size to make it easier to work with.  Ideally, I will get yields around 2 to 2.5 gallons or around enough for a single case of beer.

All grain is the requirement.   When you buy even the cheapest extract or powder, the cost goes to the moon. 

Yeast will be passaged ruthlessly.  Careful work will allow a single $6.00 packet to yield up to ten passages, maybe more.  All you need is sterile mason jars and a bit of care.  Additional yeast research will also require stability studies as to the amount of time a stored lot can be kept in the refrigerator.

Hops are getting to be quite the cost center.  Luckily I have not fallen into the current fad here in Portland where you dump so many hops in the wort that you cannot taste anything else.  I am thinking about a IPU of around 35 which is the low end of the IPA scale.  So, a two-gallon batch should take a lot less than an ounce.

So, the point of all this is that I should be able to get microbrew quality beer (I am pretty good at this) for right around $1.50 a six pack. 

Christmastide

There are better things to do than write this right now.

I do think I will start up again after the first.

Have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, and a joyous new year.

I got nothing

Try again tomorrow​

fermiers généraux

Let's start with the basis premise, popular throughout the country, that the Government is the source of the problems here in the good old USA.  This premise is getting a little timeworn.

I think that it kind of depends what level of sophistication you want, the time that you wish to spend analyzing, and the granularity of the approach.

I think that if you want to just listen to talk radio and it's internet ilk, you could suppose that it is a unitary function, led by a small cabal of folks at the federal reserve, the trilateral commision and any number of sundry other nefarious organizations.  You might not be wrong, but you probably aren't all that right and your analysis might be a shade on the unsophisticated side.

Nope, I think that you have to stand back and ask what makes them "elite".  Simply put, it is a function of access to the table.  Whether one likes it or not, government in an Industrial/De-industrial society such as ours is the arena where, for the sake of analogy, representatives sit around a table and figure out how to share the pie of resources (either physical, intellectual, or human) that are available to the society in general.

Now, first things first, I am going to spend a brief digression here disabusing you of the idea that a democratically elected government is in charge of this role.  It hasn't been the case ever, and recent revelations about campaign finance and the Clinton foundation show that access to the table is strictly limited to those who can pay for the privilege.

I cannot and will not make a claim to know the intricate details of who is at the table and at what position.   You have to read a lot in fairly dry journals and news accounts to discover the make up of the table, but simply put, I would just follow the money.

The elite are elite not because of their honesty or intelligence or hard work, nope.  they are there because they have figured out the way to exploit the tax revenues and the workings of the federal government and its functionaries.

• Defense industry, check
• Pharmaceutical industry, check
• Medical Industry, check
• Educational Industry, check

And so on, and so on.

Now, in the past, the government created a branch to control a particular part of the American experience and keep things under control.  The lords and masters of the industries being thus controlled, feeling this control to be an imposition, promptly lied, bullied, and bribed their way into effective control of the regulatory system that was once their control.

Saint Camping

Africa is going to be a mess.

Some argue that it is already there, but I am thinking that there is a long row to hoe ahead of them and the prospects don't look good.   I was alerted to the overall issue by Demetrius over at The Cynical Tendency and I wish to thank him for the information and the thoughts.

The nice lady above gives an understated view of things.  All that is needed is a whole shitload of jobs.   This comes from the point of view of one who only sees what got us to where we are now.  I think that she doesn't see that what got us to where we are now is not going to be available to Africa because there is less every year and I think that there is no chance we will be sharing what we have.

I think that the biggest issue facing Africa will be the loss of foreign investment and aid as Europe and America start pulling back into versions of the "America First" visions currently in vogue.

The sheer number of people who need jobs in Africa coupled with the loss of foreign investment and climate change beginning to get traction will mean some pretty bad things may very well be in the offing.

I think that Europe has just scratched the surface of the Volkswanderung that is coming. Here in the colonies, there are a couple of oceans buffering the flow.

Perhaps it is time to revisit "The Camp of the Saints".

Where we we be?

As usual, Ugo Bardi something to think about.  Thanks again for your time and efforts.

But, after the bile and calumny of this election I have come to a pretty basic conclusion:

We're fucked.

But, either of the two astonishly unpopular candidates would have taken us to the same place, the only difference was the style and personality.  We had the choice between a thin-lipped corrupt schoolmarm and an arrogant blowhard.  The plans were the same (Try to hold together the facade of neoliberalism and neoconservatism) and the choices presented to the US citizenry leads to the same destination.

Everyone is worried because the Trump will try for a last gasp attack on the resource base of limited planet.  Well Buckaroos, that train left the station a long time ago.  Come to think of it, we were all on the train when it left.

Lets say Trump makes the attempt at letting the oil companies "Drill baby Drill".  Will that change the depletion rate of the fracking well or the ongoing decline of Gwahar?  Nope, it most certainly won't.  Will the US populace suddenly wake up to the error of its ways and divest itself of the sacred Automobile and start taking mass transit.  Again nope.

Trump as a decision maker will offer a brief rise in oil production and accelerate the negative slope of the curve after the party.  But 50 years from now we will still be out of high EROEI oil and we will be making due with a lot less energy than we do now.  What Trump chooses to do in the here and now is just window dressing.

The factories and jobs aren't coming back, and do we want the pollution of heavy industry coming back anyway?  The deplorables lot will not be better in fifty years, bank on it.  The monetary system is a shambles, and a cashless society won't save us.

Look, the party is over.  Time to start working on what comes next, not entertain ourselves watching the thrashing of a dying dinosaur.

I think that I will work on small local medical diagnostics for a post industrial world in decline.

Because that is where we are going.  We have always known that is going to be the destination.

Snow Day

Oregon knows squat about snow.  At least that is true here in Portland.  Which is kind of odd considering the number of snowflakes living here

I'm sitting at work, waiting to deal with folks who will probably choose the path of neither coming in for their appointment nor telling us they are doing so,

Sigh. 

So the rest of the day will be make-work.  Doing things that really aren't needing done and trying to keep from being bored out of my mind. ​

Pity me

Grandstands

So:

Nancy Pelosi's daughter and twenty-eight other Democrats want a briefing by the CIA on Rooshan interference in the election.

You think that it will change their vote?

Oh, By the way, there is one Republican, wish I could find out who that is for you, but there you go.

Maybe this will become a "soft coup" in time, but right now it looks like whining to me.

Same as it ever was

What we are looking at is a change in government from one set of oligarchs to another set of oligarchs.

The current flavor of oligarchs are understandably miffed about the ejection from their access to "just desserts".  The new flavor of oligarch seems to be fumbling around a bit, trying to figure out how to extract the resources needed to get things together and assembling the team that will war with reality (and probably lose).

In other words, another December in a leap year in America.  It has happened this way frequently in the past, this time it just has a lot less style and a lot more drama than ones we have had to deal with in the not-too-recent past.

Truthfully, I kinda blame this state of affairs on the artless and vulgar Clinton family.  They and their minion fellow-travelers have been nothing but trouble for the past twenty-four years.  They came into power being kinda sleazy, they maintained their power by being kinda sleazy, they got rich afterward by being kinda sleazy, and now they seem to be taking their defeat by being kinda of sleazy.  But one does have to give them high marks for consistency.

I think that my favorite ploy of late is that "The Rooshans did it!".  But what did the Russians do? Apparently, they allowed the citizens and voters of the United States a peek inside of the sausage making factory that is America's version of a Constitutional Federal Republic.   Horrors.

I have yet to see even a shred of hard evidence that the vote was sullied (any more than usual, I would guess that the Dem's still fuck with the vote in Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts, Republicans still fuck with Florida and Texas)  But that is just baseline voter fraud, balanced between the parties and part of the rich tradition of our quadrennial clown-show.

I have no doubt that the Russians did something somewhere.  But I doubt seriously that what we are seeing and what people are shouting about is what the Russians did.  

We are not a subtle people.  The Russians are.  I feel strongly that the Russians wish to weaken us, but that is a normal part of statecraft which we, as a country, feel more than justified in doing to others.  We seem to forget that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I think that what we are seeing here is a lot of hard feelings about being made a fool and not having the intelligence to figure out how or why it was done to us.

Hat's off to Vladimir Vladimirovich and his gang of merry pranksters and a job well done.

Now, lets get back to work fixing the problems we have, rather than whining about our hurt feelings.

Gonna Fall

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?

And what did you hear, my darling young one?

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,

Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',

Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',

Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,

Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Bob Dylan 

I am very torn about the performance above.  One of the top ten songs in my version of music excellence, performed by one of the icons of my misspent youth.

But just spend a moment to look at the ironies here, they are legion. I will allow my readers to sit down with a beverage and think about the state of the sell out.  I am grateful that Bob stiffed the rich fucks in the audience.  I am not so happy that Patty took the bait and got dressed up like a servant.  But I will give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she just wanted to be the one looking them in the eyes when she delivered the message.

The audience is the real core of the irony.  Just look at them.  They are the elites that brought us to this pass.  Well dressed and self absorbed, I think that they were well-pleased by awarding so talented a servant.

But I wonder if they realize that the lyrics of the song were directed at them?  Or do they consider themselves "Sheltered from the Storm"?

Wait for it

We are sitting down.  Smack dab in the middle of wait-for-it.

I think that the best part about all of this is the fantasies that people project on the ongoing American project. These seem to fall into two camps, the beginning of a bright new future or the start of the apocalypse.

Neither of those things are currently occurring.  We are waiting around to watch the dance of a group of novice outsiders and newbies attempt to come to grips with the largest and best funded bureaucracy in the history of the planet.  It might turn out to be an epic battle.  It also might turn out to be a damp squib.

The executive branch of government is an odd thing.  Every election we put someone up to act as its titular leader, but the truth is, these "leaders" usually know jack shit about the process.   So they put up a group of cronies as "Secretaries", who then in turn put in place a bunch of their cronies.

These cronies presumably will run the departments of the government.

Lets look at my squatting ground, the good old VASpa.  The total political appointees are twelve.

The workforce of the VA is around 312K as of 2013.  The political appointees of the last administration are burrowing into the system now, trying to convert their appointed power into a permanent presence.  The 312K has a pretty darn big number of senior executives who will gleefully monkey wrench any attempt to slice away their power and privilege.

And the truth is, these high level political appointees and their minions really don't have complete control of the system, they push higher level thought and deflect damage, but they are as much a captive of the system as the system is a captive to them.

What we will see in the none-to-distant future is a subtle, congressional-mediated, bureaucracy-hindered attempt by a small handful of political players to change the course and livelihoods of an entrenched bureaucracy.

Anyone who thinks that "You're Fired" will work in these conditions might want to consider hedging your bets.

A funereal time

Locutius and Octavia surprised me last night and showed up on my doorstep.  Things are not going right for them.  Entropy confuses the crap out of them.

Folks like them are having a tough time of it right now.  They have carefully constructed a life using the rules dominant in our culture during the past forty years.

Those rules are cracking apart now, and the life thus constructed now appears fragile.  The things that are happening in the world are evidentiary​.  But the things that are happening in the world will continue to attack fragile structures like the American Dream.

But the get rich and die happy mythos of the post-Reagan years are reaching their pull date.  The almost-elite that took their cue from the advertising and acquisition industries and fooled themselves into believing that the short term goals that held sway would not self destruct at the end of the party.

Folks need to start realizing that the turgid, tortured pseudo-logic that fuelled Francis Fukayama's fever dream concerning "the end of history" was never meant to last.   It was always a ridiculous idea.  But the transient "victory" of shallow, self-serving policies benefitting the professional class was never, ever built to last.  Acting as though a set of rules that impoverishes a significant portion of a nation for the leisure of a self-centered elite is self-evidently right is a behavior that won't stand the test of time.

Refusal

Sat around a table at the Laurelwood last night, drinking dark beers and listening to friends reminisce, bitch, and whine.

2 x Ph.D., a masters, and a couple of BS.  Lotta education at the table.  What we talked about was a dying technology.  But the 100+ years of work of the participants ensured that the technology and the business practices of the management paying the bills stayed center stage.  The desire to maintain their stuff and their relative status was none too subtly ignores.

I won't even bother to tell you the tech, it in non-important.  What is important is the way that folks have approached it here in the West.  Simple tech, cheap materials, easy manufacture.  Provides for a desperate need.  But the West lards on layers of greedy management, corrupt regulatory efforts, scheming and corrupt and greedy middlemen and what was once a $0.50 product is now a $7.00 white elephant that no one wants.

So what does the brain trust at the table come up with as an idea.  Why, all you have to do to reach your dreams of continued steady and lucrative employment is to pair a simple, hand-held, computer chip reader with the already overpriced system.

Folks wonder why everything moved out of America.

Very Odd

Don't really know what to say.

I saw the full flower of "Trump won, prepare for the apocalypse" this weekend.

It is scary.

A good birthday weekend though, watched "White Christmas" for the first time ever and hooted.  I am always pleased when I watch 50's innocent, 100% hokey films.  The fifties ability with hokey is the key to the whole thing.

Hollywood created a wonderful myth.  A saccharine simulacrum of reality for all of us to believe.

And we did so want to believe.  We spent the next fifty years staring at the simulacrum and wishing ourselves into it.  Unfortunately,  the world outside the simulacrum failed us, and now the cold reality of the big world shows that the Republic is in serious trouble.

So we cast around in our different options for simulacrum selection  and voila, out pops the zombie apocalypse.  Bing and Rosemary failed us, so lets cast around for something opposite of what didn't work.  So now rides the zombies.  Coming at you, so make certain that you put aside enough guns and ammo to ride out the storm.

Whew.  It gets tiresome.

You notice that Hollywood doesn't ever have a "We gotta slog through years of shit, doing kinda unpleasant things, and making unfortunate compromises and sacrifices, just to keep things almost (but not quite) the same", myth.

Some of us are now without a myth to live by.

Not Gonna be here until the sixth

Going up to see Locutius...mourning another birthday of mine passing...not going to think a bit.

More Post Mortem

I have been giving some thought to the vagaries of the election.  A conversation with young Horatius yesterday had me thinking a clarified my thoughts (I will withhold further elaboration at this point since you Dear Reader, in your mind will substitute a different verb than clarification in this sentence)

As you are well aware, I voted for the strangely coiffed blowhard.

It wasn't an easy choice, but there you go.  He is the best of a bad lot.

But truth be told, Trump is my best choice because of his crudeness and lack of sophistication.  He will probably attempt stupid things that will arouse the ire of all "right thinking" folk.  When that happens, all of the checks and balances of our pretty-damn-fine system will kick in and stop the stupid.  Life is good.

Hillary, on the other hand, is a smart, sneaky, two faced bitch who will like her husband before her, would play the system for everything it is worth and put together a package of "legislation" that would gut the system further for the sake of her friends.  We probably wouldn't even notice it until about 2025, after she left office.  Then we would realize, for the second time, just how badly the Clintons had fucked us.

Luminiferous Ether and other such things

​​As always, the ex-Archdruid has caused a couple of my neurons to fire.

This time it was kicked off by his use of the quaint phrase "Luminiferous Ether".  Man, started me laughing, because along with phlogiston and phrenology, you have yourself a blast from the past that is truly hard to beat.

But then, as I continued to think about these ​​​​things, I also started thinking about the science that is going down in our time.  How much of what is passed of in the "scientific" journal industry today will be in same category as luminiferous ether fifty years from now?

I spent years in the nether regions of science.  Was I a top-flight tech?  Was I an slightly below average scientist?  Who knows?  The point here is that I was a part of that particular argumentative collective for years.  The group

​-​

think and arrogance is astonishing.  They are certain that anything done in the past has no merit whatsoever and only current methodology and theory yield "truth".

B​ut, on the other side, they hold up the "miracles" and saints bones of earlier enshrined experiments.  Michelson-Morley is one of these.  My experience with physics explanations for this experiment is "Nice".  But when you hear the experiment discussed by serious physics types, it gains the stuff of religion.  It proved the issue, discussion is done, full stop.

But the trouble is that the game of "science" is beginning to unwind.  We have established a set of theorems that give us stuff.  But how much of what we know has taken everything into consideration?

Consider for a moment another bit of work over at Ugo's place:

Now Ugo should know about work not being appreciated.  To be honest, people comparing Malthus to the Club of Rome is not an under-performed bit of art.  But, as Ugo says, not 

​a rigorous piece of art, but a carefully crafted partial reading of the corpus.

How much of our science is that way?  It gives us certain things, some of which we treasure greatly.  But how does the limited reading of the world around us and the subsequent enshrining the current mental model of the universe lead us to a dead end in our knowledge.

​Consider a moment this excerpt from Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" trilogy.

"What weapon could Leibniz possibly have that would do injury to Sir Isaac?"

"To begin with, a refusal to be over-awed, and a willingness, not shared at this time by any Englishman, to ask awkward questions."

"What sort of awkward questions?"

"Such as I've already asked: how does the water know where the moon is? How can it perceive the Moon through the entire thickness of the Earth?"

"Gravity goes through the earth, like light through a pane of glass."

"And what form does Gravity take, that gives it this astonishing power of streaming through the solid earth?"

"I've no idea."

"Neither does Sir Isaac." Barnes was stopped in his tracks for a few moments.

"Does Leibniz?"

"Leibniz has a completely different way of thinking about it, so different as to seem perverse to some. It has the great advantage that it avoids having to talk rubbish about Gravity streaming through Earth like light through glass."

"Then it must have as great disadvantages, or else he, and not Sir Isaac, would be the world's foremost Natural Philosopher."

"Perhaps he is, and no one knows it," Daniel said. "But you are right. Leibniz's philosophy has the disadvantage that no one knows, yet, how to express it mathematically. And so he cannot predict tides and eclipses, as Sir Isaac can."

"Then what good is Leibniz's philosophy?"

"It might be the truth," Daniel answered.

.

Bitching About Blogger

I do it, everyone that uses it does it.

I am just not at all for certain that it is justified.

I have been writing on this medium for over eleven years now.  100K plus visitors.  That is a fair sized soap box for any purpose.

But yet I bitch about Blogger.

I haven't set up a single server, I didn't have to write any code.  Most important, I didn't have to lay out a dime of my own money.  But I still bitch because an entity like Google chooses to modify the interface to fit their needs.  

Kinda shows a little bit about me and others.  They use things and consider it to be their right, when it is in fact a freebie that they ought to have a little gratitude for the convenience and value provided for nothing.

But I will still bitch about the changes whenever they make them.  I will grumble about the changes for the amount of time that it takes me to figure out the change and adapt to it.

In a perfect world, I would thank Google for the free service that they provide.  But since they show every indication of becoming a nasty cross between predatory business practices and politically correct douchebaggery, I don't think that is going to happen.

So instead, you get to hear me confess to the sin of ingratitude.

Fair Enough? 

I'm Kinda Sad

So, the Washington Post and Propornot.com have published a lengthy list of websites that are apparently outlets for "Russian Propaganda" or "Useful Idiots" for publishing thoughts and proposed courses of action that benefits the Russians.

Wow.

So:  After checking out the website, I decided to go and take a look at some of the sites so impugned. Fortified by a hot toddy, I plowed headlong into my research.  I chose sites which I am not an infrequent visitor.

• Zerohedge; actually a pretty classy response, just reported on the story and kept on keepin' on. They did lead me over to; 
• Charles Hugh Smith:  He started out with being "amused" but then he went kinda shrill.  His amusement seems to be tempered with a bit of anger.  I'm OK with that, seems kinda that would be the way that anyone would take the same news about them.
• Washington's Blog:  This one welcomed the story with open arms.  Went right out there and addressed the "Washington Post Readers" and went into detail about what their blog is all about.  Nice...I will make a bet that they will have a pretty big boost in their readership for a while.....Lets us hope that some of it sticks around.
• Not Much on Paul Craig Roberts...He seems to be ignoring it with dignity.
• Yves over at Naked Capitalism, I am truly sorry that the story ruined your Thanksgiving.
• The fact that the Ron Paul Institute was included on the list is truly astonishing.

Nope this is the most interesting thing I have seen for a while.  Where will this one go?  Who is behind it, what is happening here?

Read this and think back to your days in Physics for Scientists and Engineers (Phys 171)

http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/1.B36120

Wouldn't it be great if these folks actually proved that there might in fact be a "Luminiferous Aether Wind" that could be manipulated.

Michelson and Morley might be just a touch miffed.  Newton would just sit back contentedly

Truth be told

Happy Thanksgiving:  Please take the time to cherish your loved ones and be grateful for the tender mercies that this life has given you.

A Repost: and would someone please tell me why people keep reading this one

{I woke up at 05:30 this rainy Sunday morning and did my reading and writing thing.  Drank a couple cups of coffee and for some odd reason looked at the site statistics for this bit of screed.  This old post had come up as #1 for the month}


I am trying to figure out my relationship with this medium.  In a real sense, this blog is a vain affectation.  It makes an assumption that the public commons is a fair outlet for ideas.  I would have to agree that this is true.  But my numbers for folks coming to visit seem to show that either my ideas are stale or my presentation is lame.

Oh well.

The ideas presented here aren't particularly palatable.  When I sit down to think of them, even I am not fond of the conclusions reached.   That overpopulation seems to be at a tipping point.  That resource depletion is getting some firm traction.  That the environmental consequences of these first two points above are going to lubricate the decline we are entering.

What everyone here in Doomerland seems to agree on is the idea that badness happens.  Serious armed-survivalist preppers stock up beans and bullets and hope that they can outlast and outgun the opposition.   The vegan-prepper-survivalists are trying on the idea that being a agrarian peasant is an economic/environmental niche worth exploiting.

What seems obvious to me is that we are very close to a time of compression.  Barring some currently unforeseen and historically unique event, I don't think that the fall will be precipitous one, leading to the Mad Max scenario so adored by the survivalists.   The beans and bullets have a 99+ percent chance of going unused for their original purpose.  The vegans will discover just how hard and precarious the life of an agrarian really is.

The compressive decline ahead of us will be a long-drawn out affair.  The industrial age started around 200-odd years ago.  We have used up right around half of the fossil fuels and even more of the industrial resources.  It won't be a symmetrical bell curve with a 200-year tail, but will probably be asymmetric with a tail on the order of 80-100 years.   The exact term is a negatively-skewed distribution.

So, what I think is that we need to get a firm grasp on the idea of a decline that will take generations. This in not sexy.  It has no heroes.  It will just take hard work and adaptability.  We will see the unrealistic goals and rewards of the current system be replaced (sometimes forcefully) with something different.  There will be errors made, and scrambling done.  Some lives will be happy, most won't.

In other words, we are going to be returning from Never-Neverland.

Ongoing Review

So, Little Donny, a rich preppie from New York is the boss.  Might do well, might not.

But he does bring some interesting baggage and people with him.   On first glance, Ivanka's hubby, Jared Kushner seems a greasy little shit.  Daddy buys his way into Harvard and he marries well.  Rich daddy's boy marries rich Daddy's girl.

But, let's stand back here and look at the whole deal.   Maybe things are all right.  Rich kid goes to "elite" private school catering to folks of my paternal grandmother's faith.  Kid fucks off because he knows that the nose to the grindstone shit that these rich kid diploma mills pawn off as an education is  just a bragging point for his parents and a place for him to learn to suck up to the right people.  Now I am starting to like this kid.

Then Daddy big bucks (who the more I read about the more I like) gifts the whores of Harvard with 2.5 large and Voila!,  the impersonal wheels of GPA and SAT spit out an acceptance letter.

But now come the real questions.  Who did he hang out with?  What did he learn from folks not of his class?  Did he recognize the social club atmosphere and use it, all the time laughing his way to the bank?

From what I have read, he comes from new money, a family without the slavish devotion to the elite norms.  A family that is competent in a knife fight.

Maybe this will be OK.

OK, here's the deal.

Right off the bat, I voted for Trump.

No shame, no gloating.

So any squeaky Hillary supporters out there, let fly.  Let fly with your sneery-upper-class "I'm better than others" attitude that makes your argument seem to come out of the mouth and psyche of a British Toff from the 1920's.

Trumpeters:  Let go and get-down your not-too-well-disguised John Wayne swagger and ideas that "There is a new Sheriff in town" that will fill your desire to transform this country into a decrepit and past-its-pull-date facsimile of 1950's America.

Nope, I chose Trump, but me and most folks who voted for The Donald did so on the not-too-likely chance that the slide downward won't be quite so steep.   I really felt that Hillary would be more likely to do serious damage (Read here:  Major war and an acceleration of the crumbling of the lower 60% of the American populace) than the flim-flam man with the oddly-coiffed hair.

Any one of the four national candidates would have failed.  Donald will probably fail.  But I truly think that the fallout, blowback, and out and out damage from the Trump Presidency would be more manageable, more containable, than the fallout, blowback and out and out damage than from a Clinton Administration.

Neither of them had policies to address the big problems facing us.  Their "policies" if they can be called such, were genuflections to emotional responses to second tier problems.

Big issues will be coming at us soon.  I voted for Trump because he might have a pretty crappy chance of pulling something out of his hat.  I think that he is clever enough that he might come up with something to slow down the skid. Hillary had nothing.  A huge victory for either of these two midgets would be simply a maintenance of things as they are right now. 

But I most certainly ain't putting my money on that kind of keeping things afloat outcome.  Unless you give me 10:1 or better odds.

Can we please just stop talking about the election?

iacta alea est

It is done.

It is time to stop talking.

It is time to get back to work.

If Trump puts something forward that you disagree with, work to stop it.

If Trump puts something forward that you agree with, help him accomplish it.

He has done nothing yet.  Wait until something happens and then react.

I think that it will be a 50-50 deal.  But right now you are all just acting like children.

Please stop it.

The Rules in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016

Hillary and her minions finely crafted a campaign that completely ignored the "flyover states" and their electoral votes.

Hillary based her campaign on winning the "battleground" states where money and large cities dominate the landscape (if such a word is appropriate.

In other words, she bet her good money (quite a bit of it I might add) on a strategy centering on the electoral college and the requisite 270 votes.

Well, that didn't work, did it.

So now the folks here on the left coast, along with starting up the secession nonsense, are trying to invalidate a part of the constitution that they don't like by squeaking about the "popular vote" and trying to get the electors to violate their oaths.

Look, Article Two of the constitution is important.  It keeps the city folks from oppressing the country folks.  Straight up.  City folks on the coasts don't get to dictate to the rest of the country.  You must realize that of  those of us who just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we don't believe the same things that you do,

The electoral college protects the folks out in the country who reject the city.

If you want to get it gone, all you have to do is pass it through 38 state legislatures.  If 13 state legislatures don't like it, well then it is dead on arrival.

Look at the map and count folks.

Fuck majority rule and city bullying.

A Sneering Bully

Politics, like bullying, is a way of forcing conformity on others.


No, it isn't the Donald (though he does lean that way).

Nope, this is a person that I respected.  Read his blog for years now, was one of my first sources when I tossed aside the need to go a "filching lucre and gulping warm beer" (You gotta love Conrad).

But now he is shutting down.  Pouting like a little girl because some of his readers don't agree with him and he doesn't like the character of a man he has never met.   He quit because a lot of people pointed out that all you had a choice of was two plates of shit and you thought choice A was less nauseating than choice B.

For these transgressions, one who was once a great help now goes out in a flame of pettiness.

• Donald Trump will destroy the environment; well sorry bud, that train left the station years ago, and we all had a hand in that with our greed and cupidity.
• Donald will repeal the Affordable Care Act, which by me is OK, as the last time I looked this abortion was none of the above, merely a conduit for the Ferme Generale made up by the Insurance Industry.
• Donald is a racist for kicking out people living here illegally, taking jobs and services and allowing the powers that control the industry here in the US to decimate the working class.  PS, he also is not convinced that the muslim faith and the christian faith are entirely compatable and will perhaps they will not walk off into the sunset together, hand in hand.
• Donald will not Pass TPP and will go after NAFTA.  Hey, why don't you run that by congress and see what they think about Donald telling them what to do.
• Donald Trump is a racist.  Well my friend, my guess is that you are painted with that brush too.

Nope this guy ought to come out here to Portland and have a tantrum with the rest of the spoiled, self-absorbed children here.

I am an old man.  I watched Johnson take over for Kennedy.  I watched Nixon come in and leave, Reagan entered and left,  The shrub got elected.  Hopey-Changey came in and gave us neither.  The resident of the White House isn't that powerful and the solution space he operates in is shrinking constantly and dramatically

The Republic isn't going to fall because someone who disgusts you enters the Oval Office and puts his feet up on the desk.  Checks and Balances still exist.  

All the problems that Trump faces are not problems, they are predicaments.  There are solutions to problems, there are no solutions for predicaments.  Trump is at least giving it a go, he isn't quitting. The guy will almost certainly fail, but so would Hillary, and she would have failed even faster.  The President elected on November 8 and who will take office on January 20th will probably be the biggest bag holder since Herbert Hoover.

All that crap (and the other nonsense that this whiner put out today (I especally liked the FEMA camp nonsense that magically disappeared from the post) is just the tantrum of a sore loser.

But we could have used his help.   

Returning to rational

Its over.

Thank God.

Now, back to important stuff.

This week is baked beans.

As always, start the day before soaking the beans.  White navy beans this time around, but truthfully, pinto or black or kidney or anything will do just fine.  But the pork and beans that I grew up with (you know, the kind that had a nasty hunk of pork fat in the bottom of the can) requires the use of navy beans for the proper aesthetic).

First things first.  Start with one of the nastier bits of a dead pig.  Today's choice bit of semi-offal can be had at Winco Foods (or whatever local grocery chain around you that bothers to recognize that there is a working class/ethnic class in this country.  You will recognize this chain by the lack of an olive bar, artisan cheese, and Lexus(es) in the parking lot.

This pork jowl bacon is cheap.  $4.00 gets you a couple of pounds.  It is always un-sliced.  It looks funny.

Sliced up pork jowl bacon...looks different, tastes great.

Fry this up in a dutch oven.  An aside to this pretty basic concept:  In my humble opinion, when using a dutch oven, one should never, ever turn the heat on the range higher than whatever the approx. 40% mark is.  Mine top end is medium low. 

Fry it up

Fry the bacon up and take the meat aside for garnish.  Now you have the real basis of good baked beans..rendered pig fat.  Chop up an onion and toss it in to cook until translucent.  

An excellent start to any meal worth eating

Now....the sauce:  An aside here, pork and beans is not a gourmet dish, it is a working class dish and what makes it good is working class set of ingredients and those are not purchased at a boutique grocery store.  Winco is a good first choice, but a good backup is your local liquidator store.  Here in Wash/Ore/Commie land, the choice is Grocery Outlet (God Bless 'em).

The sauce is pretty simple:  

• 3/4 cup of cheap barbecue sauce
• 1/4 cup of cheap wet mustard
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• a good dollop of Worcester sauce (give or take 2 tablespoons)
• a good dollop of molasses (approx 1/4 cup)
• a teaspoon of liquid smoke
• a tablespoon of tomato/chicken bouillon
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon

Redneck Cred

Mix all of this stuff in the the rest of the stuff already in the dutch oven, drain the soaked beans and dump them in, stir the hell out of it along with about a cup of water.  If you want to worry about presentation, put the bacon on the top in an attractive pattern, if not, just stir it in like I do.

Pre-Baked

Put the covered dutch oven in an oven set to 200 F. and bake for around 3-4 hours. Take the dutch oven out, stir, and add water if you need, put it back in the oven for another three to four hours.  (Tip:  Since you are baking this, you might want to fill up your teapot and put it over the burner that vents the oven.  That way you can parasite the waste heat and if you do need to add water, it can be hot and not screw up the cooking cycle)

The End

Forgive me father, for I have sinned

I really like the Cowboys this year.

They are a fun team to watch.  I like their players.

I am so ashamed

Astonishment

I read this paragraph over at Politico:

Dashed are the hopes that the campaign could come to a conclusion on a high note, instilling in Americans a feeling that casting a history-making vote for Clinton is something more than merely a repudiation of Donald Trump.

Wow.

I am getting used to the twisted view being presented to us by these folks, but little things jump out at me.  These folks actually think this way.

Out here in the real world, the politics are coarser, less ideologically defined.  The politics center around what one feels has been done to him and by whom.  Neither candidate is an example for others.  Both candidates are a loud and clear "fuck you" to the other camp.

High notes are not possible in this cesspit of an election.

Say what you want

This election has certainly been different.

Yep

Trump might be finished. But another playwright, Bertolt Brecht, warned: "Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."

Gotta take a breath

Look, everyone knows that the deal is going down.  

What everyone is worried about is that it might not go their way.

Well, I got new for all you pilgrims.  All of you are right.  It won't go your way.  

No reason to stop anything.  Even if shit goes seriously south, do you think that you aren't going to have to put time and energy into the system to make the new way work?  Do you think that the energy that you put in now is going to be wasted?  

Look, life is series of decisions and accommodations.  Some of what you sow gets reaped.  Some is carried away on the wind. Get over it.

All you can do is keep trying, don't plan on winning them all.  Try to learn from your failures.  Try to reinforce your successes.

Things are going to go awry in the none-to-distant future.  Stay on your feet, keep your wits about you and soldier on.

A Ramble

Of late, I am trying hard not to spend to much time watching the goings-on being perpetrated in the name of the American People. It isn't really working.

I seem to have a taste for watching and reading history.  Lately, the headline news from trusted sources seems to have been quite selective in the coverage of the world.  Where they once at least pretended to give us information (Yes, I remember Walter Cronkite, Huntley/Brinkley, and McNeil/Lehrer), we now get a sanitized and self-serving pablum of pre-digested pap that services the goals of the corporations that control the news services.

So you go off hunting.  Try and find sources of information that aren't too slanted or biased.  Hard to do, and you have to spend a lot of time on the threshing floor.  Separating wheat from chaff has always involved hard work and application of energy.

I don't know what is going on.  I have assigned in my own little head a set of probabilities.  I am hoping to raise the level of certainty for the key propositions up to >80%, but this will be a serious task considering the quality of the data that I have as my starting points. 

Mailing this one in

I am finding it hard to decide how to keep this thing going.  The Blogger interface is annoying, and when I send stuff, it just never looks all that good.

So I have to calibrate my expectations.  This is an experiment with posting using the e-mail feature.

Wonder how it will look​

effing funny

Ophiuchus: Nov. 29 - Dec. 17

I admit it, when I am bored, I read my horoscope.  Don't put a single bit of credence into what is says, but it is always fun

I am no longer a Sagittarius. 

I wonder what my new personal characteristics are....gotta get working on this, get ahead of the curve

Dagny Clinton

You know, when I was driving home tonight, I took some time to reflect on the feeling of malaise that happens whenever I think thoughts concerning the current election.  But when I have a quiet half hour to think (the only positive thing about a half hour commute) is that I get to stand back from the fray and analyze objectively.  Today, I finally realized that, one single thing that sends me reeling away from Hillary as a candidate is that she reminds me of something, and today I realized what that was.   She is an aging and embittered, and grown-up Dagney Taggart. 

No, No, No.....Not the politics.  The Person.

While I might take exception with some of the points of Mr.Sale's essay over at Sic Semper Tyrannis today. (The truth is that, I am hoping those differences of opinion will gel later, but one never knows when the act of writing something down and reading it makes was seemed to be a good idea appear pretty shopworn), the article itself is masterful and along with John-Michael Greer’s gentle body slam of Hillary back in February now constitute the Canon in my personal bibliography about what makes Hillary tick.

All that being said, I stand behind my thesis in the first paragraph. 

Let’s sit down and really spend some time with my history with the novel.  I first read it as a freshman in Austin Hall dorms at Utah, in 1972, smack dab in the middle of the cooling slag heap that was left of the sixties, it was heady stuff.  Completely at odds with the zeitgeist of Rachel Carson and Edward Abby and Ken Kesey.  It was an odd sort of mental aphrodisiac, taking thought in a new direction.  This is the period of my greatest love for the book.   

But years passed, the Army, a failed marriage, and entry into the workforce led me to a point where, on a whim, I bought a copy in a used bookstore (one of my favorite haunts) and reread the book.  Boy different take this time.  The book was still solid, but I spent a lot of time performing the required mental jiu-jitsu on the plot and characters and in the end, my opinion shifted, the book now had serious problems, but still worth the read, still thought-provoking.

Then came the rise up into corporate, accompanied by a nice salary, two sons, and a good job helping to eviscerate the productive capacity of this country and training up workers in Asia.  After much thought and pain, I fell to earth and ended up as a low-level bureaucrat plugging veterans into their healthcare. I had raised a couple of kids at this time, and while I was planning my fall, I reread “Atlas”.  “My God” I asked myself; had I really been that fatuous?

You see, that is the problem with Ayn Rand and her acolytes, they take as gospel something that, in my experience, doesn’t do well in the passing of years.  There is an irresistible excitement of this “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” kind of fantasy.  The fact that the creed espoused in the books is antithetical to the Western-Christian philosophy and any notional view of equality is a pretty powerful drug.    

But, as you grow older, you start to notice that the folks who act like the characters in “Atlas Shrugged” aren’t your favorite people.  My opinion of Dagney is that she is one of those people who will not improved at all with the coming of the aging process. The young, pleasantly-perverted Dagney would not age well.

Read Mr. Sale’s article.  I don’t know Hillary, but as have watched her over the years, I start to see the characteristics Mr. Sales describes, and it is not attractive to the old man I have become.  Those very same characteristics that Mr. Sales describes Mrs Clinton s having probably is a pretty good description of the backstory on a fictional character in a decidedly odd novel published back when Ike was President

I hearken back to the fatuous freshman tackle that wore this skin and how what he thought then came to pass and left us where we are now.  What he found sexy and virile and rebellious has been tested over these last four decades and have been found wanting.

And I think about the way that my character has changed.  And I think that maybe Hillary hasn’t changed that much.  Why would she change?  Who she is and what drives her has brought her almost to the throne of power.

So that is why I won't vote for Hillary,  It is just a feeling.  A personal certainty that I know who she is and what drives her.  The character that she plays and her motivations and psychic scars just doesn't suit me.

Vinegar

https://fourthievesvinegar.org/

Nation

I am a nationalist.  I care about the US.  I couldn't give a flying fuck about the rest of the world.

I think that the Department of Defense should be just that.

I don't think that troops should be stationed overseas.  The troops that we maintain should be to protect the North American continent...yes, this will mean that Mexico and Canada will pretty much get a free ride.

The Navy should be gutted.  If folks want to sell overseas, that is fine, but who says we have to protect businessmen outside of our borders.

I think that if a couple of other countries want to kill each other, that is fine with me.

I think that folks should stay in their own country and improve it, I do not think that they should be allowed into my country to improve themselves.

There...happy?