Meh

Some days......

The eldest is sick of school.  Can't say as I blame him.  So he is out looking for his first real-life job.  I have my fingers crossed.

But I do like the process. While I have been counseling him to think out of the box for the long term, the short term requires obeisance to the peculiar customs of our peculiar economy.  

So he is polishing up social skills and getting used to talk to people he has never talked to before.  Always a good skill.  The practice allowed by a crappy economy also calibrates expectations quite well.

So life is good

The Two Nations

At the end of the day, this is why the vast majority American is not happy. At the end of the day, this is why the US is inching toward the failed state status. 

The mythical “Men on the street” really don't think, they believe.  They have been fed a ration of crap their whole life and been told that it is the whole truth.  I am impressed by just how many different plates of shit we have been fed and just how many people have bought in.  The list is stunning in its breadth;  Free-market, American Exceptionalism, Calvinist Christianity, these have become the New Holy Trinity here in Red America. They are opposed by a completely different set of odd beliefs.  In the land of Blue, the piecemeal faith of sexual identity, globalism, and social justice creates a strangely ineffective counterpoint to the ravings of the Red.

We have lost the leaders of our society.  They seem to have vanished and left in their place poseurs who mouth the words needed to convince the gullible that they, the poseurs, and only they, have the gift of prophecy required to fulfill the needs of the nation. But if the beliefs of the two countries is so deeply riven that any promise will piss off half the population, nothing good will come out of the attempt. 

But what no one wants to talk about is how neither of the two beliefs stated can be reconciled with the facts on the ground. Both beliefs require infinite growth on a finite world. Both require human nature to have something that human nature doesn’t seem to have any evidence of possessing. The two beliefs are proven failures.

The clowns we get are the clowns we deserve. Because there are vanishingly few of us here in the good old USA that bother to think about the nature of our faith (and I am not at all certain I belong to the thinking subset), we vote in the clowns that seem most likely not to disturb whatever particular secular faith that we espouse. But to provide for one set of beliefs tears at the fabric of the other belief so the emnity is permanent, the defect is structural.

The mass-democracy overlaying a Republic that we tout as exceptional is just going to stay here and fester. It cannot resolve the conflicting goals of the two populaces that inhabit this chunk of North America, so it will just continue down the path it is on. No change, no fixes, just the same shit.

Hellloooo!

Look at all the folks out there talking about how, pretty dang soon now, the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

I don't know how to tell you folks, but we are already there.

Look, with the exception of a couple of folks and a couple of off years, myself and everyone I know have been tapering down for forty years now.  Sure, nearly everyone I know has had at least a couple of good years.  Some of the folks I know are even shitting in the tall cotton thank you very much.

But for the most part, everyone I know is not quite up to the red queen's standards.  We ran as hard as we could and we ended up a little bit behind where we started.

Oh fucking well, that's the way she goes.

For the next forty or so years, the trend is going to continue. and things will be back a little bit, maybe even fair amount behind where we are now.  That is the nature of things.  Oil is running out, ore stocks are getting thin, population is out of effing control, migration is starting, the odd war is giving us the side-eye, and things just keep moseying down the slope toward the aforementioned "Hell in a hand basket".

But newbies like to think that we are revving up to a Hollywood Spectacular denouement, complete with rogue planets, roving bands of cannibal zombies, martial law, and the destruction of all that is good and decent.

No buckaroos, just gonna be the same thing as now, but a little worse, a lot different, and with the same cast of clowns (That's us) figuring out how to make shit work and piecing together the crap sandwich what the world hands us that week.

No one says it has to be pretty or spectacular, but gravity always wins.

But its is the only game in town......so game on.

bleh

Bleh

Caveat Legens

I am in no way supporting a drastic change to the current way of the world.

But, everything that I see seems to point in the direction of a massive change in the way that the world works.

I am quite comfortable in the current system thank you very much.  But, as an old man, reasonably rich in experience, I have come to the conclusion that what I want has little effect on the machinations of the world.

All my writing, crackpot theorizing, and low-grade analysis done here, albeit mostly unnoticed and unread, is merely a means for me to:

• Try and figure out the "Why" and "Who"
• work out my best guess of the "When".  This will also include recognizing that the "when" of such a scenario may be past my lifespan and that, as such, can be safely ignored.
• and then to figure out "where" to be when and if such a thing occurs
• finally to discover the "how", should such a thing become necessary, I will integrate the above data into a concrete plan.

Obviously, I might be wrong about everything written here.

Caveat Legens

Thinking about...give me a bit

Been thinking about the nature of the elites.  Things are starting to gel.  Maybe tomorrow.

The key, I think is to stop thinking of them as organized,

Arnold

Bacon makes me happy.

But pigs are really great critters.  Arnold Ziffel was a completely understandable phenomenon.  Pigs are very smart, actually have great personalities, and can provide a great service in ridding a household of compost and providing garden fertilizer.

Pigs have been an important part of the human ecology for millennia. 

In my dotage, I hope to have a small place with a pig or two and some chickens and rabbits and a nice quarter acre garden.

I will care for the pigs and appreciate their company.

But I will turn them into bacon.

And I will be grateful.

Toasty Friday

Summertime and I am holed up trying to keep my body temp at a reasonable level.

Up early in the AM....open up the place and put the fan in the door to blow in as much coolness as I can during the 45 minutes of my morning ablutions.  Since it 66 F. outside.  the place gets pretty reasonable pretty fast.  Then the place gets buttoned up;  windows closed, shades down, the place is a flipping cave.

Then off to my air conditioned office for the day.  Being a pampered bureaucrat is its own reward.  Pay sucks though.

When I get home, the place is still in the 70's and twenty or so degrees cooler than outside.  Hide in the cave until the sun goes down.

A summer life explained

The uppity

The anger out there has been documented.   The poor folks got it, the rich folks don't get it.
That is the way the cookie always crumbles.

The question now is, just how bad do the poor folks have it?  Right now I would guess that it isn't bad enough for anything to come of it anytime soon.   What will it take to give the anger some traction?

There is a lot there to work with.  With the election going the way it appears to be going, there is going to be a lot more grist for that particular mill in the near future.   It seems to me that we are going to continue down this tired path for a while yet, carving a percentage or two off of the protected  elite list and pissing down more pain on the "lowers".

Now keep an eye out for someone who is as slippery and as salesman-like as the Donald to start his rise.   He will tap into to the same angry crowd that Trump taps into, but will do so with a plan and an organization, not just an oversized ego.  This to-be-established successor will attack the privileges of the elite and will be attacked by the elite's media poodles for the temerity of challenging their economic droit de seigneur.

So the bet here is this.  I see Trumpussy garnering around forty percent this election if things keep going the way that they are (1).  That is approximately the percentage of the angry folks.  The media will tout the win as a "landslide" for the bitch.  She will continue the screwing and will add to the totals of the angry over the next four years.  Then should the reasonably intelligent and crafty successor to Donald arise and begin his work, then things could get interesting.
____________________________________

(1)  There is the off-chance that Trumpussy is playing a crafty game of rope-a-dope and will come out in the very near future with an effective and competent game plan.  I wouldn't hold my breath

Hmm

For it is certain that the less a man is acquainted with the sweets of life, the less reason he has to be afraid of death

The Military Institutions of the Romans (De Re Militari) 

By Flavius Vegetius Renatus

Over at Sic Semper Tyrannis, there was a discussion about the draft and how it should be re-implemented and how it would fix a lot of things.   At first I began by agreeing with the sentiments, then I worked my way down to my current state of being ambivalent leaning slightly toward the idea.

At this point in our country's history, I am not certain that the draft would fulfill the role that the folks here posit.  First, the rot in the society is pretty damn deep, and this reflects on the quality of the personnel that are available for a draft.  So instead of citizens being called up for duty, you get a mishmash of capabilities and intentions.  Some of them are good, some of them are bad.

My Army experience was at the changeover from a draftee army to the VOLAR.  Sitting in barracks at Fort Jackson and Fort Polk with the mishmash of folks that period engendered, I started to realize that folks is folks by the time they hit draft age.  Spent time with them in such places as Benning and Bragg and Sam Houston made me change my mind, but then I started to realize that the folks in these places were the elite, they came in with the attitude that made for a good soldier/citizen, the Army just put a shine on it.  The truth of the matter is that the Army didn't fix anyone, just like it didn't fix me.  Sure I came out of it with some Army customs imprinted indelibly on my brain, but it didn't make me a better citizen or a better person.  It did make me a pretty fair soldier.   I think it was then that I realized only the soul matters.

All of the folks that I knew in the Army seemed to go through the same trajectory of life as the folks who stayed home.  Same number of criminals, same number of flim-flam men, same number of just-plain folk.  The army didn't appear to change anything long-term from the person they were to the person they became.

As for the hypothesized impact of the draft on the populace, I would propose that the war protests during the Vietnam Era were the result of a free and active press.  The current gaggle of neutered fops that hang  breathlessly off every Pentagon briefing would give no such coverage.  Their corporate masters simply would not allow it.   No press coverage, no mass protest, no policy change.

Vietnam and its protest leading to the closure of the war was a one-off.

No, the concept that the draft would change things is tempting, and things might have been different had the draft remained extant, but the box is open.  Can't stuff all the problems back in.

“This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. 

Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. 

The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details--and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.”  

― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Plowin' the field

OK  here is an uncomfortable thought.

My generation (The Boomers) have had is easy in relative terms.  Never been so many having so much.  Oh sure, you can trot out statistics about wealth disparities, unemployment, and other such twaddle, but we have had it great.

Truth is, we took too much out of the pie and didn't leave enough for those following us.

So, when you look at Social Security; why shouldn't we take a hard look at it.  Some of the folks don't need it.  Some don't deserve it.  Some folks can keep-a-working.

If everyone runs in and starts grabbing their piece, the fund (already bankrupt by any rational accounting) will dwindle even faster.  Yes, I know, we paid the money in.  But every single one of us plans to take more out than we put in.

That is always a recipe for disaster.  Third rail my ass, it was a bone thrown to the poor during the depression to keep them from rioting.

Riven

Whoever wins this abomination of an election, a significant minority of Americans will view the result as further proof of “rigged” and irredeemably corrupt political system dominated by two deeply amoral organizations.  Rather than reconciling the country and allowing us to move forward, this election will add to the chasms separating the two Americas.

We aren't going into a second American revolution or civil war any time soon.  But we will proceed apace in the direction we are heading.  The wealth will become increasingly concentrated as the financial sector sucks the life out of the economy.  The middle/professional bourgeoisie will be shrunk further as the hard core elite continue to winnow the lower edge of this most threatened class.

Now, I can already hear the cries of disagreement.  "Certainly you must mean that the working class is the most threatened".  Nope, they have already been screwed.  There is no threat there, the action has been taken and implemented.

So, the next while (I am guessing 5-8 years) will be a steady and slow degradation of the lower reaches of what passes for a professional/working class.  They will begin to see that they are the next on the chopping block and will begin to make common cause with the already screwed working class to strike back at the corporate/financial elite.

So, what I thought would happen will happen, it will just happen when it decides to, not when my predictions say it will happen.

Where is it?

I've lost the thread of what is happening.  It seems to be a jumbled mess with no one knowing what to do and where to go.  The number and complexity of problems facing us seem to be insurmountable.

Good luck to all...I think we are going to need it.

Birds of a Feather

Richard Armitage, Henry Paulson, Brent Scowcroft.

They have all endorsed Hilly.

Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger.  I'll make a bet right here and now that these asshats will back her too.

Look...the folks who brought us to this sad, sad point will likely all back Hilly.

There you go.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it

Next

I have written off this election.  We're fucked either way.

You can spend hours trying to figure out what got us here, but where we sit is that we are a country making a choice between the worst two candidates ever to grace the center ring of this quadrennial circus.  Neither major party candidate is worth a bucket of warm spit.

In a nutshell, no matter who wins, we are going to have a clown in place for the next four years, with an idiot running the Administrative branch for the next four years. The odds of the country actually improving will be minimal, the chance that things will either not improve or get worse is increased.

So, what comes in two years when the next election is held?  Who will take over the house and how? What happens in four years when someone competent captures the anger of the Trumpeteers?  What happens when the Democratic party continues spitting on the poor, who will rise out of that?

Look, we are fresh out of problems here in the US.  All we have left is predicaments.

What happens next?

Care to bet

Opponents of science-informed policy cite uncertainty as a reason to delay action. Mainstream science acknowledges and objectively quantifies uncertainty, whereas opponents often use the language of certainty. Because communication is typically more persuasive when a message is conveyed with certitude, contrary voices may appear stronger than scientific voices to the public. To redress this imbalance, we must find a way to determine whether expressed opinions represent true opinions. One longstanding method is through wagering, and this session will examine the role of bets in exposing actual beliefs related to climate change and associated risk.

Climate Scientist James Annan 

Two lemmas to start:

1.   I think that the raw data sets used in the global climate model are pretty tight.  If you want, you can argue around the edges all you want, you can find questionable area in isolated data sets, and gaps exist.   But when you take them all and use them to balance one another and try to control and characterize the levels of uncertainty, you get a pretty damn watertight set of data.
2. The math and the worldview aren't really linear.  It can best be described as a non-intuitive mess that yields results that points in a direction with an assigned degree of uncertainty attached to the near term and medium term.

Look, we are never going to get to the A+B=C kind of equation that folks want to have before they feel the need to change their desires.  Most of the folks arguing over climate change are being asked to give up pretty big parts a life that they have carefully crafted inside a cultural milieu that actively promoted such things on the basis a science that is larded with the problemmatic accouterments that is chasing science around these days. (I would really hope that folks would take the time to read this essay and this essay by John Michael Greer as nice overviews of the tattered cloth that is science nowadays) .

The culture of the past fifty years has been an exercise in cognitive dissonance concerning the uncomfortable idea the we are fucking things up.  I would venture a guess that no one with a brain in their head really believes in a Star Trek future.  When you look at the multiple, interconnected streams of problems heading our way, even the most optimistic will hedge his bets and agree that there is a downside sitting out there.

So we are involved here in a betting game, an argument over the meaning of statistics.  The sides of the fight ranges from that fucking idiot Guy McPherson to That fucking idiot James Inhofe.

So, when I read this article the other day, I was intrigued.  Why not set up system where you could bet on the environment?   Let these silly fuckers put their money where their mouth is.  Make bets on the extent of arctic sea ice in the year.  No problem.  El Niño event this year and extent, put down your money with a sliding scale for  extent and strength.  How about the claim for hottest year recorded, setting this one up would be a walk on the park.

Look, the medium that most of us swim in the global economy.  The odds of supporting the population load (current and projected) without the dizzying web of interconnected systems that make up the current system are vanishingly small.  Anthropomorphic climate change and the required changes need to arrest it will translate in the real world to the simple old truism of "well, a lot of folks are going to die".

The betting system engendered will allow folks to better establish, within an economic system, the actual results of climate change.  The dollars and cents, pouinds and pennies, yuan and fen that Everyman uses to help establish the veracity of the data coming in.  My bet is that this will help everyone to come to grips with a very problematic data set and the decisions that need to be made concerning an uncertain topic.

As an aside, the problem with this is that it won't effect the true believers.  As a case in point, I have bet on the Raiders for years now.  Knowing myself, I will probably continue.  The same will probably be the case for the weather bookie industry.  Sometimes hope and belief trump empirical data.

dissolution

“Whatever faith I might have in the perfectibility of man, until human nature is altered, and men wholly transformed,” Which of course would take Christian faith, “I shall refuse to believe in the duration of a government which is called upon to hold together 40 different peoples, disseminated over a territory equal to one half of Europe in extent. To avoid all rivalry, ambition, and struggles between them, and to direct their independence according to the accomplishment of the same design. But the greatest peril to which the Union is exposed by its increase arises from the continual changes which take place in the position of his internal strength.”

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville 

We are facing a choice here in the good old USof A., and not just the clown show masquerading as a presidential election. 

Look, our period where you could posit an idea of "American Exceptionalism", without being laughed at, has gone past its pull date. We had a good run as a constitutional republic, won a couple of good sized wars, and then proceeded to make hay with our industrial and resource bases intact and selling everything hand over fist. We here have had a good run during my lifetime. 

But things are in the process of changing. I am hoping for, and tend to guess that, We are looking long slow decline ahead. Unfortunately however, the possibility of a rabid fall is significant enough to pay attention, and the chance of defying entropy and continuing an upward climb is slim indeed. 

It is the same choice that the rest of the world faces. We can try for the perfectibility of the entire world, where all are brought to a common level and human needs are taken care of and people everywhere are ruled by a rational philosopher king. Plato had a great idea 2,400 years ago, but the truth appears to be that it it is a great idea that just didn't pan out. 

I genuinely think and feel that the United States will have to change radically. I think that the easiest way to come to grips with the change will be a dissolution of the Union. The Union itself has become burdened by its own weight and the additional weight of its perceived goals. 

But what is scaring me the most is how people will handle the process. Because the process will insist upon the purging of some of our most cherished dreams and even more importantly, or self delusions. 

I think that hardest one to purge will be the "We are the greatest". I have never seen the attraction of this.  When a person does it, he is an ass. Trash-talk has become ingrained in our culture. But truth is, whether or not we are the greatest is now subject to grave doubt. 

The next hardest part will be the fragmentation of the mass market and the commensurate damage to the grossly swollen corporations that now sit astride the economics of the country and the world. These entities are very powerful at the current moment, and I don't see them responding to the diminution of their power with any significant grace. 

Finally, there will be loss of the manufactured dreams of comfort offered by overweening set of ideals and beliefs that motivate the actions of Americans in this peculiar period in time. Being taken down a notch or two is never pretty, and the usual response is rage and a counterattack. Mature self-reflection is not one of mankind's strong suits. 

I don't really like the choices arrayed in front of me. I really don't see this coming off well. I think that there a 50:50 chance that I will pass before we as a country will have to take one of the crappy choices on offer. But I can't really see what impact that I might have on the outcome. My views are too unpleasant and the vision that I see for the future too far away from the desires of the “common clay”. 

So, the best vision that I can offer is that of smaller political entities.

• The Dixie South,
• The Atlantic North,
• the Midwest encompassing the Mississippi drainage above Louisiana,
• Texas by its lonesome,
• California and the Colorado drainage, and
• the Columbia River drainage

I am not saying that this will be good. There is going to be a lot of pain pissed down. But these are manageable entities. They all have solid internal lines of communication, they all have a somewhat cohesive cultural structure, they all have adequate agriculture. The populations sizes and densities vary sufficiently to allow differing experiments to be allowed on how to deal with the world facing us. 

A lot of these experiments will fail, but that needs to be known as well. Right now we are forcing untested single systems onto too big a body-politic.  I ask you to consider this question:   

How would an educated person in 450 AD in what was remaining of the Roman Empire know that a Dark Age was coming?

 

A

Because......

The 2016 Presidential Debate
Thanks to Yves and Martha M over at Naked Capitalism

Just speaking about Hillary Clinton here.

I won't vote for her because nothing will change and things are not getting better.

Just speaking about Donald Trump here.

I won't vote for him because he is a self-promoting jackass.  He has no depth.

A preview of their debate

Security

This is probably one of the best descriptions of reality I have ever read

https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1#.fcnsm66bb

I have ranted in the past about the "security of the internet".  If you are interested, here, here, and here are the pieces that I wrote in the past.

Again, I say it, there is no security on the internet, only a fool thinks there can be.

Sort of Vacation?

On normal weeks, I would be gulping down the last of my coffee and getting ready to head out the door.  

But this week is 40 hours of paid time off from good old Uncle Sugar.  Do some stuff, relax, do some camping, get outta town.

So, if I do write, which I feel won't be the case the bulk of the time, The pickings will be sparse.  Not like there is that many folks out there who read this, but for you folks who do....well, maybe expectations should be lowered.