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