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.