The Deal's going down

Music to listen to:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4zkZQQieU

I am a known and well documented Eeyore:  I wear it with pride.

I also recognize that said "Eeyore-ishness" is a function of age and is definitely directly related to my ever increasing dotage.  But let me take this moment of your time (and by doing so, call into question your time management skills) to explain how the process of looking at the world through the lens of cynicism sometimes gives one an advantage.

Star align.  Things happen in cycles.  There are portents out there, they aren't found by epiphanies. They are teased out by paying attention to the world around you, looking for clues in mundane things and mass movements.

Most importantly, at the end of the day, the ability to accept that your vision of the future is nothing more than assignment of probabilities to a set of future outcomes.  It also requires the understanding that one's vision into the future can never, ever reach certainty.

Most everyone in the US today is infected by the false myth of a "Positive Mental Attitude" having an effect on the way the world goes.  This shit is an outgrowth of the hippie bullshit ginned-up by the self-actualization, follow your bliss idiots.  It is a great way to make yourself happy, but it most certainly isn't a way to take a realistic view of what is coming.

Positive outcomes are only a part of the world.  Bad things happen to good people, Good things happen to bad people.   The PMA people are closing their eyes to a real set of possible outcomes, and by doing so, they are limiting the planning and thought that they can do in advance to ameliorate the negative.

So, in the twisty little back alleys of my stunted prescience gland, I have arbitrarily assigned a 30% chance of bad outcomes as a red-line for concern.  Less than that, things are just operating as normal, more than that, it is time to put some thought into mapping out a set of possible future scenarios and thinking through how to best navigate them.

For the past four or five years, the state of affairs here in the land o' the free have not bumped over the 30% tripwire.  But I began to notice an upward movement in my "well shit" meter in early-to-mid-2016.   The eventuality of the election of one of two completely unacceptable choices started the push toward the magic 30%.  Well, in a nutshell, in the last week or two, the meter has pushed over the mark.

Look, I reckon that we are about 31% chance of a bad outcome at the national level. Bad outcomes at the national level drift down to make up a bigger shitstorm that I have to navigate.  This in turn makes it harder to live the simple life I so fervently desire, more chances of me having to live in an even smaller footprint than I currently reside (and that is with me consciously doing everything that I can to decrease my footprint).

There are still the usual suspects out there.

• Energy use his heading downhill.  Now this might seem like a good thing, and it is a good thing in the long run, but for now, energy use and economic activity are intimately entwined.  If this keeps slipping, the economy may continue to slip with it.
• Maybe it is different this time, but 2017 is looking a lot like 2007.  Real estate and stock market looking decidedly "frothy" and overpriced.
• Trump is a buffoon, but he was elected fair and square.  It is looking more and more like the folks in Washington might do something stupid.  This might start us down the path of the Romans,  It won't probably be a revolution like one expects out of a steady diet of Hollywood, but remember, removing the Gracchi started Rome down the path.
• It looks like the folks in the NeoCon wing have gotten enough mojo together to trick Trump into upping the ante again in the Middle East and in Korea.
• Politics are seriously poisoned.  We are still under the force of law of the stupid debt limit, the Democratic party is in a shambles, the Republicans are a clown car with no leadership (Thanks Donald), the corporations and the rich are in charge and all else is getting poorer.  There is a decent chance that the guvmint might shut down in the fall.
• The disparity in wealth is getting worse, I cannot find a time when this ever turned out well.   Jobs are being eaten by offshoring, migrants, and automation. When the AI boom starts getting serious traction, wait until you see what this does to the office crowd.
• Climate change/global warming/environmental degradation is starting to get traction.  We have known about this since the sixties, just never saw any reason to change what we are doing.  It is just starting to get noticable.  It isn't going to get better.

There are more. but I think that this listing will provide you with a basic idea of the reasons that the chances of shit going wrong are high.  All of these phenomenon are in process now.  It appears to me that they are all inter-related and they are starting to feed off of each other.

Now, I am trying to take a look at what may cause movement in the opposite direction.  Truth be told, I don't see much.  The plans that people have seem to be patches to keep the party going the way that it is going, rather than the changes required to move to something that works better.
But there is hope among the youth.  I think that, for the most part, they see that the way that the deal is going down is not going to be helping them.

Most of the fixes to the macro-structures that dominate the human ecology that is the political-economic realm are really not serious about making the changes needed to move to a mature society. They tend toward the flim-flam and the promoter who tells people that they can have what they want rather than working out the ways to downshift to a system that is less energy dependent.
So, when I note that things are kinda going to hell right now, there are several big caveats that must be addressed:

1.   The "going to hell" process is indeterminate.    No one is exactly sure where Hell starts and the road to it ends.  All I note is that we are on the path and I am trying to find a sign which tells me how far it is until we get there.
2. What I really most about is those things I haven't thought about.  It is those thing that you don'e expect that need the most looking for.  I have a truly bad feeling that the thing that sucker punches us will be something that will leave me saying:  "Didn't see that one coming".

Wasting Potatoes

Step one of the process is the fermentation medium.  In distilling terms this is called a "wash".  Simply put, is sugar and nutrients for the yeasty-beasties that they can eat up and poop out alcohol.

I am starting with potatoes.  440 grams are chopped up and put into a measuring cup

The measuring cup is filled up to the 1 liter mark with tap water.  Total weight of potatoes and water is 981 grams. (541 grams of water)

Potatoes/water placed in pot and brought to a boil....heat is reduced to achieve a slow boil and potatoes are cooked for 30 minutes.

After boil, total volume reduced to 850ml.  Added 150mL tap water.

Let cool to about 155 C.  

Added 1/8 teaspoon of alpha amylase.  Amylase is the enzyme that converts starch to simple sugars.  Yeast can't eat starch, so you have to break it down for them.  A starch is just a chain with the individual links being simple sugars

 

Wait an hour:  Leave the pan on the burner to scavenge residual heat and slow cooling.

Measured the specific gravity..  1.024....  shit...best I can get out of this is a 4.5%....not enough for good distillation.....back to the drawing board

How Should we Live?

“Of all the changes that the twentieth century has brought, none goes deeper
than the disappearance of that unquestioning faith in the future and the absolute value of our civilization which was the dominant note of the nineteenth century
Dawson, Christopher (1956). The Dynamics of World History, Sheed and Ward, New York

In a sense, this post came out of a perusal of the comments over at John Michael Greer’s latest article at his new site (If you need to track it down, here is the link).

The upshot of this is it seems that my polytheistic-leaning guru of tree-and-twig (It isn’t healthy to be all that respectful toward a spiritual guide) has moved to nice little apartment in Providence.

Now, in my mind, there is nothing wrong with this, truth be told, it is a smart choice. But I find it an interesting choice for a writer whose past works center on the decline and breakdown of industrial society (I concur!).  You see, most folks who subscribe to this train of thought this eventuality usually go off in the other direction.  The usual response is one I refer to as the demi-hippie where land is purchased as far away from the mōbile as one can afford and then try to create a simulacrum of what they left behind.

When your standard “end of industrial civilization” type heads out to the wilderness to live away from the industrial civilization, they spend a whole bunch of their time and money making certain that the retreat is well upholstered with all the accouterments of industrial civilization.

So, John Michael and I appear to agree, if everything that you do when you move away to escape drags all the crap of what you are trying to escape along, why not just figure out how to live within the society while not partaking of what is poisoning the system.

The system we inhabit, this artificial ecology of man, has always been fragile.  it has been hiccuping along for millennia now, usually not doing all that well, marked by high fevers and the not-all-that infrequent local collapse.  But the bulk of the people usually get through it, skinnier and tougher than what they started with.

So why not stay put?

Look, what one needs to live can be found in some pretty damn bad places.  Joy and fulfillment and self-worth can be had in a system in decline as easy as in a rising system if one has a certain frame of mind regarding what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.  So when in a decline from a excessive and frivolous “top”, it is important to figure out the relationship between “less” and happiness (I’ll give you a hint here, it is approximately the same as the relationship between “more” and happiness).

So, living small in a city will always be an option.  Farm products will always find their way to population centers.  Police aren’t always just looking to oppress.  Help and medical care are there.  Access to limited common resources are there.

Most importantly, people are there.

I have come to the conclusion, that for the most part, the folks who move off to the hinterlands are the “my cake and eat it too” crowd.  The society that they grew up is changing and is beginning the painful task of downsizing, so they are picking up their shit and getting out, leaving everyone else to suck it.

But all the shit that they take with them is an umbilical to that which they are trying so desperately to escape.  Want all the stuff: just join Amazon Prime and have the world shipped to your door.   High speed internet beamed to your house so you can watch the revolution on television.

The folks out there will have less, just like the folks in town will have less.  But what they won’t have is the respect of the folks that they left behind.  Because ultimately the move to the country without leaving behind the complexities and luxuries of the city is a lame attempt to become the landed aristocracy of the latifundia.

But the erstwhile aristocrats currently parasite from the complexity and the structure of the current system, I genuinely think that once the system no longer can provide the routes for linkage to the city that the modern latifundia so cherish.  They will probably die there on the vine, their fragile links to humanity taken away one by one being taken from them.  Imagine the sorrow and the gnashing of teeth that will be engendered when the FEDEX truck starts asking for the actual cost of delivery.

I will abide here with all of the mess.  I am going to try to try to flatten the curve and slow things down.