Haunting

Its coming back to haunt us.  All that crap that was shoved down our throats in the 50's and 60's.  Teaching us to fear and hate the Russians.  I am one of the ones that they made cower under my desk at the Wilson Lane Elementary school. 

Of course, if they had attacked, Hill Air Force base being a couple of miles south meant that bring under that desk would have meant squat when that 4 or 5 weapon expenditure wiped out the main Air Force logistics base.

But now I am seeing the long term effects of such silliness.  Folks my age,  conditioned from their childhood to fear the Russians are now assigning unearned blame to all their fears coming to roost.

The Russians are being blamed for our presumed descent into autocracy.  That is because most folks my age can't believe for a moment that their greed, their inaction, and their cupidity is what bought us the rapidly greying symbol that resides in the White House. 

Books

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

~Kung Fu Monkey

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

I guess that my dotage will be heavily invested in reading, walking, and cooking from raw materials on the cheap.  If I plan things right there will also be a garden plot and a bunch of mason jars.

I don't see this as a bad thing.  When you throw in some writing every day, I am thinking that you have the makings of a petty fine life.

I need to get into the habit of reading older stuff though.  I have a couple of modern writers that I re-read a lot, but I think that I need to start plowing through the older stuff and using that as a springboard for my writing.  Project Gutenberg makes getting the old stuff easy.  I think that I will start getting things now before they change the copyright laws again.

I also need to start plowing through some philosophy.  This is going to be painful.  The more I work on this stuff, the more that I realize that English is a second language to these folks.  I guess that if your livelihood depends on folks thinking that you are a deep thinker, you can't speak clearly and descriptively.

I think that I will need to spend some time in the next little while putting together a list of must-reads.  I will always need to read trashy stuff, so I will need to set up a library account with my fucking-Jeff-Bezos-e-ink-reader (there isn't a better one out there, as soon as there is one, rest assured I will purchase it) to fix this need.

The Horse Latitudes of Angst

It's Friday night. Not even five yet.  I am sporting a new, high tech knee brace that keeps my remaining good knee from becoming my second bad knee.

Eye staring

I am also sporting a new soul malaise.  One stemming from the fact that I am approaching medicare age at warp speed and have no clue whatsoever about what to do with the rest of my life.  This damn thing is staring at me while I tap out the seed of this article on a cell phone while being baked on the couch.

The source of the discomfort is a complete blank when I try to figure out which way to jump.  I have been only so-so at guessing the slope of the decline, but I think that I am correct in seeing it as a decline.  Will the slope steepen or flatten out or just meander down like it has been?  This is a dammed interesting question because it will define the level of effort I will have to put into the project of living out my slothful, poorly planned, and somewhat tenuous retirement.

Part of me wants to pull up stakes, tell everyone to take a hike, and head out to the boonies in parts unknown.  But then the fact that I do love my odd little family and the desire to stay connected kinda puts the kibosh on any such bit of fancy.

So off I wander around the too-clean and sensitive environs of lower Hawthorne and order a flight of local beers.  I'm sitting in a bar sucking down some pretty-fine IPA and listening to the Dead.  Right now they are playing the whole of "Workingman's Dead".  I am remarkably content.

So how do I approach the coming change.  I am not just talking about the change in my life when I go from useful (a marginal call at best) to useless (retirement is self-absorption, nothing less)?  Maybe I am seeing the way now.  It ain't fancy.  But truth be told, it ain't half bad.

I just convinced the bartender to prepare me a half/half plate of mini-corn dogs and tater tots.

Does it get better than this.

 

Secure the Perimeter

An old truism.  Never a bad habit.  If your haven't bothered lately, now is a good time to restart.

But securing the perimeter is useful only in limited ways.  Camping, living in a inner city, etc, etc.

John Michael recently wrote an post over at Dreamwidth where he was forcefully reminded that there be some folks who want to shut down anything but their beliefs.   I kinda doubt that this is the first time that such a thing has crossed his desk, but apparently this one stung.

I am coming at it from the exact opposite end.  Dogma is the rule, not the exception.  Now that I am plowing through the "work toward magic" game, I am thinking that staying out of the clutches of the folks who are certain that they know the "right way" is going to take quite a bit of effort and slow down my progress toward the goal.

Dogma is required for a group/organization.  No other way around it.  Jim Jones was just an extreme example.  The Catholic Church's fifteen century run is primarily an outcome of a centralized enforcement of standards.

Head on over to the local Christian congregation and hang out.  What you will find is a uniformity of faith and not-too-subtle enforcement of norms.  A lot of this comes from the American habit of "congregation shopping", but as the person is assimilated into the collective, their already limited tolerance hardens into cant flavor pietism.

Well, all the "Alternative" folks have been looking at the formation of new religions. These alternative faiths (and that is what they are) like Wicca and Druid and Chaos and whatever are now just about old enough to start wearing fancy clothes, bossing the little people around, and setting up the 501(c)(3) Corporation.

I can understand John Michael's irritation at being branded an apostate. It would tend to peeve me as well. But the truth of the matter, when you are dealing with faith, there are folks out there who would be more than happy to tie people who disagree with them to a local fencepost and go out an fetch a bunch of 3-5 pound stones to bring to the party.

I kinda doubt that there are very many people out there who would agree with Krishnamurti when he gave his dissolution speech.

Angie and Vlad

Shit.

I was so taken with Vlad and Xi show that I missed the Vlad and Angie Show starting.

Now, I bet you think that I am going to start ranting about how Trumpolino just drove these two together.  For the record, he didn't help the situation one little bit, but the pre-existing conditions were never all that favorable for us here in the "Land 'o the Free" to control the situation much longer.

Look, Germany is a real player in the world, and we might not be offering that much anymore.  The Marshall Plan ended a long time ago and our troops squatting on some pretty sweet real estate has been a stick in their craw for a long time now.


The big problem here is us.  (Walt Kelly sez:  We have met the enemy and he is us).  The way that we deal with international politics is childish, and don't think for a moment that little Donnie is the fons et origo of our jingoism.  We threaten, we demand, anything less than our plan is for the trash bin.

We want to reduce our trade deficits with the other developed countries.  So we bully and threaten and tax the stuff they send us.  We do this to sell more of our shit to them and make their shit less attractive here.  We whine because their shit is "cooler" that our shit and we like our German cars to show off with.

But, the shit we want to sell them doesn't make sense to them.  LNG is just plain stupid.  Expensive, and even worse, sells our energy to they competitors.  Russian gas just makes more sense to the Germans.  Not because they are betraying us, because doing stupid shit to make someone else rich is a piss poor way to run a country.

So, while we are ignoring the idea that a major industrial power might have needs other than our desires, Vlad brings Angie flowers and listens carefully while she talks about her needs.

Don't think for a minute that stuff like that doesn't matter. 

Retreat

I think that they are going to pull down Donniekins.  

Don't get me wrong, as events go, it is not one that lends me great sadness.  But a banquet of unintended consequences might very well be in the offing.  Donnie is a dickhead of almost mythic proportions, thus feeling any sympathy for his fall from "grace" is well beyond my oh-so-limited abilities.

The oh-so-righteous who brought us this show are probably toasting the impending fall with a flavored martini and some light appetizers.  I am equally certain that there will be a smug feeling of victory and a "told you so" coming my way about my poorly thought out vote against the more corrupt major party candidate. 

I think that I am going to have to put up with ongoing cheerleader gloating of how the losing side in a contest of despicable's managed to pull down the head of State using the lame-ass cover of the aftermath of screwing a couple of hookers.   Kinda puts a cum-stained blue dress in perspective, doesn't it?

But I think that the folks who are so intent on his demise are going to be surprised by the reaction of the deplorables who brought us this particular shitshow.  The Wall Street money, the fragmented Social Justice Warriors, the differently gendered, and the desperately clinging professional class might think that they will breathe a sigh and the world will go back to its grandiloquent and stately progress to their imagined perfect world.

I suppose that they imagine that the deplorable 47% will take their guns and religion and, now suitably chastened, will skulk back to Walmart and resume buying the shit they are told to buy.

Nope, all the problems are still there.  If you don't live in a gated community you see a few more homeless on your way to work every day.  You don't see the cops getting more aggressive at rousting them.  You don't see the poor folks searching for the jobs that everyone is talking about.  You do see the price of everything going up at the Wal Mart and the Dollar Store.

Now, don't think for a minute that I thought that little Donniekins ever had any intention of taking care of us low-lifes.   But the little guy did notice that shit ain't going right for the greater part of our society.  He was right when he said that the immigrants were sucking up the available jobs.  Nothing could be truer, but the jobs that they suck up were shitty jobs working for shitty people for shitty money.  What Donnie proposed is that we cut off the flow of illegal migrant workers so that homegrown folks could be thoroughly fucked by the rapacious corporations instead of imports.

Nope, they are going to take down Donniekins and things are going to continue to get worse.  Because the folks who are so certain that removing him is the solution cannot even see the problem

Relativity

I hang with my liberal buddies mostly.  Love'em, but sometimes when they talk politics, I wonder what world they are living in.

It seems to me that they all would just prefer to go into a union with Canada or something. They really don't like the low-lifes and they also think that their concepts of right and good are the only ones out there.

But then there are my low-life buds.  They aren't in quite the same condition.  Some of them are doing OK but most of them are doing crappy.  Now as an observation, nearly everything that they consider crappy would be jumped on with both feet by any self-respecting peasant in 90% of the world.  But here, it is just crap.

Some well-fed, overpaid group of Doctors here in the USA even came up with a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”.

The problem is that there are too many of us here in the US for the number of jobs available.  The tech companies are doing everything in their power to decrease the number of jobs through the miracle of automation.  The migrants coming here for a better life doing shitty day labor down on the street corner or in the apple groves do us the favor of providing the agriculture/food processing/building trades a form of "worker-rights-free" labor for a industrial elite that doesn't even pretend to care about employees.  The best thing about the migrants from the elite's point of view is that they can be easily disposed of should ICE show up.

Wage suppression coupled with squashed workers rights coupled with forced worker obsolescence appear to be the American capitalist dream.

So we are sitting here, looking at the continuing formation of an underclass.  Awkward silence all around.

My homies here in lowlifeland are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are shitty minimum wage jobs, where the bosses would throw you over the side in a heartbeat (in defense of the bosses though, they aren't usually doing that well themselves).

These folks live in poor neighborhoods with crazy neighbors. Sure some of the folks in the poor neighborhoods are salt-of-the-earth, but a sizable minority of your neighbors in these neighborhoods are flamboyantly batshit crazy. 

So the folks here in the lower stratum struggle to find something to believe in.  But the struggle to just get through to the next paycheck seems to take everything they have, so their selection of belief systems tends toward the prepackaged and the loud, hence the popularity of the oddly dissonant clusterfuck that is American Christianity.

The world defined by the television or the shopping mall is not available to these folks.  They knowing that they mean nothing to the elite that they want so desperately to be, and when they finally come to the conclusion that they mean nothing to the powers, they resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze.

Mostly it is knowing that you have no value to the upper tiers of the society that is crippling,  because everyone has taught you that everything that you should want is there. 

The Train

 

   To Begin:  

An Extended Quote:  I will footnote the hell out of this thing just so you are doubly-tripley sure you know who wrote it:

 He slowed and stopped as we rounded the northeastern limb. “Did you know that we live in a beautiful place?” he asked.

“How could I not know it?” I demanded. “Every day, I go into the Mynster, I see the chancel, we sing the Anathem—”

“Your words say yes, your defensive tone says something else,” Orolo said. “You haven’t even seen this.” And he gestured to the northeast.
The range of mountains leading off in that direction was obscured during winter by clouds and during summer by haze and dust. But we were between summer and winter now. The previous week had been hot, but temperatures had fallen suddenly on the second day of Apert, and we had plumped our bolts up to winter thickness. When I had entered the Præsidium a couple of hours earlier, it had been storming, but as I’d ascended the stair, the roar of the rain and the hail had gradually diminished. By the time I’d found Orolo up top, nothing remained of the storm except for a few wild drops hurtling around on the wind like rocks in space, and a foam of tiny hailstones on the walkway. We were almost in the clouds. The sky had hurled itself against the mountains like a sea attacking a stony headland, and spent its cold energy in half an hour. The clouds were dissolving, yet the sky did not get any brighter, because the sun was going down. But Orolo with his cosmographer’s eye had noted on the flank of a mountain a stretched patch that was brighter than the rest. When I first saw what he was pointing at, I guessed that hail had silvered the boughs of trees in some high vale. But as we watched, the color of it warmed. It broadened, brightened, and crept up the mountainside, setting fire to individual trees that had changed color early. It was a ray coming through a gap in the weather far to the west, levering up as the sun sank.

“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Neal Stephenson

(Anathem)

Seriously, Go and Buy this Book

Folks, consider the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, what you are seeing whizzing by you is the view from the inside of a train that has left the station.

Now, this is going to be unpleasant, and the questions I am will ask may very well make you feel uncomfortable, but, since I am a churlish sort, I will blithely  plow ahead despite current hurt feelings.

It's the usual question:  at what point in a cycle does one decide to get off the train?  If it is too late, you are stuck baby.  If it is too early, people look at you like you are a dumb-ass.  The trouble is that not guessing right on this might turn out to be damned bad for your health.

The reason that I put up the above quote is because there stands a decent chance of the different flavors of ugliness are going to crowd around us.  I think that it is going to be important as hell to keep a firm grasp of the beauty that may well  be the only thing to sustain you.

The "Premature":  (exit prior to 2015)

OK:  Thats me.  I'm am just tickled pink that the damn thing has held together as long as it has.  I thought that 2015 would be the kickoff date, but that didn't work, did it.  Cost me five ounces of silver to pay off that bet.

But truthfully, it didn't really hurt me all that much when I lost that bet.  Truth be told, paying it was a touch of a relief.  Having the ability to be fat, dumb, and happy beats the hell out of not having that option, and the last five years have given me just that.

So, if you were premature like me, all you are missing out on is status and its accompanying social bullshit.   You just aren't as "rich" as you could be if you would have stayed in the game, so I don't see things as too bad of a loss

The "Right on Time": (exit 2015 to 2016)

These are the lucky guessers, they have the ability to spot a train wreck and have the resources to get off.  There really aren't that many of them.  'Nuff said.

The "jump off before the train builds up too much steam" (Current situation)

I think that we are starting to see this now. I think that the kids see it better than us geezers manage to see it.   Most of the liberals are plotting their dark plots to get rid of the clown at the top, but the rank and file are starting to wonder if the plan will suit them even if they succeed.  One of the most important things in the world to remember is that change does not always benefit those that desire that change.

Folks are starting to look around for an out.  You are seeing younglings beginning to desert the bigger cities and move to the hinterlands.  I see this as hopeful, but I will withhold judgment due to the fact I watched something similar when the hippies tried.

The "Train isn't Moving"

Unfortunately, this one is the most common of the reactions.  By a long shot.  They just don't see it.  It doesn't exist.  The most common reactions are either either a blank look or a slow escalation to anger.

These folks will simply not see.  They have either deliberatively chosen a narrow world view or are so caught up in the purported "benefits" that any mention of change will send them into a tizzy.

Where are you, where am I?

Basic Beans

I am of the opinion that beans and rice are going to be a big part of everyone's life in the years to come.  I don't see a problem with this.

Look, living high off the hog has to come to an end soon.  If you think that going out and eating 60% of your calorie intake as animal protein is going to last, I am afraid I have some painful news for you.

So, lets go over beans in detail.  I am personally enamored with black beans (turtle beans).  Best of the breed in my mind.  They have to be cooked right and seasoned, but they are good for you, cheap, and nutritious.

I kinda go Jamaican with my spice mix.  I also use bulk dried spices because while the survivalist preppers are wrong about a lot of things, they are right about a lot of things too.

Soak 2 cups of dried beans overnight

Discard soak water, rinse well and allow to drain.

Add into the pressure cooker:

• 1/2 teaspoon allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 cup dried onions
• 2 tablespoons dried red chilis
• 1 tablespoon chicken-tomato bouillion
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder

Add 3-1/2 cups of water and bring to a boil.  Add in the rinsed and drained black beans, put the top on, bring up to full pressure, turn off the burner and leave it until it cools.

Eat...  Very good on salads of just spoon it into your mouth

Raw Silk and Uncut Wood

 

  Raw silk and uncut wood

From Ursula K. LeGuin's translation of the Tao Te Ching

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Stop being holy, forget being prudent,
it’ll be a hundred times better for everyone.
Stop being altruistic, forget being righteous,
people will remember what family feeling is.
Stop planning, forget making a profit,
there won’t be any thieves and robbers.

But even these three rules needn’t be followed;

what works reliably
is to know the raw silk,
hold the uncut wood.
Need little,
want less.
Forget the rules.
Be untroubled.

19

Abandon wisdom, discard knowledge,
And people will benefit a hundredfold.
Abandon benevolence, discard duty,
And people will return to the family ties.
Abandon cleverness, discard profit,
And thieves and robbers will disappear.

These three, though, are superficial, and not enough.
Let this be what to rely on:

Behave simply and hold on to purity.
Lessen selfishness and restrain desires.
Abandon knowledge and your worries are over.

The sad part is that, in the NeoLiberal system of greed and acquisitiveness, such things are not possible.  The elites will never, even for a moment, consider such a thing.  The elites are easy to understand.  The deserve everything that they took.  The methods they used were virtuous.  Simply put, they are better.

I think that we have a chance ratcheting back for the range of the 50th percentile through the 90th percentile.  But the 10%, they would rather die than give up anything.  The bottom 50th percentile is actively regressing, so pissing on them further is just a display of poor taste.

Everyone knows what have to be done.  We have to stop buying so much shit and driving around everywhere like a bunch of idiots.  But it appears that even accomplishing such simple things is beyond us.

The status classification system here in the good old USA is quite simple.  The richer you are, the better you are.  The Democrats once represented the working class, but that fuckhead Bubba Clinton and the folks following him as Democratic nominees put paid to that nonsense and paid homage to the All Powerful Pelosi, dispenser of funds.

Look, we can get past all this, but the bottom 90% have to get over the Stockholm Syndrome that grips the country.  Rich people aren't our friends, educated people aren't our friends, the education/health complex aren't our friends, and for absolutely certain the corporations aren't our friends.

Just remember, and for absolutely certain, those are the people who fucked you, stop thinking that somehow if you work hard you can join them. 

Cathedrals

Went through Elwa the other day.

Saw the containment vessels.

Maybe I should take this moment to found the new faith.

Now, I am going to be intellectually honest here, I am stealing a lot of beliefs from the "Cargo Cult" 9f indigenous New Guinea post WWII and slamming it forcibly against the Christian propensity to build big fucking buildings with no useful purpose.

Now this is going to be the seed of the religion, the time isn't ready yet, but when the decline we are facing starts getting some serious traction, then what we set up now will come into play and then Ka-ching baby, we are in the catbird seat.

So here is what we serve up to our parishioners.  Remember, this will start being useful about 30-40 years from now when we get on the other side of this first serious decline

The basic tenets of this faith are going to be pretty straightforward.  The people of the past had cooler shit than what we have now (of course I see this as a trend).  So of course we have to worship them so that they will share the cool shit and help us around the next shitstorm.

Well, we have this big useless containment building that is sitting there unused and it is way cooler than anything our weak-ass shit can pull off.

Let's stick in a shitload of cramped pews ( I am proposing repurposed economy seating from Ryanair) and bring the rabble in to throw down some tithe.

Look, this is brilliant.  Building is a done deal.  Built helfer-stout.  Literally the design parameters were such that the tower was able to withstand the impact of a 747 in a dive (fuck you Twin Towers).  Look, maintenance will be zero and you will be able to add all kinds of shit as you need.

My first idea was to call it the church of whoops WPPS, but that was too obvious.  So I thinks that I will name it, "The Church of the Container".  Now we're going.  

Container vessel.....yeah put there to contain the evil demons of nuclear energy and force them to work as we lay mickle spells to control the demons.  Ohhh .. serious theological bullshit possibilities here.

Then with the nuclear bad guys clearly identified, then bring in the second of the trinity for the Church...the shipping container!!!   This is the member of the trinity needing worship.  These were the containers bearing the wealth from elsewhere.  This one is for the schmucks who pony up the money. 

The third act is tying together the idea of container, that limits are the only way that things become useful.  Here is the real theological kicker.  The outer church will worship the stuff coming in the shipping containers, the middle church will be wary of the useful demons, and the inner church will focus on the idea of limits.

An open letter to my Liberal friends

Ahhh..the never-ending angst.  Its reek permeates all our conversations.  The angst gets denser as we approach politics.  Angst becomes viscous when our sitting President is mentioned.

I have been listening to you guys for two years now.  You are right.  The fucker is a clown.   But the fact of the matter is he is the legally elected President of the peculiar constitutional Republic we have become.  The other truth of the matter is he is as dumb, venal, and creepy as Bush, and we got through Bush.

You seem to think that if somehow, someone got sufficient dirt on the sleazy little fuck, we could kick him out of office and we would restart our journey to the Nirvana of Equality of Outcome.

Fucking idiots.  The reason the Donny boy was elected is that no one worth a bucket of warm piss would want anything to do with that office in the here and now.

Look, there isn't much in the way of good coming down the path right now.  It is looking like this climate change thing is starting to get some traction.  The petrodollar is looking shaky as all get out.  The Federal budget is out of control, No matter what side you are on, the migrant problem ain't going away and is going to cost a pretty penny.  Trade is fucked.  We spend way too much money losing wars and there are just too many old fucks hanging on.

So at the end of the rant, with the "we're fucked" train is pulling into the station.  You wienies think that getting rid of Donnie will solve our problems.  Nope, that dog don't hunt.  The problems will be still a' comin' full bore whether or not Donny-Boy leaves or stays.  Truth be told, I didn't see a single person running for President in the 2016 Presidential election campaign that bothered to address the problems in a serious way.

Nope.  We are looking at a banquet of consequences.  No one wants to talk about the complexity of the problems or the consequences of the actions that will need to happen to ameliorate the decline.  Ratcheting back from excessive consumerism and corporatism is going to leave a lot of people pissed and wondering what happened to them.

Donnie is the dumb one all right.  But it ain't Donny you got to worry about, it is who will follow him.

Last Day on Vacation

I'm Still on Vacation

I'm on Vacation

Listen to this and tell me it isn't a masterpiece

Mindset for Alternatives

In a previous post, I discussed the methodology for learning about magic.

This is an extension of the ideas first seen there.

When you start dealing with magic, you have to examine a lot of your current beliefs and attempt to reconcile the nature of what you brought to the table with what folks are telling you need to be done.

OK then.  Sounds simple, but the conflicts are enormous.  I would tend to think that the greater bulk of folks out there rejected the harshly enforced western standards from the get go. I wasn't ever fully in that crowd. It seems the magic crowd is folks who have been disaffected and alienated from the mainstream form the get-go.  I don't see this as a problem or a judgment, but the bulk of magic folks just never fit into the day to day of the society where I grew up and currently reside.

The reason that I don't mind is that the same problem is effecting me now. 

I was drawn into science because it answered a lot of the questions about the physical world.  I was able to make effects happen and understand the macro scale of a lot of phenomenon that I saw operating around me every day.  But the more that I learned, the more walls I ran into, and when I started asking the really hard questions, all that science could give me was pretty pictures from computers, a lot of not-very-satisfactory hand waving, and sullen silence.

So I am thinking hard about the way that I think.  A lot of time has went into the world view that has served me until now.  A lot of effort is out there, trying to keep folks like me channeled into their roles as well-meaning servants and grist for the mill.

John Michael speaks of magic as a way for the powerless to gain a modicum of power.  I think that it might be even more than that.  It might even be a means to remove the beams from our eyes to see clearly.  The storm is coming. 

Limitations

"The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception."

                                                                                                  Carl G Jung

                                                                                                  From the Preface to The I Ching or Book of Changes
                                                                                                  The Richard Wilhelm Translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes

Consider for a moment the smartest person that you know.

Most likely, that person has a couple of letters tacked discreetly at the end of their name and an impressive expertise in one or two areas.  If they are really talented, their brains can range out into two or three other areas but with a corresponding loss of "knowitalliveness".

But we have literally thousands of fields of endeavor now,  so the one or two areas where they know things is looking kinda threadbare.  Now I realize that someone reading this is going to pipe up with the "but all things are connected".

Thus begins this screed.  What level of interconnectedness is possible for a bunch of apes with opposable thumbs and an unfortunate tendency toward being curious?  Even if we use the sterility of the laboratory and the bright focus of the scientific method, just how close can we come to an understanding of an entire process?

So we come back in a circle to the smart guy.  Minds in general do process data well on an individual datum basis.  Set up an experiment and do "A" to "B" then wait for a bit and write down what happens.  Nice and easy, fully understandable.  But then that damn need for reproducibility comes in and smartperson repeats the process a couple of times (the more the better) and sees if things stay the same.  This is where the trouble starts.

Outliers crop up after a bunch of tries.  Some of them can be ascribed to mistakes made by the smartperson or his designated flunkies, but sure as sure, some of them just sit there, eliciting awkward silence and nerdy frustration.

This is where we sit right now.  The outliers are starting to crop up in serious way.  We have been running experiments like "how many cars can we sell" and "how much oil can we drill" and "how much stuff can we stuff into the blue sky"?

For a long time following WWII, we were getting solely "good" results and the model worked.  About 1972 the outliers began cropping up and a bunch of rogue statisticians from the club of Rome pointed out that the good times would not last.

So, as a former smartperson, I am now trying to change the way that I look at things.  I think that the first step it to stop looking at the data the way that I always have.  I have always looked at data as the relationship between two physical things.  May, just maybe another way to look at it is to try and untangle the web of interdependency that lies in the gaps and shadows of different physical manifestations.

Addendum

I am drawn to the idea of Odin/Wotan as a God.  Now, before you go and get all hinkey on me, I don't want the Wotan of Jung's great essay, the Wotan of whacked out NeoNazi's.  I am looking at the wanderer and searcher for knowledge.  I kinda feel comfortable yet slightly nervous about the idea.  I am going to have to listen patiently and keep an eye on him.  He doesn't appear to be the God with my best interests at heart.  He has bigger fish to fry but if I pay attention, he might offer more than he takes.

When you think about it, that might be the right way to approach a God.  

But I have no idea of how he is going to feel about the I Ching thing. I wonder if anyone would be offended if I worked it into the Seidr?

Back to School

 

I think that I need to learn about the world.  Not about the economy, nor how to struggle for lucre nor have a status in the human system.

I need to learn about the world around me, you know, the permanent one that will be here at the end of this tawdry little empire, the one that the people hundreds of years from now will inhabit.  The world that I thought that I was living in for the past 64 years is a smallish thing.  It is built around a decaying energy source and a population too big for the container it lives in.

Most everyone I know agrees that the way of life we have now is unsustainable.  But yet everyone that I know is engaged in a life-or-death struggle to keep exactly what they have.

I guess that I will go the other way.  I have dropped pretty fast, I need to go down even farther.  Right now the issues that need to be solved is where to live that will allow me to reduce further, and how to get around once I get there.

Addendum:

Trying to be good and change my ways.  I cast I Ching this morning and got this hexagram with a nine at the top.  The question that was asked is "Is is getting close to being time to bail".

I wrote the initial pass of this post couple of days ago, put it in the woodpile, and scheduled it for today.   I have been thinking about moving "somewhere else" to get away from the insanity that is Portlandia.  I know that things are changing.  I know things can't continue the way they are going.  

Maybe, if for some odd reason, you have stumbled across this little vanity of mine and haven't read the "Kek Wars" over at 

Currently Speculative

John Michael told me what I was in a recent post.

"A Speculative Mage".

Well, that doesn't appear to be doing shit for me.  I think that I am like those political science students you met in college.  You know them, the ones that take courses in East Asian Studies but don't learn any languages and don't visit the countries that they study.  

The ones that usually go into government work.

So, if I am to be allowed to see what the hell is going on and if magic is in fact afoot, I have to go and try to do something and see how it works.  In other words, I have to travel to where magic exists, and that appears to be right where I am, I just have to turn the key.

I think that since I have no particular relationship with any of the entities that appear to mediate magic, I will have to figure out what the hell that they are are try to do a little shout out.  The problem for me is, while I can tentatively accept the existence of things out there with greater power and knowledge that I can deploy, I have no idea of who/what they are or how to contact them.

I think that the best that I can do right now is to examine myself and my way of thinking.  If there are things out there, and they can have an effect on my consciousness and will, there may be traces there if I look for it.

Now, I am thinking that the hard part will be the whole belief aspect of the problem.  Most things that I read start out with the same nonsense that the Christers start with.  "first you have to believe, then the results will flow from the effect of that belief".

Hmmm.  I have always been uncomfortable with that particular proposition.  Kinda strikes me as the same path that made me leave science.  Science got into trouble because folks decided what they wanted to prove, then went out and set things up to prove them.

Strikes me that idea of having a pre-defined result in the occult is every bit as dangerous as having a pre-defined result in science.