Working through

Don't really have anything for today.  Shifting shifts usually leaves me
kind of fuddled for a couple of days.  Getting up today was later than
five, so that is a win.

I am willfully ignoring the debates tonight.  Fuck those two old men.

That's all I got.

Confessions of a Leg-Breaker

Chef just informed me that my pictures haven't been coming through.  I think that it is a google thing so let's see if they will reappear if I use the pictures stored on Dreamwidth rather than the ones over at the dark princes realm.  So here is an old picture that I just uploaded on the Dreamwidth site.  Lets see if this one shows up.

First day back to the 7:30 start.  AN extra hour in the morning makes a difference.  I still woke up before five.  It will take a bit to retrain, but I think that I am up to the task. 

Weird font issues.  I think that I will need to play around with this to get it working out the way that I want.

Screed

I read an interesting piece yesterday.  Can't say as there was one single thing that I disagreed with.  I was especially taken with this tidbit.  Which hit the nail on the head.

"Donald Trump, on the other hand, is not your normal president. He is, according to his own relatives, a "sociopath," "clown," "narcissist," "habitual liar," "inept," and a cheater even when it comes to taking a SAT exam. According to his former aids, he is an "idiot," a "dope," a "moron," "unhinged," with understanding of "a fifth- or sixth-grader." To this list one can add many other attributes, such as a white supremacist, an accused sex offender, a semi-literate, etc. He has destroyed the aura of the presidency. He has shown that the US president has no clothes (a very ugly image!). He has shown that nearly 40% of Americans love him and love what he stands for. He has been laughed at by other "world leaders." He has, as stated earlier, only been able to obtain the support of the puny Dominican Republic at the UNSC when it comes to sanctioning Iran. In short, he has almost destroyed the image of the US empire. If elected again, he could complete the job."

Now, that shows me why I might just vote for fuckwad again.  It isn't because he will be a good President who will lead us Americans to our place in the shining new world of the future, It will be because he won't try to return us to the past that failed.  I have stated over and over again that the money people who run this country loathe him because his massive incompetence threatens their privilege (and I use the term in its original Latin roots "Private Law") and their ill-gotten gains.  Their money and their privilege requires the continuation of the wealth-pump that is Empire.

Trump is all about ill-gotten gains.  He is a con-man of the first order.  I have always been impressed with his flaunting of the social norms that govern the money people.  They dress themselves in a similacrum of virtue, but their wealth is theft and is really no different from the wealth that fuckwad has amassed.  It is just that fuckwad has not conformed to the charade of how the nobility should act.

Look, the empire is ending.  We have done just about everything wrong for the past forty years.  All of our presidents have been bag men for the money that truly runs the country.  The money people have systems in place that strip-mine everything that they can get their claws into and the presidency is part of that machine. 

Biden is part of that machine.  Hell, Biden, in his decrepitude and senescence might well be the poster child for that machine. 

It truly is a choice of the lesser of two evils. 

I am thinking that the loss of empire and the marginalization of the American "dream" might be the lesser.

Tea and Sympathy

A waste of good pixels

I finally got off the morning shift.  04:00 wakeup every morning was getting lame.  Good news is that tomorrow is my 12 year anniversary on the hill and is the official start of the two-year countdown to the genteel poverty of retirement in a failing state.  Sounds fun, huh?

Nothing that I can do about it.  So truthfully, I am oddly content.  I am completely aware that the game is changing around me, and this little plan might just go up in smoke, but since there is nothing that I can do about the antecedent conditions, might as well run with the plan and make adjustments as I go.  Folks always seem to forget that retreat or withdrawal is a plan too. 

Screed

I am wondering how things will work with my writing habit when access to the internet starts becoming increasingly limited.  I am guessing that this will take a couple of years yet, but as it stands right now, the current structure of the internet is not conducive to profit in a declining economy (actually, nothing is, but that point seems obvious:  Does this count as a tautology?) As the internet becomes more "pay as you go" and more folks won't be able to handle the "pay" part, the internet will start fading away over time. 

Now, there are those out there who will scream and launch into spittle-flecked tirades about just how the "Internet is the Future" or "we can't run the country without the internet".  Now, both of these sentiments are true and false.  Let's start with the most audacious:  The internet is the future.  That is true.  But not in the way that folks think.  The internet is a means of communication.  It is remarkably fluid and can pass information faster than anything.  But truthfully, it has a bad case of giantism.  The current structure that has been spackled together over the past twenty years is just to unstable and fraught with fast-buck schemes to be economically viable.  The world changed recently and all the efforts being made to allow the internet serve as everything to everyone will come to naught.  I really see the internet reverting to something akin to 1995-2000.  Much smaller, much more focused, more text based, more useful, less frivolous.  This will happen on the server end first.  Google's massive server farms are the Argentinosaurus of the pre-asteroid internet that we now hold so dear.  Things are going to have to return to a couple of steps up from the Darpanet that this monstrosity evolved from.   I will still be useful, it will still be fast, it will still be a lot faster than any other system, it just won't be as effing fatuous.

The next part will be the network end.  My guess is that the patched together network will be just as well maintained as our roads and our power grid.  I really don't think that I need to say more than that. 

The final part will be the client.  Truth be told, this will be the most interesting to watch.  Moores law might be weakened, but it ain't dead.  But more important will be the blowback from the first two issues when confronted by the this aspect.  Right now, the business model is that someone sells you an expensive piece of silicon, which you hook up to an expensive network connection that will connect you to websites that sell you things, let you snoop on your neighbors, and raise your blood pressure.  I really can't see how this kind of thing has a place in a declining economy.  Now, perhaps this has become so ingrained that it has become a shibboleth that folks won't give up, but I don't see that happening.  Folks will respond that work from home will allow the internet to survive, but my strong belief is that if you can do your job from home, the chances are that your job is what is known as a "Bullshit Job" and will go away in the upcoming compression. 

Who knows what will happen.  The chances are that I won't see the final moves of the endgame we are entering.  I am just looking at the pieces that we moved into place over the past forty years and trying to figure out how long until I have to lay down my king.

Saturdays

Sitting in the dark in the kitchen waiting for the tea to brew.  Eldest is snoring and youngest will be over from his new digs to pick up the TV that I never use. 

Looks to be an interesting day in Stumptown today.  The rednecks are coming to town to confront the city-boy cool kids.  It is unfortunate that Hegel was always so bloody wrong, because watching the synthesis being achieved from this particular thesis/antithesis dichotomy would be interesting.  But sadly, neither of these parties is anything but pieces of shit being used by ideologues.  So all it is going to be is a shitshow.  I will stay well away from it, because absolutley zero positive will come of this.  I am figuring on some serious rumbles today.  The clowns that run Oregon might be doing some feasting tonight on their banquet of consequences.

Nationally the place is a fucking mess and getting worse.  Everyone is worried, they tend to think that their ennui is because of Fuckwad or SenileJoe, but the realization is now coming around to many that we are just in a very, very bad place.  Who the President is that is going to be presiding on the right side of the Seneca curve is taking people attention away from the right side of the Seneca curve.  No matter who wins, it is downhill from here.  As quoted from a bumper sticker in the long ago "where are we going and why am I in this handbasket".

Really, we are just biding time right now.  For me, it has been a curious time.  I have sufficient time to explore what I consider to be important stuff (Thanks Everyone!!) and just keep my cool and make all the little arrangements and develop all the little habits that I hope will let me navigate the weirdness ahead of me.  Nothing especially complicated, just making provisions.

Homo Novus

Been pondering the origin of the loathing of Fuckwad.  Now, some will take umbrage, but I think that the outpouring of pure bile and disgust might well have more to do with the pitcher than the catcher.

Look, I am not arguing that Fuckwad isn't worthy of the scorn, but rather that those who loathe him so vehemently and so constant are seeing something that truly frightens them. 

Trump hatred is primarily concentrated in the educated professional class.  Now, folks kind of want to portray it a cross-class, universal hatred that is only unsubscribed by racists, homophobes, and other such things.  Sorry folks, but that dog won't hunt.  Granted, major sections of the lower class dislikes him, but it isn't all that heartfelt of that passionate.  At best, it seems that all they can do is to work up a mild distaste. 

Nope, true and strong Trump hatred is found in what the Romans used to refer to as Homo Novus.  These are the folks from what used to be the middle class (when it was still a "working" class that did all the right things and went to college and "moved up" into the "professional" class.  They went to college and bought themselves shiny new degrees and shiny new personae which best suited the Kabuki theatre that was the Amercan corporate structure of the time.  This was referred to as the "American Dream".

But then it all went wrong.  Didn't start with fuckwad, nope, he was just the first harbinger of the failure of the model that they worshiped so fervently.  By vastly overemphasizing the value of the educated class and strip mining the processes and infrastructure that allowed a working class to exist, the natural thing was that the wealth disparity between the classes became the mess that it now. (80% struggling/20% "professional and above) and the rigors of the "once-known-as-working-class" brought us to the path we are on.

So, we have an oversized and pampered professional class and a huge and struggling working class.  The professionals think that since they "earned" their largesse, it is their by right.  In fact, it was a wealth transfer pure and simple.  And the professionals feel that their unearned and oversized rewards are theirs by right.  The working class didn't suck dick for good grades like they did so the working class can rot if they think that they are going to give up one shred of what the professional considers their share of the loot.

That is seedbed where the hatred of Donald Trump took root.  Donny boy is a rich kid.  But he doesn't act like the other rich kids or worship at the shibboleths that the professional class worship.  He ran a campaign listening to "Those People" and his hotels and his businesses and his demeanor reflect a less than strict adherence to the poses and the pretensions of the professionals.

In other words, he reminds them of their past and where they came from. 

Look, the professional class is remarkably parochial.  They run from a status based pecking order and feel that everyone outside of their little realms are servants and should recognize their roles as such.Either that or they are customers who need to be harvested for the $$ that give the professionals life meaning. 

Donny violated the code.  He pulled aside the curtain where all of us come from.  As a people, we American aren't classy.  We tend toward being rude and boorish.  We eat too much, we drink too much, we fight too much.  When you go to college and get a little polish and move into an overpaid and pampered elite, you want to forget that little truth and pretend you are living in some Victorian novel with servants and drama and tasteful home decor. 

Donny is hated by the elite because he reminds them that the party is coming to an end.

Response from Michael

Getting to be Thursday.  Dragging a little at this point.  Youngest is in his own apartment, Eldest has a new electric bicycle.  Seems as though my immediate world contains no crisis.  Sounds like a win to me

SCIENCE ACCORDING TO A SPENCER

 Darwin: "This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection."

A scientist remains within the realm of science by commenting on the data itself, or by explaining what the data means using a tautology. So Darwin did fine, if the presupposition of advantage is accepted.

If survival in the future is forced by human imagination to be dependent on having an advantage of some sort, then advantage must be defined in abstraction as whatever it is that supports survival at that point in the future. Science is not allowed to guess about the future.

On the other hand, a douchebag like Herbert Spencer was allowed to guess that a variety of human represented by himself, would be the fittest variety for all time. England today shows how correct Spencer was, and the body count of dead and enslaved indigenous humans is proof that he deserves to be considered a douchebag of note.

Spencer wrote and spoke from two false presuppositions that he did not mention – that Nature provides unlimited resources, and that advantage (what is not eliminated) does not change.

As smart as humans are, it is surprising that they have never been capable of imagining that mankind is missing more than the final one or two critical discoveries. This is why people today think that Spencer was undoubtedly wrong, but a new version of Spencer is undoubtedly correct.

Morning in Portlandia

Beeble

Smoke is pretty much gone, can't see the air I breathe anymore which is a big plus.  It is the little things.

I think that, from time to time, it is nice to just come out and voice an idea which has no chance of ever talking hold but is a fun way to think.

That being the case, here goes....

When you look at the requirements for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency there are specific age requirements.  For the presidency, there is also a time limit that an individual can hold the office.  This kind of thing is enshrined and for a good reason.

But the supreme court has nada this way.  Maybe it is time to do something about this. 

My proposal is simple but weird.  One term. twenty years. Maximum age at confirmation of forty. 

The cat has to retire at a maximum of sixty and has to live with the consequences.  It just might improve the breed

Re: Candide's Garden #4 [Wednesday Essay] Playing Hooky edition

BUD

Good on you for considering it.  Having something "concrete" to refer back to and to plagiarize from and riff off of would be convenient for all of us.

I think that your resistance to metaphors like compression and resolution due their being highjacked by Tech is interesting. In a way it is akin to Michael and my ongoing argument about evolution. 

Science and technology are linguistic rapists.  Consider physics for example.  All math, all the time.  Engineers just set up their solution space and then run the numbers and then build the damn thing and then have to explain it to the non-engineers.  To do this they go trolling through the language, stealing what they will and twisting the meaning of the words to convey (in usually a spurious and unsatisfactory manner) of the realities of the mathematical world that they inhabit.  They do this because most folks education doesn't give them the ability to understand the models and the methods of science and engineering. 

This is where science and technology become our priesthood.  Engineers are the Parish Priests, scientists are in the Vatican.  Their income and their prestige are dependent on convincing the Hoi Polloi that they know what they are doing and that "they got this".  That can only be done with word and the end-products of what they create.  Bridges hold beauty, roads bring dreams.  These are the beauty of form that is only described through mathematics.  When someone starts trotting out words and poetry, and symbols and verbal and symbolic descriptions of an arch or the curve of a wing or a suspension bridge, these derivative symbols pale against the elegance and power of the mathematics and the almost platonic forms in the mind of the engineer.

We talk about trying to convey meaning and beauty through the flawed vessels that are words.  We seem to get lost in the words that we create trying in vain to explain what we feel and what we understand, but words fail us.  Maybe it is time to just look around us and see and appreciate the beauty of form that is everywhere.  We can keep trying to tell others, but it is critical that we understand that we will nearly always fail.  But the beauty is still there, and our minds can touch it.  I think that might be the only way to oppose the ugliness that appears to be coming our way.

Bush vs Gore vs Beans

Autumn is Coming

My Stellar Jay is outside bitching because I ran out of peanuts and he came by to get some grub.  Sorry dude.

Screed

Only this time the split may well be 4-4 and then we are really fucked.  I think that a lot of folks are realizing that the party is over

The weirdness just seems to accelerate lately.  It even seems to be gathering momentum.  Maybe it is my frame of mind right now, but it doesn't feel like depression, it just feels like that uncomfortable feeling that you have been right and really didn't want to be. 

It is inconceivable that I not pay attention to the politics at the national level.  My response to that kind of thing is Pavlovian, I can't help myself.  But after years of being a political junkie, I have developed a "drug resistance" to the screaming meemies who cast doom (though I kinda think that they might be right) and instead just look at the day-to-day and street-level realities that I will have to deal with once the crazy starts getting serious traction.

This election is going to be true and total shit.  We have the choice of a madman vs a cabal of opportunists whose ambition and self-love cross into madness.  In other words, we are looking at a choice where we choose between augering it in at 10º or at 12º.  The only thing that we are discussing is the size of the crater. 

So, let's just take it as a given that things are not going to be looking up at the national level.  I think that any Pollyanna-ish app approach will not serve you.   It doesn't mean the end of the world, it doesn't mean mass-extinction, it doesn't mean civil war, it doesn't mean Mad Max.  It just means that the things that have been getting worse during this benighted century will continue to do so.  All we are talking about is the slope of decline.  Whether Fuckwad wins or SenileJoe or Ms SleepYourWayToTheTop resides at 1600 Pennsylvania is not important to the overall problem.

With the advent of a news media controlled by large corporations at a national level, we have forgotten about the old axiom that "all politics are local".  We wallow in the vagaries of national news like it actually means something other than being the modern implementation of George Orwell's "Two Minute Hate".  Walking away from that is important, even though everyone around you is screaming at you regarding how this will cause an armageddon.  Don't listen to them.  Keep your mouth shut and make provisions.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
                                                                                                              Jung -- Psychology and Alchemy

Further Refinements and Back to Babbling

Post-Impressionism / Jozsef Rippl-Ronai/ Painting for the Schiffer Villa

I am really liking the idea of using the e-mail editor as a blog editor.  Really works for me.  I was worried a bit about sizing the pictures that I want to put up top, but I have even worked out that little problem (though one does have to spend almost 30 seconds doing arithmetic to get the sizes right.  I think that I am up to the task).  Tomorrow I will see how my pictures taken during my tottering around came over from the evil-king google's site. 

The Kombucha snot is coming along just fine.  At two weeks, it is a definite presence on the top of the "fermentation vessel"

Screed

I am coming to the most unwelcome conclusion that 2021 is probably going to suck more than 2020.

Shit.

So today was Hexagram 63.  One of the great myths of the scientific worldview is the devout adherence to the idea of coincidence.  More and more, as I become more of a believer in the interconnections of things, I become increasingly suspicious of the twin beliefs of "randomness" and "coincidence". 

Legge: The image of water above fire forms Completion. The superior man, in accordance with this, thinks of the evil that may come, and guards against it in advance.

I am thinking that I need to reinstate my "prepper" state of mind.  Please don't sweat this.  I never really strayed all that far from that particular path.  I just need to polish things up and prepare for shit getting worse. 

I have already echoed Jim Kunstler's prediction from over at "Clusterfuck Nation" to people silly enough to give me their cell phone numbers.

You heard it here first: Joe Biden will call in "sick" to the presidential candidates' debate on Tuesday, September 29, and within days the Democratic Party will be obliged to replace him. Enough said for now. Wait for it….

The country just isn't in any condition to deal with the kind of nonsense that we will have to endure politically.  Economically we are well and truly fucked.  The environment/weather is showing signs of instability.  None of the signs are promising.  None.  I think that at, if we are extraordinarily lucky, it will  third quarter 2021before the societal "M" is going to be anything other than a  negative number.  As things are already a shitshow, further downward trajectories are decidedly unwelcome but probably what is in the cards.. 

Here is my big problem.  No one in the good ol' USA wants to be a negative Nellie.  Obligatory optimism is the only socially acceptable point of view in the current Weltanschauung here in the land o' the free.  If one thinks like your humble correspondent and sees the hole rather than the doughnut, one is cast into an outer darkness of a social life.  I think that this trend is accentuated as one moves up the "social ladder".  Poor folks who always been poor and knew how to cope with it might be the best way to emulate the issue.  Now.  I am not talking about the city poor-folks, generations of which have been bought off and silenced by the the social programs of the "Great Society" but the hardscrabble folks of rural America. 

I think that the long-time prepper battle cry of Beans, Bullets, and Bandaids needs to be closely examined, added to, and prioritized carefully.  I think that other requirements are "books" and "bagatelles" and "bytes".

So, here is the list in my current thought-frame and in order of priority: 

1. Beans (food to include water)
2. Bandaids (medical supplies to include prescription medication)
3. Bytes (communication)
4. Books
5. Bagatelles (Music)
6. Bullets
   

Now, since it is a Sunday when I am writing this, will spend a little more time a thinking and then go out for a walk and then loaf a little.  Time to save and get on with things.  Rust never sleeps.

Just another chunk of writing. A memo to M&K

I am hoping that this picture shows up

I think that I have discovered a new method of publishing for the long run.  Look, we are in one shitty place economically, gotta allow that and I adore Dreamwidth and will stick with them until the cows come home. But as I have spent many a summer day hiking out the near pasture to bring the cows in for milking with Jerry and Thor.  (No real need to do it other than somebody had to open the gate to let them walk back to the barn to get milked), I have a good idea of when cows come home.

Look, I got a sneaking hunch that the cows are on their way home for a lot of folks.  I am doing everything that I can to make sure Dreamwidth isn't one of them, but what I want and what the world dishes out are quite frequently not the same thing.  I love you Dreamwidth, but provisions must be made.

I wrote for years using Blogger (hell, the first post is back in 2006).  Google gives it away and blogging is so passé that they probably just keep it up out of pity and it probably doesn't take that much to maintain.  But it is a strange space.  By Blogger being an elderly relative of a huge monstrous mega-corporation bent on world domination, it doesn't exactly fill by every wish.  In all honesty, neither does Dreamwidth, but their is a more homey, more personal form of capitalism that I vastly prefer. 

So there have been rumblings for the past little while that Blogger has made changes to their free service and there are folks out there who are in high dudgeon as they weren't consulted by a multi-billion dollar entity about their opinion reference the aforementioned changes.  So I went over to check.  As usual, the whiners are just whining.  The platform still does what it always did, they changed some cosmetics around.  But going over there, and worrying about Dreamwidth made me put two and two together and hence I came up with this plan.  I am writing this in a standard, plain vanilla e-mail program (being a Linux maven, Thunderbird is the client of choice).  As you two are of the writing ilk, I thought that you may well be interested in how this works.  Keith has a great little blog and I have been trying to lead Michael into the blogging wasteland for years.  Since blogger has a "e-mail in your posts" feature, I can just work out the piece at my leisure and it stays in my "Drafts" folder until I feel ist is good to go, then I just hit send.  Instant post on Blogger. 

Now the real beauty of this is that I can now avoid the primitive and truly not-very-good editor that is foisted on me by Dreamwidth and still post there for what I hope will be a long relationship.  And it would appear that by doing my writing in the processor on Thunderbird does some nice things to the formatting. 

Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it's incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past - not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains - objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.

Alice Roberts

Now, if this works the way that I think, the quote in green will have a nice outline around it.

https://degringolade.dreamwidth.org/

https://mightaswellliebackandenjoyit.blogspot.com/

The picture a the top is from over at WikiArt (If it shows up, this is all experimental at this

OK:  That is the yackity yack for today.  I will be leaving this post exactly as it is in order to serve as a heads up for others who can perhaps find it useful.

Just checking in

 So:  I have been hearing mucho whining on the internet about the new blogger interface.

Now, I have no intention of coming back to the borg mothership and I will stay over at my new place, so I will take a look and see what all the whining is about.  

OK:  Just looking at it I don't see anything especially hateful.  Seems to be the same plain vanilla shit that the googlers have been throwing at us since 2006 when I started there.

Uploads pictures just fine.  OK

lets you set links (see above)

Changes typefaces OK

Changes Colors OK

Changes sizes OK

As always I think that the whole issue is folks bitching about how they weren't consulted.  

As if your opinion really mattered.

Look, they give the damn thing away free and try hard.  I am making a bet that a lot of the changes that you fuckwads are complaining about makes the code base a damn site easier to work with so maintenance becomes easier.  That ain't about you pretentious fucks who are merely complaining about the free ride.

It isn't like your pearls of wisdom are required for the proper running of the world.

So why don't you shut up and be grateful.

OK  Back to Dreamwidth.  Yeah I gotta pay and they ain't perfect, but at least I don't bite the hand that feeds me.