Correlations

Correlation is not causality:

Look, everyone is low-key a-twitter about trumpy’s latest bit of performative art over in the middle east.  I remember him doing something similar back around this time in his first term.  He blew a bunch of holes in the Syrian desert and that did nothing particularly useful other than letting the male/female news-whores (Mika and Joe and their ilk) dismount the “I hate Trump” train for a day or two.

I can’t say that this time is different other than the fact that I have successfully weaned myself off mainstream media and at this time I take my news-whores in written form and have a much higher threshold of disbelief.

Look, when I was still in my serious tin-foil hat days, I found it interesting that one could take a plain-vanilla, reasonably accurate set of data like sunspots and map “shit-hitting-the-fan” events on the poor, innocent graph and believe that it meant something.  Now I am not so certain.

My latest worldview is that especially here in the land-o-the-free and to a unknown extent elsewhere, we have the attention span of a swarm of gnats.  We act like everything that happened two weeks ago is ancient history.  I cling to data like sunspots not because they are correlative/causitive, but because they remind me that history is there and echoes throughout the actions of the world.

History is there, from Darius to Sikes-Picot to the six-day-war.  People in that region remember it all and act on that history.  We are a bit player in that context.  Maybe we ought to step aside and let them continue.