Plowin' the field

OK  here is an uncomfortable thought.

My generation (The Boomers) have had is easy in relative terms.  Never been so many having so much.  Oh sure, you can trot out statistics about wealth disparities, unemployment, and other such twaddle, but we have had it great.

Truth is, we took too much out of the pie and didn't leave enough for those following us.

So, when you look at Social Security; why shouldn't we take a hard look at it.  Some of the folks don't need it.  Some don't deserve it.  Some folks can keep-a-working.

If everyone runs in and starts grabbing their piece, the fund (already bankrupt by any rational accounting) will dwindle even faster.  Yes, I know, we paid the money in.  But every single one of us plans to take more out than we put in.

That is always a recipe for disaster.  Third rail my ass, it was a bone thrown to the poor during the depression to keep them from rioting.

Riven

Whoever wins this abomination of an election, a significant minority of Americans will view the result as further proof of “rigged” and irredeemably corrupt political system dominated by two deeply amoral organizations.  Rather than reconciling the country and allowing us to move forward, this election will add to the chasms separating the two Americas.

We aren't going into a second American revolution or civil war any time soon.  But we will proceed apace in the direction we are heading.  The wealth will become increasingly concentrated as the financial sector sucks the life out of the economy.  The middle/professional bourgeoisie will be shrunk further as the hard core elite continue to winnow the lower edge of this most threatened class.

Now, I can already hear the cries of disagreement.  "Certainly you must mean that the working class is the most threatened".  Nope, they have already been screwed.  There is no threat there, the action has been taken and implemented.

So, the next while (I am guessing 5-8 years) will be a steady and slow degradation of the lower reaches of what passes for a professional/working class.  They will begin to see that they are the next on the chopping block and will begin to make common cause with the already screwed working class to strike back at the corporate/financial elite.

So, what I thought would happen will happen, it will just happen when it decides to, not when my predictions say it will happen.

Where is it?

I've lost the thread of what is happening.  It seems to be a jumbled mess with no one knowing what to do and where to go.  The number and complexity of problems facing us seem to be insurmountable.

Good luck to all...I think we are going to need it.

Birds of a Feather

Richard Armitage, Henry Paulson, Brent Scowcroft.

They have all endorsed Hilly.

Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger.  I'll make a bet right here and now that these asshats will back her too.

Look...the folks who brought us to this sad, sad point will likely all back Hilly.

There you go.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it

Next

I have written off this election.  We're fucked either way.

You can spend hours trying to figure out what got us here, but where we sit is that we are a country making a choice between the worst two candidates ever to grace the center ring of this quadrennial circus.  Neither major party candidate is worth a bucket of warm spit.

In a nutshell, no matter who wins, we are going to have a clown in place for the next four years, with an idiot running the Administrative branch for the next four years. The odds of the country actually improving will be minimal, the chance that things will either not improve or get worse is increased.

So, what comes in two years when the next election is held?  Who will take over the house and how? What happens in four years when someone competent captures the anger of the Trumpeteers?  What happens when the Democratic party continues spitting on the poor, who will rise out of that?

Look, we are fresh out of problems here in the US.  All we have left is predicaments.

What happens next?

Care to bet

Opponents of science-informed policy cite uncertainty as a reason to delay action. Mainstream science acknowledges and objectively quantifies uncertainty, whereas opponents often use the language of certainty. Because communication is typically more persuasive when a message is conveyed with certitude, contrary voices may appear stronger than scientific voices to the public. To redress this imbalance, we must find a way to determine whether expressed opinions represent true opinions. One longstanding method is through wagering, and this session will examine the role of bets in exposing actual beliefs related to climate change and associated risk.

Climate Scientist James Annan 

Two lemmas to start:

1.   I think that the raw data sets used in the global climate model are pretty tight.  If you want, you can argue around the edges all you want, you can find questionable area in isolated data sets, and gaps exist.   But when you take them all and use them to balance one another and try to control and characterize the levels of uncertainty, you get a pretty damn watertight set of data.
2. The math and the worldview aren't really linear.  It can best be described as a non-intuitive mess that yields results that points in a direction with an assigned degree of uncertainty attached to the near term and medium term.

Look, we are never going to get to the A+B=C kind of equation that folks want to have before they feel the need to change their desires.  Most of the folks arguing over climate change are being asked to give up pretty big parts a life that they have carefully crafted inside a cultural milieu that actively promoted such things on the basis a science that is larded with the problemmatic accouterments that is chasing science around these days. (I would really hope that folks would take the time to read this essay and this essay by John Michael Greer as nice overviews of the tattered cloth that is science nowadays) .

The culture of the past fifty years has been an exercise in cognitive dissonance concerning the uncomfortable idea the we are fucking things up.  I would venture a guess that no one with a brain in their head really believes in a Star Trek future.  When you look at the multiple, interconnected streams of problems heading our way, even the most optimistic will hedge his bets and agree that there is a downside sitting out there.

So we are involved here in a betting game, an argument over the meaning of statistics.  The sides of the fight ranges from that fucking idiot Guy McPherson to That fucking idiot James Inhofe.

So, when I read this article the other day, I was intrigued.  Why not set up system where you could bet on the environment?   Let these silly fuckers put their money where their mouth is.  Make bets on the extent of arctic sea ice in the year.  No problem.  El Niño event this year and extent, put down your money with a sliding scale for  extent and strength.  How about the claim for hottest year recorded, setting this one up would be a walk on the park.

Look, the medium that most of us swim in the global economy.  The odds of supporting the population load (current and projected) without the dizzying web of interconnected systems that make up the current system are vanishingly small.  Anthropomorphic climate change and the required changes need to arrest it will translate in the real world to the simple old truism of "well, a lot of folks are going to die".

The betting system engendered will allow folks to better establish, within an economic system, the actual results of climate change.  The dollars and cents, pouinds and pennies, yuan and fen that Everyman uses to help establish the veracity of the data coming in.  My bet is that this will help everyone to come to grips with a very problematic data set and the decisions that need to be made concerning an uncertain topic.

As an aside, the problem with this is that it won't effect the true believers.  As a case in point, I have bet on the Raiders for years now.  Knowing myself, I will probably continue.  The same will probably be the case for the weather bookie industry.  Sometimes hope and belief trump empirical data.

dissolution

“Whatever faith I might have in the perfectibility of man, until human nature is altered, and men wholly transformed,” Which of course would take Christian faith, “I shall refuse to believe in the duration of a government which is called upon to hold together 40 different peoples, disseminated over a territory equal to one half of Europe in extent. To avoid all rivalry, ambition, and struggles between them, and to direct their independence according to the accomplishment of the same design. But the greatest peril to which the Union is exposed by its increase arises from the continual changes which take place in the position of his internal strength.”

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville 

We are facing a choice here in the good old USof A., and not just the clown show masquerading as a presidential election. 

Look, our period where you could posit an idea of "American Exceptionalism", without being laughed at, has gone past its pull date. We had a good run as a constitutional republic, won a couple of good sized wars, and then proceeded to make hay with our industrial and resource bases intact and selling everything hand over fist. We here have had a good run during my lifetime. 

But things are in the process of changing. I am hoping for, and tend to guess that, We are looking long slow decline ahead. Unfortunately however, the possibility of a rabid fall is significant enough to pay attention, and the chance of defying entropy and continuing an upward climb is slim indeed. 

It is the same choice that the rest of the world faces. We can try for the perfectibility of the entire world, where all are brought to a common level and human needs are taken care of and people everywhere are ruled by a rational philosopher king. Plato had a great idea 2,400 years ago, but the truth appears to be that it it is a great idea that just didn't pan out. 

I genuinely think and feel that the United States will have to change radically. I think that the easiest way to come to grips with the change will be a dissolution of the Union. The Union itself has become burdened by its own weight and the additional weight of its perceived goals. 

But what is scaring me the most is how people will handle the process. Because the process will insist upon the purging of some of our most cherished dreams and even more importantly, or self delusions. 

I think that hardest one to purge will be the "We are the greatest". I have never seen the attraction of this.  When a person does it, he is an ass. Trash-talk has become ingrained in our culture. But truth is, whether or not we are the greatest is now subject to grave doubt. 

The next hardest part will be the fragmentation of the mass market and the commensurate damage to the grossly swollen corporations that now sit astride the economics of the country and the world. These entities are very powerful at the current moment, and I don't see them responding to the diminution of their power with any significant grace. 

Finally, there will be loss of the manufactured dreams of comfort offered by overweening set of ideals and beliefs that motivate the actions of Americans in this peculiar period in time. Being taken down a notch or two is never pretty, and the usual response is rage and a counterattack. Mature self-reflection is not one of mankind's strong suits. 

I don't really like the choices arrayed in front of me. I really don't see this coming off well. I think that there a 50:50 chance that I will pass before we as a country will have to take one of the crappy choices on offer. But I can't really see what impact that I might have on the outcome. My views are too unpleasant and the vision that I see for the future too far away from the desires of the “common clay”. 

So, the best vision that I can offer is that of smaller political entities.

• The Dixie South,
• The Atlantic North,
• the Midwest encompassing the Mississippi drainage above Louisiana,
• Texas by its lonesome,
• California and the Colorado drainage, and
• the Columbia River drainage

I am not saying that this will be good. There is going to be a lot of pain pissed down. But these are manageable entities. They all have solid internal lines of communication, they all have a somewhat cohesive cultural structure, they all have adequate agriculture. The populations sizes and densities vary sufficiently to allow differing experiments to be allowed on how to deal with the world facing us. 

A lot of these experiments will fail, but that needs to be known as well. Right now we are forcing untested single systems onto too big a body-politic.  I ask you to consider this question:   

How would an educated person in 450 AD in what was remaining of the Roman Empire know that a Dark Age was coming?

 

A

Because......

The 2016 Presidential Debate
Thanks to Yves and Martha M over at Naked Capitalism

Just speaking about Hillary Clinton here.

I won't vote for her because nothing will change and things are not getting better.

Just speaking about Donald Trump here.

I won't vote for him because he is a self-promoting jackass.  He has no depth.

A preview of their debate

Security

This is probably one of the best descriptions of reality I have ever read

https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1#.fcnsm66bb

I have ranted in the past about the "security of the internet".  If you are interested, here, here, and here are the pieces that I wrote in the past.

Again, I say it, there is no security on the internet, only a fool thinks there can be.

Sort of Vacation?

On normal weeks, I would be gulping down the last of my coffee and getting ready to head out the door.  

But this week is 40 hours of paid time off from good old Uncle Sugar.  Do some stuff, relax, do some camping, get outta town.

So, if I do write, which I feel won't be the case the bulk of the time, The pickings will be sparse.  Not like there is that many folks out there who read this, but for you folks who do....well, maybe expectations should be lowered.

You Know....

I think that we the USA might be worse off than we thought.

Shit.

I wrote yesterday about the definitions of hypocrisy and sin.  Someone whose writings I respect sent back a quick e-mail clarifying his thoughts, and that helped.

A hypocrite fails and lies about it, to themselves and to others.  A sinner repents.

But then I started thinking, and it took me further into the land of "troubled".  What is the definition of someone who believes that their failures are successes, that instead of bearing false witness against himself, he/she genuinely believe that they have done no wrong.  There are these folks out there.

If you fail, and in your own mind, cannot recognize that failure and immediately paint your failures as success and your weaknesses as strengths, what does that make you?  If you see the act of taking things and selling yourself as as a normal part of business as usual and not a sin, does doing so make you a sinner.

In my mind, we are talking about choosing between two broken vessels.  Folks out there bandy about cold sounding clinical descriptions:  Sociopaths, paranoids...etc...etc...etc.

More and more we are just trying beat around the bush and not say out loud what everyone seems to know.

We are only discussing our choice between one type of madness and another.

False Witness

I found this quote over at Jesse's today.

"The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."

                                                               Hannah Arendt

I have always been leery of the folks who brand others as hypocrites.   As the above quote states, the hypocrite seems to be worse than the criminal.

But this seems to me to be shaky thought.  If one takes to heart a set of standards for conduct, and they are high standards, that are difficult to attain, and still thinks that those are the correct standards that he wishes to hew to, does that make him a hypocrite when he fails?

Of just a sinner.

Objectivist??

Question for the day:

Is putting a "Who is John Galt" bumper sticker on a late model Toyota pickup.

1. ironic?
2. pathetic?
3. a deeper understanding of a masterpiece? (Note:  That is Irony)