Alternation

Sitting on a sofa

On a Sunday afternoon

Going to the candidates' debate

Laugh about itShout about itWhen you've got to choose

Every way you look at it you lose

Written by Paul Simon • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group

What I think that we are seeing here in the US is the same sad lesson taught by the history that we so assiduously ignore, that we don't think applies to us, because we are different and special.

Power alternates.  The wise that manage the growth and the power that causes a country to rise get tired and neglect that which makes them strong.  I'm not talking about the military, or the strength of so-called "financial Institutions", but the process of strengthening the people that make up the country.  All of them.

When those wise men (Washington, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Eisenhower) pass out of the gates of power, they are usually followed by those who are less wise, often evil, and who are preoccupied with gaining power at all costs.

Look, Donald Trump is the candidate of a party that has long since discarded the pretense of caring about the rank and file of this country.  He is a flim-flam man of the highest order, and has a history of failures.  He is a rich boy, having gotten his start through the mechanism of a "small loan" of a million dollars from his family back in the seventies.  All that being said he has no driving need to be President, it almost seems that he is doing so out of a sense of duty, because things have gotten so damn bad that something has to be done.

But he is an old man, who is inexorably wedded to the flamboyant and shallow.  An aging icon who sees a imagined past golden age and wants to return us to that illusion.

Hillary is the apotheosis of ambition without conscience.  She cares nothing for the common man, even though she represents the party of the same.  Her "base" is the rich and unprincipled who have bought and sold her through the mechanism of her charity,  Her whole life is a construct, reaching for power and money any way she can.  

She is an old woman, whose ambition rides her and blinds her to anything but her own desires.  In a sense, she is the perfect figurehead for the boomers, the generation who brought the country to its knees.  

These are the two most likely candidates for the occupant of the presidency, an office that has been gradually losing its power and prestige for a over a generation now.  

This is getting interesting

Who knows what way things will go.

The options are multiplying.  There is opportunity for the most ruthless.

We will see.

The Biggest Question

Why is doing something well important when in the end nothing is left?

Long Time Coming

I'm OK with what Colin did.

He has a right to do what he wishes and to speak his mind.

Get over it, this action is what we are all about.

Long Time Coming.

Laboring

Took a couple of days off.  Had nothing to write, had other stuff to do.

Mostly I am tired of the tendentious bullshit that passes for culture here in the land o' the free(TM).

 We seem to have become a nation that stands for opposites, so in the end we stand for nothing.  We do so much to make certain that the way we think is the only allowable way.

I cannot effect the nature of a society.  I can only act and think the way that I think is right.  I will respect other's opinions and where they have merit, try to incorporate that merit into a syncretic worldview.  I will dismiss the idea that self-esteem and its concordant arrogance is the way to approach a life.

More and more, I think that the problems that we face are the problems that we made ourselves.  Mostly it is the way that we were raised, boomers and subsequent generations all.  We are not as naturally good as we thought that we were.  The cult of the child that took over this country in the early sixties and shaped the ethos that we are now foundering in was also just plain wrong.  It is the outgrowth of that idiot frog Rousseau's ravings.

We are bound into a path that leads to decline.  I would argue that we are well into that decline.  

Meh

Some days......

The eldest is sick of school.  Can't say as I blame him.  So he is out looking for his first real-life job.  I have my fingers crossed.

But I do like the process. While I have been counseling him to think out of the box for the long term, the short term requires obeisance to the peculiar customs of our peculiar economy.  

So he is polishing up social skills and getting used to talk to people he has never talked to before.  Always a good skill.  The practice allowed by a crappy economy also calibrates expectations quite well.

So life is good

The Two Nations

At the end of the day, this is why the vast majority American is not happy. At the end of the day, this is why the US is inching toward the failed state status. 

The mythical “Men on the street” really don't think, they believe.  They have been fed a ration of crap their whole life and been told that it is the whole truth.  I am impressed by just how many different plates of shit we have been fed and just how many people have bought in.  The list is stunning in its breadth;  Free-market, American Exceptionalism, Calvinist Christianity, these have become the New Holy Trinity here in Red America. They are opposed by a completely different set of odd beliefs.  In the land of Blue, the piecemeal faith of sexual identity, globalism, and social justice creates a strangely ineffective counterpoint to the ravings of the Red.

We have lost the leaders of our society.  They seem to have vanished and left in their place poseurs who mouth the words needed to convince the gullible that they, the poseurs, and only they, have the gift of prophecy required to fulfill the needs of the nation. But if the beliefs of the two countries is so deeply riven that any promise will piss off half the population, nothing good will come out of the attempt. 

But what no one wants to talk about is how neither of the two beliefs stated can be reconciled with the facts on the ground. Both beliefs require infinite growth on a finite world. Both require human nature to have something that human nature doesn’t seem to have any evidence of possessing. The two beliefs are proven failures.

The clowns we get are the clowns we deserve. Because there are vanishingly few of us here in the good old USA that bother to think about the nature of our faith (and I am not at all certain I belong to the thinking subset), we vote in the clowns that seem most likely not to disturb whatever particular secular faith that we espouse. But to provide for one set of beliefs tears at the fabric of the other belief so the emnity is permanent, the defect is structural.

The mass-democracy overlaying a Republic that we tout as exceptional is just going to stay here and fester. It cannot resolve the conflicting goals of the two populaces that inhabit this chunk of North America, so it will just continue down the path it is on. No change, no fixes, just the same shit.

Hellloooo!

Look at all the folks out there talking about how, pretty dang soon now, the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

I don't know how to tell you folks, but we are already there.

Look, with the exception of a couple of folks and a couple of off years, myself and everyone I know have been tapering down for forty years now.  Sure, nearly everyone I know has had at least a couple of good years.  Some of the folks I know are even shitting in the tall cotton thank you very much.

But for the most part, everyone I know is not quite up to the red queen's standards.  We ran as hard as we could and we ended up a little bit behind where we started.

Oh fucking well, that's the way she goes.

For the next forty or so years, the trend is going to continue. and things will be back a little bit, maybe even fair amount behind where we are now.  That is the nature of things.  Oil is running out, ore stocks are getting thin, population is out of effing control, migration is starting, the odd war is giving us the side-eye, and things just keep moseying down the slope toward the aforementioned "Hell in a hand basket".

But newbies like to think that we are revving up to a Hollywood Spectacular denouement, complete with rogue planets, roving bands of cannibal zombies, martial law, and the destruction of all that is good and decent.

No buckaroos, just gonna be the same thing as now, but a little worse, a lot different, and with the same cast of clowns (That's us) figuring out how to make shit work and piecing together the crap sandwich what the world hands us that week.

No one says it has to be pretty or spectacular, but gravity always wins.

But its is the only game in town......so game on.

bleh

Bleh

Caveat Legens

I am in no way supporting a drastic change to the current way of the world.

But, everything that I see seems to point in the direction of a massive change in the way that the world works.

I am quite comfortable in the current system thank you very much.  But, as an old man, reasonably rich in experience, I have come to the conclusion that what I want has little effect on the machinations of the world.

All my writing, crackpot theorizing, and low-grade analysis done here, albeit mostly unnoticed and unread, is merely a means for me to:

• Try and figure out the "Why" and "Who"
• work out my best guess of the "When".  This will also include recognizing that the "when" of such a scenario may be past my lifespan and that, as such, can be safely ignored.
• and then to figure out "where" to be when and if such a thing occurs
• finally to discover the "how", should such a thing become necessary, I will integrate the above data into a concrete plan.

Obviously, I might be wrong about everything written here.

Caveat Legens

Thinking about...give me a bit

Been thinking about the nature of the elites.  Things are starting to gel.  Maybe tomorrow.

The key, I think is to stop thinking of them as organized,

Arnold

Bacon makes me happy.

But pigs are really great critters.  Arnold Ziffel was a completely understandable phenomenon.  Pigs are very smart, actually have great personalities, and can provide a great service in ridding a household of compost and providing garden fertilizer.

Pigs have been an important part of the human ecology for millennia. 

In my dotage, I hope to have a small place with a pig or two and some chickens and rabbits and a nice quarter acre garden.

I will care for the pigs and appreciate their company.

But I will turn them into bacon.

And I will be grateful.

Toasty Friday

Summertime and I am holed up trying to keep my body temp at a reasonable level.

Up early in the AM....open up the place and put the fan in the door to blow in as much coolness as I can during the 45 minutes of my morning ablutions.  Since it 66 F. outside.  the place gets pretty reasonable pretty fast.  Then the place gets buttoned up;  windows closed, shades down, the place is a flipping cave.

Then off to my air conditioned office for the day.  Being a pampered bureaucrat is its own reward.  Pay sucks though.

When I get home, the place is still in the 70's and twenty or so degrees cooler than outside.  Hide in the cave until the sun goes down.

A summer life explained