A Very Long Conversation

A couple of posts came up lately, one mine, one over at Mayberry's. In a way, the both of them kinda got me thinkin'. So I went and talked to my mom and Aunt's and uncles and the old folks back in the Italian rural ghetto I grew up in.

What I talked to them about was how folks ate. I didn't talk to a person who was less than 79 and I listened harder as the folks got older. What I talked to them about was their eating habits and how they used things like clothes.

They ate low on the food chain. Even I remembered that part. Gardens were big. Canning was a fact of life. Meat portions were small and you got one piece.  Potatoes and polenta was used as filler.  Green beans in a mason jar were a fact of life.  Sweets were simple like cakes and cookies and were used as bribes for children and when visitors came over.

But they remember having a good life.  That is the key to the whole banana.  Try stopping the fancy crap that you see on restaurants and TV cooking shows.  Try eating basics.  You will find that by stopping your pretensions and your striving and just eating simple good food you might start a process of simplification that will make you a better person.

Slave to the Beauty

Took some time to talk with Claudius for a while today.  He was bored on a long holiday weekend and we had time for a great chat.  One of the more interesting seeds that he sowed was the purpose of art and beauty in a life.

He gave a reference to a book he had been reading, about art and its importance.  Then I got jabbering and thus this post is here.

Music, painting, sculpture, and all the forms of art (Yes, even the not-well-done ones) should all elicit from us a reminder that the world is a beautiful place.  A great time we do not notice this simple fact.  If a piece of someone else's time can draw from us a recognition of the beauty, maybe for a moment we can turn away from the tawdriness and ugliness that we are so prone to obsess on.

I guess that I see this as a survival strategy second to none.  When you spend all of your time wondering what/how to eat and how to kill/maim transgressors and punish the guilty, you are surviving, but the only thing that truly survives is the meat puppet that carries you.  I would argue that you do all of those things out of necessity, as they allow your physical form to live.

The beauty that surrounds you, the slap of waves coming in from the ocean, the whisper of wind through the trees, the raucous cackle of a crow wheeling overhead are why you are living.  Art can give this to you in a small way when they aren't otherwise easily available.

Paintings and sculpture can show you a purity of form.  Music can elicit the sounds of beauty in your mind.  A simple hymn can allow you to briefly sense God.

Don't leave this essential out of your plans.

To Live with the Consequences

As you are probably aware, I really see a descent into a sub-human apocalypse as a very long-odds type of affair.  It isn't impossible, but having to deal with mutant zombie bikers is a scenario best left to movies, as for the most part, it really doesn't play that well in Peoria.   For the sake of the argument, I see it as no greater than a 3-4% chance.

That being said, what is it I am prepping for?  Simply put, it is the breakdown of the US federal government.  You see, I think that the country and its riches are more than adequate for us plebes who live here.  Food can be grown, water is available, there is energy and industry and vision enough for the people.

What there isn't enough for is the rapacious and insatiable desires of the "military-industrial-congressional" complex that we were warned about back in '59.   The system we have generated here in the US is not a democracy, but an extraordinarily efficient means of tax farming.

This system has lasted this long because it has figured out the stealth taxes like social security, where they swear they will give it back to you later.  Needless to say, you know my take on when you get it back.  Even more, I'll allow you a guess as to where they will give it back to you.  Here is a hint: ()*()

Anyway, these regular taxes and the stealth taxes (which they spend as freely as the regular taxes) have allowed them to shove "Hush Money" into everyones pockets.  Now it is set up so that the whole structure is so intertwined that if you pull out one piece, the whole damn shooting match comes a tumblin' down.

Why do you thing the well-coiffured thug Nancy Pelosi did her little political whore magic on the defense spending bill for Afghanistan?  All the little bribes to the voters that keep electing these clowns is buried in the defense bill that allows this profitable little war going.

So, two birds were killed with one stone.  They made the "Defense Establishment" happy with ongoing profits.  They also bribed enough voters to get them re-elected.

Is this a great country or what?

Thinking About a Nail

When you write for public consumption, even a public as vanishingly small as those who read this, there are many choices to be made.  Many avenues to be explored and the ramifications of each to be outlined.

We are looking hard at a point in American history that may be the equivalent of the other great spasms that have shaken the country; the changeover from the Revolution to the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution(1770-1787), the Civil War(1850-1865), and the Great Spasm (1917 to 1945, This is a moniker of my own making, it describes the First World War, the Great Depression, and The Second World War, In my mind these three "events" are so intertwined that the must necessarily be looked at as a whole).

Now, you will probably notice a kind of rhythm to these things.  The overall time from crest to crest is around seventy to eighty years.  The last one ended around sixty-five years ago.  Each of these periods went from a steadily more nasty run up leading to a spasm running for around 10 to 15 years.  Hmmm, it is not too difficult to imagine 2003 as a starting point for the nasty run up.

So, like most of you, I am thinking that we are getting pretty damn close to a nasty bit in our collective history.   

But it seems that like any conflict, there are strategies and tactics needed in order for the change to be successfully made or resisted.  So right now, I have to think hard about the approach that I am going to be taking over the next little bit.  We are facing an immensely powerful force that has taken over the country (No, it isn't Obama, he is just their Press Secretary).  This Oligarchy has no intention of letting go their chokehold on the system and they are implementing laws that will allow them to safely default on any "responsibility" and to be able to enforce any measures necessary for us to continue lining their wallets.

Now, I have no intention of allowing them to do this to me.  But I think that a straight up fight might not be the best idea.  Despite any desire for a flamboyant gesture, in the current environment, a straight up fight will just get you squashed like a bug.  I believe in my heart that I am a Freeman.  The Oligarchy that is now attempting to run the country wishes me to be a Consumer.

So, I by choosing the path of a Freeman, I feel that my only ethical move is to disallow the Oligarch's plans to make me less than I am.  I must subvert their goals of making me and my fellow citizens their pawns.

So, the inelegant and effective method of subversion and eating away at the supports of the system seem to be an effective way to go.  But what is the system that you are trying to subvert?  Where is the most effective point of attack and what are the tactics that you can use to make the attack.

• I would argue that the main point of attack would necessarily have to be the finance and banking systems.  They also have the benefit of being the easiest to attack.  Go Cash and Gold.  Doing so will strangle them if enough folks realize that these folks are stealing from them and get out from under them. 
• Pay off your debt.  Look at your statements.  If it says Interest Due anywhere on the statement, you are paying a vampire for the right to suck your blood.  Don't take out any more debt.
• Stop wanting everything NOW.  Real people with real lives realize that they have to work and save to get anything of real value.  Spoiled children want things now. Save you money until you can buy cash.  If you can't pay cash, do without and save.
• Don't pay for anything with any flavor of plastic whatsoever.  It screws you and it screws the person selling stuff to you.  The vendor has to pay the bank for the right to launder the money though bank (read here: Scum sucking parasite), the vendor then raises the price to cover his cost.  You get screwed either way.  The bank gets money for your lack of discipline.  This is a tax, pure and simple, and you can stop paying it. 
• Get out of the stock market.  It is a mafiosi casino.  The "returns" are nothing more than illusions generated for the gullible.  If you can find a company that pays dividends appropriate to it's revenues and pays it's CEO and management an income less than 20x the income of its line workers, then I would say go for it, but good luck finding one of those.
• Save money in a safe in your house.  As the banks start toppling, they will take your money with them.  The promises that they give to back your money are as ephemeral as a fart in the breeze.  The government and the FDIC doesn't have that kind of cash.
• Stop thinking about the money you could have "made" with your investments and your savings with interest.  If you feel that the system is corrupt, you must sever yourself from the shackles of greed by which you bind yourself to this corrupt system.  
• Start taking less.  My favorite quote from the past is:  "Fix it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
• Ruthlessly reduce your energy use.  The current system is based on profligate acquisition and consumption of energy.  If you can figure out how to cut your energy use in half, you are reducing the money flows going into the complex, thus starving the beast.
• Start providing for yourself.  Start figuring out where you can do this, gardening, raising chickens, walking.  Start providing means where you are self-sustaining and independent of the large scale structures that allow the system control.
• Barter your produce.  If you can fix someones boat and they give you three or four cases of homebrew, you are strangling the beast.

I think that these simple ideas are do-able.  There are probably a thousand subtle variations on each of these as well as a host of others that I haven't thought of.  Will they bring down the system, probably not.  The analogy that I figure comes closest to the effect each of these will have on the beast is that of a red blood cell.  If you can do one of these, you will take one red blood cell from the beast.  Will that bring it down? No.  But if enough of us get fed up and start doing these simple things, the decrease in the number of blood cells will start having an effect.

These may well make the system unstable enough that it can be taken down.  It will also allow you to develop the skills to transition to the new regime or to weather the interregnum.

But until enough of us are angered when they call us consumers, until enough of us think of ourselves as citizens, the beast will ride us until we founder. 

Upon Mature Reflection

OK, I spent some time and coin making a statement.  Moved the site over to a new server. Then quit because I didn't see the use in writing anymore.  Grand gestures of an idealist.

What a dumbass.

So what if Google watches my every keystroke.  In the first case, I am fairly certain now that they are only doing this to better figure out how to sell me shit on the internet.  If I don't buy shit on the internet, their loss.  In the second case, all I am doing in exercising my right to free speech and free press.  If someone wants to give me a free soapbox (with their company name placed prominently on the soapbox) well, good on them.

So my going to another site and throwing this grand hissy fit is yet another in a long line of grand gestures that end up with me slinking back and looking sheepish.  I would feel guilty for this, but it is such a time honored tradition in my life, it is more like an old friend than a character flaw.

So, I am going to let the other, $90.00/annum site go and come back here with the requisite amount of contrition.  I might or might not write a lot.  I think that I will just build up some lumber in the virtual lumber yard of the post storage.

I am here to write for myself and for you fellow odd ducks that occasionally agree with me.   Sometime you give me new ideas, sometimes you make me laugh.  Sometimes you piss me off.

For some odd reason, I am happier when I do this.  That's enough.

Equals

At the end of the day, we have been taken in by a myth.  It is a myth of equality.

I think that it the core of our beliefs currently in the US.  It is a myth foisted on us by Democrats and Republicans alike.  But the concept of equality is a subtle thing.  It has limits and a circumscribed area where it is valid.  What has happened to it over the past couple of hundred years is that it has been pounced upon by the unsophisticated, treating the fragile little concept that started out roughly.

I would guess that when it started out, the thoughts about equality were pretty limited.  If you were able to stand up and swing with the rest of the boys, they thought of you as an equal.

No, the equality they spoke of is the chance to get into the furball and take a try at the prize.  They never, ever said that you would get an equal share of the prize, just that you would have a chance to take a whack at it.

What things have degenerated into is a game where political blocks are promised shares of the proceeds because that block has defined a set of conditions that prove they "exist".  I would not try to say that this is minority issue, as the biggest dollops of money go to pasty faced white pukes who are to big to fail.

Nope, equality has always been an illusion.  There are a lot of folks who are better than you at shit.  Get used to it. 

All real equality can offer you is a chance at the prize.

Unfortunately, that isn't offered here anymore.

Leftovers Beer (Brought in from the the affectation blog)

Since the State of Oregon sees fit to relieve me of some of that evil load of money (One needs always remember Christ’s contempt towards the rich), I am using up leftovers in nearly all facets of my life. This trend has been ongoing for quite some time now, but I think that it is going to be even more pronounced for the next couple of weeks.

I need to start making beer for the summer. Brew doesn’t appeal to me in the winter..wine better suits the mood then. But a beer in the summer is an act of kindness. But, due to shortfalls as described above, I went rooting around the basement and found the following:

1. An old mason jar in the deep freeze containing what is probably Millenium hops pellets. These are probably around two years old.
2. Two cans of Coopers light malt extract.
3. Big jug of molasses
4. Spices in the freezer
5. Some brewers yeast of uncertain origin. I think that it is fermentis SAF T-58 High Gravity Yeast, but who knows for sure.

So looks like an odd batch of beer will be coming down the pipe. I did go out and buy more priming sugar (3 lbs for $2.99) and a lb of rice syrup solids for $4.49.
First, disinfect the hell out of all equipment. I have found that soaking with bleach followed by soaking with iodophore cuts infections way down.

I started out by adding a 5-second pour of molasses into around a gallon of cold water I figure that this is around 2 or so cups, stuck this on the stove and started heating it. At around 120 F, I added

• 2 teaspoons nutmeg powder
• 2 teaspoons clove powder
• 2 tablespoons dried orange peel

Brought the mix to a boil and then chucked in the hop pellets as follows:

1. 1/3 cup of pellets in a muslin bag, tied off with dental floss. Give yourself a long string to pull it out when it is cooked, makes it easier. These get steeped for an hour. Set the time for thirty minutes to tell you when to put in the next hops.
2. 1/4 cup of pellets, prepared as above, go in for thirty minutes, set a timer for twenty minutes.
3. 1/8 cup of pellets go in for ten minutes. When the last timer goes off, pull them out of the solution and let them drain for a minute before you pull them out.

After the hops are out, I added one can of the malt extract and the pound of rice syrup solids and then brought it back up to a boil. Just so you know my nomenclature, I call this the wort concentrate. At this point I turned off the burner and let it cool for three hours. Note folks, do not open the lid during this cooling time. If it is cooling from 210 F, the stuff in there has almost no bioburden. If you open it to the air, you have no idea what cooties you are letting in. Don’t open it.

After the wort concentrate has cooled, dump the iodophore out of the carboy and put it upside down to drain for five minutes. Add around two gallons of cold water (I usually use the sprayer head to make sure the water gets well aereated) then use a funnel to pour in the wort concentrate. Fill the carboy to the five gallon line with cold water and pitch the yeast.

I usually lug it back down the basement the next day. Wait two weeks, transfer the beer to another carboy, prime it with one cup of sugar, and bottle it.

Bye-Bye google

http://www.desgringueler.com/degringolade/

The new blog is up and running on a server farm somewhere, it isn't perfect, but until I can get my own server up and running, it will just have to do.  It appears to work just dandy so far.  So, I think that I will just put up a link here for a week or two and then just go over and stop posting here.  I'll leave everything up here, as a archive of things past, but I have also moved the old posts over to the new place.

The only bummer is that I haven't been able to figure out how to bring all the comments over.  I have the most recent fifty over there, but that is it.  All of the comment will remain here so they won't be lost.

I am hoping that the folks who link to me will notice the change in venue.  Needless to say, I am going to send them the new address so that those of you who exhibit the poor time management skills necessary to take to time and read this screed  can find me again.

Even semi-celibate old men are stupid

Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. I wish it wasn't so, But the fact just sits there.  Mute embaressment all around.

I have the good fortune to work in an area with a heavy population of attractive and intelligent younger women.  These youngsters have adopted me as one of their own as I speak with them as adults and don't openly try to chase them.  The reason that I don't chase them is the somewhat unwelcome realization that they probably aren't attracted by my aging, obese, scarred and broken body.    

However, certain parts of my body resist this charitable description and insist that, if I would only get off my duff, a little procreation is there for the taking.

Idiots, as I stated before.

I wonder when they will shut up?

The train has left the station

I have no problem with the science behind global warming.  You can scream like a little girl and believe some dope somewhere who has taken his finger out of his nose long enough to tap out a claim to have "disproved" the science behind it, but it will not get you anything.

It is happening, and its effects will persist for centuries.  It will pass, but not in your lifetime.  And you know what else?

It doesn't matter if you believe it or not.

You see, global warming is the kind of shit we hate here in the good old schizophrenic USA.  It is complex.  It has multiple causes. it behaves in a non-linear fashion, replete with feedback loops, attractors, oscillations, and all kinds of crap that make the average Joe clutch his temples and wish fervently he had paid more attention back there in middle school where they tried to introduce him to algebra.

But on top of that, it is our favorite kind of problem too.  The kind where we really don't have any control over the issue, but we feel we have to do something about it.  Makes for great political theatre and grave pronouncements, but the truth is that there is really nothing that can be done and all the pronouncements are just kabuki theatre, being performed to piss off one side of the argument or the other.

We'll adapt.

Our grain belt will move north.  Canada will get fairly nice.  It will absolutely suck living in the Maldives.  Maybe England will be able to make some decent wine.  Maybe the Sahel will continue getting green.

But, you won't adapt if you ignore it or deny it.  You gotta pay attention and make the adjustments.  If you don't, I'm even cool with that.

'Cuz you see, if you and your little group of inbred piglets aren't capable or seeing the facts and adapting to them, you/they will die off, along with that odd strain of DNA that makes up the natural experiment we refer to as "your lineage".  And if that happens, there will be more for me and mine.

Magisteria

This post is a bit of a blather...forgive me in advance.  The plot wanders about a little too much for my taste, but right now I really don't give a crap, and I suspect, neither do you.  

Anyway;

I am getting very bored by folks in the doomy-financial blogosphere ranting about how crooked things are now.

Huh?

Look cherubs, the game has always been rigged.  Has been since the time of Gaius Gracchus and probably hearkens back to Solon.  What happened in the last fifty of so years is that there was enough disparity in money, energy, and military power between us folks here in the good ol' USA and the rest of the world that the Bon Temps did in fact roullez for everyone here in the USA.

Well cherubs, it was never meant to last.  Once the rest of the world got off of dead center after having had the crap kicked out of them in the second world war, things were going to have to come a little bit back to balanced.

Now, if the forever upwards folks are right (and the data doesn't look too good for their side of the argument) then the rest of the world will just catch up with us and we will all move together into a golden future.

Those of you who read me regularly now which side of this issue I am on.  We here in the good ol' USA have had a nice party while the rest of the world was getting up.  The rich folk took a respite from butt-fucking the poor folks here and went throughout the world screwing the poor folks there.  Gave us low-lifes a nice breather and we managed to catch up a bit.  Burned through a lot of energy stocks during the party and lived comfortably large.

Then the nineties happened and scuzzy bastards such as your humble correspondent started taking apart US factories and productive capacity and moving to not quite third world countries so that the "Shareholders" could reap rentier income from the unwashed masses here in the US by paying ten cents on the dollar to little brown folks who were truly grateful for the jobs.

The "aughts" (2000-2009) brought around the uncomfortable realization that the growth that we were getting used was little more that burning through the planets stored resources at a mind-boggling pace.  The end conclusion that lots of folks seem to be coming to is that perhaps the party is over and we might have to deal with a touch of a nasty hangover.

So, now it looks as though the game is up.  The median wage here in the US is being painfully adjusted to the rest of the world's standards, and the Hoi Polloi here are getting a painful education in how the world usually works.

I expect that during the next little bit we will see some right-wing populism, some left-wing populism, some corporo-fascism, some syndico-anarchism and a whole bunch of other 'isms coming out of the woodwork.  These will be dusty and malformed at first.  Living large has shut down our collective political intelligence and allowed sloppy and self-serving thought to predominate in the limited political spectrum that we have remaining.

'Cuz you see folks, our current stunted and corrupt political system isn't up to the task of reforming itself.  There has not been any thought placed into the political system we now inhabit, only pandering to the "core" and self-aggrandizement.  The elected officials are now merely the servant class of the wealthy.  They have the power and we don't.  What is going to happen is that the full spectrum of political thought is going to be trotted out and chewed over by the country as a whole.  A new set of political goals and constraints is going to be put in place.  This is going to remarkably ugly and painful.

Americans, in the next while, will be dusting off old thought systems and trying to find new ones to recover the political system from the asshats who dominate it now.  The first couple of efforts will be pretty sorry, but we will get the hang of it.

Adrift

I cannot shake the thought that the cold times are coming. The feeling of malaise now doesn’t seem to want to leave. I cannot say that I am depressed as I am about as happy as I have ever been, but the sense of foreboding around me just seems to deepen.

More and more I am thinking that there is a reckoning coming. Not just for my pathetic excuse of a job or my less than excessive lifestyle, but for the society that I swim in. There does not seem to be any sense of accountability, spin rules all. But the reckoning will be a spasm, and the really hard part will be to weather the storm and wait until things settle down.

The real issue is that there is no concept of restraint. The zeitgeist is that there can be no constraints on the individual. But this allows too much room for the flawed vessels that make up our race to move in. We consume and consume, unwilling to take less or to save because there is no future, only the infinite now.

We rationalize the things we buy as necessities, somehow different from the self-serving opulence of the past. But it is all the same, subtle differentiations of class and power designed to make those around you aware of your status.
When we come to the reckoning, we will be in a crisis, because all that we have built is a reaction to the past.

We are the new puritans, creating a set of oh-so-carefully crafted mores and enforcing them with a puritan’s zeal. But there are no roots to what we have created. We threw out the baby with the bathwater. So the past can provide us no guide to find our way out of the morass, and the sad set of rules we have created will not be up to the task.

So we use up our finite resources because we don’t know what else to do. We spend energy extravagantly to fuel our mobility and freedom and our drive for the cult of the self, and by doing so have shackled the future to less.

One of the paths which we strayed from

This is a very good message for what I have been talking about. How dependent are we on a system primarily controlled by large corporate interests? How much of the internet is controlled by large companies and barely disguised quasi-governmental entities. How easy would it be to shut down communication on the net.

The net was designed in the beginning to be robust in the case of an attack.  Now it has been reduced to a advertising medium.

Think really hard after watching this.  See what is possible.  Yes, it blew apart, but the lessons are there should anyone pay attention.

I think that you should seriously consider the discussion at minute 18:30.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3145680396796021272&ei=QEuJS8bMO5TMrAO_o7yMBw&q=fidonet&client=firefox-a#