Numbers Do Lie

But the people who write the papers that publish the numbers sure the fuck do.

And the idiots who write the mass-market articles about the papers that publish the numbers most definitely lie for their own purposes.

Science is first and foremost about being able to isolate specific things and define what they do under specific circumstances.   When you read things about what "a scientific study" purportedly "proved" in the mass media, you are not getting a true idea of the limitations of the study and understanding the meaning (usually limited) of the actual results become vanishingly small.

Look, I am all for science.  Spent a long time doing it day-to-day, but the actual slop that comes out on the web and in the mass market is usually tainted by hopes and greed and other such human contaminants.

You can believe what you want when you read the glowing reports of the technology that you want to save us from ourselves, but before you get too far ahead of yourself, I would recommend actually reading the original article, read two or three of the most likely references in the article, and then think about it for a little while.

Science isn't in the discovery business anymore, it is in the business of providing a platform for people to fund-raise and keep their salaries.  Bet careful when you read the claims.  Be even more careful when you read the primary paper

Non Serviam

Samyukta is becoming a reasonably close friend.  She has been accusing me of being a hippie for some time now.  I am coming to the conclusion that she is correct.

Look, a lot of the problem is trying to figure out what to do with my body and mind in my dotage.  To me, the American ideal of retirement is about as inviting as a colonoscopy.  I find the level of self absorption and excess required to have what is considered a "good" retirement is just well past my abilities.  If I tried it, I would go crazier than what I already am.

My perfect retirement would have work in it to about the tune of 16-20 hours a week.  I have been eyeballing Castor's job at the pizza joint as a possibility.

I think that retirement in America is some kind of totem, where a "good" retirement serves as notice that the said retireee was a player and was sufficiently wired in to the system that the big boys agreed to share some of their loot.  I usually involved coming to work at a boring job and doing a tiny piece of the puzzle for a corporation primarily focused on fucking other people out of things.

I chose the other route, tried to get rich building something new with small companies.  Well, that didn't work out.  So then I said fuck it and took a lowish-level job at the fedguv ranch.  I think that I can hang out with this for some time yet.

So, in a nutshell, I want to have a part time job doing something kinda low-tech, a small place to live with a garden, a set of good books, 3 pairs of good walking shoes, and a reasonable supply of pot and whiskey.  I am planning to start on December 4, 2022.

Another Year

I am going to stay put another year.  The chances of things not going to shit are higher than the chance of things going to shit.  Granted, the interstice  between these two states are getting vanishingly close 

Mostly, the whole issue rotates around my tendency toward lethargy and sloth.  Right now I cannot for the life of me figure out how I would approach the issue if things go to shit in a serious way.  I think that is the issue that I have with the prepper/doomer crowd in general.  Look folks, if things go to shit in a serious way, you will be trying to decide whether to shit or wind your watch:  Just like me.

So, I will stay at my place for another year and try to get a better idea of what is going on.  I need to work out some of the details of my dotage.  Now, when you talk about plans, most people think that they are putting out a five-paragraph OPORD.  Well buckaroo, most of what is laid out in plans like that vanish like a puff of smoke when the real world hits them.  My plans are simpler.  Drop another 100 pounds, walk a minimum of 50,000 steps a week, keep my brain going by writing, put some serious thought into where I might want to begin my Lebowski phase.

Crazytown

I have been steering further and further away from the "News". I have completely lost my trust in what was considered the mainstream media and trying to glean something that makes sense out of the diamonds-imbedded-in-a-huge-pile-of-offal that is called the Internet is as useful as panning for gold in a played-out stream.

I haven't seen anything like this. Even in the worst of the draft-dodger riots of the 1960's and 70's we had a modicum of civility and a common ground. There were still ideologue fuckwads out there, but they didn't rule the show and there was balance and at least a modicum of respect.

I am starting to question the viability of the Union.  Someone in the political leadership has to start asking questions about this moment in time.  Just how far are you willing to go, in light of the current series of political character assasinations to polarize and anger a country, for your personal aggrandizement and political ends, before it explodes?

Am I a sinner too?

I tend to rail on about the outsized impact that social media has in our lives.  I think that Facebook and it's sleazy little fuckhead owner to be a expository and damning piece of evidence in the current trial called "What the fuck is wrong with us?".

Twitter might be even more repulsive.  280 characters in a tweet.  Fuck me.  To adequately explain even the simplest situation rising from societal interactions one needs at least a couple of pages.  And most of the time the couple of pages can merely provide an overview, not a systematic review of the situation.

Nope, these two abominations and their "me-too" scraggly copycats are complete shit, fit only for generating "snarl words" to be tossed at opponents and innocent bystanders alike.  When imagining the "public debate" fed by the output of "social media" one should keep firmly in mind the image of troops of warring bonobos flinging their feces at each other.  It appears to me that snarl words thus generated by Facebook and Twitter are the feces thrown.  So, by definition, if we are using the metaphor of posts and tweets as feces, then the orifice that produces them must necessarily be......

Now we have Blogger here.  Run by one of the snarl word orifices.  You might even argue that the big G is the worst of the bunch.  So, by writing here every day, I am questioning whether I am feeding the battle of shit-flinging.

The main reasons that prevents me from hanging my head in shame and re-re-retiring from this little affectation are as follows:

1. By being as wind-baggy as I am, I feel that I usually drop at least hints to the other side of the issue.  
2. I feel that I tend to be conservative and ask more questions than I answer.
3. Nobody reads this damn thing anyway.

So, in the words of Carl Spackler, the assistant greens-keeper at Bushwood Country Club:

Am I going too far.

At the intersection of hippie-dom and good health lies beer.

Trying to absolutely minimize the carbon footprint and lose weight at the same time forces me into the following.

I have to get off my ass and work for my beer.  I may buy two(2) beers a day, but I may only buy them at the nearest store.  All beer purchased will be consumed within 72 hours.  I may only pay in cash.

So that everyone is clear on this, the closest store is "the Little Store" in Milwaukie.  This makes me smile because the boys and I have very fond memories of "The Little Store" in Vancouver that we haunted for ten or so years.

The store is located 0.75 miles away.  Every bit helps

The occasional Saturday

At 18:54 today it will be autumn.  Happy Autumnal Equinox.

A very awkward question that will probably piss some folks off.

This one will probably piss some folk off.  It really isn't meant to, but it will ask some questions that I can seem to find satisfactory answers to.  These questions will be in regards to a lot of folks cherished beliefs.

First a disclaimer.  I don't give a single fuck about what anyone over the age of sixteen does with their private parts for pleasure.  Just don't.  You can use your penis or vagina or whatever to do whatever to whoever and it doesn't bother me one tiny bit.

I would prefer that consent be obtained in all cases.  If it isn't, I feel that you should be put in prison where anyone bigger than you can do what they want to you without containing prior consent.

OK:  Now that my social ass-covering (pun intended) is complete, I will give you some background as to where this question began.  I began riding home on the Max here in Portlandia.  The traincar was reasonably full.  Split for XX and XY was pretty much 50:50.

But here is the deal that struck me.  All my fellow XY's were kinda feminine looking.  

At first I thought to myself that I was being a prejudiced dirtbag.  So I closed my eyes and tried to clear my brain.  I opened them up and got the same results.  Now I was really kind of intrigued.  As I said before, I don't care what you do or how you act, but why, in a simple random one-off sample do I get such a preponderance of similar features?

Then it struck me, and these are the questions than many will find offensive by it even being asked:

What is the long term effect of ubiquitous, low level exposure xenoestrogens to the male population?  Will it make the XY's more XX over time.  Will this impact fertility?  Will it be localized to certain areas?  

Look, this is an important question.  Adaptation to environmental conditions is natural and useful.  I make no judgement of the form that successful adaptation takes.  In a polluted and overpopulated world, maybe a more feminized, less sexually active male population is an overall adaptive strategy.

Lots of meat in this one.....I sure don't know the answer, but it is an interesting question.

Some basic reading on the issue:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1518887/pdf/envhper00367-0112.pdf

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43156560/Developmental_exposure_to_environmental_20160228-3907-tkenup.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1537497082&Signature=6UDxVstoh3FsOYDYofXm5eSrUgQ%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DDevelopmental_exposure_to_environmental.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoestrogen

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921986/

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/increasing_impact_oestrogen_pollution_through_climate_change_population_growth_456na4_en.pdf

Running on Empty

Sometimes, I just run out of things that I want to write about. Hard to argue with, but for a person who has set a goal to write every day (with as few slips as possible) the whole idea of "I got nuthin'" is awkward in the extreme.

Why it has become important to me is one of those odd things that I can't explain.  Hardly anyone stops by here, I kind of look at this digital affectation as a diary that I leave out in public and write in every day.  I can't really say that I am interested in changing the world, I just use this to keep my "holding on by my fingernails" grip on sanity in an insane world.

Today's piece is just kind of a concession to today's hexagram.  Keeping still is sometimes hard to do, but useful. Being opposed by a numerically superior opponent who doesn't share in any sort of ethical constraints really makes it imperative for a person to just wait and be calm.

Frankie, Johnnie, and the Goal.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

Pure thought is an odd thing.  I tend to believe that, if given sufficient time, I could puzzle most things out by just sitting around and thinking, then going and setting up a quick set of experiments to check my thinking.  Oh, don't get me wrong, the harder the problem, the more time I have to ponder the problem in order to work it out in my head, and the more complex the experiments.

But, it appears that pure thought alone won’t enable me to work out the really important shit, like magic and God and the fate of the world.  Now, I don't for a moment pretend that I am the only person struggling with this.  But obviously, my searching are neither novel nor unique, when you look at the few people in the world that I can admire, they all seem to be pursuing the same goal with, what appears to me, to be the same degree of success.

The goal is merely to understand.  The current zeitgeist seems to be that of taking sides.  The hunter's quest to identify prey and pull it down.  If someone is different from you, the goals that someone pursues must be evil.

The idea that opposition is not obstruction must be kept firmly in mind.  The principle of opposites allows the world to adapt to a changing cosmos. 

Syriana

When I think of George Clooney (which I make every effort not to, thank you very much) I tend to consider his role in "Syriana", which almost made me like him.  I didn't quite push him over the line to "Not-a-hollywood-douchebag", but the effort was strong enough that I no longer consider him merely a set of teeth with an ability to remember lines for a short time.

Syriana was one of the few complex movies coming out of the Bush years.  It seemed to understand the complexity of the bullshit in the middle east and showed (I think justly) that there are no clean players in that neck of the clear cut.  

Seque to the present, with mainstream media like the Wall Street Journal and the New York times dutifully laying the groundwork for WWIII by putting up headlines about how Bashar Al Assad is going to chlorine gas his own population to fulfill his deliciously double-evil plans of actually taking control of the country he rules.

The Russians are there with him.  Their bases at Latakia and Tarsus are pretty damn important to them and their air-defense and air support are there for the Syrians.  To make it even worse, the Russians are there legally.  I cannot for the life of me find any authorization, either from Syria or the United States, for the Marine artillery that we have squatting on a foreign country's soil.  Awkward that.

Now, for some reason, we Americans put up with our Presidents attacking other countries on a fairly routine basis.  I think that if you ask the residents of Kileen or Leesville, they will respond that it is better to have the boys over there raising a ruckus than here tearing up the local real estate and impregnating the younger and more gullible.

Nope, we seem to be unsatisfied with losing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 17 years.  I think that dumb Donny is becoming aware of the idea that folks are trying to pull him down and seems to be coming apart a bit.  So Johnny Bolton and the NeoCon express seem to be sliding their long-gestating half-baked plans past Dumb Donny over to Jimmy (Have a plan to kill everyone I meet) Mattis.

I am hoping that this isn't a bridge to far.  We have been at war in the Middle East since 1991.  I don't know how to tell you this folks, but we most certainly haven't done anything useful there during those twenty seven years.  

I hope that the continued doubling down works, but it seems to me that others might decide that we are the problem. 

Factions

The really shouldn't be called "Parties"  

Those . . . things we call parties are nothing of the sort.  These are unholy alliances whose sole basis of agreement is seizing and holding power solely for the sake of the privileges that can be processed from the raw material of politics and other peoples money.

Dumb Donnie and Grifter Hillary are no more in control of these abominations than an individual wave control the sea.  

The deep state that everyone is starting to notice is real.  They are the same as the Aristocracy of the Ancien Regime, every bit as greedy and privileged and powerful as what was taken down by the terror.   They are warring factions of elites with different goals.  The goals that they pursue benefit the power and privelege of themselves and their paymasters (Which aren't us).  They could give a shit less about the man on the street.

I truly think that there is a chance of bad things happening soon.  I truly hope the probability is lower than the 25% I pulled out of a waiting orifice.

Request For Proposals

You gotta love governmentese.  The title is in honor of the long ago when I spent too much time getting other people to do the shit that I wasn't capable of doing myself.  The government sector doesn't usually have the oomph to get big projects done with their staff.   The jobs are usually too big and the in-house expertise too small.

So there is usually a person working for the guvmint that knows thaat he doesn't have the juice to get the job done right, so he goes the the agency/entity and gets castigated for his lack of knowledge and general unworthiness, then the agency/entity grudgingly gives him permission to go out and find someone competent to do the job.

That person then goes out and asks folks to come up with how to do the project.  

I am not out of ideas, but as a test to see  whether anyone is reading, I am asking folks to respond to the following questions so that I can lay an ear on the zeitgeist and further writing.

So:

•  What % chance of collapse?
• Most likely scenario if chance greater than zero.
• Best guess for timeline for that scenario.

I am going to write anyway, but input would be happily accepted.