Planning the Next Great Migration

Look, everyone who reads this knows that I am a JMG fanboy. To a lesser degree, Ugo Bardi is right up there too.

But these two are complete doomers. It seems that they have partnered up to explain how the laws of thermodynamics means that we are doomed, doomed I tell you. Well.....no shit sherlock. Now, I am not disagreeing with their predictions or their analysis of the past, but I think that things there are a little broad brush in my opinion.

I am not completely certain that anyone "knows without a doubt" how things were in the distant past. All the data is derived from indirect means. Long term temperature (>2000 years ago) are derived from ice cores and tree rings. These aren't "bad", but they do have margins of error that make their truth less than "absolute". I also have a sneaking hunch that the farther back you go the dicier the data. But in truth, it is the best we have and we need to use it.

Ugo is currently on a rant on how CO2 is the most terrible-ist thing ever. Well buckaroo, while it ain't great, it is just another thing that our grandchildren will have to curse us for. JMG longs for a past that never really was.

Mostly I just figure that we are just another species. We have memories of the past and predictions of the future. We have hunted species to extinction and rail against other opportunistic species. But we have also watched species die out when we had nothing to do with it.

Look, the world is constantly changing. I suppose I am a "evolutionist" in the sense that the world will be different in the future, but that happens. I see no reason to get all atwitter because things are changing and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it.

But today is a nice day. I am going to forget the problems and visit an old lady.

So I spent time the past couple of days chatting with a friend. I think that the amusing part is that we really don't have all that much different about our views of what is happening here in 'Murca, but we really don't at all see eye to eye about what made up the "before" and what will constitute the "after".

We got Donald Trump, because he was inevitable and truthfully, he is what we deserve. We have spent the last fifty years living through a rough version of Ayn Rand. We have decided that rents going to the wealthy and panem et circenses to distract the masses from the disembowelment of industry and it replacement with a casino stock market was a good idea.

Some folks came out of this paradigm sitting pretty. Some folks think that the paradigm is a good thing. The folks who lost are ignored, because the paradigm only has space for winners.

Oh granted, what is now ridiculously referred to as the "left" are a major contributor to the problem. They see the "guvmint" as an unending bowl of largesse. It never has been. There never has been a free lunch. But the "right", with its obeisance to the idea that only winners matter are equally odd.

Trump is what we deserve because he represents only money. And Citizen's United made sure that justice can bought by the rich. That little problem is the source of 90% of our current predicament. But until a majority of folks come to the idea that the greater the wealth, the greater the responsibility, and are allowed to ignore or undermine that moral imperative, we will continue to be a country of Gordon Gecko wannabes.

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I am getting used to the change in daylight. Granted the change is slow. It gets dark before eight and doesn't get light before eight and my sleep pattern change along with my ambition. So I am adjusting. Just like I have done in the past but my psyche is more brittle now and the adjustment gets harder.

As an update to my ongoing relationship to the internet, I have come to the conclusion that my shiny new, semi-cheapo Walmart MacBook M1 is a gaming system only. I log onto it when I want to rot my brain with World of Warcraft Classic. I am not going to use it for anything else.

So I have two screens, only one of which are allowed on the table at any given time. The old Lenovo running LMDE 7 is used for browsing and communication with every security safeguard I can think of running. The apple is tied to the tracking device that calls itself a "phone" which I am working out how to get rid of (or, even more important, is such a thing possible).

There is a bunch of talk out there on the net concerning AI. I don't think that anyone currently discussing this has the mental chops to wrap their heads around what is there facing us. I know that I don't and vanity lets me think that I am pretty up to date on the way the tide is turning.