Reading

Diary: Lawdy, Lawdy my how things change

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.

Diary: Curmudgeon

P. Dropped by last night on the way to one of his innumerable meetings. Had a nice chat, except for when the chats briefly and mistakenly veered into the realm of politics. We managed to pull away in time, chastened by a near-collision.

The people who should avoid politics in private discussions are old men. To a slightly lesser degree, old women. This is because not that these discussions aren't useful to some people, but oldsters tend to forget the mass of compromises that necessarily come with anything political.

[20171111_120642.jpg]

Diary: Amused

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.

[P4080006.JPG]

Maybe Format Will Have to Change

OK: I have been noodling around with the post-by-mail function here in Dreamwidthland. It appears (see previous post) that you can post photos using the post-by-mail function. Excellent news (well, not really news, it is just what happens when you spend the time reading the FAQ's.)

If you read this, and you see a picture below, then I can use the email function to post the pictures that I took recently. This is a test message to see if I understood what the FAQ said. As with all FAQ's and technical manuals, they conform to Captain Barbarosa's observations:

"First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate's code to apply and you're not. And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.

So here goes, if you don't see a picture below this, then I don't understand the guidelines quite yet.

Picture Text

[IMG_2088.jpg]

Diary: More on Pictures

I think that the main reason I sort of stopped putting pictures at the front of every post is twofold. The first is that dashing of a quick post is much easier when using the “post by email” option that Dreamwidth has so kindly provided. Maybe I could use the email posting to post pictures, but the thought of researching that just doesn’t appeal to me. So, If you see a “diary” post with no pictures, I am just dashing something off while drinking my coffee.

The second reason that I don’t is the awkward and semi-hostile relationship that I have with my fucking cell phone and the corporate structures behind it. Look, I got an iPhone because I get great little movies of my grand-daughter. But, like it or not, it is a great camera. Hell, even the old Motorola android that it replaced had a great camera. My actual camera collects dust. It is even quite a good camera (Olympus TG-6), but it is a descendant of the concept of “camera” which involved post-processing. This is where I am having some issues.

I suppose it is a vestige of the concept of “ownership” that I struggle with. I am not a commie, but I am fairly certain that a mortal human being really can’t “own” anything. When your luck finally runs out and the road to your long home is shown to you, you can’t take anything from this mortal coil. But for some reason, I have attached my concept of ownership to things like the images that reflect what I see around me.

For some silly reason, the places that these images are stored and the corporate entities that provide the storage service. I am not comfortable with the simple concept that these pictures are out somewhere on the internet and I have no idea who is seeing them. Now, the simple truth is, the chance that someone cares about what I see on my walks is miniscule. But for some reason, I chafe against the possibility.

The same thing goes for the writing. I like Dreamwidth because they remind me of small town hippiness which is my ideal for “internet”. But the writing interface is clunky along with the image storage. But that is a price that I am more than willing to pay for the deliberately out of the way backwater that it has created. But when I am feeling lazy and don’t want to go through the gyrations of uploading pictures and writing on the clunkiness, I sneak over to Google Docs and write stuff out there, inserting the pictures and then cut and past the whole thing into Dreamwidth’s interface and voila, a nicely formatted piece of internet ephemera.

So really, what people are observing when my posts aren’t as “pretty” as I would like is an odd combination of laziness and a crotchety old man raging against the structure of a world that he has no real control over. I just need to get over it, realize that the concept of privacy will always rub up against Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and the real history of the internet is how society deals with the reconciliation of these two ideas.

So the end message is that I have to figure out Dreamwidth's picture embedding. It can't be all that hard and it might well be even simpler than embedding graphics in WordPerfect 4.2 that I mastered back in the 80's

Diary: A Cruise Missile is Just an Old, Expensive Drone

I do listen to folks, so I will start plugging in pictures occasionally.
-----------
Folks gotta remember, the Tomahawk was first put together back in the 1970’s, in the days of the PDP-11 computers and the yellow pages phone book. GPS was just a prototype satellite. The Abrams tank was still on the drawing board and our M-60’s were still facing off T-62’s across the Fulda gap.

Reach back in your memory. Little Donny Trump, during his last administration fired a buttload of these wunderwaffen into Syria and didn’t even manage to inconvenience the Assad regime. Rumor has it that at the time, most of the missiles fired were spoofed by the godless rooskies and only blew up very inconsequential pieces of desert. Unless my memory has failed me, the airfield that they were fired at was operational the next day. Rumors were also bandied about that the S-300’s that the Russians had sold to the Syrians also did a fair job of bringing some down. My memory is that the military brass shut up and wouldn’t talk about it.

So, when I hear that we could possibly be providing these drones to the Ukies, who don’t really have a great reputation for utilizing equipment we give/sell them anyway, you can understand why the process holds no particular fear for me.

We won’t be giving the Ukrainians the latest iterations of these. They will be the oldest that we still have in stock. We definitely won’t be giving the latest version, because the chance that one of them will end up in a Russian factory for analysis is too great.

Look, warfare has changed greatly. Drones are a big deal and the technology is advancing absurdly fast. The introduction of an ancient model drone will change nothing on the battlefield. But it just might piss the Russians off more so than they are already pissed off.

I can’t really say that it seems to be that great an idea.

Diary: Reversions

Nijubashi (Bridge to the Imperial Palace) from the series Scenes of Last Tokyo

Koshiro Onchi

I have been pondering my visual contributions to this blog. I am going to try and revert to my older practice of skimming through Wikiart and plopping in a work that: 1) catches my eye while I am going, and 2) is in landscape format.

So, I am feeling a touch paranoid today. Not serious, just a realization that the outcomes I was hoping for are not in the realm of the possible currently and while my previous choices have me in a place where I will probably do just fine, the results are increasingly "baked in" and all I can do is watch. I am certain that this attitude will annoy and perhaps even anger some folks out there, but that is the way that I see it.

The outcome of this doesn't change anything. I have long since lost the illusion that outside of a very small circle, my opinion on any matter really doesn't matter. Who I have to deal with is the folks out there who still think that there opinion means something outside of their very small circle.

Our government/culture is in play right now. Samuel Huntington's ghost is having a beer somewhere with a "told you so" smirk on his face. Francis Fukuyama is working hard to explain that what he wrote was misconstrued (and dismally failing).

Trump is not the brightest light ever to occupy the Oval Office. He is not going to change the course of history. He doesn't have the tools, either intellectually or organizationally to effect any change. But the truth of the matter is, there is no one on the horizon who does. The choices left to the leadership of this country are bad choices that will change a lot of peoples lives. Simply put, there is nowhere to go but down.

JMG made a cutesy little phrase back in his Archdruid days that I both love and hate. "Collapse now and Avoid the Rush". Mostly I dislike it because the word "Collapse" is so fucking overused nowadays and "Karen-ish" that the drama applied to it just wears on me. I have been using a phrase for ten years now: "Calibrate your expectations".

Look, we are going to be reverting to mean. Don't get excited and definitely don't believe people who claim that they have a map to any promised land.

Diary: Mornings

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.