boscohorowitz
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Have a glorious ride into the twilight on me, Afewknow. Just cuz we all deserve tha mucht:
But I’ll note that this — ” the ones who did not resort to ad hominem attacks and those who could operate at a higher-than-8-year-old level of thinking and analysis” commits the sin it denounces. That’s ok; hypocrisy sneaks up on us all. But my lust for certain forms of data hygiene (think of it as my personal kink) bids me to point it out.
No, I’m wrong. Who said that? Anyway, I agree with your 3 Main Points: Wonky climate, Peak Oil Blues, almost incomprehensible biological devastation.
I’d heard the 24th was doomed, but had no idea it was so doomed we’d lose Pharaoh.
“Google CEO Sundar Pichai Tells Employees They Don’t Need Money to Have Fun Amid Cost Cuts
To support his argument, Pichai referenced the days when Google was “small and scrappy.” He told employees not to equate fun with money.”I’m sure the Schwabbians appreciate this more gradual approach to owning nothing but being happy.
“I can see how there is enough doubt to check with a scan.”
You see much that is hidden, oh Tim.
Thank you for sharing that with us, Antidote. I hope your antidote is better than your cure. I can’t complain about your remarks about me or others because you voiced them frankly and directly. I can respect that even if I couldn’t shit a give what you think of me. Yes, I am a mean teetotaller.
“Anybody with a brain knows a few kids scrambling around in the dust are not mining Lithium.”
No, you’re wrong:
And no, you’re not welcome for me proving you wrong.
I believe I have a brain. In fact, I’ve seen brain scans the doc said showed my brain. But it was just a funny image.
For all I know, I have old gym socks in my head. One never knows.
“I think part (most?) of the disruption from such stuff is not that we have 16 times as many people. It is the fragility of our current “finely tuned” production and distribution systems. In general, the more a system is tuned to be efficient, the less robust it is.”
No, you’re not wrong, but only half-right.
A population bloom of 1.5 billion to 8 billion in 100 years inevitably of itself creates structures too fragile to withstand things like bad weather streaks. Post-modern civilization is (metaphorically speaking) 10% solid ground and structures, and 90% pontoon bridges connecting jerry-rigged inflated floating islands in a global polder dependent on a vast array of financial levees and consumer-driven pumps ultimately dependent on fossil fuels of which we no longer have sufficient supply to meet demand.
It’s an axiomatic tautology: the means to balloon homo sap population so much so fast is itself the reason for so much systemic fragility, both fundamentally (fossil fuel dependence) and circumstantially (a decade or three of chronically bad weather can compound devastational energy until you have more people starving than fed.
Some wise guy wrote this a fewnmonths ago:
“The fascist’s socialist economy is slowing because an increasing amount of people no longer have the will to live a natural life. Insulin bloated blobs of entertainment seeking sugar for brains. If the cure doesn’t kill them all off, a virus certainly will. Not sure what will happen to the economy if the sugar blobs aren’t around to circulate entertainment money. But when the sugar blob’s resource draw disappears, for people who make it through the coming bottleneck there will be a lot of resources made available, at least for those of us with something to defend.”
Political Science in a nutshell, repeated from today’s main queue:
THe existence of the anti-vaks article on a gubmint site tells me that the rank and file members of the NIH/CDC are beginning to do their job, something they’re legally protected.required to do. We may see a whole bunch more of such revelations from unimpeachable sources. ONce a few heads turn, most heads turn.
“The Big Guy” among Hunter’s business coterie (though listed as “Pedo Peter” on Hunter’s speed-dial”
No, you’re wrong:
Hunter Biden’s ‘Pedo Peter’ Contact Alias Is Natalie Biden’s, Daughter of Late Brother Beau
Thanx for the info, Dr. D. Rich. I love clarification the way I love the smell of coffee at dawn. And thanx for your many useful analyses (my memory’s spotty sometimes but I seem to recall you did a lot of number-crunching for us during the early confusing days of covid).
And, since he thinks I’m so special, a very special extra-parting gift for VP{
A parting gift:
A Former US Marine Corps Officer’s Analysis of the Ukraine War William Schryver Aug 18 Lt. General (retired) Paul K. Van Riper Important Update: The identity of Marinus has now been publicly disclosed in the September 2022 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. Marinus is a collaborative undertaking of the following individuals: John F. Schmitt, Bruce I. Gudmundsson, Lt. Gen. (ret) Paul K. Van Riper, Col. James K. Van Riper, and Col. Eric M. Walters. Preface This article originally appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette August 2022 issue. Authored by an apparently frequent anonymous contributor (“Marinus”) to the Gazette, it has since raised quite a ruckus among the United States military community in various online debates. There has been much speculation – by no means definitively confirmed – that “Marinus” is none other that USMC Lt. Gen. (ret) Paul K. Van Riper, a long-revered champion of many Marines, and a prominent proponent of the so-called “Maneuverists” – a school of military thought strongly influenced by the work of the incomparable military strategist John R. Boyd. Van Riper was also the iconoclastic Red team commander for the infamous 2002 Millennium Challenge war games, during which his forces (patterned after Iranian capabilities of the time) sunk the entire US naval fleet in the Persian Gulf by employing methods and capabilities the war game planners failed to consider in their rigid calculations. (I wrote about the Millennium Challenge 2002 debacle here: Lessons Never Learned.) Whether Marinus is Van Riper, or a collaboration of Van Riper with his son (as some have conjectured, given that General Van Riper is now 84-years-old), or simply some other insightful former Marine officer is, in the final analysis, probably not all that important. What is important is that his observations and perceptions of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine are lucid, enlightening, and unsullied by the rampant anti-Russian prejudice that has blinded most in the west to both the underlying causes and now the prosecution of the war in Ukraine. I highly recommend it, partly because it so strongly parallels my own analysis as originally posted in a Twitter thread on July 3, 2022, and subsequently expanded upon in a formal blog post on July 8, 2022: Destroying the Mother of All Proxy Armies in Ukraine. I freely confess that I am posting the Gazette article without permission, and therefore it may not remain long if one of their representatives requests me to take it down. After all, they have it behind a paywall, and it only appears here because I just spent most of this morning carefully transcribing it in its entirety from a series of images widely circulating online. In any case, I am strongly persuaded that the observations of Marinus contained therein ought to be shared far and wide. They serve the public interest in this unprecedented era of oppressive state-controlled social media and imperial propaganda. If the anonymous author(s) or representatives of the Gazette desire to request that I take it down, I encourage them to contact me via my Twitter account: @imetatronink – William Schryver, August 18, 2022 The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Maneuverist Paper No. 22: Part II: The mental and moral realms by Marinus When considered as purely physical phenomena, the operations conducted by Russian ground forces in Ukraine in 2022 present a puzzling picture. In the north of Ukraine, Russian battalion tactical groups overran a great deal of territory but made no attempts to convert temporary occupation into permanent possession. Indeed, after spending five weeks in that region, they left as rapidly as they had arrived. In the south, the similarly rapid entry of Russian ground forces led to the establishment of Russian garrisons and the planting of Russian political, economic, and cultural institutions. In the third theater of the war, rapid movements of the type that characterized Russian operations on the northern and southern fronts rarely occurred. Instead, Russian formations in eastern Ukraine conducted artillery-intensive assaults to capture relatively small pieces of ground. One way to shed a little light upon this conundrum is to treat Russian operations on each of the three major fronts of the war as a distinct campaign. Further illumination is provided by the realization that each of these campaigns followed a model that had been part of the Russian operational repertoire for a very long time. Such a scheme, however, fails to explain why the Russian leadership applied particular models to particular sets of operations. Resolving that question requires an examination of the mental and moral purposes served by each of these three campaigns. Raids in the North American Marines have long used the term “raid” to describe an enterprise in which a small force moves swiftly to a particular location, completes a discrete mission, and withdraws as quickly as it can. [1] To Russian soldiers, however, the linguistic cousin of that word (reyd) carries a somewhat different meaning. Where the travel performed by the team conducting a raid is nothing more than a means of reaching particular points on the map, the movement of the frequently larger forces conducting a reyd creates significant operational effects. That is, in the course of moving along various highways and byways, they confuse enemy commanders, disrupt enemy logistics, and deprive enemy governments of the legitimacy that comes from uncontested control of their own territory. Similarly, where each phase of a present-day American raid necessarily follows a detailed script, a reyd is a more open-ended enterprise that can be adjusted to exploit new opportunities, avoid new dangers, or serve new purposes. The term reyd found its way into the Russian military lexicon in the late 19th century by theorists who noted the similarities between the independent cavalry operations of the American Civil War and the already well-established Russian practice of sending mobile columns, often composed of Cossacks, on extended excursions through enemy territory. [2] An early example of such excursions is provided by the exploits of the column led by Alexander Chernyshev during the Napoleonic Wars. In September of 1813, this force of some 2,300 horsemen and two light field guns made a 400-mile circuit through enemy territory. At the middle point of this bold enterprise, this column occupied, for two days, the city of Kassel, then serving as the capital of one of the satellite states of the French Empire. Fear of a repetition of this embarrassment convinced Napoleon to detail two army corps to garrison Dresden, then the seat of government of another one of his dependencies. [3] As a result, when Napoleon encountered the combined forces of his enemies at the Battle of Leipzig, his already outnumbered Grande Armée was much smaller than it would otherwise have been. In 2022, the many battalion tactical groups that moved deeply into northern Ukraine during the first few days of the Russian invasion made no attempt to re-enact the occupation of Leipzig. Rather, they bypassed all of the larger cities in their path and, on the rare occasions when they found themselves in a smaller city, occupation rarely lasted for more than a few hours. Nonetheless, the fast-moving Russian columns created, on a much a larger scale, an effect similar to the one that resulted from Chernyshev’s raid of 1813. That is, they convinced the Ukrainians to weaken their main field army, then fighting in the Donbass region, to bolster the defenses of distant cities. Rapid Occupation in the South In terms of speed and distance traveled, Russian operations in the area between the southern seacoast of Ukraine and the Dnipro River resembled the raids conducted in the north. They differed, however, in the handling of cities. Where Russian columns on either side of Kyiv avoided large urban areas whenever they could, their counterparts in the south took permanent possession of comparable cities. In some instances, such as the ship-to-objective maneuver that began in the Sea of Azov and ended in Melitopol, the conquest of cities took place during the first few days of the Russian invasion. In others, such as the town of Skadovsk, the Russians waited several weeks before seizing areas and engaging local defense forces they had ignored during their initial advance. In the immediate aftermath of their arrival, the Russian commanders who took charge of urban areas in the south followed the same policy as their counterparts in the north. That is, they allowed the local representatives of the Ukrainian state to perform their duties and, in many instances, to continue to fly the flag of their country on public buildings. [4] It was not long, however, before Russian civil servants took control of the local government, replaced the flags on buildings, and set in motion the replacement of Ukrainian institutions, whether banks or cell phone companies, with Russian ones. [5] Like the model of the reyd, the paradigm of campaigns that combined rapid military occupation with thoroughgoing political transformation, had been part of the Russian military culture for quite some time. Thus, when explaining the concept for operations on the southern front, Russian commanders were able to point to any one of a number of similar enterprises conducted by the Soviet state in the four decades that followed Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. (These included the conquest of the countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940; the suppression of reformist governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.) [6] While some Russian formations in the south consolidated control over conquered territory, others conducted raids in the vicinity of the city of Mykolaiv. Like their larger counter-parts on the northern front, these encouraged the Ukrainian leadership to devote to the defense of cities forces that might otherwise have been used in the fight for the Donbass region. (In this instance, the cities in question included the ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa.) At the same time, the raids in the northern portion of the southern front created a broad “no man’s land” between areas that had been occupied by Russian forces and those entirely under the control of the Ukrainian government. Stalingrad in the East Russian operations in the north and south of Ukraine made very little use of field artillery. This was partially a matter of logistics. (Whether raiding in the north or rapidly occupying in the south, the Russian columns lacked the means to bring up large numbers of shells and rockets.) The absence of cannonades in those campaigns, however, had more to do with ends than means. In the north, Russian reluctance to conduct bombardments stemmed from a desire to avoid antagonizing the local people, nearly all of whom, for reasons of language and ethnicity, tended to support the Ukrainian state. In the south, the Russian policy of avoiding the use of field artillery served a similarly political purpose of preserving the lives and property of communities in which many people identified as “Russian” and many more spoke Russian as their native language. In the east, however, the Russians conducted bombardments that, in terms of both duration and intensity, rivaled those of the great artillery contests of the world wars of the twentieth century. Made possible by short, secure, and extraordinarily redundant supply lines, these bombardments served three purposes. First, they confined Ukrainian troops into their fortifications, depriving them of the ability to do anything other than remain in place. Second, they inflicted a large number of casualties, whether physical or caused by the psychological effects of imprisonment, impotence, and proximity to large numbers of earth-shaking explosions. Third, when conducted for a sufficient period of time, which was often measured in weeks, the bombardment of a given fortification invariably resulted in either the withdrawal of its defenders or their surrender. We can glean some sense of the scale of the Russian bombardments in the east of Ukraine by comparing the struggle for the town of Popasna (18 March – 7 May 2022) with the battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945.) At Iwo Jima, American Marines fought for five weeks to annihilate the defenders of eight square miles of skillfully fortified ground. At Popasna, Russian gunners bombarded trench systems built into the ridges and ravines of a comparable area for eight weeks before the Ukrainian leadership decided to withdraw its forces from the town. The capture of real estate by artillery, in turn, contributed to the creation of the encirclements that Russians call “cauldrons” (kotly). Like so much in Russian military theory, this concept builds upon an idea borrowed from the German tradition of maneuver warfare: the “battle cauldron” (Schlachtkessel). However, where the Germans sought to create and exploit their cauldrons as quickly as possible, Russian cauldrons could be either rapid and surprising or slow and seemingly inevitable. Indeed, the successful Soviet offensives of the Second World War, such as the one that resulted in the destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, made extensive use of cauldrons of both types. Freedom from the desire to create cauldrons as quickly as possible relieved the Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine from the need to hold any particular piece of ground. Thus, when faced with a determined Ukrainian attack, the Russians often withdrew their tank and infantry units from the contested terrain. In this way, they both reduced danger to their own troops and created situations, however brief, in which the Ukrainian attackers faced Russian shells and rockets without the benefit of shelter. To put things another way, the Russians viewed such “encore bombardments” not merely as an acceptable use of ordnance but also as opportunities to inflict additional casualties while engaging in “conspicuous consumption” of artillery ammunition. In the spring of 1917, German forces on the Western Front used comparable tactics to create situations in which French troops advancing down the rear slopes of recently captured ridges were caught in the open by the fire of field artillery and machine guns. The effect of this experience on French morale was such that infantrymen in fifty French divisions engaged in acts of “collective indiscipline,” the motto for which was, “we will hold, but we refuse to attack.” [7] (In May of 2022, several videos appeared on the internet in which people claiming to be Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the Donbass region explained that, while they were willing to defend their positions, they had resolved to disobey any orders that called for them to advance.) Resolving the Paradox In the early days of the maneuver warfare debate, maneuverists often presented their preferred philosophy as the logical opposite of “firepower/attrition warfare.” Indeed, as late as 2013, the anonymous authors of the “Attritionist Letters” used this dichotomy as a framework for their critique of practices at odds with the spirit of maneuver warfare. In the Russian campaigns in Ukraine, however, a set of operations made mostly of movement complemented one composed chiefly of cannonades. One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to characterize the raids of the first five weeks of the war as a grand deception that, while working little in the way of direct destruction, made possible the subsequent attrition of the Ukrainian armed forces. In particular, the threat posed by the raids delayed the movement of Ukrainian forces in the main theater of the war until the Russians had deployed the artillery units, secured the transporting network, and accumulated the stocks of ammunition needed to conduct a long series of big bombardments. This delay also ensured that, when the Ukrainians did deploy additional formations to the Donbass region, the movement of such forces, and the supplies needed to sustain them, had been rendered much more difficult by the ruin wrought upon the Ukrainian rail network by long-range guided missiles. In other words, the Russians conducted a brief campaign of maneuver in the north in order to set the stage for a longer, and, ultimately, more important campaign of attrition in the east. The stark contrast between the types of warfare waged by Russian forces in different parts of Ukraine reinforced the message at the heart of Russian information operations. From the start, Russian propaganda insisted that the “special military operation” in Ukraine served three purposes: the protection of the two pro-Russian proto-states, “demilitarization,” and “denazification.” All three of these goals required the infliction of heavy losses upon Ukrainian formations fighting in the Donbass. None, however, depended upon the occupation of parts of Ukraine where the vast majority of people spoke the Ukrainian language, embraced a Ukrainian ethnic identity, and supported the Ukrainian state. Indeed, the sustained occupation of such places by Russian forces would have supported the proposition that Russia was trying to conquer all of Ukraine. The Russian campaign in the south served direct political aims. That is, it served to incorporate territories inhabited by a large number of ethnic Russians into the “Russian World.” At the same time, the rapid occupation of cities like Kherson and Melitopol enhanced the deceptive power of operations conducted in the north by suggesting the possibility that the columns on either side of Kyiv might attempt to do the same to cities like Chernihiv and Zhytomyr. Similarly, the raids conducted north of Kherson raised the possibility that the Russians might attempt the occupation of additional cities, the most important of which was Odessa. [8] Guided Missiles The Russian program of guided missile strikes, conducted in parallel to the three ground campaigns, created a number of moral effects favorable to the Russian war effort. The most important of these resulted from the avoidance of collateral damage that resulted, not only from the extraordinary precision of the weapons used, but also from the judicious choice of targets. Thus, Russia’s enemies found it hard to characterize strikes against fuel and ammunition depots, which were necessarily located at some distance from places where civilians lived and worked, as anything other than attacks on military installations. Likewise, the Russian effort to disrupt traffic on the Ukrainian rail system could have included attacks against the power generating stations that provide electricity to both civilian communities and trains. Such attacks, however, would have resulted in much loss of life among the people working in those plants as well as a great deal of suffering in places deprived of power. Instead, the Russians chose to direct their missiles at traction substations, the remotely located transformers that converted electricity from the general grid into forms used to move trains. [9] There were times, however, when missile strikes against “dual use” facilities gave the impression that the Russians had, in fact, targeted purely civilian facilities. The most egregious example of such a mistake was the attack, carried out on 1 March 2022, upon the main television tower in Kyiv. Whether or not there was any truth in the Russian claim that the tower had been used for military purposes, the attack on an iconic structure that had long been associated with a purely civilian purpose did much to reduce the advantages achieved by the overall Russian policy of limiting missile strikes to obvious military targets. The Challenge The three ground campaigns conducted by the Russians in Ukraine in 2022 owed much to traditional models. At the same time, the program of missile strikes exploited a capability that was nothing short of revolutionary. Whether new or old, however, these component efforts were conducted in a way that demonstrated profound appreciation of all three realms in which wars are waged. That is, the Russians rarely forgot that, in addition to being a physical struggle, war is both a mental contest and a moral argument. The Russian invasion of Ukraine may mark the start of a new cold war, a “long twilight struggle” comparable to the one that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire more than three decades ago. If that is the case, then we will face an adversary who, while drawing much of value from the Soviet military tradition, has been liberated from both the brutality inherent in the legacy of Lenin and the blinders imposed by Marxism. What would be even worse, we may find ourselves fighting disciples of John R. Boyd. Notes [1] Headquarters Marine Corps, MCWP 3-43.1, Raid Operations (Washington, DC: 1993). [2] For the adoption of the concept of the “raid” by the Russian Army of the late nineteenth century, see Karl Kraft von Hohenlobe-Ingelfingem (Neville Lloyd Walford, translator), Letters on Cavalry, (London: E. Stanford, 1893); and Frederick Chenevix Trench, Cavalry in Modern Wars, (London: Keegan, Paul, Trench, and Company, 1884). [3] For a brief account of the reyd, which was led by Alexander Chernyshev, see Michael Adams, Napoleon and Russia, (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). [4] John Reed and Polina Ivanova, “Residents of Ukraine’s Fallen Cities Regroup under Russian Occupation,” The Financial Times, (March 2022), available at https://www.ft.com. [5] David M. Glantz, “Excerpts on Soviet 1938-40 Operations from The History of Warfare, Military Art, and Military Science, a 1977 Textbook of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, (Milton Park: Routledge, March 1993). [6] The classic work on the French mutinies of 1917 is Richard M. Watt, Dare Call It Treason, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1963). [7] Michael Schwirtz, “Anxiety Grows in Odessa as Russians Advance in Southern Ukraine,” The New York Times, (March 2022), available at https://www.nytimes.com. [8] Staff, “Russia Bombs Five Railway Stations in Central and Western Ukraine,” The Guardian, (April 2022), available at https://www.the-guardian.com. [9] For an example of the many stories that characterized the 1 March 2022 television tower strike as an attack on civilian infrastructure, see Abraham Mashie, ”US Air Force Discusses Tactics with Ukrainian Air Force as Russian Advance Stalls,” Air Force Magazine, (March 2022), available at https://www.airforcemag.com.
No, you’re wrong.
And, as always, I reach a point where I’ve had my fill of yez and you’ve had your fill of me.
I am proud to say that this is definitely not true of me:
Not that y’all aren’t decent enough people, as people go on the average, but that if you’ve seen one clique, you’ve seen ’em all, and I don’t like what I see. Primates in groups are devil’s daycare. Online, it’s like Lord of the Flies but with humanity’s vain folly and ultimate downfall: words. To cite VP’s favorite line: one big throbbing collective ego.
Which is by no means to say that everyone here is in the clique. Clique is not about membership in a group; it’s about one’s perception of oneself in that group. Brave New World, Animal Farm, both dealt with the concept. Many people here participate without engaging in clique behavior. But those whose egos (oops, there’s that word again!) find validation in being a member of a group (like TAE) will inevitably form hierarchies, unannounced, subtle, often invisible to its members, and from there a certain kind of tree fort chauvinism kicks in.
As for cross-dresing, I confess:
Be kind to yourselves, individuals. It not only feels good but helps you be kind to others. I can’t cite university studies, only anecdotal evidence. But I’m right. No no no no no no no no…..
Oh, go fuck yourself with a diseased orangutan, VP, you phony old pedantic charlatan afraid to look his own ego in the mirror so he projects it onto everyone who doesn’t fawn on him.
You’re hilarious, but I dislike sick humor.
P.S. You forgot to call me a black man who of course prefers anal sex. Not that I mind a little racism: we’re all racist under the skin. But I prefer it be done with a least a smidgeon of class, or that lacking, an ability to enter a room without tripping over your shoelaces. It’s as if God invented the eye roll for you:
No, you’re wrong. (Don’t everybody thank me at once.)
A crisis is a relative thing. Weather that 600 years ago would impact a global population of “only 500-600 million, maybe a few hundred at most, like the infamous Little Ice Age, would now impact a global pop of 8 billion, 16 times as many people.
It only takes a decade of really wicked weather to crumble a global food/essentials economy like ours. But let’s ignore that and focus instead on how evil so-and-so is. Bad bad men! Let’s make him go to jail with Donald Trump! Orange IS the new black!
Often, the only problem we discussants really have is that someone disagrees with us.
“I’m fairly certain none of us are flying around in private jets for the day to shoe shop in Paris …”
Speak for yourself. 😉
No, aspnaz, we’re currently experiencing a climate crisis. Last ten years have been major icky and hammered a lot of shit. You may want to quibble about ‘weather’ vs ‘climate’ or, for that matter, ‘crisis’ but quibbles are the junk food of discourse.
The Dust Bowl of the 30s was a climate crisis. It wasn’t just a bad year, i.e., bad weather. It was devastating pattern albeit just a brief eddy in the larger climate picture.
Also, because you enjoy the word so much, let’s say it again: No. No no no… (bosco wonders away saying ‘no’ to himself repeatedly like a 5-year old first discovering the power and majesty of that mystery word, ‘Fuck’, delighted by his discovery.)
I’ma start every post I make with ‘No’ from here on out just so I haven’t missed disagreeing with anyone I even *might* disagree with. I’ma practice now:
‘No, you’re wrong. My TAE handle isn’t boscohorowitz, it’s boscohorowitz. Uh, the z is silent.’
Kinda corny but that’s it’s charm? Seems like we could use a good old-fashioned Woodstock Era future global war revolution fantasy about now. Oh, those early Boomers. They thought they had power. And they did, but ultimately had no idea how to use it other than to get high and make babies.
Still, let’s sing a war chantey as we load the depleted uranium shells like so many sandbags along a floodline human chain:
I mean, lyrics like this give sophomorism a freshly dulled edge:
In nineteen hundred and seventy-five all the
People rose from the countryside to move against
You government man d’you understand locked
Together hand in hand all through this unsteady land–
Gonna roll roll roll the rock around roll roll roll the rock
Around lift the rock out of the ground
at the Battle of Forever Plains all my people hand
In hand in hand in the rain the laser way won the day
Without one single living soul going down the government
Troops were circled in the sun gun found themselves on the
Run… from our nation the rock is raised no need to hide from
The other side now… transformation
call high to the constellation headquarters call high to the
Most high directors send out the transporting systems and
Send out the sun finders
Thirteen battalion of mind raiders three hundred master
Computer killers from great platforms in the mountains
Twenty mile lasersBut it’s like cheap porn: you know you wanna…
I once worked as a seating host in a restaurant.
Some old wag entering, said, winking, “Are you our lovely young hostess?”
“Depends on what you’re looking for in a man.” (I’ve used that line many times since then.)
Same with me looking for a few good men. Everyone has a different criteria and mine is rather precisely delineated. (Y’all have seen a few heated examinations of that delineation between me and a few of TAE’s older regulars.) But that’s just me and my little slice of reality. One thing I can say, however, is that a “man” “good” enough for my purposes wouldn’t blink an eye at my remark. The person I would deem “good enough” wouldn’t much care what I thought of him or others, knowing that it takes all kinds and that a consensus definition of what a “good man” is fails upon close definition, especially in terms of, er, applied human engineering (action) versus abstract valuations (talk).
As Groucho Marx said, “Any exclusive club that would admit me isn’t exclusive enough.”
One might also ask: Good enough for what? Good enough for me to trust them to keep their head while shit falls apart around them. (Also note that I have no clue if I would be good enough for someone good enough for me to trust my back to during seriously harsh times.) I’ve stopped looking, as I mentioned, and now hope that maybe a few good men will find me and deem me good enough.
We’re all pretty good humen. Again, it depends on what you’re looking for in a humen. Me, I got kinda severe tastes born of an oddly severe life and perspective.
I believe we’re all good enough humen when there’s something/someone (especially someone) we deem good enough to submit ourselves to in fealty or even raw unabashed love, that most dangerous and delightful of all conditions where the ego briefly disappears long enough to give us some blessed rest and, if I dare so, a taste of God’s Own private stash.
I’m Gonna Be That Man If I Can
I am blessed for over 30 years to enjoy the company of a woman who deems me good enough. But so far, I’ve only found at least one “man” good enough for a mighty jungle king like me, and that “man” is a female dog named Junebug. Boy, is she good enough. Toughest truest “man” I know.
“FWIW: an article about el Ninos from 8 years ago. ‘El Niños 10,000 years ago were as strong and frequent as the ones we experience today’.”
Note the context, however:
“Here, we present a reconstruction of ENSO in the eastern tropical Pacific spanning the past 10,000 years derived from oxygen isotopes in fossil mollusk shells from Peru. We found that ENSO variance was close to the modern level in the early Holocene and severely damped ~4000 to 5000 years ago. In addition, ENSO variability was skewed toward cold events along coastal Peru 6700 to 7500 years ago owing to a shift of warm anomalies toward the Central Pacific. The modern ENSO regime was established ~3000 to 4500 years ago. ”
It changes. A LOT. Point being that resemblance between now and 10,000 years ago should not be confused with now being “business as usual”. Anyone saying they know how to predict the climactic future is almost certainly misinformed.
The specter of global warming grew in gradual tandem with the specter of fossil fuel depletion, but the latter was obscured by the promise of atomic power “too cheap to bother to meter” while the former got kick-started for political reasons.
So now we have hysterical greenies seeing climate disasters in every thunderstorm, and rabid anti-greenies claiming that we have no oil supply crisis because politicians are lying about global warming.
You think this is bad, you shoulda seen the shit we did to each other when the early days of fossil fuel extraction, coupled with emerging machine technology, made slavery no longer a profitable MO. We had to kill bunches of each other to accept that. (The expression “Get a horse!” was often shouted derisively at early automobile drivers of those noisy smelly dangerous contraptions. I don’t know that people felt so free to holler “Get a slave!” to factory personnel when modern tech made it more profitable to make the whole populace wage slaves with blacks and such as lower-tier backup. Nowadays we holler “Get a life!” (or at least a job). Not sure what that means but it kinda scares me.
“Climate crisis” is not synonymous with long-term climate forecasts (long term in human terms, i.e., a few centuries). We’re currently experiencing a climate crisis, but whether that is caused by human activity or Yahweh’s irritable bowel syndrome, and whether it will last to the end of this decade or for centuries, no one can honestly say.
But almost everyone who says anything about global climate disruption will say Yea or Nay because few like to stand alone even if only because they’re currently undecided.
I don’t think Afewknow is a troll although anything’s possible these days. Some days I’m a troll and don’t know it. I do note that a Afewknow is prone to be shrill and toss words like “dumbshits” into a room full of crowded opinions. How much is frustration from years of proselytizing a hopeless cause, and how much is just the usual contempt born from a sense of alienation, I dunno, and have to marvel that I’m bothering to talk about it.
But we seem to want to label each other of late even more than usual, and we usually love to label everything.
I have no idea why he harps on about anthropogenic global climate disruption since he believes (as do I) that we’ll do zip about it whether it is or isn’t a real problem. I suspect that part of the reason is that, like most of us, he enjoys proclaiming that which he believes is right if it seems important enough.
Me, I like to exchange info, challenge assumptions and dogmas, turn things inside out, cognitively Klein-bottle their ass, and watch us homo saps make silly petty spectacles of ourselves as we fulminate on right and wrong and truth and falsehood and the True Meaning of It All. It’s fascinating to watch. I was once told I view the TAE crowd as an entomologist views an ant farm. It wasn’t true at the time. At the time, I was looking for a few good men. But, having failed at that, I now find myself studying our weaknesses so I can better deal with them when weakness becomes more expensive, even deadly so.
“😉
Tell us in what condition O2 becomes the drive.”I’m getting too old for that stuff but sex used to be all about the Big O(and was it good for you)2? 😉
This is how low and lost mainstream media has become:
” ‘Sham’ referendums on joining Russia underway in occupied parts of Ukraine”
So, CNN, are they real shams or sham shams,and are those real shams “really” real shams, or are they just really “sham” shams, or… comes a point where plausible deniability becomes undeniably absurd.
Anyway, here’s to real pain to my sham friends, and champagne to my real friends.
‘The drive to breath is independent of carbon dioxide, CO2, with few exceptions…
_Haldane’I don’t know why this misinformation occurred in the thread.
The urge to breathe is triggered by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the blood.
Methinks the Haldane quote is not Haldane, or is poorly mangled.
“Although the Oxford Conferences began in 1978 as a result of the inspiration of Dan Cunningham and others at the University Laboratory of Physiology in Oxford, the roots of the meetings can be traced to John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) and his colleagues at the turn of the century. Indeed, the Laboratory (or its predecessor) has had an exemplary persistence (some might say an obsession) with the role of oxygen and, particularly, carbon dioxide in the control of breathing for over 100 years. An early key paper was that by Haldane and J.G. Priestley in 1905, “The regulation of the lung ventilation,” where careful measurements of the Pco2 in alveolar gas under a variety of conditions showed its critical role in control.”
But I’ll note that while CO2 triggers the involuntary breath reflex, we then focus on how good oxygen feels in our lungs, and I don’t think that our awake breathing is as involuntary as the word sounds. The spark that drives an internal engine cylinder’s combustion cycle at top dead center just a wee moment in the cycle. A catalyst is not the whole process. A reflex is not necessarily the urge. Obviously, breathing to regulate CO2 is, well, driven by CO2, and that is something the body does involuntarily. But the desire to breathe is itself obviously all about oxygen.
I see it as CO2 being the little yappy dog reminding its owner to let it out to pee, while the urge to go for a walk is itself the primary driver of the leash both for dog and human. Not that I’m claiming to know what Haldane meant if that quote were genuine, which I doubt. It’s not here: THE REGULATION OF THE LUNG-VENTILATION. BY J. S. HALDANE, M.D., F.R.S., AND J. G. PRIESTLEY, B.A. (Eleven Figures in the Text.) (From the Physiological Laboratory, Oxford.)
As for our aspiring global overlords and the faith so many place in them as driving architects of structural global dystopia capable of inflicting their evil will upon us pretty much no matter what: we like order and meaning. We take comfort amid these feelings of powerlessness (ultimately self-inflicted, I’ll note) by feeling that we at least know at Whom to Fling Poo.
R-r-r-r-OCK-e-feller… R-r-r-r- OTH-s-child…. Bil-l-l-l-iam Gates….
I think that being raised on formulaic Hollywood/TV whodunnits etc. add to this aspect considerably. It’s also something of an inversion of the delusion we’re all taught that if we vote for the Good Guy that’s all we need to worry about.
Here’s a tiny mish-mash from the “hot spot” link in Carpenter’s Climate change debunk link:
“On the flip side, the recent “hiatus” in global warming can be explained by more frequent La Ninas, according to D’Aleo.
“It is an accepted fact that El Ninos bring global warmth and La Ninas cooling,” D’Aleo said. “It is thus not at all surprising that the period from 1947 to 1977 brought cooling, 1977 to 1997 warming and we had a flat trend from 1997 to current.”
Well then, what do we know about long-term la nina or el nino? Sure, “they’re prone to cluster” as is everything in this cosmos from tachyons to lumpy gravy. But, as John Day pointed out about my climate graphs: we don’t know much at all about ancient weather. We have to infer via myriad methods employing the more-or-less scientific method, but we can’t empirically confirm the conjectures because we can’t go back in time. Likewise, we can’t empirically refute the conjectures because we can’t go forward in time to see what the longer larger patterns really are.
Just because you’ve observed a pattern that you think is natural doesn’t mean it’s natural. When Europeans reached America en masse, they were awed by its wild lush “natural” state. But it wasn’t natural. The vast forest and populations of wild critters was an out-of-whack oscillation created by the first century or so of Europeans wiping out (mostly by dint of pandemics) the humans who had previously tended much of the Americas as their own vast garden, groomed forest, fish ponds, etc…. what they thought was natural was more like the almost freakish abundance of wildlife around Chernobyl once the worst of the radiation subsided. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
Nature fills vacuums, I’m told.
So the science sucks all around. Greenies and anti-greenies both suck. (But at least greenies have a name of their own.)
Everybody and their mother rushed the gate to prove global warming is right or wrong. People very much tend to do that, and science is done by people. Most of our science is mostly bunk these days, a victim of science’s success to the point where it went from being a rich man’s hobby to being the best path for a poor man to become rich. The sound science we have these days is that on which engineering relies, and there we see increasingly crappy technology either made or proposed based on otherwise good science. Why, hello, Mr. Musk. What a silly-looking white tux you have!
Do we know that humans are definitely causing climactic disruption? Not that I know of. Do we know that it isn’t? Nyet. Do we know that we’re throwing enough crap into the atmosphere to warrant considering a) the long-term effect of reliance on fossil fuels, especially since we used them to go from 1.5 billion to 8 billion of us in a century, and b) what the fuck we gonna do when we run out of fossil fuels within a century or two of being forced to use less and less whether we like it or not because it’s become too expensive?
We are left with the original anthropogenic global climate disruption conjecture: billions of homo saps burning billions of barrels of oil and billions of tons of coal, etc., might be wise to pay close attention to the weather and prepare for it. “Prepare for it” of itself says NOTHING about reducing carbon, etc. Homes that need scant heating/cooling would be excellent preparation. Not turning coasts into vast housing tracts but instead leaving them as commons except for harbors and ports, that would be preparation. Learning not to use cars for EVERYTHING would be savvy. Not using oil to make EVERYTHING would also be clever.
Rather than deal with reality responsibly, we’d rather choose sides and fling poo, as has ever been the primate way of resolving resource issues. But now we throw thermonuclearly explosive poo.
my parents said know seems uncommonly inspired of late.
I say that it is better to have something that others might steal than to have no choice but to attempt theft.
Alexander Carpenter’s link debunking anthropogenic climate change has some excellent data but employs many of the obfuscations (mostly unawaredly, I’m sure; it’s the standard MO) we see from the green uber alles crowd that believes global warming is THE big existential threat.
The logical fallacies in it could raise the Titanic from the swamp gas it emits. Combine it with the green crowd’s vast litany of logical fallacies, and we might even raise Atlantis. But whatever you do, don’t take my word for it. But this guy, he is gospel truth:
I concur with Afewknow’s remarks on CO2.
Different climates had different atmospheres.
Here’s a cute graph:
” Carbon dioxide concentrations dropped from 4,000 parts per million during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago to as low as 180 parts per million during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years.[2]”
You’ll see that the Ice Ages, which began a mere 2.4 million years ago, coincide with a major drop over the aeons in C)S levels. Before the Ice Ages, the world tended to be a lot warmer overall.
It’s not complicated — until one adds politics to the mix. Right-wing, left-wing, headless chicken-wings, none of it makes for good science, only for self-serving bullshit.
Another cute graph:
I would be hesitant to blame on geopolitical anxiety any perceived sense of elevated tension among TAE discussants. People cut throats daily on Youtube comment threads over the silliest things, and we are people.
Rainforest is not arable land until it is turned into arable land. NYC is quite arable if you remove an entire city, remove the toxins it put into the soil and water, and work the soil into farmable land. In practical terms that will feed people during this decade this remains true:
“…the world’s arable land was already fully dedicated to the task of feeding the world’s huge present-day population.”
Meanwhile, said arable land is fastly eroding into the oceans and being turned into sand-plus-chemical fertilizers.
The outcry over the prisoner swap cracks me up. These are people, soldiers, not Pokemon cards. Russian blogosphere is as arrogant and bloodthirsty as any.
Someone was foolish enough to ask me what I think. Well, (mumbles)….
“Sudden Adult Dirt Syndrome”
I’m all for it. I don’t what manner of political sahyte-hay the losers-in-charge make of it. They turn everything to shit regardless. What’s the diff?We extract vast amounts of life, mostly via suffering imposed on other critters, and then we deny even the worms our flesh.
Bury me please in the lone prairie
Closing remark: the anthropocentric world is falling apart, more or less as predicted going way back to lunatic tomes like Revelations (oh, that good Palestinian acid!). The various Herods and Neros of the world seem like good enough targets to blame, kinda like ducks in a barrel (or canards in a soundbite), but really, it’s an ancient daisy chain and while most of us aren’t in that exclusive club and its orgies of greed, we do like to watch. A hypnotic kind of anti-porn that rapes you as you watch, transfixed and condemnatory with throbbing erect index finger pointing at the news screen and a squeeze tube of lubricating epithets or, per a Firesign Theater quote: “It’s like dogs fucking in the street: I TRY not to watch, but…”
A deft defenestration of a babbling imbecile whom history will probvably regard similarly to, oh, Marcus Garvey or the Reverend of the Jonestown Massacre: a well-meaning but dangerous crank who encouraged a lot of reckless dangerous bullshit but didn’t kill all that many people compared to, say, the world’s weekly auto fatality number.
Meanwhile, my billion-dollar question is still: what on earth or beyond is going through PUtin’s mind regarding domestic public health? Maybe he just fucked up but is in too deep now to fix it and meanwhile, he has this existential war to finish.
Deliberate sabotage? Yes, I say, if one considers that squeezing profit at the expense of necessary maintenance and upgrades is sabotage:
Nice slow gradual sabotage, with maximum plausible deniability, and like going broke, happens gradually and then all at once. I don’t see anyone trying to bring the masses to their knees and enslave them besides a few crackpots who are good at gaming summits and getting them into the news. To me, KLaus Schwabb is less crazy than Elon Musk, and less dangerous.
Schwabb doesn’t really comand much of anything. and isn’t very rich, a pipsqueak, really. Elon gets entire regions turned into lithium mine devastations (a ‘devastory’).
