Make it so

Years ago, when I lived in Bozeman, Montana, something was going on at the federal level regarding Social Security that inspired me to organize a meeting, and to publicize that meeting on radio. I was quite the activist. It was nerve wracking, as I had no idea what the turnout would be. The subject of the meeting was the viability of the Social Security Trust Fund, and of Social Security itself. I was not receiving benefits, but since I was a wonk, I was steeped in numbers regarding the Trust Fund. I did not understand at that time that that Trust Fund was nothing more than a plot device crafted to create the illusion that benefits were threatened, and to convince young people that Social Security would not be there for them when they retired. Overall, the big picture was a movement behind corrupt senators like our then entrenched Baucus and Burns that Wall Street should be in charge of our retirements, and that the concept of “defined benefit” needed to be replaced by “defined contribution”. (If you do not understand either of those terms, now is the time to get up to speed. They are critical.)

The group I used was called “Wonderlust,” and the meeting was a huge success, even drawing a wonk from Washington to act as monitor and inspiring a huge turnout with older people asking and demanding answers to intelligent questions. What a relief! I feared a cricket fest. But to this day I regret my own lack of understanding of the nature of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all of our “entitlements”.

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Chickens come home to roost … on solar panels and windmills

Electricity Shortage Warnings Grow Across U.S.

From the Wall Street Journal, 5/8/22:

From California to Texas to Indiana, electric-grid operators are warning that power-generating capacity is struggling to keep up with demand, a gap that could lead to rolling blackouts during heat waves or other peak periods as soon as this year.

The interesting thing about the WSJ article is that the writer, Katherine Blunt, does not seem to understand that wind and solar cannot meet electrical demand, not now, not ever. Readers at this site know, or should know, that Global Warming and Climate Change are hoaxes, that the planet is not warming in any appreciable manner, in fact, not at all since 2005. The reasons behind the hoaxing … since we are all going to suffer the same fate, alarmists and realistic skeptics alike … are hard to fathom. For sure there is a great deal of stupidity among the alarmists, but Michael Mann, for instance, is not a stupid person, and is selling the hoax as real with extreme enthusiasm. Why? Is he paid to lie?

The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage. Power grids are feeling the strain as the U.S. makes a historic transition from conventional power plants fueled by coal and natural gas to cleaner forms of energy such as wind and solar power, and aging nuclear plants are slated for retirement in many parts of the country.

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Overdub this!

Overdub: to add other recorded sound or music, as a supplementary instrumental or vocal track, to a taped musical track to complete or enhance a recording.

I recently purchased a CD set containing 78 songs by the late Glen Campbell, perhaps the best all-around musician I have ever seen perform. My objective was to create a playlist on my iPhone of maybe 10-15 songs. My music library that I use when driving or working out at the gym is a large collection of classical music, too much of it. I wanted some diversity, and so lately have added the Carpenters, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, and now Glen. Man have my tastes changed over time! For each song on the Campbell CDs, the people who assembled the body of work gave full credit to the musicians who worked over the song before, during and after the vocal tract was laid down. (With Campbell, it would have been vocal and guitar, as he was among the best guitarists in the world.) Then other musicians and engineers go to work on it. For Wichita Lineman, for example, we get this:

(Song written by Jimmy Webb)

Featuring Campbell, Donald Bagley, Al Casey, Jim Gordon, Carol Kaye

Overdub musicians: Samuel Boghossian, A.D. Brisbos, Roy Canyon, Joseph DiFiore, Jesse Ahrlich, Virgil Evans, Bob Felts, Anne Goodman, Jim Horn, Dick Hyde, Norman Jeffries, Willilam Kurasch, Richard Leith, Leonard Malarsky, Michael Melvin, Wilbert Nuttycombe, Jerome Reisler, Ralph Schaffer, Sidney Sharpe, Robert Sushal, Tibor Zelig

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Dirt First!

It’s tree-planting season.  My annual order of 24 native seedlings arrived today via Fed Ex from the State nursery in Missoula, Montana. Minimum order is 24 “plugs” or bareroot stock, grown for “conservation” purposes and sold throughout the state.  This year, I selected P-pine (Ponderosa).  Last year it was juniper, and western larch the year before.  I treat this as a ritual of Spring, that for me goes way back to the mid-1980s.  The serious woman at the nursery – maybe a tree scientist —  I ordered from this year wasn’t thrilled about my selection because the seeds were gathered at a much lower elevation, and from a site West of the Continental Divide, somewhere in the Blackfoot River watershed.  I’m planting East of the divide in much poorer dirt, in a more hostile setting with less annual precipitation (drought prone) and generally lower humidity.  After a robust discussion she agreed to send my 24 Ponderosa pine. 

Ponderosa pine seedling (“plug”)

These little beauties are now in 1-gallon pots.  It didn’t take long at all.

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Sir Faul

Sir Faul

Boat photo with arrows

It all started with the boat photo, and two “Paul’s” visible. I have arrows pointing at them in the photo above. I saw this photo long before I discovered the McCartney twins, and it stuck with me. But I did not know to follow my instincts. It just struck me as very strange.

Years later (it is now 2022), I do not think the guy under the arrow on the left is Paul. The secrecy around this band would preclude any photo of the two of them together. He is someone else. But the guy in the middle (I can see his cowlick) is Mike McCartney. It is not his twin brother, Paul. Mike is the guy we today call “Macca”, or “Paul McCartney”. He is a huge phony.

We were walking through Barnes & Noble not too long ago, and I came across a book called The Lyrics, supposedly the words and stories behind all of the musical work of Paul McCartney, maybe the biggest walking impostor of a genius who ever tread on our planet. Lorne Michaels, the man behind Saturday Night Live, calls him a “fucking Mozart.” That’s OK by me, as I do not care for Mozart either. I do not buy all the stories about this child prodigy who was writing complete symphonies at age six. He was a project. So is Sir Faul. He is a guy who is perfectly comfortable taking credit for the works of scores of anonymous others. He did not write Yesterday. Neither did his brother, Paul.

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Sunday stuff

Taylor Tomlinson’s imaginary illness

I watched a performance by comedian Taylor Tomlinson last night. She is young (currently 28) and having lots of success. She’s also blue, that is, quite a big of her act involves sexual experiences and attitudes about sex and guys in general. I suppose part of that is that she is very attractive, so as with, say, Iliza Shlesinger, there is an element of imagined accessibility for guys. Neither are stunners, but both exude raw sex appeal. Most guys would fantasize that they perhaps have a shot with her. That type of fantasy does not happen with true knockouts, where guys realize they have no shot.

That’s not why I am writing about her (them). Both are very funny, and I wish them both long and prosperous careers. During Tomlinson’s act, she talked about being “manic depressive”. For anyone who does not know, that condition, sometimes referred to as a “disease” and treated with antidepressants and antispychotics, probably doesn’t exist. It is like the hundreds of disorders promoted by the DSM-5, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. There is no physical or blood or urine test that would give any indication of illness, no medical test of any kind. Like so many of the “disorders” promoted by the psychiatric profession, they are voted up or down. It’s based on symptoms, things like bouts of depression or spells of anxiety, erratic behaviors, or substance abuse.

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Endless pressure, endlessly applied.

Backyard, Bozeman, Montana. Dreaming of summer.

Wildness, wilderness and roadless areas are all words that we use to describe lands that remain as nature intended, untrammeled by man’s unquenchable thirst for comfort, convenience and attachment to shiny objects. Fragments of Montana, Idaho, Alaska and smaller parcels scattered about the Lower 48 are all that remain of the once vast wild landscape that existed before Europeans occupied (colonized) and exploited anything and everything that could be converted into gold, silver of fiat money. It was all wilderness once. Lately I’ve been reflecting on experiences and events that have influenced my life in the Northern Rockies. Yes, I’m a transplant, originally from “The East.” College in Denver, and then migrating to Missoula, Montana in the winter of 1974-75. I wrote the following piece for a group I helped to found in 1987 in Swan Lake, Montana, The Friends of the Wild Swan. wildswan.org

After 35 years of grassroots wilderness and forest-ecosystem activism, it’s worth reflecting on one of Friends of the Wild Swan’s most important accomplishments:  wildlands protection.  In 1987, the social, cultural and political climate surrounding the wilderness/roadless-areas debate was highly contentious, to put it mildly.  All across western Montana, and in the Swan Valley in particular, public outrage and resentment was growing rapidly against the rapid expansion of clearcut logging on Plum Creek’s (“checkerboard”) corporate holdings, and indiscriminate clearcutting on publicly-owned forest land managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

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Privatization: Turning The Commons Into Gold

Introduction

Thanks, Alison and Stephers, for the inspiration and love of life struggling to survive. And love the paradox.

This piece was something I wrote in 2005. A lot has changed, but the general process and trend has not. Today’s enclosure laws and regulations give to oligarchs and take from commoners. The mode of production is today, as it has ever been: colonialism.

Plight of the Commons

“By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind, the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea,” proclaimed the Roman Emperor Justinian.  Justinian’s code, the original protection of the public trust, or commons, become the law of the land in 528 A.D.  Over the centuries that have followed this precept has become widely known as the Public Trust Doctrine. 

Today, the commons face unprecedented new threats from an American 21st Century Emperor and the expansion of so-called neo-conservatism, or privatization.  From a neo-conservative perspective, laissez-faire individualism and free-market (corporate) economics, the conceptual building blocks of a bold return to medieval feudalism, offer efficiency, smaller-sized government, and greater individual choice.  Public tradeoffs or costs (public losses) are seldom discussed. 

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Of proxies and ice cores

The last post, called Some Pedagogy on Weather and Climate, showed graphs that are direct temperature measurements for the last 100 years from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. I mentioned in the comments that those temperatures may not be reliable, as Anthony Watts has studied the data gathering system, the actual instruments that report temperatures, and found that perhaps 95% of them are located on heat islands, places like airport tarmacs and parking lots. As a result, temperatures reported may be too high, and even the slight amount of warming reported in the Tisdale book, Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate may not be reliable.

I based my premise on observations that seemed to me pertinent, that our school kids do not study graphs, certainly not statistics. Consequently, when they look at complicated presentations like the Tisdale graphs, and especially the Palmer Drought Severity Index, their eyes glaze over. So I used the word “Pedagogy,” which merely means the art of teaching. What I hoped to avoid was to be “pedantic,” someone annoying. I was hoping to cross a line delicately into spreading understanding of Tisdale’s important work, which I regard sea-changing. He completely destroys the myth that our planet is warming at an alarming rate, at least for our lower forty-eight.

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Some pedagogy on weather and climate

The temptation here is to look away, I know. Recent discussions going on here about weather control have left me a little flummoxed, as even as I know such things are possible, I do not imagine that our climate can be controlled. It is simply too big to manage. I am aware of things like cloud seeding, going on for decades, and HAARP, High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a mysterious array of satellite dishes in Alaska. In June of 2021 the city of Seattle experienced incredibly high temperatures, 108 degrees on one day, shattering all records. My eyebrows arched, as Seattle is in the vicinity of HAARP. The array, allegedly funded to study the ionosphere, or outer reaches of our atmosphere, was off-limits to aircraft at the same time that Seattle/Vancouver were frying, leading to suspicion that HAARP was active during that time. I only bring this up because I want to emphasize that I am not a stranger to weather modification. That’s weather, and not “climate.”

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