Technically the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere is March 20.
That’s the official calendar and Equinox date.
My dog, the trees in the yard, and the flower beds, have a slightly different perspective.
The dog is shedding… A LOT! In the past 2 weeks he’s dropped most of his undercoat.
He’s a husky mix and as near as I can tell he’s got three different layers of fur. The outer coat is longish and seems built to shed snow, water, and ice. The mid coat is pretty dense and looks like it’s built as a wind breaking layer. The under coat is fluffy and reminds me of my down jacket.
That last coat is also prone to static attraction, and flies around the house when I’m running the vacuum. I caught myself chasing little bits of fluff with the vacuum the other day and suddenly understood why the vacuuming chore was taking twice as long as usual.
When he starts shedding the undercoat, he’s also more prone to matting so I’ve been brushing him every other day.
You’d think, “Oh, that’s nice…” You’d be wrong. The dog thinks that brushing is a game. So he plays and spins and tries to keep the brush away.
Admittedly, it’s funny.
What’s not funny is that after the brushing is done. I’m covered head to toe in static charged downey fur and I look a lot like a Yeti. (Brushing is best done outside, prior to a shower, or putting on clean clothes.)
I also try to brush him when there are no breezes. The neighbors probably don’t like clumps of fur the size of small rabbits blowing across their lawns.
Brushing him outside made me notice the large pine trees are greening. There are buds on some of the ground cover plants. As the snow recedes, I’m seeing the work that I’ll have to do in the yard.
I’m seeing greening of the maple in the front yard and sprouts in the flower beds.
If the temps remain warm, I’ve got a plan to fire up the chainsaw and vigorously prune the Apache Plume which has become a little too wild for my tastes. It’s a neat plant but this one has become rather large and threatens to take over the planet.
I need to fence off the vegetable beds. The dog loves digging in the soft soil. That’s great for him, (ahem,) but I want to grow vegetables this year. I don’t want to plant a bunch of vegetables only to have to battle the dog and rabbits. The rabbits are enough of a challenge!
Last year, the vegetable garden wasn’t remotely possible because the dog was new to the household and had no sense of boundaries. I’ve concluded that he still has no sense of boundaries and that a fence will be necessary.
While I’m fencing off the vegetable beds, I’m thinking I’ll fence off the area under the main deck. (Again to keep the dog out of that area. He likes to dig for buried treasure and an unknown number of toys have disappeared into the abyss under that deck.)
The overall plan is to get the spring gardening out of the way, which will make room for my trim and house painting projects.
It’s at these times that I wish I had a pick up truck. I’d like to be able to take cuttings and other stuff to the dump on my schedule instead of stacking it, then borrowing or renting a truck.
There are also a lot of little building projects that I’m thinking about doing.
I’d enjoy doing the projects, but I’m light on tools to accomplish the tasks. I could see myself spending $800 bucks in tools to assemble $150 in projects.
I suppose it really comes down to would I get $800 worth of pleasure and satisfaction out of the work.
Forget the lumber costs! Even decent sawhorses are obscenely expensive these days. Then there’s the issue of being able to store the tools when not in use. The other half also doesn’t much in the way of boundaries in the garage. It’s a royal pain in the butt to climb over all kinds of junk to get to my tools.
I suppose, I can start by cleaning and reorganizing the garage while it’s still too cool to work in the yard. Then I can do the yard work, rent a truck and take all of the crap to the dump. Once that’s done, I can begin the building projects.
It’s a bit like pulling a loose thread on a sweater, one thing leads to another, and another, then before you know it, your sweater is just a pile of yarn.
I’m tired just thinking about it! Oh well, I’ve got a few weeks to think on it.
That compound miter saw looks awfully nice though…
A New York Post article dated Feb 9, 2022 and another article in Law Enforcement Today talk about a DHS Bulletin describing the current heightened state of alert regarding threats to the nation.
There was a similar article yesterday in Breitbart. I’m not linking to that one. Some of these articles engaged in hyperbole suggesting that the DHS said If you question the Government you might be a terrorist. At least one article referred to Secretary Mayorkas press conference where he may have misstated or overstated the DHS Bulletin.
Titles like:
“We are all terror threats? DHS says “mistrust of US government” means you may be a terrorist“
While not incorrect, may lead a casual reader to incorrect conclusions.
The DHS Bulletin is uh, concerning, in one regard. I think it is worthy of noting the line that seems to have generated the attention.
“the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions;”
To anyone raised in the 1960’s or 1970’s that line would raise eyebrows.
In those decades it was commonplace for the younger generation to apply the thinking, Question Everything, Don’t trust the MAN (meaning government), Trust no-one over 30.
These were turbulent decades. Mounting evidence that the American People had been lied to about many things peaked with the Watergate Scandal and President Nixon’s subsequent resignation.
For many, the revelations were heart breaking. Up to that time, it was sort of accepted as truth that our government was operating in the best interests of the people.
If someone in authority told a citizen to keep quiet about something in the interest of National Security, the citizen would do as asked. There was faith on the part of that citizen that they didn’t know all the facts, and that the Authorities knew the bigger picture and were in a position to invoke National Security interest. The citizen gladly did their patriotic duty.
After revelations about Agent Orange, Nixon’s resignation, revelations about DDT, scandals about vaccinations that went horribly wrong, government medical experimentation in Tuskegee, the unsafe effects of above and below ground nuclear weapons testing, and a long litany of scandals regarding Government Approved projects, our faith in government was, in my opinion broken.
As it turned out, those people asking questions, those who didn’t trust “The Man,” actually had a point.
These were the conspiracy “nut jobs” of the time. They had local meetings, and mimeographed, (if you don’t know that term, look it up. Acetone fumes in an enclosed space could get you high as a kite,) newsletters they passed out. The Information Age as we know it today didn’t exist. Agents from the FBI, CIA, NSA, or DIA were always infiltrating these conspiracy groups, just to keep an eye on them and learn what they knew.
You see us “Boomers” have heard statements like this before. What followed these statements often involved intimidation, threats, and arrests.
Senator Joe McCarthys famous line, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party,” still echoed from 1954. The Hollywood black lists were still in full force in the ’60s and ’70s.
Involvement with some groups could get you labeled a “possible subversive” and that label could impact your employment options for years. It didn’t have to be true, all you needed was the label in a file that would show up on a background check. The FBI had files on anyone remotely associated with so called subversive organizations.
I once lived with a roommate who’d been involved with some three letter organization. For two solid years all of my mail was delivered opened and hastily stuffed back into the envelope.
It wasn’t until much later in my life that I found out I’d been carefully watched during those years as a possible security threat. This information came to me as part of an in-depth security check I’d agreed to for a particular employment situation.
That was the day, I wondered if I’d finally “Sold Out”, and was becoming “The Man”.
At the time I was well over 30 so I figured it was high time. The Job was a good one, the money was great, and I wasn’t building weapons.
Over the last 5 to 10 years I’ve concluded that in an ironic way, I’ve been building weapons for most of my career. The exception was during the time I worked for an actual defense contractor. The irony of that is also not lost on me.
The weapons I built weren’t conceived as weapons. They were mechanisms that were built with the altruistic goal of freeing information. I thought if information flowed freely that it couldn’t be controlled. The despots, elitists, and powerful couldn’t hide their misdeeds from the public as they’d done in the past.
I never imagined the way that such information flow and devices could be weaponized. I never imagined that anyone would want to monitor the communications of an entire nation. Although there was the example of the old USSR doing it. That should have been a “Spoiler Alert”.
I was laboring under the illusion that the American Government would never do it. I wanted to trust in the government once more. Then came the allegation that the Obama Administration was in fact monitoring cellphone communications and archiving virtually all of them, with the help of the NSA.
Shortly after, we found that your cellphone even without GPS, was trackable and that our Government had built software that could locate your phone in a given area, building a record of your daily movements, then putting those movements on a map.
Did the government need to know where you stopped for coffee every morning on the way to work? This was ostensibly to assist in fighting terrorism and dated back to the Patriot Act, signed into law by Bush. The very people and entities I was hoping to stop, took our good intentions, innocence, and idealism, and fashioned horrible weapons. Weapons not to be used in time of war against a common enemy, but weapons to be used against their own citizens.
Oppenheimer was right. We should not question if we can do a thing, but rather should we do a thing.
It’s been said that a modern cellphone with GPS is the NSA, CIA, and FBI’s, wet dream. Everyone carrying around a tracking device that can be tuned into easily and efficiently with a few strokes on a keyboard providing an individual’s location within a few meters is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares on its own. Add to that corporations willingness to censor contrary points of view, backed by calls from government officials to sanction such censorship is terrifying.
One could read…
“the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions;”
… as a call for the Government to begin active censorship of all unapproved narrative. Coming as it does from the DHS, this chills me to the bone.
In that light, I ask when does the DHS rename itself “This Ministry of Truth”?
As a “Boomer,” admittedly I’m on the tail end of that designation, I’ve been astounded by the breathtaking compliance and lack of questioning on the part of the American People over the past two years.
If as the hyperbolic headlines suggest, those who question the government may be considered terrorists.
I ask, what the hell happened? How did the lessons of McCarthyism get forgotten? How did the lessons of the ’60s, ’70s, and even ’80s get memory holed? How is it possible, with information flowing freely and unrestricted, that we’re at this point?
Does this mean that now, in my 6th decade, I’m suddenly a seditionist, a terrorist, a criminal?
What would be my crimes?
Asking questions? Thinking for myself? Having a lifelong aversion to a government that I justifiably never fully trusted? Speaking out against actions, I think unjust? Calling out politicians or others that I think should answer the people, but who do not?
If these are crimes, then this blog site contains abundant evidence of my guilt. Should I put my affairs in order in anticipation of the knock on my door and eventual “Suicide” from a shot to the back of my head?
I doubt I’m worth a bullet to these people. After all I don’t have Joe Rogan’s following. No, they’ll break the door down at 4 am and seize all my electronics, they’ll try to silence me and others like me by denying us access to the information network.
The question is, would that silence us, or just radicalize us further?
I wonder how much an old manual typewriter and hand cranked mimeograph machine cost these days. Can you even buy Acetone anymore? I’d bet without checking, Acetone is on the list of controlled substances.
No matter, those of us of a certain age still remember our organic chemistry. Who knows? Maybe someone even remembers the recipe.
Truth and Freedom ring like a bell. A truth, spoken or read, resonates in individuals that encounter it.
That resonance spreads and builds to questions. Those questions demand answers and cannot be denied forever.
This seems to be the one thing that totalitarian states always forget.
Truth sets the innocent free, and damns the guilty.
Let’s hope that the DHS bulletin simply contains a poorly worded statement.
In the event that our government is moving in a totalitarian direction, it’s time for us all to speak out, demanding that our concerns are heard and acted upon.
Now, I’d just be content to hitch a ride off this rock to someplace else.
Anywhere else.
It’s not this planet that’s the problem. This world is a beautiful place. The indigenous flora and fauna are spectacular. Except for one species. Even amongst that species there are some very nice individuals. As a group though, the species, Homo sapiens sucks!
Yeah, we’re a bunch of semi intelligent, semi evolved apes. We’ve done some clever things. Our music, art, and literature, explore some interesting existential concepts. We have an interesting imagination and all. But when you come right down to it, we’re not as spectacular as we think we are.
We’ve barely left our world. We’re driven by silly tribalism, religion, and fear. If we were in a zoo we’d be seen as creatures too fascinated by our own poo, to see even a slightly larger picture. One thing we’d miss, might be that we were the subjects of clever psychological experiments.(Hat tip to Douglas Adams) Or perhaps miss the fact that we were in a zoo at all.
Give us shiny trinkets and we’ll be entertained for decades. Give us differences in religion, appearance, or politics, and we’ll entertain ourselves for centuries.
Perhaps it’s a function of growing older, lately I’m less and less concerned with trinkets, religion, politics, trends, or appearance.
All I find myself longing for is simplicity and peace. The view of cities from a distance makes me very glad that I’m not living in one. Being alone and disconnected from Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of the social media platforms provides me more happiness than my participation in those systems ever did.
I’m no longer concerned with what people think of me, and am happy reading, working outside, or thinking my own thoughts. There are days now when I don’t speak more than a few words to anybody. I go for weeks without seeing anybody other than my dog and significant other.
When I scan the news, with few exceptions all I feel is pity, or sit shaking my head wondering how stupid can people be.
I would gladly pack a few belongings and board a starship to get away from my fellow Homo sapiens. I might occasionally long for the company of other humans if I left. I suspect however, that the next planet or beauty of the universe would be enough to make thinking about distant humanity not worth my time.
Lately I’ve found myself thinking along these lines…
All civilizations fall. If you change your focus just a little bit and look at our planet and all it’s inhabitants as a whole. Divisions disappear and you realize that our technology has unified us in what is essentially a single civilization.
Homo sapiens is not ready for that.
Instinctively Homo sapiens realizes this truth, and is actively destroying this planetary civilization whether they admit it or not.
One need only look at the growing tribalism worldwide. A tribalism that directly or indirectly states, “My beliefs must be ascendant above all others.” What comes next, we can extrapolate from history.
The “Dark Ages” lasted 500 years. During that time, almost everything that had been known was lost. Homo sapiens devolved back into small bands of people drawn together out of mutual need.
Imagine the collected works of Shakespeare used as firelighters, because no-one could read anymore. In 200 years or less, everything that we take for granted will likely become legends repeated around a fire pit.
Will the next dark age last only 500 years? I suppose that depends on how much is lost, what is remembered, and in what context. If some kind of “Green” religion took hold I could see the next dark age lasting 1000 years or more.
Imagine a religion that said something like, “Thou shalt only burn the oils rendered from the fat of thine sheep, for light in the darkness. All other light, save that of the sun, is an abomination before god,” or “Thou shalt only walk upon thine own feet. Any other conveyance is an abomination. Thou shall not sit upon thine animals, nor shall ye ride upon thy wagon, for this is a sin and thee will surely be damned to hell for all time.“
Adherents to a religion like that might take 2000 years to even begin rediscovering technology. If a belief like this were dominant, it’s reasonable to expect that heretics wouldn’t last long. It’s also reasonable to assume that any community with a different view would be burned to the ground. Such is the power of religious fervor.
Religion isn’t confined to God, Allah, Buddha, or any other pantheon of gods. Religion is about belief. Belief in anything.
Belief in and of itself isn’t the problem, it becomes a problem when a belief takes on a life of its own. When beliefs are practiced and never questioned you have a religion. The consensus of all knowledgable people once was that the Earth was flat, and the entire universe revolved around Earth.
Folks who questioned that “Fact” were murdered as heretics. Even when scholars had evidence to support that the Earth was round, and was not in fact the center of the universe, they were hesitant to discuss it with anybody.
Religious leaders in those times, insisted that the world was flat and cited their holy texts to prove it. But nowhere in those holy texts did their god ever say, “By the way, the world is flat and you’ll fall off the edge if you go too far.” Also, nowhere in those religious texts, does God discuss the blueprints for existence or the universe.
There’s the disconnect. Superstition became entwined with religion and the two formed a foundation for persecution and more importantly, a framework of control. Another example was the belief that if someone was sick, they were sick because of demons or evil spirits. Ever wonder how many epileptics were burned at the stake? Just sayin…
I suppose what’s tired me of humanity is that so many “well educated” people are so unlikely to ask questions. It’s not about the vaccines, or the death rate, versus the case rates. My tiredness isn’t about the politics and obvious efforts of politicians to aggrandize themselves by attempting to control all aspects of people’s lives. Those are factors, to be sure.
The main thing is that so many people refuse to see or interpret the facts before them. So many people have abdicated their personal responsibility to learn in favor of a 20 second blurb about the world around them from a talking head on a screen. They don’t question what they hear, then these folks call themselves “well informed”.
At a family event recently, one of my relatives was haranguing me about vaccines and COVID. I’d ignored him on the matter for three solid days.
Finally, I asked the questions, “Would you take your umbrella if there was a 2% chance of rain? If there was a 98% probability that you’d win the lottery wouldn’t you bet the farm on it?”
After several other family members present busted up laughing, the matter was closed. This particular family member stomped off and said nothing more about COVID. The sad part is that he is, or was, a scientist. In point of fact a lot of my knowledge of scientific proofs and objective evaluation of fact, I learned from him. I found it very disconcerting that he of all the relatives was not asking logical questions and thinking for himself.
He’s not a bad person, I choose to believe that his haranguing was coming from a place of care and concern for members of the family. That’s admirable, but his method was all wrong because he wasn’t providing proofs or facts. He was simply repeating the same message CNN had been spouting for more than a year.
Perhaps my expectations were too high. I’d expected a scientist to be armed with facts and proofs. I would actually have welcomed that. I’d have asked questions and asked to look at, and evaluate the data as he’d taught me to when I was a young man.
I suppose I’m still dealing with the shattering of my illusion that this family member was about the reality of scientific process.
Science can teach you a lot. Often, science will teach you that your preconceived notions about the world are wrong. Pure science challenges your beliefs. It doesn’t take sides and cares nothing for your feelings.
E=mc2 Works. The equation is dispassionate. It contains no inherent moral judgement. It’s up to the individual to decide if they will use the resulting energy for destruction, or to generate power that lights a city.
Superstition on the other hand is nothing but beliefs. In a revival tent, those that the faith healer can’t heal, didn’t believe hard enough. It’s the unhealed, who are at fault. They’re told to go home and pray on it then come back next week. “The donation box is by the door, leave as much as you can and god will know. Perhaps he’ll heal you next week.“
That’s the way this past couple of years appear to me. It’s like we’re all living in a revival tent.
The problem for me is that the revival tent has been growing around us for a decade. Science, truth, facts, are being replaced by beliefs and superstition. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve reached apogee in this phenomena yet.
I don’t want to be on this planet when we do.
Here’s a thought experiment.
Imagine yourself with your car, manufactured goods, and all your digital devices suddenly appearing on a street in Barcelona during the inquisition.
Witch! Demon! Unclean Spirt!
You’d be dragged in chains to the grand inquisitor before you even had a moment to take stock of what had happened to you. You’d be summarily executed too.
Imagine the same scenario, but this time you appear in 1947 near an army base. You’d find yourself in a military prison. You’d be under “protective custody” and interrogated about the technology you were carrying. The military would recognize your car, as a car, with internal combustion engine but 99% of the circuitry they couldn’t conceive of, nor could you explain. You’d die in prison as a national security asset or risk. Imagine trying to explain your navigation system, or iPhone or computer. Even a Chromebook has more computing power than all the computers extant on the planet at that time.
Now imagine that scenario but you move forward 100 years.
We like to think that the future is all bright and shiny. We’d like to think that appearing in Los Angeles in 2221 we’d be accepted as a quaint relic. Our antiquated technology would be museum pieces and we’d have to learn everything that happened in the intervening 100 years.
But suppose instead we succumb to superstition and abandon true science, individual thought, and freedom.
What would be the outcome?
Would it look like Spain during The Inquisition, or would it look like Kandahar today?
I don’t want to know. I sure don’t want to live it.
Which leads me back to wanting to hitchhike off this planet. I’ve lost faith in humanity.
I seriously think that at our current rate of decline, we’ll be using candles for light and fire pits for cooking inside 200 years.
If I could hitch hike, I figure a quick jaunt to Betelgeuse and back, should be just about right to miss all the messiness on Earth.
There I go, trusting in Einstein’s math (Science) that states time slows for a ship traveling at or beyond the speed of light relative to Earth.
For me, 5-10 years might pass. For Earth, maybe a few hundred years pass.
If I come back and the planet is still a hot mess, I could head out to Alpha Centauri with side trips to other star systems that are interesting.
Either way, I get to keep on learning new things.
I don’t want to live in a world where knowledge is suppressed based on its potential to upend politics, religion, superstition, or beliefs.
If I was to find a way to leave, I’d do my best to grab digital copies of our Science, Art, Music, Literature, and History. I’d stick it all on some kind of storage media and take it with me. I figure I could trade copies of my archives for food or transport while I was away. If I returned the Earth, I’d have an archive that could help fill in the blanks.
We all know history, is being rewritten. It might be nice to have a collection of unedited data for comparison sake 1000 years into the future. I’m under no illusion that our history as recorded is pristine. But for comparison it might be useful.
