Cold and clear in Houston.
Yesterday started at 33F and didn’t get much past mid-60s at my house and despite the sunshine ended up being a nasty day for me.
My dog died. [deleted very sad paragraph] I spent the morning holding and petting him as much as he would tolerate, and after he spent a while laying in the sun and breeze, he collapsed and died in my arms hearing about what a good boy he was. And he was a Good Boy. That was about the best outcome we could possibly have hoped for given the aggressiveness of the cancer. For now there is a giant hole in our lives the shape of an 18 pound chihuahua/dachshund mix. Thank you all for your kindness and best wishes.
There are forces at work in the wider world that we can only get glimpses of- our awareness and perception is so limited that we are really like the blind men describing the elephant. Our prejudices and hubris are not limited the same way. The combination isn’t one that leads to much actual objective understanding when events are bigger than our immediate experience.
One blind man sees Jan. 6 in DC and thinks it’s an organized insurrection. One sees a betrayal by a man he trusted. One sees an opportunity to get his hate on and blame his enemy. One sees the same old corrupted schemers playing out their own “Game of Thrones”. Time will tell which man has seen with the clearest of mind’s eyes.
Right now, forces unknown but powerful are moving the blind men into position. They are PICKING which blind men are there, and supplying the elephant. Other forces are maneuvering to swap their OWN elephant in, or change out some of the blind men. Still others are trying to put a hippo in place of the elephant, while yet others are busy proclaiming “There is no elephant, and blind men can’t see anything anyway!”
And yet. After a hotly contested election, where the biggest players in the country, and possibly from all over the world, went head to head, and knife to back, we have a candidate no one wanted, with more issues than a news stand and more baggage than a third year student at Hogwarts, ready to take the oath for what is arguably the most powerful office in the world. And his people think they need 20-30,000 armed soldiers around him to keep him safe from — something. And that they’ll need those soldiers “indefinitely”.
It looks like they are preparing to be besieged.
What could they possibly be planning to do that would provoke We The People to the kind of reaction that they are preparing for?
Or is it just theater, designed to convince people that they are being threatened and that anything they do is justified by the heinous nature of the threat? You don’t think to include a field hospital if you know that it’s all for show and there isn’t a real threat to justify the defenses.*
Neither scenario, or any of a dozen more, bodes well for you and me. The elephants are dancing and there is absolutely NOTHING we can do to change the dance. The mice are rightly worried about being turned into red jelly paste and should stay as far away from stompy feet as is possible. And prudent mice should be prepping as hard and fast as possible to tuck into their safe little hidey holes and stay safe while the dance continues. There may yet be a role for mice to play, other than floor lube, but you won’t be playing it if you are already toe jam… and you won’t be playing it if you are reduced to picking grains of wheat out of mounds of elephant dung.
Stack. Stuff. Friends. Skills. Mainly stuff, as something will be changing on the 20th. Something big. That’s not much time to build skills or networks. So work on what you can. Keep stacking. Concentrate on what might be unobtainium in a few days.
nick
*two other considerations come to mind- TPTB are sociopaths and don’t care that the soldiers will need medical attention. TPTB have never seen war and don’t know that their soldiers will need medical attention. Either is horrific in it’s own way. And don’t forget, sometimes you need to “embrace the power of ‘and'”.