I’ve been very wrapped up in my own problems of late. I have plenty of good reasons to be focused inward. When you feel as if you are fighting for survival, physical or otherwise, you can’t see anything else.
As I’ve looked up from my issues, I am seeing countless others caught in their own reactive spirals. Many of them are even directionally correct in their diagnosis of the problems facing them and the world as we know it.
The apocalyptic bent is especially strong in America at the moment. From politics to artificial intelligence to cultural wars, Americans are on the edge of change.
If your world is ending you probably can’t see beyond the horizon of the issues bringing about its end. Your view is myopic. Let’s call this phenomenon “apocalypse narcissism.”
It’s understandable to be wrapped up in fear when faced with all kinds of mortality. Your life, your nation, your culture, your planet and even your species all face world ending questions at some point. Sometimes change is so great we can’t see it as anything but death. Even if something better rises from the ashes.
I’d love to go on a long rant about the new tariffs America intends to impose, but a big winter storm is approaching and being prepared for that is likely the more important task.
Yes I am aware a much bigger looming economic storm on the horizon. I’ve been a “doomer” a while so I’ve come to gripes with that many years ago.
That would be true except we have a giant solar array that provides enough electricity for heating, lighting, our bitcoin mining (whose heat exhaust exchange warms our barn where we keep the hydroponic greens)
Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.
There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.
But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.
Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.
It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.
And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.
If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.
Now in the corner of Twitter where we discuss shared values and personal mutuality, there is an array of anonymous, pseudonymous and real name characters.
These accounts bring their experiences to the understanding of current civilizational values to life across many mediums beyond Twitter. Our wojack would be the epistemology enjoooyer but most of the memes have a darkness to them.
To think otherwise is to presume you have license which is claim for yourself of presuming a kind of irresponsibility that means you don’t suffer the consideration of others affected by your actions.
I don’t think it’s freedom as a value that is the problem. It’s the lack of realization that to truly maximize freedom, one must attend to many things (health, relationships, self knowledge, work, etc) which temporarily feel constricting – cowtongue
Freedom ultimately means responsibility to the choices you made and the people who are affected by them.
Libertarians in particular should most sincerely believe in the bedrock of responsibility in ensuring freedom.
Without that way shared way of knowing and understanding freedom we have juvenile behavior and culture. Those seeking to defer responsibility to others seem to seek a license for facing no consequences. It’s poison to any political system.
that it’s child-like to think of freedom as a thing you can have, a thing that exists, in the absence of responsibilities – forthwriter
There is no freedom absent responsibility. That’s an expensive view so I understand why people would prefer license to avoid that heavy burden.
I’d wager the biggest complaint of feminism is women who claim the agency of freedom but run to license when overwhelmed by the very real mutual responsibilities that bind us.
That is no less true of men. To claim freedom to act as a man has always meant bearing the responsibility of that power.
When men only wish for the freedoms of power without the responsibilities undergirding your claim to your own freedom it can be maddening.
Both genders wish for less license and much more responsibility in the freedom to build a thriving society of mutuality. And you might ask how to I know this?
I scared someone really badly today. As I was being locked into the hard shell for my eighth hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy session, I realized I had forgotten my chewing gum.
At 2 atmospheres of pressure it can be a real challenge to keep your ears from getting painfully congested. Even with yawning and blowing oxygen out your nose, it’s like going into an airplane with a sinus trouble. It’s uncomfortable but it can also be dangerous.
Careful. Equalize the pressure in your ears. If you feel your ears stuffy, equalize the pressure in the following ways. 1. Yawn 2. Swallow saliva. 3. Close mouth, pinch the nose, out of breath, blow the nose (all spelling mistakes theirs)
I got a little panicked as I was trying to stop the clinic technician from finishing the sealing process as I wasn’t sure if they could stop it once it was sealed or if I would need a full decompression cycle.
I was texting frantically “I forgot my gum can this be stopped ASAP so I can get it?”
I was tapping the window on the hardshell with a worried look and showing the text. I kept trying to make the font bigger and be clearer. FORGOT GUM OPEN?!
But it was confusing enough that everyone in the room thought something was seriously wrong. Which it would have been without the gum as I can’t do a full hour at 2 atmosphere without the help of the chewing. All the yawning, blowing out through the nose and other techniques aren’t quite enough.
It wasn’t yet an emergency. If it was I would have hit the big red button. But everyone seemed to think it was. After 2-3 minutes of frantic miscommunication it turned out that it was fine to open it up but we’d need to restart the seal and pressurize it again. I got the gum. And look who was on the TV screen.
My in-laws live on the west side of Los Angeles as well as one of my portfolio founders, significant extended family and many dear friends including one of my closest and best friends. I am afraid for all them as the fires in Pacific Palisades has rapidly spread.
Officials warned of devastating losses as the main blaze raced through the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The fast-moving fire spread across nearly 3,000 acres and was still 0% contained early Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department –WSJ
A professional colleague known well to the venture community Mark Suster is quoted in this WSJ piece as he and his family were evacuated. I fear many more may be in his position. I pray their homes are not lost.
I have an especially strong emotional reaction to these types of rapid urban firestorms after living through Boulder’s Marshall Fire two years ago. Over three thousand homes were lost. It was devastating to my hometown and it is still rebuilding three years later.
I advocate for preparedness as both an individual and a community. I have lots of posts and media on the top if you are interested. When these tragedies strike, show up for your neighbors and your family by preparing so that when the worst happens you can be at your best for people.
It would be helpful for most media readers to understand the history of the news business and its relationship to war and finance.
For all the standards and ethics and best practices we expect from professional newsrooms (and they do have conduct standards), the history of media isn’t a clean narrative America went to war thanks to Yellow Journalism in the Spanish American War. If you think the Pulitzer is a badge of merit wait till you learn its history and financing.
You have probably lived through multiple media scandals. Millennials remember the neoconservative “weapons of mass destruction” story thanks to notably terrible editorial decision at the New York Times.
When someone says you are in a media bubble or on an information island, recall that these systems made up of people with varied interests, ambitions and aims.
I marvel every time I fly. My life rests on miracles and small issues like repair delays and malfunctioning climate systems can make the miracle feel too much like magic and not enough like good process.
I’m happy to be home in Montana after a couple weeks on the road. Financial markets are happy with certainty. So business is looking good and optimism is emerging in all sorts of corners.
And yet we are in the worst Cyperpunk moment of my life. I think about other uniquely connected moments and it’s got nothing on this.
I expect turbulence to continue. Both when I’m flying and in the wider environment. I feel as prepared as it’s possible to be with edge positions across the board and some distance from the center of the empire. I’m glad I’m back home.
Like many fans of Star Trek, I am not at all ashamed of my affection for one of science fictions greatest franchises. I’m proud to love it.
When I visit San Francisco I like to rewatch the classic original series movie from 1986 “Star Trek: The Voyage Home” which is affectionately known as the whale movie.
Future San Francisco is a beautiful paradise where exceptional young people go to Star Fleet Academy. It’s fully automated luxury communism thanks to the not really military (but definitely feels like it) the United Federation of Planets.
The movie involves getting Spock back from previous escapades that had left him for dead. As they retrieve Spock a crisis is unfolding on earth.
A spacecraft is signaling to Earth alas no one can answer it. It disables everything near it. The Enterprise figure out that it’s whalesong and decide the only way to answer is going back in time to find Humpback whales.
The Reagan era was a strange one for environmentalist. The crew goes back in time to rescue Humpback whales and ends up in San Francisco in the 70s at least vibe wise. It was definitely a pop culture “save the whales” moment.
San Francisco was a mess in the past and everyone finds this to be relatable as a plot point though we all know it can be made a paradise.
We see nuclear vessels in Alameda as the brave future. We have to save our whales to save our future though. This was not a universe where environmentalists make the best villains. Environmentalists are the good guys which is almost sweet.
The Voyage Home is a ridiculous movie with a premise stuck in a bubble of social attitudes that is almost comforting.
Leaving San Francisco myself to voyage home myself makes me laugh at one of comedic bits of the movie. “I don’t know how these people made it out of the 20th century!”
To the skeptics I say a double dumb ass on you! Humans and their colorful metaphors might just might get us to the future after all. And San Francisco will be part of making it.
I was preparing to head out for a lunch meeting when I got a blaring alert on my phone. I’d been putting on cosmetics in the bathroom while my phone charged in the other room. Initially I thought it was an amber alert.
The National Weather Service has issued a tsunami warning. A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now. Keep away from the coastal waters until local officials say it safe to return.
My blaring alarm was not for a personal family tragedy but a warning for the entire Bay Area. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake had been registered offshore.
Naturally Twitter lit up almost instantly as a number of older established users remain in the area. When San Francisco has weather or news it tends to dominate the instant chronological feed.
Thankfully organizations like the U.S Geological Survey and other relevant public service accounts spread information quickly.
I could feel my cortisol spike as one after another meetings canceled and texts came in from friends in the city (and those who knew I was in town) checking up on each other. We quickly learned it was a large earthquake and its proximity to the coast automatically meant a tsunami warning.
We are staying in a hilly neighborhood so it was easy to calculate we were 100 feet above sea level. It seemed we us an hour till any expected wave was due in San Francisco at 12:10.
An hour of warning seemed like a lot for filling up tubs with water and doing a few frantic preparations like washing socks in case we were looking at a disaster. We wondered if SFO might be impacted given how low lying it is relative to other neighborhoods.
A friend headed over as the park was high ground so we figured why not watch if something happens and catch up together.
As Twitter churned it was mentioned in some coverage that “this was a strike-slip fault, as opposed to a subduction fault, so it’s less likely to cause tsunamis.”
As other areas closer to the epicenter did not see waves, we soon got the automated cancellation of the warning. 12:10 cane and went without a disaster. The cortisol wave I was riding crashed. Everyday there is some new chaotic thing that gets integrated into one’s world as just another day. Yesterday it was corporate assassinations. Today it was tsunamis. Hopefully tomorrow will be calmer.
