What a crappy day
Today hasn’t been one of my best days. I woke up with a migraine attack starting up–something I haven’t done in a long while. Even though the new neurologist, who specializes in migraine and associated disorders, has helped me improve by several orders of magnitude, the reality is that I have a have a neurological disorder that is going to be with me for the remainder of my life, and every so often it’s going to make itself known. At least today it wasn’t one of the Oh-My-God-My-Head-Is-Going-To-Explode attacks, it was one of the “new”, much lesser attacks that I have now that I’m getting appropriate care. You feel crappy, but you can still function at a reduced level. And I only get them somewhere between every 5-14 days.
Hey, it beats having the OMG ones 20 or 25 days of the month, trust me. That isn’t living, that is existing. I had one of those a few days ago, first one in months, and I honestly don’t know how I was able to do the things I did, in terms of holding a job and such, for as long as I managed it. I guess I was good at hiding it or going through the motions or something.
At any rate, I decided that another day of burning brush piles wasn’t going to be happening. Instead, I took on more domestic activities, like laundry (yes, retirement is exciting) and a lot of random walking the Internet. I’ve found a three things of interest.
The first two can fall under the headline of “Your Government At Work”. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone really wants this to be how our government works. Encouraging police agencies to steal private property for profit and strong-arming some citizens to entrap other citizens into criminal enterprises just doesn’t match up with the things I was taught in civics class about “how our country works”. Neither of these is exactly news if you’ve been paying attention, but they both just felt like slaps in the face today.
The third goes back to a topic I’ve touched on any number of times, the impending disruptions and changes in society. This article is written from a leftist perspective and looks at the election of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon’s part in it and in particular, Bannon’s interest in Strauss and Howe’s book “The Fourth Turning”.
This particular piece can take a while to read, especially if you chase down all the linked articles. But it was interesting, because it shows that someone on that side of the street understands that the reason for Trump’s pimp-slap of the Clinton candidacy wasn’t just because a bunch of redneck pissed off white guys voted for him, and he isn’t screaming for Teh Resistences to get out in da streetz and PROTEST! As you might suspect, I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion, which calls for us to in effect step outside of history and find some mystic group of people to help us “level up”.
Spare me the gamer talk, please. We won’t be stepping outside of history or, as he says we must, our genetics. While it’s possible for individuals and small groups to do such things, asking the mass of humanity to do so simply won’t happen. Think of it as a human form of inertia. You can’t make 7+ billion people move easily, even with the threat of the dissolution of the old system and the fear of a new unknown system. Things are going to change, whether anyone likes it or not, but you can’t control the change. If we can do anything in terms of effecting this change, we need to do what we can to keep it as non-destructive as possible, especially in terms of such things as large wars. Our war-fighting tools are a bit too effective these days, and things could get out of hand. That would lead us to one of the population bottlenecks he notes. This would not be a Good Thing.
At any rate, it was an interesting afternoon of reading, even if it was a bit on the dark side.