MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment)

Some of us heard that Deceitful Traitor was bragging about taking this test. It is a single page, and can be administered in about ten minutes. The purpose of the test is to determine whether someone should be able to take the city bus alone, or to be otherwise left unattended. It can help determine whether someone has had a stroke or other lapse of consciousness. The results of his test are not being released. This test is freely available over the internet and how the scores are allocated, are clearly defined for anyone who wants them. Sadly, the person  with their finger on the button  can't be bothered understanding the test or why it is given, he just answered the questions "and some of them were hard..." Yes, there is a new book out about what sort of heinous creature inhabits the White House, but anyone who had been paying attention has known for decades that this guy is like King Midas, but with shit. He bankrupted not one, but two casinos. Perhaps this explains his abject misunderstanding of money, his penchant for filling Administrative positions with incompetent people who are hell-bent on destroying the institutions they are in charge of. The level of contempt that this Administration has for the rule of law, civil society, education and basic humanity has never before been seen in such vibrant, sweeping technicolor. Under this traitor, teargas was used against peaceful protesters for a photo-op, in front of a church that did not want him there. Flagrant bombast aside, these are crimes according to the Geneva Convention, too heinous for war. Does it make it better if it is moms and dads? Children and elders? Mayors or Governors? Fascists always accuse others of that which they are guilty. Thuggish, terrorists in riot gear need to step off! They need to understand, we are petitioning for redress of grievances, something guaranteed by the Constitution.  The federally prosecuted arsonists from Minneapolis have all been privileged, white nationalists with allegiance to proud boys and/or boogaloo ideologies. What they are charged with need to be subject to hate crime enhancement because their activities were perpetrated specifically to reflect badly on the people who were peacefully in the street to work for qualitative change. Destroying their neighborhood will surely affect the neighborhoods negatively for generations. Crimes are being committed under the guise of "protests" that have nothing to do with the actual protesters. Seriously, even the Federales admit that the peaceful protests are not even on their radar, they are protecting the Federal Building from the arsonists who come out between three and five am. All dressed in their own riot gear, masks and paramilitary garb, all matching, all black. No peaceful loving person would waste money on that sort of gear.

If there is a test to determine if someone has a shred of humanity left, that is the one Deceitful Traitor needs to be given.

White Ghosts

The uberwealthy are invisible to themselves. Living the same sorts of lives as their neighbors, or the contacts they surround themselves with, they look just like everyone else. The confident supporters of their lifestyle look just like they do. It is perhaps not politically correct to use the term today, but WASP is what they called it when I was young. White Anglo Saxon, Protestant. Part of what allows one to see is contrast. Inhabitants of the wealthiest of class, never mingle with commoners. "Traffic" is something interesting to look at if you take a helicopter to the office, or perhaps the name of a PBS series that taught you more than you wanted to know about heroin, but it made you feel like a better person to have learned about it. Traffic is something a guy you pay deals with if it must be dealt with at all. We called their predominantly female offspring Debs, short for debutantes. This was long before the Karen epidemic. The boys stayed home to become investment bankers or day traders like Dad. We never really had a name for those guys, they were not of our world. The privileged have always been rather invisible to themselves.
When recent pandemic relief funds were authorized, of course most of the money would go to companies that had long-established relationships with banks, because you could call up the folks you knew and set up an appointment, or perhaps even do the deal over the phone, we can e-sign documents now-a-days! Jeesh, I wasn't even thinkin' and I'm trying to talk about it! This is how sneaky wealth can be. In my state, Wisconsin, 58 of the states 72 counties are below average per capita income and the vast majority of per capita wealth is concentrated in just eight counties. Vast swaths of territory poor, and just a few concentrations of wealth. Sadly, per capita figures do not raise the floor for the impoverished, it just busts the immense wealth bubble that keeps the impoverished "in their place", for a few, allowing elite status and power for a tiny segment of the population. The top five percent own more wealth than at any time in history. On the last day of January, 2020, it was reported that Jeff Bezos made $13.5 billion in just 15 minutes the previous Thursday. Using per capita income, that is as much as more than 507,061 people would make working for an entire year! Until we begin to attach real life understanding of how vacuous the wallet of a fat cat actually is, we will never get impetus toward sensible and fair taxation. 
Imagine if you will, that in the fifteen minutes we just spoke of, the invisible hand of the state was skimming off 70% of everything over a certain amount and for the sake of perspective, we will say that earlier in the month, his income had already surpassed the amount that would kick his earnings into the highest bracket. He would still have four billion, fifty million to call his own, as much as more than 152,118 people working in Wisconsin would make ALL YEAR! That is more people than live in the entire city of Green Bay, I'm sure that he has no understanding of his vast wealth. No perspective to fit it into, no rational support for the unfairness inherent in his blatant robbery of all of us.

Trash in the foreground picked up by conscientious citizens. Trash pile in the background has been providing toxic blight to our city for generations. Billionaires benefit, the poor, who live, breathe and die in this neighborhood develop black lung.

We go on allowing the ultrawealthy to exploit what is left as if they will one day develop a conscience. If not now, when? If not us, who? The Koch empire owns interest in over a mile of riverfront property in my city. This is just one of the ways they choose to spend their money. My guess is that some of the companies they own have relationships with banks. I can be pretty sure they get subsidies and tax breaks as well, for making my city a slum. We humans are perverse creatures when whole portions of our culture can be in a status of out of sight out of mind. My eyes are attuned to the White Ghosts of the billionaire class who own the rest of us. We are allowed to search for crumbs that fall from the edges of their gilded tables.

Dancing Storms

I have always watched the skies, learned their ways and been excited to know as much as I could learn about all the parameters of climate. This probably got a huge push to a more scientific understanding because of Mr. Paul Hayes, my science teacher for the brief time I was at Fort Howard School. He got the help of the janitor to mount a weather station on the roof of the school, along with a pair of mirrors so we could observe the station from the classroom. It was pretty ingenious. We would take measurements with the sling psychrometer and got to know the feeling of moist and dry air at a range of temperatures. As far back as the late Sixties, I began to get a clear picture of how different storm fronts would move and what winds from different directions typically brought with them. Even the cloud formations, in my mind could help show what to expect in the coming hours or days. One of the most important things I learned, so important in fact, that it was taught all the way through college, is that high and low pressure cells were RELATIVE pressure. Highs did not mean, necessarily a numerically high number, just that compared to the surrounding atmosphere, it is relatively high pressure. You could have low pressure, surrounded for the most part by very low pressure, and it would still be designated a high pressure "cell".

By the time I learned the science of this, there was also great focus on the fact that these cells typically follow patterns, rarely would pressure cells stall for great lengths of time, nor would they ever gain enough strength to cross the Equator. Much of what we thought we knew about our planet has changed to the point of being wrong now-a-days. The old weather maps showed a series of highs and lows that would be, for lack of better words, slow, relatively steady and somewhat predictable, because the cells would alternate, high, low, high, low. Today, there can be a three lobed cell of ultra low pressure that covers the country from the Continental Divide at the Rocky Mountains, all the way through the Piedmont and into the Northeast. Three super low pressure areas, combined into one huge "relatively" low pressure cell. This would have been incomprehensible in previous centuries. We have already had more than twenty years to begin grappling with the "new normal" and so little was made of the first cohesive pressure cell crossing the Equator, a few years ago, it seems that most meteorologists were not paying attention in class or asleep on the job. I get it, now some conspiracy theorists might say, "Or, they were told not to talk about it." I'm nearly positive that this is not it. Think about it, if your job is to come into everyone's home every day and tell them what to expect, reporting on what may prove to be climatically catastrophic might not be the best way to remain on good terms with them. Not everyone has to be told not to bite the hand that feeds them either, so even if there was some sort of conspiracy to keep it quiet, it was ineffectual. Science documents this sort of thing and there is not a cover up, just lack of attention being paid to the planet and her processes.

This brings me to the title of this post, the weather observation I made this morning, looking at nearby radar, 09-07-2020 between Sheboygan and Manitowoc. Storms had been traveling from Northwest to Southeast overnight and just before sun up, they were tapering out, near Lake Michigan. Just North of Sheboygan, they seemed to hit a wall, stack up and intensify greatly. At that point, the entire storm front stopped (from a speed of about 30 MPH)  and remained stationary for about an hour, then began to very slowly drift back to the Northeast. What had been slowly moving, spotty  cells overnight not only got stronger just before the heating of the day began, but also, grew in size and intensity, poured down heavy rain as it did this little stutter step before heading back up the coast. This back and forth movement is peculiar. We have seen more and more of what is being called "training" storms (ones that, like a freight train develop over a location and continue develop and "run" over it for hours. We have also seen extremely intense storms stall and create record downpours, but this combination of forward, stationary and then, nearly opposite direction movement  is something I have not seen. The first time I saw a massive thunderstorm remain stationary overnight, it was eerie, as if the end of all I had learned had come and All I could do is blink, like a deer in headlights. A week later I got to see first-hand the damage that was done to Wyalusing State Park by that massive downpour that parked over the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers. That night, in July of 2007 I had a clear view to the horizon upstream of Portage and could see the top of that thunderhead stationary all night long. It truly felt like the end of meteorology as I had come to know it.

All of these new oddities we are seeing are due to climate destabilization, nothing more. The atmosphere is like a giant rubber band, or gelatin surrounding the planet. Long, long ago, the largest source of energy was the Sun. Now we routinely burn fossil energy to power our machine slaves. All this energy has to go somewhere, there is no away. The majority flows into this weather producing atmosphere. What dance step that energy fuels next is anyone's guess.
 

Hello Its Me

Todd Rundgren said it so well, so long ago. I think they called him Runt back then. Now, he's old, like me. When one bursts on the scene, or attempts to command their image, as opposed to letting others make their own images up about them, it may seem pretentious. In saying this, I am, on the one hand throwing a bone to those who will shout "narcissist", but also trying to peel back some of the layers of problems we have developed by simply making our minds up about what the world is, without getting to know it. Finding that "me" inside us is fraught with challenges. Who has not, at some point, heard Thomas Hobbes' theory that "Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."? Nearly four hundred year old ideas, survive in our culture, whether they are adaptive or not. My point is that each of us has more to offer the world than any privileged white guy who has been dead for hundreds of years! We can distract ourselves with history, or we can use it to help open our minds. Just as Hobbes could not fathom the supreme privilege that he was provided, or how it shaped his thinking, Charles Darwin could not either. If he had, perhaps the popular saying about his theory would be "survival of the luckiest".  I touch on this misconception periodically only because it is so important to remember.
The net of words we get to use for conceptualizing the world is only possible because we more or less agree on the meanings of those words and accept them as adequate labels and parameters for observable fact as well as the occasional thought experiment for those who may be particularly ingenious. What I am trying to represent is beyond words, but so much a part of who we are, it almost defies our ability to define it. Another popular cultural concept is described by the German word schadenfreude. It is the joy and sense of  delight experienced at the bad luck, failure or injury of another. In describing "me", there would need to be a word for the opposition of that and as far as I know, my language can't convey that concept. All good teachers can tell you the feeling is real, although it might be difficult finding even a dozen words to pull out the concept. When a child learns, there is a pulling back of the curtain moment and they are in awe at the grand design. Teachers get a thrill from seeing that opening, the integration of new mental territory and knowing that by just that one person being turned on to learning in that one moment there is hope for all of us. Everyone could be better off if there were more of this. My utter delight and supreme joy arise from making the world better for everyone.

WI-08

To find myself, I went back as far as I could in my own life, piecing together, putting things in their place; their order and progression, like how and why I turned out left-handed. I remember the afternoon and the way the light fell where I sat, across form my father who was bound and determined to teach me to tie my own shoes. I looked at hundreds of old photos, thought back to the day they were taken, where we were, who went with, what I learned. I took the time to revisit my memories of the colorful art on my nursery wall, how the light fell across that room in the early afternoon, the music that accompanied different events in my life. I took the time to re-live my feelings of excitement when I got my first hammer, how proud I how I felt when my sister came home from the hospital making me a big brother and how I learned what I knew of the black sheep in our family and other often overlooked experiences that, in total shaped me, informed my "reality" and guided my actions and beliefs.

Understanding who we are, eventually requires us to take a long look into humanity and the collective traces those who came before us have left behind. Much of what we are taught, or know about exist outside ourselves, but seeing ourselves in relation to that larger world also helps define what we can know about who we are. The history of us, the strange race called homo sapiens is in large part who I am. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny. I have spoken of a concept before, in an earlier post, that was shared with me by a trained spy. Imagine this image: Two pairs of cones, one larger diameter and one smaller, nested into one another. The other pair the same, and the apexes of all four, touching at a single point. That point is now. The small cones represent limited knowledge of history on the one side of "now" and limited possibilities (opportunities) on the other. Limited choices caused your blind spot that developed because of limited knowledge and awareness. The larger cones represent a more full knowledge of history, on one side that opens to more, diverse and greater possibilities (opportunities) in the future, more possible correct paths, more choices, perhaps far better options than one would have with a limited or truncated scope and world view. I reflect on this often, especially when in my studies feel boring. It helps inspire me to keep learning and growing so that more and better choices will be possible.

This "Me" that I would like to display has changed little since I was age seven. I think I was fully aware of these things before that, but was not yet self aware. The person I would like to display to the world was the field dependent child who sucked up information like it was going out of style. This becomes more interesting when you understand that in many ways, it actually was. While I was growing up, I moved more often than I had birthdays and my best friend through all of it was the Colliers Encyclopedia. Now, with more information in the palm of most of our hands, than there was at the libraries at Alexandria, we seem to make our decisions based on the whale song of social media and clamoring hearsay. I was the child who as soon as I got permission to play at the other end of the block, where "Fat Mary" lived, I went down there and got the attention of all the kids on the block, yelling to get their attention, I said, calling Mary fat is mean. She was mean and I had a strong feeling that she was mean because she was abused and neglected. As a small child, I'm not sure I would have had the words to say all that, but I definitely felt it. Mary's response chilled me to my core. It confused me, it angered me and I actually felt pathetic for thinking that I could improve the world for others. She said, "Why shouldn't they call me Fat Mary? My Mom and Dad do!" Then, everyone went back to playing as if nothing had happened and I went home. I cried a little bit along the way. I think I told my mom that I didn't want to play down there any more. I remember having a mother that understood that it was important for me to process that sort of thing. She talked to me for a while about the experience. That is when I began to learn that we don't all share the same reality. I may have been four. I ended up going back, at Mom's urging and trying to make friends several more times, but nothing ever went well at that end of the block. One kid I thought was my friend drank gasoline. If I had not run to his mother, they said he could have died. Even as a very young child, it seemed like the rest of the world was set for self-destruct.

Little things never seemed to bother me, perhaps I was too busy struggling with bigger issues.
That is a large part of why I have paid particular attention to the history of biochar.
Going back nine thousand years, understanding that what language we shared had not been written down yet, knowing that people were teaching one another this valuable skill, a mixture of art and science, a six step process that took at least six weeks, really makes one appreciate who we all are as a species. Knowing that human beings, much like us were cooperating to change the quality of soil, so they could all enjoy a better life amazes me as much as the benefits of using it. Biochar sequesters carbon and doubles crop production. It protected both ground and surface water quality back then, just as it does today. I'm also positive that even today, making soil healthier and better gives meaning to the entire human species. We have had this as our common human heritage for 360 generations. Building soil may be the most significant human activity we can participate in. I know that it puts me in a state of meditative and sublime bliss bordering on ecstasy. All six steps require a prayerful emptying of our selves of expectation and it allows you to touch geologic time when you do it well, so that's pretty exciting too!