Day of the Crooked Spirit, 10th of Autumn, 526. M.E. (Betelgeuse): This is fun: according to the New York Times, the Stable Genius' Iran War and specifically the closing of the Strait of Hurmuz is pushing the global use of coal to record highs. Five years ago, virtually every world leader agreed to phase down the use of coal for climate reasons, but the disruption of oil and natural gas shipments through the strait is causing them to go back on their pledges. At the same time, the powerful El Niño in the Pacific is expected to drive up the use of coal this year in countries like Vietnam and India by increasing the demand for air-conditioning while simultaneously reducing output from hydropower dams.  

   

Today, it may not have been as hot here as in recent days and there were no dire heat advisories, but today's humidity (56%; dew point, 71°) made it quite uncomfortable during my alternating-day walk. There's a 60 to 90% chance of rain over the next three days, and the humid air today was probably the moist Gulf air moving into the region. In any event, I cut my walk down to a 5.3-mile Monroe as it was quite fatiguing to be outside.

During my walks, I usually wear headphones and use my time to listen to podcasts. My five-mile Madisons to eleven-mile Polks have become my podcast listening time. But recently, I've become somewhat tired of a lot of the 'casts to which I usually listen, so I recently switched over to listening to audio books. I started with an old favorite that I read way back in high school, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, narrated by James Franco because why not? 

I was impressed by how much of the book I remembered, even these fifty-plus years later, and  how much of my current thinking aligns with Vonnegut's ideas from 1969. Of course, all of my impressions from Slaughterhouse may not have been from that one book alone, as Vonnegut freely recycled ideas and characters in his novels, and I'd read many of them over the years (Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, etc.). In any event, it was interesting to re-examine the seeds of my current thoughts and opinions. I finished the entire reading in three walks - a Madison, a Van Buren, and today's Monroe, while I sincerely doubt I  would have finished the book in three sittings.

Realizing What He Was Doing, 9th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Artificial intelligence could cause human extinction by 2030, according to three researchers from Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest.

I thing we can all agree that's a small price to pay if it could increase the short-term profits of some tech bros and oligarchs in the meanwhile. 

 

Metropolis Death and Being, 8th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): Here's another thing about contentment. When you settle for contentment rather than strive after happiness or joy, happiness and joy can still arise in your life. In fact, they might even arise more frequently than in a life spent constantly pursuing happiness and joy. 

Here's the secret to happiness, folks: just enjoy the spontaneous moments of happiness as they arise, and don't try to cling to them or make them last longer than they naturally occur. Clutching happiness is like trying to hold water in your hand - the tighter you squeeze, the more it slips away. 

A life spent in constant pursuit of happiness and joy is a life of discontentment - you're either not happy at that moment, or you're not happy enough, or you have a lingering suspicion that you could somehow be still more joyous or ecstatic. Ultimately, it's discontentment.

Of course, choosing to try contentment in order to experience more happiness and joy is a trap, as it's still seeking out the latter. It's not really contentment. True contentment is accepting life as it is, warts and all, in sickness and in health, taking the good with the bad. Contentment is enjoying a book, laughing with your children, kissing your beloved, a rainy day, and receiving a bad health diagnosis. It's accepting life as it is.        

Stop trying to be so fucking happy all the time. Just be happy when you're happy and sad when you're sad. Just be whatever life hands you. Just be.

 

Communique of Unknown Voltage, 7th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Electra): Happiness and joy are overrated. I've found something better.

The problem with happiness is that it's so dependent on external conditions, things of which you don't have control. The pursuit of happiness becomes just that - a pursuit - and one finds oneself endlessly chasing after something that forever seems to be just beyond one's grasp.

Joy is all that and, even worse, it's almost by definition temporary and ephemeral. It's like crack cocaine, and after an exhilarating burst you find yourself craving more, and then finding yourself experiencing unhappiness and craving between those short, transient hits of joy. 

You can have happiness and joy. I'll take the better thing - contentment. Contentment is something totally under your own control - you can choose how you experience present conditions, either with acceptance or rejection. It's your choice if you're content with the present situation or not. It's entirely up to you.

Sure, life throws things at you that can be nearly impossible to accept - death of a loved one, say, or a cancer diagnosis. War or hunger or extreme poverty. But even in suffering, there's still room for recognition that things are the way they are, and that's its still a choice how much additional suffering you're going to impose on yourself protesting the unfairness of it all. It sucks to lose a loved one or to face a critical illness, but one can still accept that those are merely consequences of being alive. Impermanence is not only swift but also an inevitable condition of existence. Contentment is accepting our mortality and not expecting ourselves to be the lone immortal exception.         

Contentment doesn't have the exciting but addictive highs of joy and excitement, but it lasts a lot, lot longer and doesn't have the sugar crash of disappointment afterward. Contentment lasts exactly as long as you choose to experience it.

 

The Distant Strollers, 6th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The Autumn avatar, the ROM, is styled after my own face, or at least an AI interpretation of my face. I once thought that ROM stood for Retired Old Man, but on further reflection I now realize it actually stands for Reclusive Old Monster.

Speaking of monsters, the Stable Genius took another step toward stripping federal protections away from amerika's wetlands. A proposed rule from the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers would significantly narrow the definition of “waters of the United Stakes” in the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The new version is even more extreme than an initial proposal released last November. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the new proposed rule could strip federal protections from 94% of all U.S. wetlands. The November proposal could have removed protections from 81% of wetlands. 

The corrupt and partisan Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the Clean Water Act allowed the EPA to only regulate “relatively permanent” bodies of water and the wetlands connected to them. But they didn't define “relatively permanent,” causing confusion for both landowners and developers as well as regulators. To address the confusion, November's proposal defined “relatively permanent” as flowing either every day or during the “wet season.” The new proposal would define it flowing every day except for temporary interruptions like droughts lasting less than 30 days.

Other than a handful of coastal marshes influenced by tides, very few wetlands border bodies of water that flow every day. Therefore, the EPA's proposed rule would effectively declare open warfare against the nation’s waterways. 

The Stable Genius, the Supreme Court, and the EPA are the reason we can't have nice things.

It's recognized that the old system of defining wetlands and "waters of the United Snakes" was vague and confusing, and that some (but not all) regulators sometimes (but not always) took it too far. For example, I once had a project at a construction site, and a contractor's truck got stuck in the mud. We had to dig the ties out with shovels, and when New York State regulators visited the site after a rainfall and saw the ruts from the tire filled with water, they declared it a "wetland." Tire ruts. Fortunately, it was too small to warrant further action, but it illustrates the kind of overreach that sometimes occurred. 

But stripping all, or at least 94%, of wetlands from federal protection is not a common sense way of correcting the overreach. It's ecological suicide. It's the equivalent of amputating your leg rather than clipping a toenail. It's giving up a precious ecological resource, not to mention a freshwater reservoir and a buffer against floods and storms, for the cost-reduction benefit of developers and industry.

The ROM wasn't made for these times, and actions like this only further alienate him from this insane society.

 

Day of the Animal Mind, 5th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): "He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient unto himself, must be either a saint or a monster," Aristotle wrote in Politics. Nietzsche pointed out that Aristotle left out a third case: one could be both, that is, a philosopher.

I am not a philosopher. I am certainly not a saint. I can pretend to be different than what I am, or I can accept and embrace my role.

I will devour your children at sunset.

 

Escape Dream Through, 4th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): We're under a heat advisory again. "Heat index values up to 106." "Possible threat to life or property." "Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors." Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Since I missed my walk two days ago, I took my alternating-day walk today despite the heat, out of the cool, domestic comfort of my air-conditioned house and outside under the unforgiving Georgia sun. I did keep it to a relatively short, 4.9-mile Madison in consideration of the heat, however. No relatives or neighbors checked on this Retired Old Man, although to be fair, this ROM didn't check on any of his relatives or neighbors either.

An El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern that typically develops every two to seven years, when waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific become unusually warm. That warming can alter atmospheric circulation thousands of miles away, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns everywhere. But the current El Niño is developing is waters that are already exceptionally warm. Subsurface ocean temperatures in July and early August were already more than eight degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in some parts of the Pacific according to a UN report (sadly, the U.S. agencies are no longer considered reliable with regard to scientific data), nd El Ninos typically don't peak until the winter months. 

My concern is that a feedback loop could occur - the warmer temperatures of the current El Nino keep heating the Pacific forming additional El Ninos, and so on and so forth in an endless loop until the natural El Nino/La Nina cycle collapses and we're in continuous El Nino.

Climate skeptics say "So what? Climate changes all the time." True, on a large enough time scale, but that doesn't take into account the effect of sudden climate change on human culture, commerce, and sustainability systems built around the climate norms of the last five or six centuries. New farmland capable of providing for the bulk of humanity won't necessarily appear as our current arable land is decimated by droughts and by floods. Or that the majority of the human population lives on or near coastlines subject to sea-level rise, with most of the rest in low river valley subject to flooding. Our whole civilized infrastructure was built upon fixed assumptions of climatic stability and when those assumptions catastrophically fail, we may be looking at nothing less that civilization collapse.

The UK government is already advising citizens to keep three days worth of water and supplies on hand, although the collapse I'm envisioning goes far beyond the inconvenience of a long weekend. Keep food on hand is fine and good, but also consider how you might preserve and prepare it beyond three days when there's no electricity and the natural gas has been depleted.

For my part, I'm not going all in on prepper stashes and survival gear - guns, MREs, fuel tanks, and so on. I'm not sure I want to be a survivor in that hand-to-mouth, dog-eat-dog, Mad Max world. I've lived a long and good life for the most part, and my strategy for the coming times is getting comfortable with the concept of my inevitable death. 

 

Day of the Sidestep, 3rd of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): This is a public service announcement. I went to the pharmacy today to pick up the refill on my script. I was surprised to see the price was $32.13, when just 90 days ago, it was $23.04. Today's price was 40% higher than last time. 

Sadly, everything's costing more these days (we have a functional idiot in the White House trashing the economy with everything from needless wars to pointless tariffs). It didn't surprise me to see the cost had gone up, but I didn't expect to see it increase by that much that quickly.

I asked the pharmacist if she had any idea why the price was so much higher, and if all pharmaceuticals were up by the same or similar amount or just my meds. She checked my records and acknowledged that my price had gone up and then went over to another computer for a minute or two. When she came back, she said she found a different discount coupon than the one they had on file for me, and my price was now $18.72.

I hadn't known they could drop the price from $32 to $18 just by my asking. I told her I liked the $18 price more and she rang me up. I'm glad I spoke up.

So, life lesson, a Retired Old Man's advice to those of you out there, and the point of this PSA - ask your pharmacy if there's other discount coupons with better prices when you pick up your meds.        

 

Cloud Hammer, Second Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): It may be Autumn, but outside it still feels like the Dog Days - 97°, and feels like 102° with the heat index factor thrown in.  Eduardo's now but a tropical depression over East Texas, but the Nacogdoches area is under flash-flood warnings. 

Too hot for my alternating day walk. I mean, technically I could walk outside today, unpleasant as it is, but why? I don't want to and you can't make me do it. I'll settle for a King George (less than a one-mile Washington).

I have a question and it's genuine. I really want to know. It's not rhetorical and it's not meant sarcastically or ironically. But here it is - why did white liberals and progressive agree to quickly with the far right that "woke" was a pejorative word and deny any association with the term? And as long as we're at it, why are there no defenders of DEI? What's wrong with diversity? Or equality? Or inclusiveness? 

"Awakening" and being "awake" have special meanings in Buddhism and are generally synonyms for "enlightened," so it's especially offensive to those of us who study the buddha-dharma to hear the word "woke" used pejoratively. I understand why the word is anathema in the MAGAsphere - it was associated with African-American speech and was used sarcastically by white christian nationalists to deride those who held progressive positions, i.e., "Oh, you're so woke." But rather than replying, "Fucking straight I'm woke, motherfucker," white liberals denied association with the term and now make ridiculous statements like, "I mean, I don't want to sound all woke or anything, but I think all U.S. citizens should have access to the vote."

And DEI. After the bigoted and corrupt Supreme Court declared that DEI-based college admissions were an unconstitutional form of discrimination, the Stable Genius' administration has run with the concept and is regularly purging government agencies of non-white and non-male employees as "DEI hires." Even four-star generals and world-recognized scientists. It's getting so ridiculous and so blatantly racist that they've even identified public amenities that mainly benefit impoverished or minority communities as "DEI," like "DEI bike trails" and "DEI transit." I wouldn't expect anything less from the current racist administration, but after some fifty year of supporting and watching the progress of the civil rights movement, I find it genuinely perplexing how the left, or even the midstream for that matter, aren't challenging these cuts and firings, and not trying to defend diversity or equality or inclusiveness.

Have white progressives just given up, "Well, what can you do?," or did they never really care all that much about policies they don't see as directly affecting themselves in the first place?   

 

First Day of Quest, 1st of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Electra): It's the first day of autumn, the fifth season in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar, but it still feels more like a Dog Day outside than Autumn, at least here in Georgia. But we'll get there.

Friendly reminder that in the New Revised USC, each year has 366 days divided into six seasons of 61 days each. Each year starts with Childwinter and ends with Hagwinter, Childwinter is followed by Spring and Hagwinter is preceded by Autumn, and the remainder of the year between Spring and Autumn is divided into Midsommar and the Dog Days.  Yesterday was the last of the Dog Days and today is the first day of Autumn.

Each day of the New Revised USC has a specific name taken from Angus MacLise's original USC, although some of the names have been moved around. The names are virtually impossible to memorize, but all you need to know for Autumn is the first day is known as First Day of Quest and the 61st and last day is Last Day of Quest. The autumnal equinox falls on the 21st day, Day of the Blood Sun. The 24th dozenth day of the year (two dozen dozen) is the 44th day of Autumn and is called Tenth Ocean, and a dozen days after that is the Eleventh Ocean.

Each season has a five-day sequence of same-named days, sort of like a holiday celebration, and in Autumn, the 33rd to 37th days are First Day of the World Course, Second Day of the World Course, and so on to the Fifth Day of the World Course.  

Weeks in the New Revised USC consist of six days to evenly fit into the 366 days and so each year begins on the first day of the week and each year ends on the last day of the week. The days of the weeks area all named for stars, with the final and ultimate day named for our star, the Sun, Helios. The first five days of the week are in alphabetical order for mnemonic purposes and are Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Castor, Deneb, and Electra. 

If all that's sounding difficult and complicated, here's a calendar of the Autumn season to help make sense of it all.

If your question isn't "What?," but "Why?," I'm afraid I may not have an answer for you. Who needs or wants an alternative calendar? I don't know. I ask myself why I'm trying to format this blog to the New Revised USC, and the closest I can come to an answer is, "Because I can?"

The original USC was developed by artist, poet, and calligrapher Angus MacLise, a founding member of The Velvet Underground who was fired from the band by Lou Reed before the first album was recorded. MacLise revised the USC at least once, and I made several additional changes of my own, including six seasons instead of MacLise's five, adding a 366th day, the six-day weeks and the weekday names, and moving many of the day names around to fit the revised format, although I kept all of the names to preserve the poetry of MacLise's orignal. 

This blog has an avatar for each season, so no more images of Barkley now that the Dog Days are over and we're retiring the hound until next year. The avatar for Autumn is a Retired Old Man in the autumn of his life, based on an idealized (and glamorized) version of my own face as interpreted by an AI image generator. So you're stuck with my gray beard and balding head for the next 60 days.

That all got a lot more involved and complicated than I had intended! At this point, I either got you to understand my methods and approach, or convinced you that I have indeed lost my mind - or maybe both.

 

Dog Days End, 61st of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The Dog Days of the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar coincide almost exactly with the Gregorian months of July and August. They began on July 2 and end today, August 31. Autumn starts tomorrow.

It was a bit more comfortable today, at least drier if not cooler. I got a long walk in today, nine miles, although my miserly phone only gave me credit for an 8.3-mile Van Buren. To be sure, it's still summer and I sweated and needed a shower as soon as I got back home, but walking outdoors didn't feel like walking through soup at least. We'll see if summer actually ends by the first day of USC autumn tomorrow (it's forecast to be a degree warmer than today).

Speaking of weather (which I'm aware that I speak far too often of), the remnant of Dolly are still forecast to arrive at Mar-A-Lago this week, although all eyes are of Tropical Storm Five, soon to be Eduardo,  which is scheduled to make landfall on the Texas coast tomorrow afternoon. Where it goes after that is anybody's guess, but if you live in Texas Hill Country, be advised - there might be flash floods this week.

There were flash floods on the Colorado River this weekend, killing two, and twelve are still unaccounted for. The death toll from the flash flood last week in Nepal and Tibet has risen to 939 people, with more than 4,400 missing on the two sides of the border.

The current El Nino is now stronger than at any point in the last 1,000 years. Not going to be stronger, not forecast to be stronger, it already is stronger and will only gain strength. We know it's stronger based on fossilized Galapagos Island corals which were studied to reconstruct the strength of previous El Nino/La Nina cycles. Studies of the fossils have confirmed that recent Super El Ninos in modern times are significantly stronger than anything recorded in the pre-industrial age. Temperature variability is now 36.5% higher than during the pre-industrial period up to 1850, with a clear skew in the positive direction showing that it is primarily the El Nino rather than the La Nina phase which is getting stronger.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed your Dog Days. Here's to an auspicious Autumn! 

 

 

 

The Glass Limbo, 60th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Castor): In the 1980s, New Zealand researcher James R. Flynn identified a consistent rise in IQ scores across the world throughout the 20th century. This became known as the Flynn Effect, and was initially interpreted as evidence of humanity getting smarter - perhaps thanks to better nutrition, education, and healthcare.

But by the 1990s, the trend reversed. Because of its compulsory military service, Norway had a massive database of cognitive testing, covering more than 730,000 men from 1962 to today. The data revealed that IQ scores peaked among those born around 1975 and have been declining since. The average drop is about 7 points per generation.

Similar trends have been identified in the UK, where teenagers in the 2000s tested lower than their 1980s counterparts, and researchers elsewhere around the world have observed the same pattern in developed countries.

The leading theory is that the decline isn’t genetic but environmental, a reflection of how modern life is reshaping our brains. Today’s children grow up immersed in a world of screens, scrolling, and superficial content. Quick dopamine hits from social media and 30-second videos have replaced deep reading and problem-solving. Studies suggest that merely checking your phone or email can temporarily reduce IQ by up to 10 points. Educational systems, pressured to meet standardized benchmarks, often "teach to the test" rather than nurture independent thinking.

As a society, we’ve lost the traditional checks on intellectual quality. Before social media, books and journalism underwent rigorous editing. Now, content floods our feeds without any such gatekeeping. As a result, many people are absorbing the thoughts not of experts or educators but of influencers, bloggers, and pseudo-celebrities, many of whom probably couldn’t pass a high-school exam.

Kind of explains how some 73 million Americans could vote for the Stable Genius, doesn't it?