It was so orange [at dawn, edit to add, ed.] I had to run outside …

but I am not so happy with my camera or the lens, camera malfunctioning and lens not getting the crispness of focus I would expect. Happy busy feeding my father-in-law and the wood stove, and now watching a terrific blow outside from the sanctity of the upper boathouse, and wanted to share this golden moment.:

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I know schadenfreude is a bad thing but the big machine is back next door because nature does not take kindly to structures built in water and his berm is falling in, his boathouse is too low now the water is up, and this is my favourite part, he is putting in a swimming pool, having taken out the one the last rich people put in.

Life is much simpler and still very complicated without having to make a massive footprint wherever you go.  A paw print will do just fine.

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21 Responses to It was so orange [at dawn, edit to add, ed.] I had to run outside …

  1. EO says:

    Nice pics Xty. Mouse is always a winner.

    Here’s a nice little news item. Makes you wanna run out and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, don’t it? Oh boy, gotta get me some of that “Old Time Religion”, lol.

    Montgomery pastor admits to having AIDS, sleeping with church members

  2. EO says:

    Lewis Black, famous here for his “Drinking in Wisconsin” bit, has done an ad against voter suppression.

  3. Dude says:

    From last thread- who is billy-o? I’ve heard BillyHell, but not very often.

  4. xty says:

    Here’s one billy-ohhhh of a rainbow:

  5. xty says:

    I really like Louis Black.

  6. xty says:

    EO – you find the most delightful stories. What says pastoral care more than a deadly communicative disease.

  7. EO says:

    We went to see Lewis Black not too long ago in Madison. It was good, but a little bit awkward.

    You never know if he’s trying to be funny or if he’s trying to make a statement, and he keeps you purposely off balance. You think he’s making a joke, and you laugh, and he admonishes you and says “No! This is serious!”. And then when you think he’s making a serious statement, and you are just nodding, he says “What…Nothing?” It makes it tough for the audience to really get rolling with the belly laughs, but that’s his schtick.

  8. xty says:

    His politics aren’t predictable partly because he used to be the right wing component of the Daily Show, but he is uncategorizable. So yeah, deliberately off balance. But I like when people make me laugh and I disagree with them at the same time – it is a real challenge to preconceived notions. Pulp Fiction made me mad because it was so funny.

  9. EO says:

    And….Boooooo-Yahhhhh! Hot off the presses, The US Supreme Court is working overtime tonight!! I guess Lewis Black scared them straight, ha ha.

    Supreme Court Blocks Wisconsin Voter ID Law

    Scott Walker is pissing himself right now.

  10. EO says:

    Here is a very interesting article. Not so much for what it says, but more for where it lies on the changing spectrum of thought. A little background is in order.

    The author, Gail Tverberg, is one of the old guard of Peak Oil authors. One of the very best. Now, Peak Oil has been pretty much thrown on the dung heap by most folks, though not entirely by the hard core. They will tell you that the whole fracking boom will in the end turn out to be a blip on the screen. I would also classify Peak Oil as more or less “Left Wing Doomerism”. But this article is not about any of that.

    This article is the first of it’s kind that I’ve seen in the sense that it admits that while you may still be sure of your fundamental theory, taking the next step with it and making any sort of useful predictions about the economy or the markets is another kettle of fish altogether. In that area, the Peak Oilers got a lot of stuff wrong. This is an admission by Left Wing Doomers that there are really a lot of moving parts out there that they had never considered, and there are some revisions much needed. If you are in a rush, skip to figure 5 in the article.

    Contrast that to the Hard Money Cabal, who can be accurately considered “Right Wing Doomers”. Here the Left Wing Doomers have been discredited long enough that they are becoming more realistic about the practical results of the theory that they still hold dear. Right Wing Doomers have been discredited for a shorter time, and are less far along. They are still in a place where they have dug in their heels and admit nothing in terms of how maybe they don’t know how everything works. To them, QE leads straight to Weimar, and that’s that. If you quibble, you are tossed out of the club.

    So here’s the question. Will a few more years in the wilderness lead to anyone in the Hard Money Cabal admitting to any fallibility at all? Will they ever begin to discuss the need to address their woeful record in predicting anything useful in terms of the economy or the markets, even if their core theory is still held? Or will the overtly political overlay of their views (far more partisan than the Peak Oil stuff, which was more across the spectrum, though on balance somewhat Left), prevent any such waffling or introspection? Time will tell.

    http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-06/wsj-gets-it-wrong-on-why-peak-oil-predictions-haven-t-come-true2

  11. xty says:

    Good morning. Nice write up EO and I will peruse the article after I make a brief social dash into the cottage from my bell tower.

  12. xty says:

    And again this morning:

  13. xty says:

    That was an interesting article, but he makes a lot of assumptions. One of the things he talks a great deal about is the “need” for a perfect substitute for oil, that he seems to want to appear all at once, and the price of oil (or this substitute) being low or high he also sees as a problem, implying there is a perfect price for oil.

    In my view, the date of the drop in oil supply will be determined by what appear to on-lookers to be financial problems. One possible cause is that the oil price will be too low for producers (a condition that is occurring now). Governments will find it unpopular to raise oil prices, but at the same time, will be powerless to stop the adverse impacts the fall in price has on world oil supply.
    Falling oil prices have especially adverse effects on oil exporters, because they depend on revenues from oil to fund their programs. We are already seeing this now, with the increased warfare in the Middle East, Russia’s increased belligerence, and the problems of Venezuela. These issues will tend to reduce globalization, leading to less world growth, and a greater tendency for the world economy to shrink.
    Unfortunately, there are no obvious ways of fixing our problems. High-priced substitutes for oil (that is, substitutes costing more than $40 or $50 barrel) are likely to have as adverse an impact on the economy as high-priced oil. The idea that energy prices can rise and the economy can adapt to them is based on wishful thinking.

    And then he calls for collapse if this substitute doesn’t appear, and says solar and wind can’t do it. He also doesn’t include nuclear power at the end, though he talks of it in the beginning as having been posited as a solution, and indeed we get a lot of power from nuclear today.

    So though I do appreciate the mea culpa, I will accuse him of being single-mindedly fixed on a single commodity and also unable to imagine a world without oil. And I also think it is impossible to model 150 year economic cycles correctly. As he points out, the problem with peak oilers was an inability to understand the complexities of the economy, but then he really makes the same mistake. I think it is a kind of statism, or that is the term I made up, to describe people who cannot imagine change despite an understanding of history. This water level must remain! But all of Toronto was underwater just 10,000 years ago. This temperature is ideal! But it has been warmer and colder, and things have survived. This economy must be preserved as is! But it is constantly changing, through technological advances, that a) really slow the decline in return he is so worried about, and b) create a world that is unrecognizable and we can’t predict.

    Not saying running out of oil won’t be a problem, but if both lower and higher prices are a disaster, and he cannot see any way out and thinks all modern technologies are inadequate, then I call unrepentant doomer.

  14. Pete Maravich says:

  15. xty says:

    What a great band for a moment. Off to make this true …

  16. EO says:

    Good points, xty, but I think maybe you missed my main point.

    Yes, unrepentant doomer. Absolutely. But sticking with the core theory, and then taking the next step and forecasting how it will all play out in the economy are two different things. Peak Oilers have not abandoned Peak Oil. Not hardly. But 10 years ago the idea was that oil would go to 100, 150, 200, 250 a barrel, producers would have all the power, and the rest of us would be at their mercy, stuck in an inflationary hell, not unlike the type the Hard Money Doomers are always threatening us with.

    The big change now, is that the Peak Oilers, after getting so much so wrong, are having an open conversation about economic impacts. They are recognizing that the producers also MUST sell their product. To cover their costs, earn their return, and/or meet national budgets in the case of state run enterprises. They can’t just withhold production. Supply and demand must meet. Therefore the price of oil isn’t necessarily heading to the moon, but is limited by the customers’ ability to pay. This throws all kinds of prior assumptions, about GDP growth, wage growth, inflation, into doubt. In short, the Peak Oilers are now recognizing that they had gotten some things wrong and that the economic outcome is a lot more complicated than they had thought.

    On the other side, however, on the Right Wing, Hard Money Doomers, I see no such open conversation going on at all. If anyone calls them on all the crap they’ve gotten wrong, the party line is “Well, we ARE totally right, it’s just all this terrible manipulation that is covering it all up, but just you wait!” In other words, total denial.

    That’s the dichotomy that struck me as so interesting. Both sides clinging to their core theories, but one side perhaps having a change of thought about what it means for Average Joe, and the other side entertaining no such debate.

  17. EO says:

    Hey Pete!

    I had to dig deep in the old archives for this one. Used to have this in the cassette player in my Mustang in high school.

  18. xty says:

    I do see your point and agree that there are many out there who need to apologize for being so polemical about things. People make absolutist statements all the time that they fail to later take into account as they make their next one. If both sides could stop demonizing the other it would really help.

    I was just pointing out that he is fixated on an exact replacement, and sees a sort of set price as the only workable system because he casts aspersions on the theory that the market will respond with price and that that leads to innovation. Creative destruction is something I very much believe in, and when you see the Janesville GM plant on “standby” forever while everyone stagnates it is very clear that trying to cling to what we think we had is a terrible way to “run” an economy.

    This is not a left right thing for me, and you know I defend socialism in lots of cases, like our government health insurance. But he is still wrong about the economy and how dependent it is on oil. It is like the folks who think the economy depends on military procurement or car manufacturing or labor. It is good that he questions his previous theory because it didn’t pan out, and yes, the hard money people have their heels dug in and I do think a lot of it is driven from a political hypocrisy, but I still wish his argument had been more logical and forward thinking.

    And good morning.

  19. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    totally in agreement Xty. the world is complicated, and people are intellectually lazy. we all want simple explanations, but the more realistic among us know that the world is a very gray place.

    for the peak oil debate, simple supply and demand curves work. more supply will appear as the price goes up. at the same time demand will be destroyed.

    but there is a finite amount of petroleum on the planet, and at some point in the future if mankind is still around we will for all practical purposes run out (unless you believe that oil is still forming). will we ever use the very last drop of oil? of course not.

    those of you that studied calculus might remember limit equations. a variable can approach zero but never touch it – for instance in an infinite (∞) number of years we will use the last drop of oil on the planet.

    look at “x approaching zero”, or “approaching infinity” here…

    http://www.mathsisfun.com/calculus/limits.html

    the other day i was walking around downtown Janesville taking some pictures. i became depressed and deleted them all. it really is a sad sight. Janesville was the largest city in Wisconsin in the 1850’s, and flourished for many decades after, and so has a very historic downtown, and many awesome buildings architecturally. but it has been in decline for so many years now, starting even before GM closed. and now over the last few years many of the buildings have remained vacant just too long. after a while the buildings will be too dilapidated to restore. for example this building is a few blocks from me, and remains vacant, unless you count the antenna farm on the roof for cellular phone providers, as it is the tallest building in the whole city…

    http://www.gazettextra.com/news/2012/aug/18/nothing-happening-monterey-hotel/

    i have been trying to find work here lately again, and it is truly hopeless. having a college degree actually makes it more difficult to find work. no one believes that you will stick around if the economy ever improves. what an evil world we now live in. do not buy into any of the punditry – they are all lying. and the world ain’t that simple you partisan fools!

    what happened to the Isthmus newspaper EO? sheesh. that article on Paul Ryan this week insults the term “kid gloves”. i though the Isthmus was always considered a commie pinko rag! but as i have been saying, the two parties in the USA are nothing other than two cheeks on the same ass.

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