A town street party? Nice. We are in the midst of our county fair. We swung by last evening to watch the kids with their steers, look at the exhibits, buy some homemade treats, and eat fair food. We love the state fair, too, which is coming up in September.

Glad it's Friday. We're expecting rain today, so I hope it shows up and refreshes this high desert!

Have a beautiful day and weekend, everyone!

Sorry about the internet issues. I understand them all too well.

Have fun at the party tonight. We're taking a break from our weekly session tonight. Bass player had by-pass surgery last week and just got home yesterday.

Have a good weekend!

DSL, o/s wiring, i/s wiring, modem dying, ISP throttling and ISP crashing pushes one definitely into the "too damn many variables, damnit!" zone. Hope it gets sorted to your satisfaction reasonably soon. I sometimes wonder if it might not be better to cancel the internet service, upgrade the hell of the data plan for ones phone and go full time mobile hotspot. Sadly, the 'phone reception, all providers, in my immediate neighborhood is seriously shabby, so that won't work just yet for me.

Gotta run, have a great one.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-twilight-of-environmentalism/

It’s at this point that I find myself overwhelmed by memories from my misspent youth, because we’ve been here before. Most of my readers have heard of The Limits to Growth, the seminal 1972 study sponsored by the Club of Rome which showed that the pursuit of limitless growth on a finite planet leads inevitably to prolonged gradual declines in population and economic output. (Yes, that’s what it showed. It’s astonishing how many people can’t see past apocalyptic fantasies and read what Meadows et al. actually wrote.) I wonder, though, how many of my readers know that the Club of Rome also sponsored a series of studies that followed up on The Limits to Growth and proposed a solution to the problem: Mankind at the Turning Point (1975), Reshaping the International Order (1976), and Goals for Mankind (1977) were the first three.

If you haven’t heard of these followup studies, dear reader, there’s good reason for that. They argued unconvincingly that everything would be just fine if only the nations of the world handed over control of the global economy to an unelected cadre of experts, under whom the institutions of democratic governance would be turned into powerless debating societies while the decisions that mattered would be made by corporate-bureaucratic committees conveniently sheltered from public oversight. (If this seems familiar to those of my readers who endure EU rule just now, there’s a reason for that: the state of affairs just described has been the wet dream of Europe’s privileged classes and their tame intellectuals for quite a few decades now.) That’s the usually unmentioned reason why The Limits to Growth fielded the savage resistance it did: a good many people in 1972 recognized it as a stalking horse for a political agenda.

nothing new

Gabbard delivered a piercing, if inaccurate, appraisal of Kamala Harris’ law enforcement record — then turned it into a misleading, yet effective, online ad push...
“People are concerned that even if she drops out of the [presidential] race and runs for her seat again, the second something else comes up she’ll abandon it and abandon us again. In other words, that her run for president is the precursor to her run for whatever,” said former Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who is backing her primary challenger — and isn't the only one wondering what Gabbard's objective is.

He added, “People think she’s going to get a media job, that CNN or MSNBC of Fox will want her to become a commentator.”
...
One thing is clear: No one would be talking about her if she hadn’t tried to kneecap Harris.

“She could get hot any minute,” Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, told POLITICO. “It’s a grassroots fire waiting to happen.”

Others see something approximating a dumpster fire.

The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, took credit for juicing donations to Gabbard and helping her qualify for the first two debates. The Stormer said it promoted her to “make the Jews go nuts.” A story in Jewish Insider said while the website did not explicitly support Gabbard’s candidacy, it said her participation in the debate was an opportunity to “talk about Jews starting all the wars.”

David Duke praised her earlier in the year as the only presidential candidate who doesn't want to send “White children off to die for Israel.”

Gabbard denied any connections between her campaign and neo-Nazis, distancing herself from the website’s solicitations. “I have and continue to completely denounce people like David Duke, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists and the evil they preach across our country,” she said.

Asked about other conservative supporters, she added: “I don’t know why people like you keep bringing them up other than to try to make it out that I’m something that I’m not.”

The wind in Gabbard’s post-debate sails was quickly clipped by a series of confrontational interviews on CNN and MSNBC about her meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2017, and her repeated reluctance to condemn the murderous despot (Gabbard did tell CNN that Assad is "a brutal dictator— just like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi.")

She was on friendlier ground with Fox News. In a segment with Tucker Carlson, the host called Harris’ criticism of Gabbard after the debate “the first refuge of contemptible.”

The loss of Internet service can be considered a positive.

When Hurricane Ike hit the Houston area in 2008, one thing it revealed was that there were children in my neighborhood. Electrical power for many was out for weeks, and that was true for me. Without power, and consequently without home computers, the streets were magically filled with children of all ages, suddenly untethered from the tubes. While some certainly had them, mobile devices were not as prevalent amongst the young ten years ago. It wouldn't have mattered much if they did have mobile devices anyway, as the backup batteries powering the cellular towers soon failed.

One image is particularly etched in my mind: a young boy, perhaps preteen or early teen aged, was across the street, intently staring at a large pine tree. He was often right up next to the trunk inspecting it, sometimes closely. Perhaps he was examining the bark; perhaps watching some insects move up and down the trunk. Whatever the case, it was as though he'd never before seen a tree and was fascinated with it. He must have spent close to an hour looking at that tree. I pondered this, and after observing other roaming children, came to the conclusion that most of them were totally unfamiliar with any natural life; nothing outside the virtual world of the Internet.

Over the weeks after the storm, gradually power was restored and Internet service returned to the area. The children vanished as if they had never been there. I never saw them again until Hurricane Harvey visited Houston in August of 2017. Then, I witnessed a similar, although somewhat lesser scene. Many cell towers did stay powered during Harvey, and by then mobile devices were more commonly found with children. However, if there was no power at the mains in homes, the mobile device's batteries went uncharged when depleted.

It seems our natural world, and even our awareness of our neighbors, is masked by the Internet.