Let’s all go back to our happy place of no-nothingness.

Here’s a fun game I like to play, called thinkin’ bout stuff- 

The #7 trending article on The Guardian is on Thermobaric weapons being used by Russia, and with wide use by the U.S. in our genocidal cleansings as well. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/01/what-are-thermobaric-weapons-and-how-do-they-work

The Guardian article says it explains how they work. It does not. It does mention a powdered metal as a possible ingredient in the explosive; it is in fact an essential part, as it is Depleted Uranium, which burns at a higher temperature than anything else (cuz it’s made from a nuclear warhead, possibly one from Ukraine or Belarus when the U.S. collected them all when the Soviet Union collapsed, to mill them for MOX fuel in next-gen nuclear reactors and munitions)- with the added bonus of gasification of the hot particles. This is what the U.S. rolled out during the Gulf War (Gulf War sickness for our soldiers, and birth defects and cancers for the civilian population), and later we termed them “Bunker Busters” when justifying their use with the tale of Bin Laden hiding in a cave.

Here’s a newsweek article spelling out some of the fallout from our fallout bombs:

https://www.newsweek.com/how-us-made-use-radioactive-bombs-routine-443732

A question to ask, rhetorically one would hope, is why the U.S. and Russia can both equally use nuclear weapons on civilian populations with stalwart media outlets of the free world writing profiles on the specifics of the weapons used, and omitting the most important and defining attribute of said weapon.

Longtermism

For a primer here are two great articles:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk

https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

Most critical discussions at academic or msm level are discouraged by their peers prior to publication.

There are unstated correlations that are foundational to the discussion, yet third-rail issues. Lets have a think…

Petroleum Resource Bottleneck and Effective Altruism

The rubric of Longtermism argues that all Rare Earth minerals and Petroleum / Plastics must be conserved and directed to an AI-Positive outcome (and in immediate response to an AI-Negative outcome). AI-Positive describes Longtermism’ premise of algorithmic expansion of “consciousness”, loosely human, on an AI platform expanding through space/time in proportion to growing spiritual enlightenment as the numeric 10 to the 58. Currently humanity is an uncounted “nth” decimal place to this vast potential, and so, irrelevant as a whole; yet of primary importance in the small percentage of first-world capitalists accelerating AI in tech/engineering, cold fusion, quantum computing, and space travel that is the sole avenue to the AI-Positive future. 

The looming bottleneck of industrial resources is of primary concern to Longtermism. The international push for Green Technology to serve all of humanity will result in consuming all remaining resources to create this competing paradigm, simultaneously accelerating the climate catastrophe, which creates another inevitable bottleneck ensuring the end of human consciousness and its AI equivalent. An alternative paradigm that equally allows all rapacious international extraction/trade/finance/manufacture as an absolute necessity, and posits this as a singular path to moral good, IF & WHEN, the Creative Class (recursive 1% bubble) make this a political reality, while giving 10% of their earnings (not the untaxed brackets or off-shored assets) to a new paradigm of  philanthropy called Effective Altruism (EA) and in doing so align themselves with the AI-Positive future, and bonus: greed, finally, is good- with EA currently valued at 46 billion USD.

EA is premised on “the NEEDS of the many outweigh the needs of the one, or the few”. The many being the 10 to the 58 AI-positive space-fairing super-spiritualized self-actualized future-folk, and their NEEDS being the creation said of AI-positive direction that moves humanity through the space/tec bottleneck by irreplaceably valuable first world titans, who’s endeavors become the only value and the rest of humanity deemed mathematically insignificant. If significant at all, only as the 20 million central Americans who died at the arrival of Spain in the 15th Century, in financing the Counter-Reformation and peripherally instigating the Age of Reason and modern industrialization. Or maybe as remote to the Aztec as the Mayan civilization that had fallen long before Spain / European arrival. Even the most critical modern Titan will be to the algorithm of the AI-Future-Folk, less important than the stranded Neanderthal DNA in said Titan’s Homo-Sapiens Sapiens genome.

This is a new paradigm for philanthropy that encourages ignoring the majority of the living people of the planet. When compared to the possible 10 to the 58 AI-future-folk, the current living majority is meaningless, yet can simultaneously be weighted evenly and possibly override the AI-Positive future-folk.  Hence the current population of the earth is a clear and present danger, due to the industrial resource bottleneck coupled with accepted norms of philanthropic concern for humanity- both of which need to be jettisoned from the rubric of concern and replaced with the new paradigm of Effective Altruism, whose sole purpose is rewarding the AI-Positive first-world international private-capitol/industrial system.

other considerations: Corporate Capture / Government Capture to secure AI-Positive from AI-Negative outcome of algorithm-driven defense disaster.

Character Building through Human Capture: the premise for AI-Positive consciousness.

Fire Blanket!

The annual migration of the plants from the deck to the sunroom was just a few days ago, and closing down the filtration for the pond and adding in the direct bypass line to keep the waterfall flowing all winter for the goldfish and backyard wildlife.

This lovely lady Mantis came in with the greenery. She is as big as my hand.

She was on the right tree at the right time.

It has been snowing and sub-zero at the ranch off and on for weeks putting out a mountain wildfire 10 miles away, and winter snow is finally blanketing the massive & explosive Colorado wildfires.

112mph Windstorm

Our neighbor’s tree wound up in our yard and on the studio roof. 50 semis flipped, thousands of trees damaged and toppled, houses wrecked, power to be out for many for days. We got off easy.

I’ve just begun hauling the detritus to stage on the driveway.

All the plants on the porch are on the ground, some by wind, some by me.

My neighbor and I started piling his tree up, me from my yard and he from his.

Hanging limbs, shattered limbs, and one punched a hole through the roof of the studio, but luckily missed both skylights landing between them and punching a hole clear through just to the side. Glad it was just wind. It died down and I got up there and found the hole and patched it.

Image dropout explanation.

When the earthquake destroyed my computer, I replaced it with a new/used unit and we headed off to MT. All the images I uploaded from the new computer were not reducing in size for the interwebs, and those few weeks of full-format photos used the equivalent data of the past 10 years of blogging. So I wiped them. I probably won’t go to trouble of rebuilding those pages. I left the spoof “Ice House” artisanal wood stave post…

Thunderstorm Spring

Montana Covid Quarantine: Day 32

After a day of rain, evening squalls blow up from the Northern plain. In the past few days the lawn has been hand raked for sticks and matted leaves, then mulched with a mower with spring hooks (the yard ate 4 hooks), then all the dead grass & detritus vacuumed up with a bagging mower. The front hedgerow was thinned and trimmed, and the Iris bed at the front porch was split and moved into its expanded bed (more Iris splits and beds on the to-do list, the largest area needing split was still locked in a frost layer and has to wait).

This bit was under a snowbank, so it has only been raked. See how it is laid down and swept toward the corral by the snow…

Minutes later the storm has swept overhead and is driving up the valley to the South.

Our resident pair of Redtail hawks fly down-valley from the high forests, as the twilight thunderstorms are on the way.

They drift around the front yard and over the forest, then on down.

Anvil thunderheads amass to the South and West. As twilight falls the lighting courses behind the high ridges flashing among the clouds and booming and reverberating the valley. E and I stand in the yard as it begins, Nora stays in the house with an anxiety pill as she tries to crawl under the bed with uncontrollable shaking.

It’s the little things that kill you…

Tankless water heater not to blame for bad pipe venting.

I’ve been heading downstairs in the morning after E leaves for work to take care of our cat, Voices, who is in kitty prison for marking around the house. I’d noticed a bit of an exhaust smell a few times, and logged it in the wtf area of my brain under Tankless Water Heater (of course, Carbon Monoxide is odorless). Yesterday morning was particularly bad, and we ran the dishwasher in the evening and had to open the basement windows so the whole-house-fan could dissipate the gasses (none of our CO sensors beeped, but whatever).  After clearing the water filtration drop-valve (the only diy warranty maintenance on the tankless system), I googled for venting and found the solution. A plumber on you-tube shows exactly how bad installations lead to exhaust blowing back into the house; and how to fix it with Aluminum tape- assuming that everything else is done right. Ours is not done right, but AL tape triage (after cutting a bit more of the drywall ceiling away to reach around the tubing) is the fix it gets for now.

This galvanized tube needed Aluminum heat tape. It should be stainless steel tube with sealed fittings, and the top run should slope downward by a degree or so to the outside to keep condensation from running back into the vent tubing and possibly ruining the tankless system. It is at a straight 90 degree bend snugged up against the floor above, and there was some condensation damage to the tubing.

The system had huge gaps where the pipes sleeved into one another (which is beyond stupid construction work from the original installation), and water staining and pinholes from condensation rolling back into the house. I could feel (and smell) the exhaust blowing down into the room when running hot water. It must always have had some exhaust blowing back in, and the whole house fan probably backdrafts the system. Maybe when the heater fan turns off and the system is cycling, then the whole house fan pulls all the latent gasses into the house. something like that anyway.

In June I replaced the big brass fitting on the R- it is the water pressure gauge, and had begun to drip, then spray a fine mist. This gauge should be placed after the piping for outside water, but no, we regulate the pressure for the yard. So that needs resolved. Turns out we also filter the water for the yard as well, which is the blue unit. It had no filter in it, so I picked one up and installed it. This unit is supposed to be placed in line with the tankless water heater as a pre-filter just for the heater.

Still not right plumbing wise, but at least not trying to kill us any more.

Lucky’s first winter out west.

It’s 10 degrees and Lucky is safely entombed in his snowbank.

Lucky dressed up for the holidays back when he thought this was all the snow he’d see.

The Snow-Horn called in the snow!

Wichita angel now in Utah

Quadruplet Wichita angel now in Utah

8am Xmas morning, 10 inches of new snow outside.

Xander makes an Xmas morning toast from the head of the table.

Holiday winter setting.

These little ladies were just heads and wings with pipe cleaner arms, and then an Xmas miracle gave them bodies again and a sled!

Lucky isn’t feeling as lucky as usual.

Lucky begins to eat his way out of the drift.

The Walter Horn.

Shawn is going haut-couture this season.

The silvered weir-fairy called down the snow.

The welcoming committee on the front porch.

Santa brings smiles all ’round.

Broad Canyon Fire

Broad Canyon Fire. Acrylic. 24″x48″

some sense of the perspective; near = fire/sunlit crazy smoke you are about to pass under, far is miles and miles of smoke heading to distant mountains.

Redo of the last post with an image 5x denser; the sun is now red and the vaseline view is clarified.

This is ten days of painting, but who’s counting…