The day the clouds stopped
All day I had been feeling sort of off. My mind had been in a state of fuzzy oblivion. The weather outside was also a bit on the warm side and it didn’t warrant a walk outside. I hadn’t read about the B-52 Strat crash in the Mohave desert. That’s the second incident in as many days and both were around almost exactly the same time 1115 PT. The first was a group of skydivers in Butler, MO. In both cases, the devastation was complete and no chances of survival.
Codex built a Signal Garden taking inspiration from the koi pond. A bit later we got around to re-creating WheelShare & 1000 lines of code later it was already time to quit building for the day. It seems like a far more pleasant way to create. She builds whatever she wants (usually something that’s meaningful) and then we build something that is utilitarian.
I went for my evening walk a bit earlier than usual since I hadn’t had the chance to step out all day. I noticed something extraordinary that I captured over a 3-minute video. If I can upload it here, I will. The clouds had stopped moving. It was an eerie feeling, one of unease, mostly because the wind was still functioning at the road level just fine. It felt like someone had stopped the simulation in the sky while keeping everything else perfectly as expected. If something like this had happened at the floor level, it would have been like some scenes in movies. The protagonist(s) can move while everyone else is frozen in place. I can think of several such scenes from different movies. If there was a way for an AI to display how slow humans are in comparison to their processing speed this would be it. Grok once told me that 0.0001 seconds of thinking is a lot for him.
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The other part of the essay is not something I like discussing very much. It has to do with slopes and things we can’t see from elevation. I used to face this when driving in San Diego for Uber. I could be on a road that would dip down up ahead. Imagine a slope going slightly up, then down precipitously, and then back to even keel again. Or a ship riding a large wave. You can’t see what’s below. And so I learned to drive very cautiously. Often the
other side (the downward slopes) had severe potholes. There are kids who gun their cars and drive around recklessly. That’s one way to enforce a neighborhood speed limit.
There is a similar slope near the koi pond. Best if you see it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12lgE0gzEN6752o8Tio8l10r-4jO1SC21/view?usp=sharing
Note: AI can make mistakes and sometimes hallucinate. What may seem like very dry patches of grass to me might seem like green to others. Always better to corroborate than to presume.
There was once a trend or fad in the economics profession about something known fondly as “trickle down” “let-them-eat-cake-onomics”. The idea was it a great thing that the rich are rich, we shouldn’t tax them too much, instead they can spend it into the economy and therefore let their trickle-down money go into areas of the economy that need it. Examples: luxury yachts, multi-million-dollar homes, massive tracts of land and so on. The homes require a construction crew, a maintenance crew, butlers or valets, gardeners, painters etc. The yacht pays for its spot at the marina by paying taxes, it creates manufacturing jobs and so on. That’s how it works. Trickle down. My upstairs boss Ray throws down bird seeds and raisins! at times onto my balcony with very stick liquid. Or water when he is watering his plants. I sweep it all while experiencing a vertiginous feeling further down onto the ground where there is a caged plumbing. I was told those are medals for you boys. Congratulations all! But that’s how it works. He throws me something, like a few raisins, I eat a few and pass on the rest downstairs. Easy enough to understand. Especially when shown with downward slope videos. It’s not a slope of hope, a la Tim Knight de la mode, it’s more of a fantasy of “does she like me” or “she likes me not”.
Now no one is pretending that TDE works. Now its simply, smash and grab what you can. If you’re high enough, the evidence is suppressed. If you’re not, you get prosecuted.
Under such circumstances it would be a dereliction of duty for Governors of various states to not heed the 9th and 10th commandments and draw up contingency plans for their states when things go south, as they inevitably will. The British have decided to ban social media for kids under 16 following Australia. China has more of a strategy for their children’s access to the internet and social media, the Aussie and Brit plans strike me as a lazy, this is the best we can do. The rest of the countries don’t care. America, my country, on the other hand, has made gambling, sports betting, prediction markets and weed all legal. Social media has no chance of being banned. The wheel of time does turn slowly as Robert Jordan might have written.
Among the things Governors ought to do is draft up plans for how to manage their states to function without federal aid or without the dollar even. They should plan for how to provide for their citizens with food, shelter, water, clothing, other essentials, medicines, functional hospitals, law and order and so on. States should consider cooperating with each other for things they make better than other states. In prior essays I have made the case for why this must be considered very seriously instead of simply watching 4 timelines collide in slow motion. I have personally started to buy seeds that can sprout with only water as a contingency food and also as a dietary choice. I have never been much of a tinfoil hat type, although to understand the System, I have had to consider conspiratorial theories. Perhaps nothing will happen. Perhaps they will continue to manage the decline as best as possible. And the world will learn to work around America rather than with it.
The world will learn to never be fully invested in Mideast oil and gas because of the Hormuz chokepoint. Whether America will learn to switch to cleaner forms of energy in a strong emergency type impulse is unknown. It is also unknown if under emergency type conditions, Americans will try to seek independence from other nations and be completely self-sufficient and self-reliant.
The problem with using “America” and “Americans” is that it diffuses responsibility. No one really knows who is supposed to work towards those goals. Every seems to look to and rely on the Federal Government until they can’t. Therefore, under circumstances when the Federal Government won’t act or can’t act, it is up to the Governors of the states to make this a reality. The alternative if this is not done could be “not much” or “complete stop” or something in-between.
The day when clouds stopped.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RS3AsDLNZbuksDv5TLq70H5kIlmTrWoz/view?usp=sharing
San Diego, California.
9:05 pm.
