A Catalogue of Short Notes (Summer 2021)

This will be a collected list of short notes, beginning with one, and with more to be added.

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Considering Corbett’s recent report on “Limits to Growth” [Are There Limits to Growth? – Questions For Corbett #077 : The Corbett Report]

(By the way, if you are unacquainted with James Corbett and his work, head to his site and explore. He is brilliant, prolific, and independent. His reporting on history, sociology, current events, psychology, media analysis, and anything and everything else of significance is impeccable and vital to a healthy understanding of reality today.)

A significant motivating factor to my thinking on “Economic Growth”, is subject to some slight revision. “Non-renewable resource depletion” is less an issue than I had previously taken for granted. Turns out, the evidence really is not there for the rate of “diminishing returns”, particularly of fossil fuels, particularly oil, that I had used as a metric in logical explorations of which it is a factor. The problem of oil running out eventually, or us destroying vast swathes of nature to find less and less of it, is still there (unless we somehow find that oil is created in some other manner than the prevailing theory of millions of years of compaction of organic material), but the urgency for a solution is less an issue than I have previously related in my analyses, artwork, and poetry.

Besides that, considering the rate of technological advancement of the last couple decades alone, prior to a serious oil supply problem, we may find ways of extracting energy from things like gemstones or diamonds. It’s theoretically possible, if not immediately evident the practical methods of doing so. (If this has not been discovered already.)

So, let it be known, that there has been a change to a motivating factor in the urgency of large-scale societal interventions within my former rhetoric, conclusions, and solutions, particularly on the matter of “non-renewable resource depletion”, and the implications thereof. That is to say, the urgency is reduced.

What this changes, for example, is less the observation itself (of the modern world engaged in a merry-go-round), but rather the level of the absurdity, like running the carousel on fine scotch instead of ethanol.

A subject poetic phrase, from “A Response to a Lack of Color”:

“… interconnected machinery-bloated frustration.
An oxygenated continuum ever regenerating, but grease drying
with asymptotic declination.”

It would appear that the aforementioned “asymptotic declination” is less rapid than I had previously assessed. The faulty metrics are to blame here. What I took to be accurate estimations were actually, well, nonsense. Imagine that. “Flatten the curve”, indeed.

This does not exactly invalidate this particular analogy, nor the rest of my “logically-fomented” poetry, but it does lessen the impact.
Thanks for nothing, “people who funded groups of researchers in the 70s to use sloppy metrics of vital global statistics for political gain”. (And who are still doing it now…)

Yep folks, once again, we have been lied to. And for me, this one is particularly painful.

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There appears to have been an odd preponderance of surface ozone in the continental United States for the last couple weeks, particularly concentrated in West and in the Northeast. Also, it’s been raining in the desert for the last month, during what’s supposed to be the dry season.

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Here’s a fun fact:

If you started counting at the beginning of the year “2000”, then the 21st year of the 21st century was the year called “2020”. Odd that, no?

This is because, when you look at the whole numbers, in terms of time, there’s a disconnect between 0 and 1. Ya’ll may remember people talking about this at the turn of the century. The debate is not just related to years or centuries, but can be for months and days, hours, minutes, etc. Looking at it in terms of a month, when we talk about the “1st of August”, that is, if it were expressed as we express years, would be “August 0”, which would nonetheless be the “first day” of the month. It would be the “first day” regardless whether you called it 8/1 or 8/0. (Also, that first day, at noon, would be August “0.5” or “1.5”, if days were expressed in decimal, by this logic.)

So, considering that, if you started August with a 0, so the notation would range from 8/0 to 8/30, you would still have 31 full days by the end of it.

The reason there is a debate on this, as you wade into the question, is that some people want to start on the 0, and some on the 1.  Mathematically, personally, it makes more sense to start something on a 0 than on a 1, but you can pick either. It’s ultimately arbitrary, like the “glass half-full, half-empty” binary. However, to do so in this respect would result in a notation that is misleading. Hence, starting on the “1”.

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