144th day sober. I fiddled around with Ebay stuff last night but didn't list things because this middle-of-the-night stuff is starting to bug me. I practiced, and I'd say doing long tones on high notes and doing octaves is really helping me. Simply playing every day isn't going to do it, it's *how* I practice/play. If just playing, period, made one a good player than Rabbit Trumpet Guy would have improved.
I got going a bit earlier, took things to the post office and got two chicken thighs at Krispy Chicken, picked up a few boxes I can use, and got back here. The chicken was really good especially since they gave me some ranch dressing too - it's good to dip the crispy bits in. It only cost about $6.50 which is a bargain around here.
In other news I've given up posting on Morris Berman's blog. First, I don't have what it takes to be a "New Monastic Individual" as it seems to involve being the kind of person who will get so offended/frightened by some offhand remark by a young punk riding by on a bike that they'll wait with a big rock in each hand, ready to right to the death, for an hour; a psychotic loonie menacing anyone on the bike trail, for an hour or two. That just sounds like too much angst and hard work, to me.
And, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are welcome there. Today Mr. Berman said flat-out that considering the vaccine a "Communist plot" was insane, and then went on to rattle out his own pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory ... so the real objection isn't that the trump-tards are wrong, it's just that they're not dressing things up in a way to appeal to college graduates. This is why the Nazis had the Brownshirts and Julius Streicher and their crude songs and cartoons for the non-grads, and slick types like Goebbels and Speer to appeal to the grad/postgrad crowd. Something for everyone!
In fact, I think whether they are conscious of it or not, they're really survivalists. The survivalist religion involves one being "good" and "virtuous" and when the Great Collapse comes, you end up on top. To the more obvious survivalists, this means stocking up guns and ammo and canned beans, and having a list, kept in one's mind at least, of which neighbors to shoot right away and which to save for later. But the more suave survivalists might simply think in terms of being more "good" and "virtuous" by leaving the US (keeping in mind that however much they were an outsider in the US they'll be more of one outside of it) and reading lots of books and staying quiet and all the cruder types will kill each other off and then .... they'll end up on top.
Somehow Berman doesn't mention any of the social and economic turmoil going on in Mexico City where he lives, or that he no doubt has some pretty hefty security in place. Sure, he probably passes as an upper-middle-class Mexican OK but that's no protection in a country where kidnapping happens to gringo and native alike. Mentioning how he really lives would spoil the picture.
Survivalism has a lot in common in the most popular death cult, Christianity, where there will be a great downfall, and the good and the virtuous (basically defined as those who are willing to pray the "hardest" and kill the most for Christ) will be left and will be on top of things. And so in both cases, bring on that downfall ASAP!
There are a few, a very few, saner minds on places like Reddit. They say that a downfall whatever brings it on will be awful and miserable and flat-out suck, and too many of the wrong people will die, and so on. Better to try for a gradual decline because maybe just maybe, new ways of living will be found or old ways rediscovered, and it may be possible, just, to bring things down without the planet becoming a dead radioactive lump. The chance is small but it is there.
The 2020's are the first time people are really coming face to face with things like global warming and our system's response to pandemics and so on. It was easy to write off the dot-com bomb as just being a thing tech does, as tech undergoes an exaggerated version of the boom-and-crash cycle of the rapacious US economy. But 08, which hurt far more people and most of us permanently, was about houses and banks and everyone deals with houses and banks. And with the advent of covid, a thing arguably not even alive but smarter than most Americans, the capitalist constrictor coils tighten once more.
In response people are not having kids, they're offing themselves (maybe not the best reaction but I'd say not the worst), they're walking off of stupid jobs, and they're buying less stuff. Less and less people can afford a car, that industry's in a slump and I say the microchip shortage is just a smokescreen. Needed chips used to be smuggled all over the planet in the 70s and 80s; I know people who used to do it. Come right out and say people aren't buying cars and that can send things into a panic.
If we in the "first world" (quotation marks because most of the US isn't) can spread the wealth around, we can get the planetary birth rate down to less than replacement and learn to manage a shrinking, rather than growing, economy.
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