On cleaning

Waiting for Mr. Clean

 

To make a long story short, it has been possibly seven years since there was a decent cleanup around here. Recently embarked upon a journey to redress this sin for a visit by an old friend, and there are surely lessons learned:

              No matter what you thought there is a lot more stuff to throw out. Every room, every closet, every drawer and shelf have 40% stuff that it makes no sense to keep and get out all manner of crud that requires cleaning.  Throw it out.  Then throw out another 20%.

              Once you start you are trapped into finishing. One clean area adjacent to a cruddy area is unacceptable and you are intimidated to keep going.

              No housekeeper will come near the place until it is already cleaned.  I have had friends and their mothers run laughing……

              Painting over dirt is not possible.  You still have to clean first.  And then the painting merely reveals how filthy the unpainted areas are. You cannot partially paint.

              Many things are easier to replace than clean.  Toasters, coffee makers, some rugs, lamp shades, and houseplants need more than a revitalization….they need a deep six.

              Some cleaning is simply awful and has to be done as in ‘taking castor oil’.  Ceiling fans top the list, but screen door/storm doors and the thresholds are tedious. Appliances (damn that Cuisinart) are better tucked out of sight.

So we are getting there…it will be easier now with no daylight. Might even consider dusting…..

Short Answer to ‘Why Things Are?’

Events of the past year, reaching a crescendo in the Paris dystopia.  Media addicts on both the supply and demand sides reached their usual exaggerative peaks.  I have not been shocked or surprised.  Why?

Two fundamental elements have changed in the 21^st century, pushed by technological change and the cumulative effect of repeated short-termism – the structure of societies, and the symmetry of solutions.

Experts, researchers, and reporters accustomed to measuring year to year phenomena from economics to behavior are using old models of how cultures, countries, and groups are constructed.  There have been so many significant structural changes (all anecdotal, but piling up) that the family is not the same family, the society is not the old structure, and groups previously identified have reformed or split. Thus, the data and statistics are not incorrect; they are merely measuring and analyzing the wrong things.  The broad measures no longer suffice, since every part of our world is now an assemblage of many smaller parts, all difficult to deal with as a block. All the experts are not wrong; they are just off the mark.  Structural change explains why.

We love reliable structures.  For work, or opinion, or convenience we relax in the knowledge that people and places and things fits nicely into broad catagories.  They no longer fit, and we are no longer comfortable.

We also love linear explanations and solutions.  Cause and effect is probably taught in formative years all around the world. Explanations appear inadequate and the solutions attempted fail to fully achieve objectives – because few things are linear anymore. You cannot have a ‘war’ on anything from drugs to terrorists because the problems are asymmetric and the attacks are linear. (Think whack a mole)

Each month the experts appear increasingly foolish and the problems more intractable.   I am a bit relaxed about how all our leaders and/or heroes appear foolish.  I am more concerned that the proper (asymmetric) solutions fly in the face of our core beliefs….like our constitution.

How to be a really bad (stalking) target

This piece is for you to pass to grandma and grandpa (unless you are grandma).

I met a nice pair of ladies, out at my roadside honor vegetable stand. Subsequently and randomly the younger one (a redhead) showed up from time to time to help me pick tomatoes and squash early in the morning.  Happy to have the company, I was charmed.  Later in the summer mom came along and bought some baskets and vases for a wedding she was doing – again it was not a waste of time and they were charming. In case you don’t know, Zeke and I don’t have a lot of visitors (at least I don’t), but in vegetable season there are neighbors who enjoy my garden almost every day. The redhead must have come a half dozen times and mom twice.

Last weekend, summer long over, they popped in on a Sunday and visited the greenhouse and picked up some decorations and vases. Both charming, mom breathless, they hit me with the pitch.  What I really needed to do was come to a full day seminar with them – it would be really well worth it --- trust them.  Repetition of the invitation – almost insistence – got me to say ‘I’ll think about it.’

Of course the internet told me that this was all part of the Landmark pyramid scheme (a descendant of Erhard Seminar Training) which insidiously invites vulnerable people to free short seminar and then longer seminars for a small fees  and then the fees increase and once they are imbedded in your life they get imbedded in your finances.  They are patient – they wait for the elderly to enter into decline.

I was at the gateway, but nevertheless I was shocked that they had been essentially stalking me all summer long and were giving their gateway pitch, foolishly, to the wrong guy. They may not even be the perps in the scheme, since the design is to hook multitudes to the free seminars and use them to recruit more participants so they can target the best ones.  My ‘mom and redhead’ might just be pawns.

The census lady told me that 30% of households are single person, mostly older.  How many of them are being stalked?  How many of them become victims of persuasive rhetoric?  Maybe I should volunteer to the D.A.’s office to go undercover? Nope, that would be out of character.

Come to think of it, they never paid me for the vases and decorations.

Big Deal for everyone to be concerned…..about us not them

China, is appears, has been burning more coal than previously announced (14% or 17% more, depending on the source).  This is a lot of carbon by any standards.  My own recent experiences with PRC is that they probably did not intend to do this, but they still have a 20^th century bureaucracy (soon to be minus a few heads) that is clueless about things like unintended consequences.

What should be of concern is our officials.  Consider the possibilities:

1. Our officials did not know.  Hard to believe since they know Xi’s underwear color every day.
2. They wanted to suppress the information and negotiate behind the scenes. After all the Chinese have made a 20 year climate commitment and are shocked by their own air quality.
3. Revealing this data during the political campaign season would hurt/help key people.
4. The addition of information like this feeds the science denial folklore
5. There is more, possibly mercury data that they are burying.

All this is in the age of public pronouncements (by all) urging more transparency….

Blame it all on the short form

Astute or trained observation not required – everyone is now captive to the short form.  Small screens, sound bites, elevator speech, wisdom in 140 characters, messages for drive-time radio – they are now the currency of the majority.  Combine this intellectual attention disorder with an infusion of highly skilled rhetorical persuaders and you get extreme, shallow, views. The humans are smart, their phones are smart, but chronically under informed and seemingly content to stay that way.

Sometimes they will search, but only read bits on the small screens and never go to the pages after the first. The long form interview survives, but for a small minority.  The long form feature in print or film also survives, but for the few who are not continuously interrupted by device creep in their lives.

Little wonder that our politics are bollixed (technical term) and our public discourse shallow.  Persuasive rhetoric leads to cognitive capture no matter what fallacies are imbedded in the conclusions.  Fallacies, after all, require the time to dissect, analyze, research and debunk – no time for that. All argument becomes polarized (no time for nuance) and discussion of underlying facts become swamped in reductive and inductive errors – no time to construct proper arguments.

Here is to the reclusive lifestyle – we can revel in our large screens and long written presentations. The hubris of knowing you are either correct or well documented is of great comfort, but doesn’t solve anything.