I'm back on the blog after a lapse of some time but the winter is moving in and my mind is adrift with fear and loathing.
Is Donald Trump a Black Swan?
The other day one of Trump’s less than-intelligent-sons
made mention that his father was a Black Swan. That took a few folks back but the
comment only lasted a moment in the news cycle, but it did strike me as odd. The
term Black Swan is taken from a book called The Black Swan by Taleb. Its premise
was that in history, many changes have come about by a radically unanticipated
event, an event that may have very disturbing consequences. Previously, it was
thought the all the swans in the world were white! That black one in Australia was
oddly catastrophic in the ornithology world—and did offer for a nice metaphor.
The one I remember best was the scene
where there was a group of Native Americans standing on the eastern shore of
the US, looking out and seeing a tall ship owned by Columbus. Initially they
may have thought, “Oh look dude, there is a really big canoe maybe build by
those pesky Iroquois.” Not really giving it much thought, they went back to
weed the pumpkins. As it turned out, that was one hell of a Black Swan because in
short order, most of the natives were dead or dying, or fighting, or just
flat-ass running off. Life changed.
There were others mentioned and I suspect
the killing of Archduke Ferdinand was one as it gave us a war and an
accompanied pile of real dead people.
So is Trump the Buffoon, or as my son
calls him Cheeto Mussolini, a Black Swan as his ill-informed Jr. suggested in a
speech?
So I am thinking to myself, self, It is
well known that the way we are living, that is the consuming yahoos we are, say
me driving 200 miles to go fishing, or the guy next door driving 400 miles with
his Tundra Super Conquistador pulling a $30,000 bass boat powered by 2 250 HP
Honda Blasters, (or was it to Merlin aircraft engines?) has to at some point,
go away. This we intuitively know because
fossil fuels, particularly that oil stuff, is a finite resource and to top it
off it is giving off CO2, which is now warming the earth faster than Trump can
rework his silly, wombat imitated comb-over.
These activities simply have to change,
and we, that would be we Amurkins, have to at least get down to European consumption
levels of one half (1/2) of our present gluttony. It is also known Dick Cheney
was right when he said, “We can not do anything about the climate change because
it will hurt the economy.” Well, shit, he was right and the economy as defined
by everyone from Charles Buchannan to Milton Freidman—oh, and even Keynes,
requires never ending exponential growth and that ain’t gonna fly in a finite world.
Because of this truth, it immediately seems
reasonable to think that if we want to rectify the CO2 and other dandy greenhouse
gasses, say methane that comes out of our bungs—particularly Trump, then we
have to get rid of the GDP growth as well as population growth. The graph here
shows that the only decrease in emissions we have had in recent years was in
2008 during the great recession. Jesus, there is a message I can even see.
So, while we are carrying on about
changing light bulbs, making wind generators, and having fewer steaks, in Sconnie
talk, it don’t mean jack because we still have this growth issue. I mean, how
the hell are we going to off-set another million people every 4.5 days? We ain’t.
Here is where we get back to the Black
Swan. One has to see that the only drop-off we’ve had in emissions was during
an economic downturn like the great recession of ’08, and actually the fall of
Russia when they went to consuming ethanol (vodka) and no gasoline.
What this means, from my backwoods point
of view, is we need a freaking recession/depression of some note, and then sure
as hell the emissions will drop off in noticeable fashion.
Now if The Cheeto guy is a true Black
Swan, he may be the trigger to get us where we actually need to go. This would
also make Eric (The Red) Trump correct in his statement and also explain why his
comment dropped of the news most pronto. In other words, do you suppose The Trumpster may actually do some heinous, or
not heinous thing that will trigger a collapse? Does this mean we vote for
Trump to get a correction of climate change---or is there a humane way to get
where we need to go?
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