Clear and cold this early Friday morning on California’s northern coast, and although rain has been forecast, hopefully today (and the weekend) will be like this past week — warm and sunny.
Not warm and sunny in my brain.

As any of the tiny, baby-handful of visitors to this blog already know, I’m working off a screwed-up laptop and the pure, total-piece of shit Internet Explorer. Never have I come across an online device so crappy, complicated and nerve-wracking combustible.
All IE really does is make it harder to work on the Web — shit that should be easy, like cut-and-paste, are so confoundedly convoluted with pop-up boxes, no editing tools at hand and a scatter-gun approach to the cursor.

Who put together this piece of shit? There’s so much wrong here.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Le Goût du Bonheur‘ (A Taste of Happiness) found here).

Well, I’m going to try and keep my emotions under control, finish this post and fuck it!

Here in California right now cops are all over Big Bear, looking for a supposedly cop killer who has been on a rampage the last couple of days. He’s suspect in the killing of three LA policemen in a kind of vendetta because he’d been fired from the force.
Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz via the LA Times: “My opinion of the suspect is unprintable,” Diaz said. “The manifesto I think speaks for itself as evidence enough of a depraved and abandoned mind and heart.”

Meanwhile, on the east coast a giant, whopper of a winter storm is about to strike — sadly the system is apparently following the same route as Hurricane Sandy.
Snow with wind gusts between 60 and 75 mph — via CNN:

A potentially historic winter storm was closing in on New England on Friday with tens of millions of people in its sights.
The storm has canceled thousands of flights and could bring 2 feet of snow to cities like Boston.
The icy rage will commence Friday afternoon, the National Weather Service predicts, and will last into Saturday.
Snow could lock some residents indoors over the weekend.
In addition, it will produce high winds and stir up trouble at sea, pushing ocean waves onto land and flooding New England coastlines.
“It’s going to be one of the strongest winter storms we’ve seen in a very long time,” CNN meteorologist Pedram Javaheri said.

Add another chapter/verse on climate change — not many will related this storm to global warming, but way-chances are high it’s in the temperatures.

In this the nowadays, all kinds of shit are tied into our environment, into our daily way of life. No matter the situation or circumstances, all of us — humans — are strapped to this earth with all its forces and elements; and no matter where we live, this tie that binds is coming loose.
And unlike those silly people on the Titanic, this ship can sink.

Even big shit don’t waver the public, as of yet — even as the US Great Lakes are wasting away:

Two of the Great Lakes have hit their lowest water levels ever recorded, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday, capping more than a decade of below-normal rain and snowfall and higher temperatures that boost evaporation.
Measurements taken last month show Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have reached their lowest ebb since record keeping began in 1918, and the lakes could set additional records over the next few months, the corps said.
The lakes were 29 inches below their long-term average and had declined 17 inches since January 2012.
The other Great Lakes, Superior, Erie and Ontario, were also well below average.
“We’re in an extreme situation,” said Keith Kompoltowicz, watershed hydrology chief for the corps district office in Detroit.

We’ve been some kind of ‘extreme situation’ a long time — we’ve become detached from reality.
John Mason at Skeptical Science calls this phenomenon, ‘The Great Disconnect,’ and climate change is the key to finding the door back.
If we ever do.
A few points from Mason:

Connectivity.
We utterly rely on it.
Without connectivity, our civilisation ceases to exist.
That’s a big statement to make, but I will argue below how, over the past fifty years, many of us have lost the full understanding of its importance, or in many cases have not developed such an understanding.
In a destabilising climate, that detachment becomes all the more problematic.
Some connections we still manage to make with ease.
We know that if there is a power-cut, things that run on mains electricity will, in the absence of a generator, not work.
We know that if there is a heavy snowstorm then the roads will be paralysed.
We fully understand that, if the systems we have devised go down, then disruption to our day-to-day lives will ensue until the problems are fixed, the power reconnected and the snow thaws.
We see and feel the connectivity of these systems and plan for them accordingly – candles in the cupboard, a shovel in the car boot during the winter months, and so on.
…
The corporate world, of course, finds it easier to function with a disconnected populace, which is why it has promoted and continues to promote such disconnection.
The more disconnected people become, the less awkward questions they are likely to ask.
Indeed, the less questions full stop.
Climate change denial is just one symptom of the greater malaise here: as long as people think all the environment represents is some place you go on vacation, in corporate eyes everything is fine.
It is to their advantage to have people who think that the environment is quite irrelevant and that all environmentalists are nutters.
They exist to make as much money as possible from you – the people – and that’s a whole lot easier if people stop asking questions and stick to watching the football or the soaps, replete with those essential advertisements.
…
To my mind, we have two options regarding the Great Disconnect.
We can a) make the reconnection ourselves at a relatively gentle pace over the coming years – this is the stuff the Transition Movement is all about – or b) we can carry on with this manic, headlong, polluting and disconnected state of living until it is done for us in a much less subtle manner as physical processes start to pull the plugs.
We can either work with the environment or against it, but whilst pondering the choice to make, remember that the absolute bottom line is that if the environment dies, it takes Mankind with it.
A healthy environment provides us with breathable air, drinkable water and all our food: the supermarket is merely one of several middlemen.
We need to be connected to it.
With that in mind, of the two options, I rather like Plan A.
I’m doing my best to implement it in my own life, and perhaps not surprisingly, life feels a lot less stressful.
One of the most powerful antidotes to stress is reconnection with Nature: this is often stated and I can confirm it from personal experience.
But if we all adopted it, what would you keep and what would you leave behind?

I’d sure as shit leave Internet Explorer behind — way behind.
Disconnect that…