Collapse

Location: Germany, France. The usual rioting, burning cars (in France) and attacking first responders and police with (sometimes illegal and dangerous) fireworks on the new year's night (Germany). Several hundreds arrests, more of it in France. No reporting of mass attacks on women this year, at least so far.

Farmers spraying political buildings with manure. Likely farmer blockades forthcoming starting on 8th January in Germany.

Lots of austerity budget cuts forthcoming in 2024 in Germany due to budget having been declared unconstitutional. Energy announced to become even more expensive. Lots more hospitals closing down. Unemployment figures are starting to creep up. Dismal economic prospects, deindustrialization is picking up pace.

No real MSM backpedalling in the NATO-Russia proxy conflict yet. Propaganda is still at deafening volume, but the general public is showing first signs of becoming weary of it.

NOAA in the US indicates that their models show strong agreement that El Niño will end in April-March, and that it is highly likely that ENSO will fully invert into another La Niña soon after. Spring traditionally has higher unpredictably in terms of ENSO fluctuations, fwiw.

I was expecting it to last longer based on absolutely nothing. It looks like one model (CanCM4i) is predicting the possibility that it lasts a few months longer, vs. 5 in agreement that it ends April-March.

It's been a notably severe cycle based on SST warming (~2C, in top 10 since 1950), but if the 5 models are accurate on the timeline then it won't beat some recent peaks (e.g. 2015) let alone set the record.

There's some interesting complexity in the ENSO record-keeping, though. They try to remove the effect of global warming when calculating the temperature variance, but a trend still exists that many argue is the result of additional warming that isn't accounted for. The way that they account for warming appears to be by using a 30-year rolling average for the temperature baseline. How... linear.

Also interesting, I think, is that NOAA uses a system that incorporates researcher predictions as well as statistical algorithms (having updated from a fully subjective system iirc). It has more predictive power at present than purely human or purely algorithmic methods. The algorithm on its own has a tendency to predict false state changes (indicated by a large drop in the predicted temperature deviance) at times when researchers accurately forecast a continued El Niño state. Researchers aren't as effective at constructing confidence intervals for their predictions, though.

I need to start a journal. I'm overloaded. I also need to unplug from more digital distractions. Headlines are clickbait, articles are spin pieces, and discussions are (while generally earnest) so narrowly-informed and attached to each own's opinion that it makes it hard to partake.

I understand why people are like this, though. We are all saturated in propaganda all of the time, and in the long run it has made us aggressively defensive of what we believe to be the truth - because we all fear that well-connected actors are trying to gaslight us into acting against our interests. And it's true - it's true even for people who are already gaslit by other actors!

Trust is more valuable than gold in a world like this. The information ecology has effectively been poisoned. That is, imo, what people are observing when they mourn the "old" internet. Power struggles inevitably expanded their war into the digital theater. Part of that, of course, materialized through its intense commercialization.

The multitude of firehoses of lies that are on full blast all of the time in every direction - for me - diminish the efficiency of the important information that I encounter. Naturally it muddies the water. But moreover, it is unfortunately simpler to remember enraging nonsense than to keep track of the important but tiny and sterile facts that are relevant for interpreting events. That's just the trick, though, isn't it? (Not a real question.)

Additionally, watching world events (including collapse) is like the most immersive movie one could imagine. We're actually living it - but in an indirect way. We aren't living the things we read in headlines. I'm not living life on the Red Sea. The repercussions of events anywhere in the world may reach me. But as an individual, our subjective experience does not match our linguistic constructions. The reasons why gas is up, or why there was weather that killed the beans, or why some stranger is acting towards us with peculiar bias: These are essentially noise from the most basic level of the individual perspective. Larger systems thinking and understanding is built on top of that simple basis and provides it context, but such is not automatic. And understanding does not undo material harm, or protect one's emotional health.

I feel over-focused on my abstract world model and underfocused on myself as a human being living a subjective experience, and I think a journal might help with that.

Regarding regional conflicts: I'm too jaded. I see people learning about the plights of others for the first time, and I feel the pit of my stomach drop. Too much change is needed, in too little time. Will it be tank fumes or nuclear fallout that does us in? (Fumes, I still think.)

Oh well, I suppose it's easier to do the right thing when one has less of a future to sacrifice.

I wish I had the money it would take to garden my yard properly. I don't see how the impoverished can escape their condition at this point. I think the best they can realistically hope for is not getting kicked off benefits / not getting fired / not getting evicted, and subsequently fed to the wolves.

How come none of the people with money are making gardens right now? (Not a real question.)

Daffodils blooming in Northern California, USA (which usually wait until spring).

Infrastructure

Public services - especially regarding persons with disabilities (PwD) - are being increasingly starved.

In Poland, effectively 1st of January, the caretaker support (for people not employed due to taking full time care of their disabled relatives) has been replaced with "supportive money", much harder to obtain and in lower amount. New parliament is promising substantial rises, but there is no money in sight to back them up.

In UK, as almost 20% of municipalities warns about imminent bankruptcy, an old idea to "warehouse" PwD looms again.

In the Upper Midwestern USA, we have had an unprecedented warm spell this winter, with almost no snow in December, and the mildest winter on record thus far. The only blip was a minor cold snap of below-zero wind chills for just over a week, and that just ended in the past couple of days. Now we are in a January thaw that looks to cause an entire melting off of the snow cover, which I don't recall ever happening before during January in my life. This pattern is the result of a combination of overall warming and a "Super El Nino" pattern in the Pacific this year.

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