The smoke has cleared from the Seattle area skies, for the time being. And rains are here and in the forecast. We very much need the moisture.
Since my teenage years, reading apocalyptic sci-fi, I always wondered what the end times would be like. But like many of you I generally believed it would come after my life time. Yet here we are in the start of what is clearly the demise of global civilization and conceivably the human species. For all these years I have been writing about the increasingly dysfunctional institutions I have been attending to the rate of change as best I could measure it. We've been going downhill for a long time but it seemed to me that rates at which these institutions were changing were accelerating but not so rapidly that the collapse was imminent. But such is the nature of a chaotic system that is being steadily pushed that at some point it can instantly jump to a new attractor basin that disrupts everything. I think that is what we are witnessing now.
Being too old to act on this understanding I will continue to observe the goings-on from my home and, as long as the Internet works, offer my thoughts here. But I would recommend that if you are at all able to distance yourself from the grid and learn to garden it would be a good time to make it happen. Maybe I'll have something to say at the Winter Solstice.