time

The Decline and Fall of Nuance

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Nuance is a great word. It sounds cool, is interesting to spell, fun to say, and it is still shiny from lack of use. Like keeping your new car smell by not driving. Ever. In fact, it’s doubtful you even know what nuance means, and you certainly don’t know where the word came from, do you.*

Nuance. The word comes from “nubes” the Latin word for cloud but then the French got involved and romanticized it into their own word for “shade” or “slight variation”, per Ai. My Ai goes on to add in the lovely English accent I selected: “Think of it as those little, delicate distinctions that can make a big difference.”

Imagine all your conversations so far today. Nuance ever come up? Not just the word but maybe “the little, delicate distinctions”?

It’s doubtful. America learns to read and write and stroke screens but thinking, especially about “little, delicate, distinctions” is an effort left for…who?  Modern dissemination of facts and news has to be condensed into the 3 second (or less) American attention span. Unless it is a kitten, gossip, crepe skin, or has boobs, we don’t linger long enough for nuance. Do we really need it, anyway, that stupid French word?

Aha. Since you’ve made it this far you have decided we do. And you are right. A recent puzzle indicates why: “try to draw a perfect square with three straight lines.” Much like 2 plus 2 equals four unless you’re adding apples and oranges and not caring about the total amount of fruits and want to know…crap. Two plus two always equals four if you add context, or nuance, the little delicate you-know-whats. Eg; If you have two apples and I have two apples, we have four apples between us. If I have two apples, and you have one orange and one pear, we have a great start on a fruit salad, but not four apples.

To draw the perfect square with three straight lines, some add “distinctions”, like using the edge of the paper as the fourth side. An arguably “out of the box” solution but the puzzle itself already supplies the distinctions.** As we review our journey into the Land of Nuance, we learn to ask what does “with three straight lines” mean? If you’re sensitive to nuance, a “meaning” spurts out of this puzzle and longs for you to see it.

So what? We have trouble with a puzzles. Or counting. Big deal. It is a big deal. There is not a problem we face as a country, that is not loaded with so much nuance it’s a wonder we don’t sink into the oceans. All our problems like Wars, the Economy, Immigration, politics, work…all nuance-rich and ready to be emphatically debated, discussed, and solved. Nuance flourishes in trees like low-hanging fruit, on the ground like exposed diamonds, and floats in the very air we breath.

But we ignore it. We stumble over the diamonds, let the fruit rot, and nuance floats off into  space, a twilight zone none of us ever go to.*** Then we try to solve world problems we don’t understand with nuance-deprived solutions that don’t work and we look back later, and wonder why. Finally, we engage in nuance-free discussions about who’s to blame.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a domestic dispute leading up to a divorce, it is. Nuance is missing from our personal lives, too.

Nuance is obsolete. Whose fault is that?

*Added “do you” to avoid the dreadful prepositional ending. Got lazy, sorry. I should have looked for a better sentence structure. It would have been shorter than this explanation.

**Do I need the quotation marks anymore?

***No. Ai says it’s okay, these days. Worrying about prepositional endings is “old fashioned and clunky.”

Quirks Quarks Quacks Quilts

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I often believe, and state here, that not much has changed from the turbulent 1960s to the mediocre 2020s. It is a mistaken belief. Readon for proof, and about things never imagined.

Quirky Donald Trump is CONVICTED (not just indicted) of felonies and American voters re-elect him president. Maybe voters just did not want a woman? 1968 election winning President Richard Nixon is rolling over in his grave. With his new 2025 position Trump pardons other CONVICTED felons without regard to their crimes or histories. And the pardoning of J6 criminals is only one of his efforts to re-write history. And we let him do it. All of us.

Quacks, political version. Modern American Politicians do not just talk crudely and rudely in public, they actually lie better and believe what they say. Truth is now a debated issue, not a fact. And we let it happen. All of us.

This should be a time in life when no political or world event will bother me, since being old not only makes one unimportant, but also uncaring: The End is near. The Golden Years are ruined now, as not only is political fighting the standard of the day, but so is the ending of all normal life.  A self-centered government is governing by feelings instead of the above-referenced debatable facts. Senior support programs, research into senior health issues, and recissed* (sic) funding for Public Information and Education, all change the tone and tenor of The Senior’s life. Thank you, Donald J, Trump. If all of us had the billions you have, we’d all be okay.

A recent scientific paper postulates that Time is not linear and representing it that way is a mistake. Without insulting the scientists, it is linear. If using a circle to depict my life and its events makes more sense, it will take more explaining. I know when I reach my end it will not be right back at the beginning. Or stuck in some right-angled corner. I can understand the concept of time ALSO being dimensional, and possibly the past and the future already existing, but until I bounce back and forth between dimensions like Billy Pilgrim**, I’ll remain linear. And eventually horizontal.

Quantum Mechanics, (QE) continues to blow The Mind. As a regular reader (You are, right?) you know QE is often talked about here. What The Mind keeps coming back to is the “Russian Nesting Doll” aspect of discoveries. Remember as a kid when we were told Atoms are the building blocks, and make up all things? As of 2026, scientists have drilled farther down*** The Big Bang pipeline and found “Point-like” particles with “no measurable internal structure”. Well, how they hell did they find them, then? Quarks, Muons, Leptons. We’re getting better at seeing really, really, small things, but will we ever be able to see The Smallest Thing, if it even exists? Boom.

Quiltcore? There is an anti-electronic media trend taking shape in our country. Young participants read books and reject smart phones, use simple cell phones instead, and actually play outdoors. One of the new trends these YOUNG people are trying is Quilting. Yep. Sewing disparate**** patches of cloth into one complete, united bed warmer. Old-timey DEI. As you learn more about Quiltcore-type activities, however, you see modern improvements. There are computer designs and computer guided Smart Sewing machines, making tasks a little easier and faster. Can you see a future of laser guided quilts raining down on our enemies?

There are more Q’s but no more room. Do not let me know if this is already too long. The decision has been made to post. Don’t troll me.

*Recissed is a bastardization of recission which is, per Ai “a request by the President to cancel funding that Congress has already appropriated but has not been spent.” It results in existing programs and research being suspended and new programs and research being stopped. Imagine a cancer research facility planning and budgeting for millions of dollars in aid in December and the new Administration in January saying “Screw you. You’re not getting it.” Not an exaggeration.

**SlaughterHouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut. 1969.

***See? Linear time. Vertical, but linear.

****Unless you really know the meaning of this word, look it up.

Civilization and People and God

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It occurred to me as I was reading the normal allotment of assorted news this morning, there may be a higher force involved in the rise and fall of civilizations. National Geographic once published a large, fold out chart showing the timeline of the major civilizations that have come and gone from the Earth. Incas, Mayans, Sioux, Ottomans, as well as Celts, Pics, Huns, and multiple Asian Dynasties. The information is too large for my own mental storage system, and too diverse to even memorize all the lost civilizations, but the graphic point illustrated is that civilizations have come and gone for all the time the globe has spun, making ripe opportunities for current civilizations to learn enough lessons to do better next time and last longer. But do we?

Most dynasties flame out after a few hundred years, an important fact as we begin to celebrate 250 years of the United States of America. It appears we haven’t learned anything as we are on the very cusp of a slope we can either go down or avoid. History often cites hubris and over-extension as a reason for a civilization to disappear, but no one can ever be sure. Imagine a population getting so big it outgrows not only sewer systems, but food delivery systems, health systems, and judicial systems. It’s a simple step, then, to infer a collapse of society and a descent into unstoppable chaos and decay. As our 2026 government focuses on external expansion, internal issues fester and multiply, all the while government hopes money, riches, wealth, rare earth metals, and other tangible things are the glue that will hold us together for another 250 years.

In remembering the chart as it was on my wall, and staring at it every day, it looked like a complicated system of trial and error, start and restart. If looked like a record of humankind  trying to figure out the best “style” civilization to ensure long-lasting survival, it tells a story. The main problem appears to be the generations of citizens populating those civilizations. Looked at this way, we (the Royal We) have tried one way, it didn’t work, we tried another, and we tried another, but we didn’t give up…for millions of years.

Unless you are an atheist, or a strong-willed agnostic, it’s hard not to see the hand of a Higher Power directing these actions on the macro (world) level, while we can also empathize with the suffering that must have been endured at the micro (person) level. One can hope, by the way, that the Higher Power was of some comfort to the billions of humans on that micro level who died. What else could it be to them? The sun didn’t just come and go, a god made it happen.

The conclusion reached by this writer is one he senses in life: there is a God, but He lets us work things out on our own. No fire and brimstone, no flooding, just live and learn and faith and hope. What else do we need? Over a few million years, and billions of lost lives, we will eventually get to a civilization that works and makes God…happy? Hard to say, since God being unhappy might, yet, yield Armageddon-ish consequences. But He is playing the Long Game and probably still holds out hope (faith?) we will get it right…. someday. The hard part for those of us existing now is, it may not be this moment, this very time, when we get it right. Should we take consolation in understanding we are just part of an incremental step in the establishment of a world where all can live in peace and harmony?

Maybe, but here is what God wants from His people in any civilization: Love everyone, and live The Golden Rule.

Sounds corny but think of your best friend and how you are when you are around him, her, or them*. Now imagine feeling the same for everyone else. In this day and age, your next thought will be about how you CAN’T live that way, and those thoughts are normal and necessary for micro survival but… what if they weren’t? What if micro survival did not even matter…in the long term? And what about the ages and ages and ages of life to follow? And when our macro leaders fail us, where do we go when we are no longer breathing? And what if, with each passing civilization, a larger and larger per cent of its people lived God’s macro dream and worked for the best we could be? Will the deaths of 800 billion others be worth it?

That National Geographic chart on my wall ended in 2009, but it is not the end of the story, just the latest update. Those of us alive, now, should see it as a start and imagine where we go from here.

Just have faith? Yes. Hope will help a lot, too.

Or not.

*A nod to pets, too, and other plants and animals. Our ancestors.