This is a combined blog entry for the months of August & September. I wasn't too well some of the time, but am now fitter. I.a. to blog a little.

KULTURBRAUEREI

How I will vote

Tomorrow is general election in Germany. You get to vote twice as usual, one vote for a local candidate (good old Westminster system, winner takes all of that voting "circle"), another for the party in parliament. So the latter actually determines the ratio of seats, and thereby determines who of the chancellor candidates will become head honcho (usually the one from the party with the most 2nd votes). Any parties who gain less than 5% of the national 2nd vote are not considered.

This vote splittability BTW, together with Southern-German voting behaviour, causes the German Bundestag to constantly grow in no. of seats, thus also costing us taxpayers more and more money every cycle. Currently parliament's already about a fifth larger than originally intended. Something that especially the C(hristian) parties don't seem to give a damn about, since they keep causing the growth as well as blocking any reform.

So, with these 2 big votes I will be voting for the SPD this tumultous time, for the first time ever in my life. Indirectly therefore for Olaf Scholz, who is a very smooth stoic politician, not too good at transparency on several counts, but the most experienced & moderate chancellor-wannabe; I feel we need Merkel-grade moderation while still within the latest Corona infection wave. I'm not going for the Greens for several reasons, one of them being that at the time of Joschka Fischer's ascendance, decades ago, they talked big about better/fairer handling of foreigners entering Germany, but essentially ended up doing nothing real once in power. The FDP is a liberal party only in name, or for a certain commercial/rich clientel. And "The Left" are basically day-dreamers, at least on a national level, who always say what left-leaners - like me - want to hear, but never aught about how to finance it or turn it into viable law.

But tomorrow I will also be voting for the Berlin state stuff, with a similar system as on the national scale, one vote for a local district representative, and another for the proportional distribution within the Berlin city parliament.

The party I will vote for here will be the Pirates; they are the last true liberal party left in Germany, I feel, and deserve recognition for that. Even if they have no chance of taking the 5% hurdle. I also like what the Berlin section writes in their manifest about how to handle asylum & migration, as well as their very concrete ideas about how to help save the environment (little bowing to the climate change hype).

If she appears on any of the personal voting lists, I will also make my cross next to the name of Green candidate Bettina Jarasch, whose views sound more considered & humane than several of her co-candidates'. She also spent younger years in Bavaria, like me, and is an outsider in the party (e.g. by being a practising Catholic). Outsiders tend toward realism as a rule, in my experience.

P.S.: If you have German citizenship, go vote tomorrow! Don't support more motivated extremist voters (e.g. for the near-Neo-Nazi AfD party) by letting their vote numbers weigh more due to the absence of your vote...

This is the 1-week late July entry...

Berlin cinemas are open, but I am somehow not getting to visit them; once I do, my photo series will continue, promise. There are good movies to be seen, but "catch-up" turn-around is so high, my logistic skills are trumped too often.

Also, I am very sad about what's happening in Afghanistan, esp. to Afghan women & girls. But I am too angry to be able to put it in words (below).

National Velvet

German general elections are coming up in about 7 weeks. These ones are apparently seen to be serious for once; even the typical dumb-U-down posters of the majority party, the CDU, are a little more particular. You can also tell it's all-or-nothing time by the way almost all major parties take part in (other) candidate bashing; whenever a party does that, it becomes non-electable for me. I worry about another demagogic-right party coming in, the "Basis", which is basically the new political arm of the "Anti-Thinkers" anti-vax anti-establishment movement, doing a lot of (maskless (= illegal, BTW)) demonstrating recently.

Stress-tested Berlin G.P.s

General practitioners in the capital are usually not that interested in patients that only have basic medical aid coverage, esp. in a big city where doctors almost always have more patients than they need to bring in a tidy income. And the CoVID phase since beginning of last year has stress-tested their occasionally disorganised practises to an unprecedented degree. My own g.p. has had some kind of hippy takeover in recent months, as note the enfevered statement on their WWW home page; I may just have to "left wing" my bod out of there some time soon. Sad.

An Apple for the Prof.?

Of course I'm a layman re filtering Big Data tactics employed by the big i.t. names (i.a. Facebook, Google) when they dig into uploaded content by their registered users, but when the legendary U.S. watchdog EFF rang the alarm bell on Apple's new "neuralMatch" initiative (which Apple plans to integrate in all its op. systems Real Soon Now, i.e. also on my company iPhone!), I paid attention. Apparently this little patch in your Apple experience allows relatively simple re-parametrisation to let governments into your stuff to filter e.g. for "terrorist" content. A reason to switch off iCloud uploads on your iPhone, i.a., and to look for alternatives to the phone in general, I'm afraid. To all-(better-)knowing giants like Apple I point to the mid-70s writings of a Berlin great, MIT Prof. Weizenbaum on too much "Computer Power", when he warned not to ever give software choosing power over the (further) lives of humans; I include in that neuralMatch's rapid comparison to some central pictorial database, then passing the "stamp this as undesirable" recommendatioon to an over-worked & probably partial committee somewhere, that just flips through the suspects. Digital stamping of "persons of interest" of any kind longer than a few days is as a rule draconian, and a 1st or (worse) 2nd step toward in-by-the-back-door fascism! X-.

CCC "icy math" 101

Catastrophic Climate Change doubters like me (not a "denier", thanks very much*) are of course in a bit of a bind at the moment, sticking to our "take care re the predictive quality of the data" guns - bad fires due to extensive droughts in Greece & the U.S., once-a-century deluges in West Germany (some weeks ago, well over a hundred folk dead) and Turkey (now), and now the mainly pessimistic new IPCC report). I haven't studied either the summary (often politicised in my experience) or the actual report yet, but already see 2 tropes once more wielded by journalists to emphasise the "catastrophic" part of the theory:

• Arctic ice cover dwindling at the moment, and adding to the rise in sea level - sorry, but it doesn't. Ice floating on water has already had its "raising" effect (try it out in a glass of water with ice cubes on a hot day, marking the water level before & after having melted). Ice melting off (e.g. Green)land into the sea is another matter, of course.
• Increase of heat-caused deaths - man, counting the dead is not a pleasant thing to engage in, but I didn't start it. The current reports in that direction in many media basically always ignore the decrease (!) in cold-caused deaths within a 1-year period around that heat high! When more people die of heat than are "saved" by less cold temperatures at other times, let us know! (Otherwise please stop quoting just the one extreme!)

No Friday partygoers for Future viral freedom

Currently the national R0 factor is shooting up & away from the 1.0 value (which means as a rule 1 infected person infects 1 other). It's now above 1.3, and just a few days ago, it was at 1.14. In my layman mind, this factor in essence measures well-behavedness of infected people, who, to give them credit, let's assume, don't yet know of their predicament. If this is true, and since at the moment most infected folk in Germany are twens and teenagers, it means, after seeing how wild similar-age people in i.a. England and the U.S. are currently behaving, usually at big (fun) gatherings, German youths decided to learn the lesson to plunge into the same punky disregard mode, and thus try the CoVID hospitalisation bungee jump. This (also lonely, GenZ'ers!) boomer be not happy, esp. about those of this sub-set that intersect with the other one of people, who used to frequent Friday for Future rallies...

Let's virtually link arms to get to a good Future together. Please.

After a hard downward section in the rollercoast ride of life, mainly due to the third CoVID wave in Germany, I am resurfacing now that normalcy is beginning to return in Berlin...

So perhaps this photo, following, has a second meaning: Flush all that strife and the dark thoughts of the last 6+ months away. All that incredulity & worry - & some anger - about the brainless deeds/words of the G.O.P. (yep, the party leadership as well as the big-baby-screamin' exiting Ex), how people I've known for a long time had turned increasingly petty, Berlin politics, the ugly growing power of streaming, the dissing/overpraising see-saw of "Justice League" movie directors...

(But do read the more optimistic P.S., too!)

CCC won

I want to start this further attempt at scepticism of Catastrophic Climate Change, which is - 15 years after good ol' Al kick-started it with his "Truth" video - seriously becoming en vogue now in all but high finance and crochetry news, with a story that begins quite small.

You see, I like my toilet to smell good & help cleaning efforts, by using a soapy freshener "brick" (yellow & blue on the photo) that gets slightly smaller with each flush - you know that stuff, right? (No need to explain how it works.)

Since a few years the manufacturer of this particular brand offers "refill" bricks for an emptied plastic holder; at first in all supermarkets, now in about 1 in 6. (Hey, no one is talking about plastic straws any more, right?)

Problem is, if you use the refills, your plastic holder has a weakness at its first bend point, where you "hang" it on the rim: After a few months of moving that holder 1-2 times a week (cleaning etc.) it broke at that bend point; 'tis not really designed to last as long as the refills, I warrant... :-P

So I pushed on through and tied the rest of the holder to a string. Now the brick still does what it should for non-solid events; for solid ones you need to remember to first take it out and let it hang free on the side, then put it back after flushing! :-P:-p

Aside from this let's-act-as-if-we-care attitude of the manufacturers, I am however trying to make another point here, entirely: I realised that the way the brick holder moves when doing the non-solid flush is a good example of how complex the physical world can be!

Because, you see, a toilet flushing is a daily example of turbulent flow (of water, in this case). Physicists understood long ago that there's two types of liquid or gas flow we experience - laminar (e.g. when you turn on your tap in a basin, and get a straight smooth jet of water) and turbulent (what happens to the incoming water when you flush your run-of-the-mill toilet). The former is well-described, i.e. predictable by a small set of formulae.

Describing turbulent flow accurately, however, is a no-no, until this day. Of course, we now live in a world where quantum physics tells us that certain data about particles are also always unpredictable; even worse, that an observer, just by looking, influences outcomes. However - as, once again, only a recent set of MCU movies has taught us ;-) - the "quantum world" merely starts at the very tiniest levels at 1/10**23 cm, or smaller. (That last bit was not in the movies...)

But even in the macro world there are physical processes that are so chaotic, that they cannot be precisely described. Getting turbulent flow right would be one of the great challenges still ahead, one of the greatest - incl. quantum - physicists once said, long ago.

I can see that every day! The way the plastic brick holder jumps to the left and the right during a flush is never exactly the same! How many times, how long it will stay on each "side"...

And this is one of the main peeves I have with climate change models. They do concentrate on the surface temperatures of our planet only, but that's still a hell of a large field of study. Are the models really up to simulating all that well enough, to predict interlocking systems behaviour in several decades' time?

Look at the short film provided by the Wikipedia entry on "Atmospheric Boundary Level", which describes the chaotic part of the atmosphere that starts from ground level up. (It's an OGG file you can download; you may have to install VLC player to actually play it.) See all those air flow arrows, with different speeds and temperatures, derived from measurements made in that single month in L.A.?

Complex interactions like this abound on our planet, not only on the surface, but higher up (cloud formation is another deep subject of study) and lower down, esp. in the ocean. (I got onto the latter, by currently incidentally reading HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER for the first time...)

Accurate predictions for complex systems are hard! You can usually measure the accuracy of your predictive theory in percent - for physics experiments, this accuracy needs to be 95% or higher for a thesis to be confirmed as supported by reality. Do you think the CCC models' predictions will ever reach this accuracy (well ahead of time of course, since that's what's being sold to us - our pallid future)?

I'm saying that there's a lot of grey below the CCC black edge, that I get told all CCC believers must remain at. Only the remaining ("few") deniers apparently attempt to handle the grey - or of course just propose it's all complete bullshit, which I for one find foolish.

The world is a wonderfully huge place. Let's dial down our self-hate for all the bad things we've done to it, and get to understanding it better, in every nook. And then act, without panic. Rather than keep repeating one element's name like a prayer in every debate, and ignoring everything else that needs to be done in the eco-system - locally (!) and globally - at the same time. (Like the current droughty days city trees in Germany are experiencing.*)

P.S.: Naturally many good things have also happened in recent months - early inoculation invites, rediscovery of an acqaintance from far Southern times, from decades (!) ago, letting ("ZOOMed") RPG back into my life after a very long hiatus...