Day: January 13, 2019

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The Shutdown

After a few betrayals in a game of Risk or Diplomacy, a lot of players stop talking to each other. They decide that’s it. In both games, that usually leads to stalemates. In Risk there’s the chance someone will win via cards, but the game drops into this hours-long slog where nothing really happens as players horde cards. More often everyone goes to bed with the game unfinished than someone wins. In Diplomacy it turns into nothing but fighting, but since Diplomacy lends itself to stalemates, no one can win. Again, a stalemate happens.

Both parties in Washington have dug in. I don’t think there’s any communication going on. Trump won’t sign a budget until he gets his wall, and Pelosi won’t fund the wall. There’s no room for compromise there. Neither side is going to persuade the other to cross the trenches. Neither side is going to persuade the other voters. And with the furlough/back-pay bill passed, I think both sides are set up for a long war of attrition.

I don’t see an end to this any time soon. I hope I’m wrong. But in my experience with human interaction when the various factions resort to reiterating the rightness of their causes, there’s no more meaningful discussion. And nothing’s moving through Washington now.

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The Flat Earth

I legitimately can’t figure out if @FlatEarthOrg is trolling or not.

Driving westbound from Kansas into Denver there’s a stretch of I-70 that is almost perfectly East-West. It’s also almost dead-aimed at Pike’s Peak. The road itself is a little north, so Pike’s Peak would be straight ahead and to the left, but there’s about 100 miles of straight where you can see the mountain.

Now eastern Colorado is just western Kansas in terrain. Almost perfectly flat with little hills with shallow sides. About a hundred miles away, around Burlington, CO, you come over this low hill and see Pike’s Peak. The crest of it stands above the brown horizon. The peak itself is dark blue against a dark blue sky. The peak is perfectly triangular. My phone is garbage, but I’ll get a shot when I get a new phone.

As you continue to drive west, the peak grows. It gets taller. What’s more, features appear. The shoulders of lower peaks, subordinate summits, and nearby mountains in the front range rise into the sky. They don’t come forward; they come up. By the time you get to Limon, I-70 shanks north to head towards Denver, and by then Pike’s Peak is alone and tall. You can see its white head and beard. Lesser summits are not only visible but distinguishable from the central prominance. It’s magnificent.

People, I moved to Colorado for the scenery. This stuff does it for me.

But Pike’s Peak clearly rises. As one drives in the opposite direction, the mountain sinks in the rear view mirror. It gets lower. It crouches, and the subordinate summits are lost first.

I’ve seen pictures of ships go over the horizon, and they do sink from the bottom up, but I find those pictures blurry and hard to see. There’s none of that in Pike’s Peak. Giant hill rises from behind the horizon, and it can’t do that if the Earth is flat.