Least surprising genocidal mass-murdering Hitlerian ratshit of the year
The all-consuming all-destroying all-obliterating scorched-earth hyperterrorist army EPA has produced a recruitment video to recruit LGBTQQ2ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ youth to its SS-Totenkopfverbünde death squad. The video is, of course, introduced by Chief Bullbitch Genocidal Terrorist Richard Windsor, alias "Lisa Jackson".

Least surprising genocide of the year. Satan loves Satan. No news here.
  ¶ 6:46 AM

  Moats, decades
Random thought while listening to 1942 radio programs. For a long time it was believed that the Atlantic and Pacific protected America from attacks coming from Europe and Asia. In '42 many commentators "had to admit" that the moat theory was invalid. In 2001 when we were attacked again, commentators again "had to admit" that the moats no longer worked.

Nonsense. Look at actual events.

1941: Pearl Harbor is way out in the middle of the Pacific. Hawaii was not part of America at the time; it was a colony that we had acquired during McKinley and TR's period of imperial aggression. The Japs never did attack the mainland.

2001: We were not attacked from Afghanistan as the neocons like to believe. We were attacked from Florida and Oklahoma. Those Saudi boys had entered the country earlier and had overstayed their visas. We knew who they were and what they were doing. If we had been defending our own boundaries instead of fucking around everywhere else, we could have kicked those Saudi boys out, and could have ferociously stopped all Arab and Muslim immigrants.

Conclusion: We still have moats. It's still comparatively hard to get across an ocean. We still have plenty of time and plenty of methods to detect and repel an attack, whether it's by boat or plane or missile or internet. If we wanted to protect our country, we could.

The problem is not the "small world" or Tom Friedman's "flat world". The problem is vicious blood-soaked treason by Satanic governments and corporations, who intentionally make the nation vulnerable to attacks in order to maximize their power and profits.

Oceans also protect South and Central America, which were completely untouched by the Jap and Kraut imperial aggressions. After we decided to enter WW2, we tried to get South America involved in the fight, but they politely declined.

= = = = =

Another random thought: I wonder if the nameless decade from 2000 to 2009 has broken the long-standing habit of naming decades. We never did settle on a name for the Aughties or Naughties or Pre-Teens or Zeroties. Now we're three years into a new decade that has a known and definite name, but I haven't heard anyone describe the current period as the Teens.
  ¶ 4:35 AM

  Confusion to our enemies
Polistra absolutely loves it when Commies fight Commies. In this case it's not quite accurate; China is actually an authoritarian super-capitalist country using the Commie name, while the NYTimes is hard-line Stalinist.

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees, the newspaper said on Thursday. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times's network.

Regardless of labels, it's still pure golden joyful goodness. When two enemies of civilization fight each other, civilization gets a brief rest.
  ¶ 3:34 AM

  Why Ohm met resistance
Polistra is always cheering for traditional and human-scale measurements. She wanted to find out: Was there ever a set of natural measurements for electricity? Was there ever an English unit of potential or an American unit of resistance? Or did the original experimenters jam everything into the metric prison from the start?

The answer: Well, sort of. Briefly. In the early days of telegraphy, resistance was often measured in terms of length and width of a standard wire, and different nations had different standards. But this didn't last long, and the volt, ampere and ohm were quickly adopted as universal.

Polistra admits reluctantly that this situation makes sense. Food, farmland and fabric were used and measured systematically for thousands of years before theoreticians came along. Electricity was first used and measured by theoreticians and later passed into common use.

While looking for the nonexistent tradition, an interesting forgotten story popped out. Back in 1827, Georg Ohm developed the math of circuits correctly by using an incorrect analogy. Other 'electricians' had already reached a correct understanding of positive and negative charges; Ohm ignored this understanding and used the transmission of heat instead. Because of his incorrect analogy, his correct math was not accepted by the other scientists for many years. Alfred Mayer, writing in 1890, said:

Ohm was led to the conception of this law by assuming that the flow of electricity in a voltaic circuit is similar to the flow of heat by conduction in a rod. Also, his assumptions that the actions of two electrified particles are directly as their distance, and that the electricity is uniformly dense over each cross section of a conducting wire, were directly opposed to the laws and facts well established by Coulomb for statical electricity.

Damned theoreticians. Always the same. Always ignoring truth if it doesn't fit the latest theory.

Ohm assumed that charge was handed off step by step between the 'particles' in the wire, just as the molecular agitation of heat is handed off from one molecule to another. This led him to view resistance as a sort of velocity measurement:

That is to say, both elements reciprocally change their electric state as long as a difference continues to exist between their electroscopic forces; but this change ceases as soon as they have both attained the same electroscopic force. ... The motion is effected in most bodies so rapidly that we are seldom able to determine its changes at the various places, and on that account we are not in a condition to discover by observation the law according to which they act.

If he was observing any delay using the instruments then available, he was probably seeing the result of inductive reactance in a long coil or wire, rather than simple resistance. A low-pass RL filter can easily take a perceptible amount of time to reach full flow.

Why did Ohm's bad assumption work? Probably because it wasn't all that bad! I spent much of my life playing and working with electrical stuff: repairing, designing, building, teaching. I used Ohm and his variants and corollaries daily. I always started with the analogy of airflow or waterflow**, in which the electrons pass between the atoms of the metal at a finite speed, while the charge field acts instantly across space. In the end it doesn't matter which of these concepts is treated as a finite velocity.

Polistra and Happystar try to see Ohm's original view, using a couple of experiments.


First Polistra shows heat conduction in a rod. She puts the rod onto a 'potential difference' between cold and hot, and watches the different molecular agitations transfer at a finite speed, until the rod is at a uniform temperature.


Now Happystar applies the same concept to a (non-factual!) electric circuit, perhaps as Ohm imagined it. Using an Edison iron-nickel battery to create a potential difference, he drops a wire onto the negative end to complete the circuit. The charges transfer at a finite speed toward the center of the resistive load, until the load is at a uniform current.



= = = = =

Footnote 1: **Airflow and waterflow: See my AUDIN courseware, lesson 201, for an example. Also, the battery, pulsing wires and 'resistive block' are available in my ShareCG page.


= = = = =

Footnote 2: The preface to Ohm's little book nabbed my sympathy instantly:

I herewith present to the public a theory of galvanic electricity ... and shall arrange more such portions together into a whole, if this first essay shall in some degree repay the sacrifices it has cost me. The circumstances in which I have been placed have not been adapted ... to encourage me in the pursuit of novelties. I have therefore chosen for my first attempt a portion in which I have the least to [fear from] competition.

Ah, I understand only too well. I've been there too many times. My 'donate finger' got itchy, and I looked around for Georg's Paypal button ... until I realized that old Georg was probably not online right now.

= = = = =

Footnote 3: Watching the movement of the red and blue in Happystar's resistive load block, my eyes catch an odd illusion. The block seems to be sagging on top and bulging on the side, but only near the right end. (Roughly under Happystar's left leg.) I guarantee there's no bulging in the digital graphics. The shape of the block is not touched by anything in the animation. No mesh adjustments, no displacement maps. Only the color gradients change, and they change symmetrically. So where does this off-center bulge come from?


= = = = =

Much later update: It turns out that Georg's analogy was right.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 4:08 AM

  No analogies
For a long time it's been easy to compare the American Empire with the Roman Empire. More valid and immediate comparison, of course, is Orlov's analogy to the Soviet Empire.

But we've gone waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond those two.

The late Romans weren't TRYING to destroy civilization. They weren't taking ACTIVE STEPS to blow up everything their ancestors had built; they just forgot their history and let things decay.

Lenin had tried briefly to destroy the structure of families, but gave up and focused on building a strong totalitarian country.

No, that's not enough for us. We're taking active steps to RIP UP everything our ancestors did, and we're working amazingly hard to destroy the structure of culture and families.

What was the first step in forming civilizations? Keeping out predatory animals. Finding ways to exclude lions and tigers and bears from human settlements. So naturally we have to bring them back. We have to re-implant bears and wolves, and viciously PUNISH anyone who dares to oppose them.

What's another big step? Draining miasmal swamps to get rid of mosquitoes, and building dams and irrigation systems to move water where it will help to produce food and energy. So naturally we blow up dams, "restore" canals into useless streams, refill miasmal swamps that our ancestors had drained, and even build new malarial swamps where swamps didn't naturally occur.

Smashing family structure? Watch any TV show to see how it's done. Or listen to the politicians who have "completed their fucking personal journey" and "evolved" into raw gibbering psychopathic genocidal mass murderers.

No, you can't make those Roman or Soviet analogies any more. We're fucking PIONEERS. We're truly fucking UNPRECEDENTED. Nobody in the history of the world, not humans nor any other animal or plant, has INTENTIONALLY RIPPED THEIR OWN CIVILIZATION INTO BLOODY SHREDS.
  ¶ 4:04 AM

  If I can ace the test........
UK Telegraph has a short feature on the new British citizenship test, which "critics say" has been dumbed down too much. They included some sample questions, and I scored 100%.


Maybe the "critics" are right if a Yank who has never been to England can ace the test.

To be sure, I'm an unusually Anglocentric Yank, listening to BBC constantly for 50 years and reading UK online papers instead of US online papers ... but still my knowledge is solely verbal as opposed to experiential. They should reinsert the "mundane information about water meters" that only an actual resident would know about. It's the mundane stuff that really counts!
  ¶ 8:56 AM

  Quis custodiet ipsos custodis?
After a long period of highly stable 20-degree weather with freezing fog, we finally broke into the 30s with some nice street-clearing and roof-clearing rain. Looking at the Weather Bureau this morning to check rain amounts, I found this. (I squashed the chart horizontally to fit the important parts into a readable image)



Note the cheery "Quality Control: OK!" on the line with an obvious instrumental error. I'm fairly sure we didn't have a 136 mph wind during the night. If we did, the Weather Bureau would no longer exist, and I wouldn't either.

= = = = =

Later: they did catch the error when compiling their monthly record. It shows 22 as max wind for that date.
  ¶ 3:29 AM

  Finding sanity
The R team is predictably joyous, and the D team is downcast, over a federal "court" "decision" that says one of Obama's interim appointments was wrong for some mysterious reason, which the "court" calls "the constitution". I have a vague memory of this document. Both of our idiot teams still misuse the words of this obsolete document for their own purposes; both teams idiotically claim that OUR WONDERFUL TEAM always follows the document and THE OTHER NASTY team always violates it. In fact all presidents and all Congresses and all federal agencies operate in total and blatant violation of the document. Every appointment and every decision is transparently and prima-facie illegal.

Polistra likes to go back in time to find relative sanity. In this case she goes back to 1943 and listens to an Information Please episode featuring Senator Fulbright. The specific sanity is found at 18:00 in the clip, if you want to hear it.



Info Please liked to ask specific questions to political guests, so they asked Fulbright how a treaty can be approved by the Senate. He proceeded to outline three different ways it was actually done, making it clear that only one was really legal and proper. No party-based nonsense, no finger-pointing or blame. Just the facts.
  ¶ 5:56 PM

  Destabilize
Yesterday NPR interviewed some fucking genocidal mass-murderer representing the fucking genocidal mass-murdering Sierra Club. [Can't seem to find transcript online yet.]

Sierra Wack was discussing his civil disobedience effort (undoubtedly funded by the terrorist army EPA) nominally aimed at "encouraging" the terrorist army EPA to stop the Keystone Pipeline.

Sierra Wack seems to have found a new phrase to replace "global warming" and "climate change".

The threat of a destabilizing climate.

We need to re-stabilize the climate.

Perfectly Orwellian. This decade's weather-related problems are EXACTLY caused by an UNUSUALLY STABLE phase in the world's cycles. Just like the decade of the '30s. We get floods, droughts, persistent hot spells, persistent cold spells. Note the common theme? STABILITY. Blocking highs. Systems don't move. Heat stays in one place, cold stays in one place, wet stays in one place, dry stays in one place.

Get it? Get it? Get it? This is called



We don't need to stabilize a system that is abnormally stable. And our Evil KKKarbon Sins And Iniquities have not destabilized the system, because it is abnormally stable. And there's nothing we can do to re-stabilize Nature even if it were actually unstable. We just have to wait for the wheel to turn, and try to get out of the way. The wheel will turn. Count on it. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. Round and round and round and round and round and round and round.

Get it? Get it? Get it? This is called



The current stable phase is doing more damage to our material possessions than the '30s stable phase for several obvious reasons. We've built millions of houses in KNOWN floodplains and beaches, so more houses are subject to flooding. We've built millions of houses in forests, so more houses are subject to wildfires. We've turned lots of farmland into streets and urban areas, so ground has less ability to absorb rain. We've FAILED to maintain existing dams and levees to control flooding, and worst of all the psychopathic terrorist army EPA has actually TORN DOWN dams that were controlling floods. That is an ACT OF WAR, and nobody has yet answered the ACT OF WAR.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 3:47 AM

  Why steep roofs are better
Looking at snow on various roofs, I decided to settle a question that had puzzled me for a long time.

It's clear that steep roofs are better in snowy places.

One reason is obvious but not very important. When snow is 'shed-able', steep roofs will shed it faster. Powdery snow is inclined to fall or blow off, and it falls faster from a steep roof. However, most snow doesn't blow or slide easily. It sticks equally on all roofs. (This year's Spokane snow is especially glue-like, presumably because the temperature has been especially steady at 20 degrees.)

The other reason is more general, but I couldn't wrap my mind around it properly: Steep roofs can hold the load better. This is usually described in terms of pounds per square foot, but that doesn't hit the mark. The important variable for breaking or weakening a roof is the bending force applied at the middle of the rafters. I could sense that the bending force was different for a steep roof, but I needed a diagram to pin it down.

Here's the diagram. The animation varies the roof from steep to nearly flat. Three vector arrows represent the relevant forces felt by the middle of a rafter. The black arrow, always pointing straight down and always the same strength, is the pull of gravity on the snow. The green arrow represents the component of gravity along the rafter. This force tends to pull the house apart, and it is actually worse** for the steep roof. Most important is the red arrow, the component that tries to bend the rafters. This force is weak on a steep roof, strong on a flat roof.




= = = = =

**Footnote: If you take the green along-rafter force and vectorize its effects on the top of the wall, you see that it comes out roughly the same for all roofs. The force along the rafter is strongest for a steep roof, but most of it goes into downward compression, which is the safest kind of force. For a low roof the along-rafter force goes mainly into sideways pull-apart, but it's a weak force.


= = = = =

March 2017: a more precise observation of actual roofs. Steep is definitely better. Steep with occupied (warm) attic is best of all. No doubt about it. The Cape Cod was deaigned by experience in snowy New England, and it's still the winner.
  ¶ 7:39 PM

  We never negotiate
I've always been annoyed by the nonsense that governments emit when faced with pirates or terrorists.

"We strongly condemn in the strongest terms this cowardly act. We will never negotiate with cowardly terrorists."

Well, in reality we do pay terrorists often, though not every time. It's well known that the first few months of the Afghanistan war succeeded because we simply paid the Taliban to leave for a while. We didn't defeat them militarily or diplomatically or anything else.

The terrorists KNOW they're going to get paid. They know it because they've BEEN paid. They know it because they HAVE THE FUCKING MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS. We're not fooling them with our fine brave-sounding words.

So what's the fucking point of emitting the "Never negotiate" signal? Solely to fool Americans? But we know the truth now, so we aren't fooled either.

Finally figured it out. It's not incorrect, it's incomplete. The complete statement is:

We never negotiate with terrorists because we don't know how to haggle. We always pay sticker price up front.

Now it makes sense.
  ¶ 5:15 PM

  Never thought about that before......
An excellent essay by Satoshi Kanazawa on the role of Satanist-Stalinist fashion in rejecting scientific results. His main point is hardly a new discovery; it's been dramatically clear for 40 years inside academia. Self-censorship is still absolute in "social" ""sciences"" like economics and psychology, but it's starting to fade in real biological and medical fields. A medical result that shows a difference between races or sexes can occasionally be published without ruining careers.

Along the way, Kanazawa makes one little sidepoint that snagged my attention ferociously.

In my experience, the only time the cries of bad science from the self-appointed science police were not motivated by political correctness was the controversy surrounding Daryl Bem’s study on precognition, which I have previously defended, because, contrary to Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence. All the other times when people complained about “bad science,” they were politically motivated. They found the conclusions to be “dangerous” and “offensive,” and therefore it must be bad science.

I had always taken the 'extraordinary claims' rule as pretty good advice, but hadn't stopped to examine it. What does 'extraordinary' mean in Sagan's mind? It means UNFASHIONABLE. If a finding disagrees with Oprah Winfrey and Khloé Kardashian and Michael Mann and Al Gore and Bill Nye and 'New Scientist', it's extraordinary and needs extra evidence.

The proper rule is obvious after you peel the onion. Every claim requires valid evidence, and valid means the same regardless of fashion or consensus.
  ¶ 6:27 AM

  Human temp scale?
Listening to local radio announcer this morning: "Hey, Deer Park is getting balmy now! Their temperature is five times as warm as the last reading. They've gone from 1 degree to 5 degrees!"

The announcer was joking, but not entirely. There are two ways of 'correcting' his idea.

(1) If you want to get technical and thermodynamic about it, "five times as hot" as 1 degree F would actually be hot enough to melt iron. Absolute zero on Fahrenheit is -459, so 1 degree is actually 460 degrees above the point where molecules don't wiggle. To get the molecules wiggling 5 times as fast as they were in Deer Park's air, you'd have to reach 2360 F, which is melting range for a number of common metals.

(2) Professor Polistra doesn't want to get technical. She wants to get human, wants to find a measurement system that agrees with human experience and senses. So she wants to set up a human-based scale of temperature, something like decibels or the Beaufort wind scale. Unfortunately, temperature is much more subjective and individual than sound or wind, so a general scale is probably impossible. Consider the 'annotated thermometer' joke, which is about as close as we can get to a human scale. All of its points are specific to nationalities or localities, like:

40 F: Californians shiver uncontrollably. Minnesotans go swimming.

Still, Prof P wants to try fitting a dB-style temperature curve. It would obviously be a tanh shape, like almost all human sensory responses. Using the Fooplot online grapher, she formed up a graph for her own rather cold-loving response. The horizontal axis is degrees F, and the vertical might be called "How hot is it?" on the positive side, and "How cold is it?" on the negative side. Positive 10 is Too Fucking Hot, Negative 10 is Too Fucking Cold, and zero is Just Right.



Incidentally, the function isn't clearly visible on the blackboard. It should be:
deciGoldies = 10 * tanh((Fahrenheit - 55) / 40).

By this scale, the distinction between 1 and 5 degrees is about half a dG, which seems about right.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 8:11 AM

  Dumb linguists as usual
Benny Boy has written his first Tweet in modernized Latin. "Scholars" are saying the same old nonsense:

The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano threw its weight behind the initiative last week, with Manlio Simonetti, a professor of Christian history, telling the paper that Latin was well-suited to Twitter. "Latin adapts very well to the brevity demanded by new social networks, even better than English," he said.

Bad generalization from a good fact. Latin, as a synthetic language, packs more grammar into each word than English does. But this makes an 'average' sentence longer in terms of syllables or characters.

Because most noun inflections are repeated on article, adjective and noun, and verb inflections are often multisyllabic, you generally end up with more characters for the same meaning in Latin. English is mainly an isolating language, which means our grammatical functions are chiefly performed by separate words, and each word does its job exactly once.

Oriental languages get the most mileage from Twitter because they're allowed to cheat. Each character in Japanese or Chinese represents a syllable. Twitter still allows 140 characters, even though the characters carry far more weight than Roman letters. (Strictly speaking, Unicode is the cheater. Unicode uses 32 bits for each visible character no matter how much meaning it carries.)

Arabic and Hebrew have a more 'honest' advantage because they don't write vowels. Even if we were still using 8-bit ASCII, Arabic and Hebrew could pack about twice as much meaning into a tweet.
  ¶ 5:40 PM

  Before Morse 3
This is the third and last in a series of old telegraphs. The title isn't really accurate, because the Gray Telautograph came well after Morse; but I want to make the series consistent. (See the Wheatstone five-needle telegraph and the Breguet dial telegraph.)

Elisha Gray just missed being the famous inventor of the telephone and the founder of a giant corporate empire. Gray and Bell were working against each other, and Bell had better access to money and lawyers. Gray got his revenge to some extent with the Telautograph, which is the spiritual ancestor of the mouse and tablet, AND the ancestor of the modern computer printer. It even looks a lot like a printer.

The Telautograph was commercially successful from 1890 to 1920; it went out of use when photoelectric tubes made the optical fax machine possible. Sending and receiving machines are similar in appearance but opposite in mechanism.



On the sender, you pick up the pencil and write on the paper [almost] normally. The shelf under the paper is sensitive to pressure and detects when the pencil is making a mark; the pencil is attached via two strings to pulleys that rotate, creating pulses on the wire as you pull or push.



You could draw or write anything within the limits of the sender, and it would be reproduced faithfully at the receiver.



Polistra anxiously awaits the first communication from her faithful silent companion Happystar. What are his innermost thoughts? What has he been pondering?



Oh. I guess we should have expected that.



For more technical detail, here's a closeup of the sending action with the top covers removed. Imagine your hand grasping the pencil.

Each wire passes through a 'threader', then across the polarity switcher, then reels up onto the commutator on its own side. As you move the pencil around, each commutator turns quickly, breaking a circuit to create pulses on the wire from its own side. When the direction of each wire reverses, the polarity switcher puts the negative or positive side of the battery into the circuit for that side.




On the receiving side, these two streams of negative and positive pulses are sent to something like a linear stepping motor or stepping solenoid on each side. (I haven't been able to figure out this mechanism from the patent drawings!)

= = = = =

Artistic note for Poser types: I've released all three of these telegraphs on my ShareCG page. See also the Wheatstone and Breguet sets.


= = = = =

Later note: This 1961 British Pathe newsreel about the insure-everything Lloyds agency shows a Telautograph in action, starting at 1:30. Looks very much the same as the 1880 version.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 6:17 AM

  Schlecht und Böse
Another pair of news items leading to another random thought.

I learned German (sort of) by reading Luthers Bibel, and by singing along with Schütz and Bach. In Luther's time German made a distinction between schlecht and böse. Both words mean bad or evil, but they belong to different classes and connote different mindsets.

A peasant who snatches a piece of bacon to feed his kids is schlecht. Ein König oder Graf who snatches a peasant's land to feed his pet peacocks is böse. The peasant's schlecht actions will probably hurt someone, but he's not consciously trying to do harm, and may have no honest choice available. The König's böse behavior is fully conscious and completely gratuitous. Most of all, the König is above prosecution and knows it.

= = = = =

Schlecht news:

Spokane Valley Fire had responded to a transformer fire at the substation and saw the fence surrounding the station had been cut open. Deputies arriving on scene found a large opening in the fence and saw footprints leading to the substation.

An Avista employee told deputies a ground wire had been cut and removed from the transformer, causing it to ignite. The employee said the cutting of the ground likely burned the suspect(s). 2,165 Avista customers in the area were without power for a short time because of the incident.

Epitome of schlecht crime. Methheads work hard to acquire a few feet of copper; the crime creates its own punishment.

Fun to imagine, though. "Lessee. I'm gonna tromp through the snow; then I'm gonna cut this wire; then pull it out and take it to the recycler. Sounds like a good plaBBBBBZZZZZZFFFFFZZZZZZZFFFFZZZZZ"

= = = = =

Böse news: Lance Armstrong. Michael Mann. Lloyd Blankfein. Jamie Dimon. Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard. Nuff said.

= = = = =

  ¶ 2:27 AM

  Edison's revenge on Tesla 2


As Boeing tries to fix an unbelievably idiotic problem caused by using laptop batteries to power an aircraft, Polistra hums sedately past in her Detroit Electric.

Just another reminder that rechargeable batteries were already perfected in 1910. The nickel-iron battery doesn't burn up, lasts at least 100 years, and doesn't require Chinese materials.
  ¶ 5:34 AM

  Proposal
Various economists are tossing around dumb ideas (i.e. the trillion-dollar coin, second mortgage on Alaska) for "solving" the national debt. All of those ideas are invalid. All are mere accounting tricks with no real transfer of value. There are only two honest ways of eliminating a debt: through an actual payment, or through inflation.

So let's transfer some actual property, not just fiddle with ledger entries.

I propose giving California to China as a permanent colony in exchange for all debts. But the transfer comes with very long strings. The Chinese occupiers must be fully and enthusiastically Chinese.

Specifically, the new settlers must:

(1) Shout racist abuse at everyone who is not pure Han.

(2) Smoke constantly and aggressively.

(3) Build huge dams and coal-burning power plants, with no regard for "endangered" species.

(4) Level the Sierras and strip-mine all the gold and other minerals.

(5) Use the slag from (4) to build a new continent west of San Francisco, covered with 200-story solid gold Han-only casinos.

(6) Maintain huge slave labor camps.

(7) Execute faggots and bulldykes.

(8) Eat everything that moves. Dogs, cats, condors, brains of live monkeys.

(9) Burn down "old growth" redwood forests and sell the ash as a dick enhancer.

(10) Imprison pornographers and hippieshits.

(11) Abort female babies and treat male children as little emperors.

= = = = =

One more condition: These essentially Chinese actions must be constantly televised in the remaining US, so that normal Americans can watch hypersensitive Californians screaming and dying of unbearable mental anguish. This will provide a huge source of revenue for the colony, and may even have the side benefit of crowding out all existing media. Revenge Channel 1, Revenge Channel 2, Revenge Channel 3.... pretty soon there's no audience for NBC, CBS, Fox, etc.
  ¶ 3:54 AM

  Two items, one error
A couple of totally separate news items today illustrate the same basic error in thinking. This error is fairly new and nearly universal. I'm pretty sure nobody with any sort of sophistication fell into this fallacy 100 years ago.

Item 1: A murderer was actually executed, which is rare enough; he was killed in the electric chair, which is unique. First time in several years. He had to volunteer repeatedly and aggressively to make this happen, and had to overrule a dozen satanic lawyers over and over and over.**

Satan dba ACLU has brought us to this point by manipulating the error I'm discussing. Every possible method of execution is illegally declared to be "cruel and unusual" because it may cause some extra pain in the last minute of life.

= = = = =

Item 2: Some idiot "professor" has done a Skinner-box experiment on crabs, showing that they can learn to avoid an electric shock.

First of all, this is fantastically redundant. Many millenia of informal experience and two centuries of formal experiments have taught us that ALL LIVING THINGS from bacteria to begonias to bumblebees to bonobos have some way of sensing pain or unpleasant situations; and ALL LIVING THINGS have some way of escaping from the pain or unpleasantness. Our understanding of sensory systems in plants and protozoa is new and still developing, but we've known about animals forever. This is as certain and unarguable as gravity.

Now the idiot "professor" is using the completely unremarkable fact to reach a completely nonsensical conclusion via the same error:

The finding could have important implications for the food industry, where many chefs boil crabs, lobsters and prawns alive in the belief that they are impervious to pain.

Lead researcher Professor Bob Elwood said: 'The experiments show it is likely they experience pain, rather than flinching, and therefore we must start to question how these animals are treated."

Well of course they experience pain. There's absolutely no way to draw a line anywhere in the living world between "critters that experience things" and "critters that don't experience things". Maybe awareness exists only in some phyla and not others; or maybe there's a spectrum from dim awareness to bright awareness; but we have NO OBJECTIVE WAY to draw those lines. If we use the word experience for our action when we run away from a skunk, we also have to use the word experience for the action of a bacterium swimming away from a toxin.

This idiot "professor", and his accomplices in the media who are loudly trumpeting his "special new finding", want to use the "special new finding" about crabs to make us stop eating crabs, because the crabs suffer in the last minute of life.

= = = = =

Why is that focus so fallacious? Because anything that happens in the last minute of life will not be remembered.

We DO need to focus on humane treatment DURING THE FULL LIFETIME of the critters we're going to eat. A cow or chicken or crab that is unnecessarily deprived, or unnecessarily confined, is being treated inhumanely. It is suffering, and it endures and remembers the suffering for months or years.

Sophisticated religions have always understood this point, and have tried to encourage decent treatment of livestock and careful use of crops, followed by a respectful but not necessarily painless death. Kosher, halal, saying grace at table. Three ways to demonstrate sacred respect toward the animal we're sacrificing.

= = = = =

** Footnote: The fact that ONLY A THREE-TIME MURDERER can wrestle our official Satans into a sort of temporary semi-sanity, and the fact that it takes TWENTY YEARS for a THREE-TIME MURDERER to achieve this little temporary partial victory, tells us EVERY MOTHERFUCKING THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about the current _____ ______ _____ ______ ______ ______ of what we formerly knew as "Western civilization". [No words exist to fill those blanks, and if they did exist, I wouldn't deflower and contaminate an innocent computer by typing them.]

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 6:00 PM

  Forgotten stuff


Listening to old radio MP3s, Polistra and Happystar have picked up a few facts and words that have been forgotten.

(1) In a 1940 report from Germany, a CBS correspondent mentioned that he had been driving on a "double-track highway" called an Autobahn. Shows that the four-lane road was still completely unfamiliar to Americans. The reporter had to make a railroad analogy which was both familiar and appropriate. At that time Americans understood that a double track made it easier for trains to run in both directions, without risk of collision if the dispatcher failed to give the right signals.

It's odd that Americans didn't apply that analogy to automobiles until much later. We had plenty of divided boulevards inside cities, so the connection should have been possible. There was simply no pressure for highway safety.

(2) Also in 1940 the Senate passed a new Conscription law. Sen Josh Lee of Okla introduced a bill to conscript money as well as men. Seems like a good idea. The rich are always able to keep their sons safe, so why not put their money in harm's way instead? Of course the bill failed. Then as now, Wall Street was pure treason.

(3) In 1952 when Comrade Truman was fucking up the Korean War, Senator Al Gore Senior made a suggestion that shows us the genetic origin of Al Junior's fantastic stupidity. Al Senior proposed dumping nuclear waste across the Korean Peninsula to create a 'moat' that the forces of the North couldn't cross. A spokesman for the Atomic Energy Commission refuted the idea with a degree of clarity and logic that we rarely hear from officials now: It would be possible to create a mile-wide zone with enough radiation to kill a man who stays there for a month. But no matter how strong we made the radiation, a soldier could run through it in 10 minutes with no ill effects. A soldier in a steel truck or tank could drive across it even faster, with even less exposure. [A modern bureaucrat would say with drearily predictable legalism: "We haven't read the statement. We'll let Senator Gore speak for himself." .... thus leaving the ignorance uncorrected.]
  ¶ 3:10 AM

  THIS! IS! AMAZING!
This is the most important piece of science. Ever. Period. Everything before and after pales in comparison. Wheel, fire, gravity, electricity. Minor trivia.

[Later: Well, okay, it's not that big, but still plenty big!]

Part of the writeup:

...They applied Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) in the middle of the fMRI scan to temporarily disable the Wernicke area in the participants' brains. The participants, while in the MRI scanner, were performing a sentence comprehension task before, during and after the TMS was applied. Normally, the Wernickearea is a major player in sentence comprehension.

The results showed that as the brain function in the Wernicke area decreased following the application of TMS, a "back-up" team of secondary brain areas immediately became activated and coordinated, allowing the individual's thought process to continue with no decrease in comprehension performance.

The brain's back-up team consisted of three types of brain regions:

(1) contralateral areas -- areas that are in the mirror-image location of the brain;

(2) areas that are right next to the impaired area; and

(3) a frontal executive area.

"The first two types of back-up areas have similar brain capabilities as the impaired Wernicke area, although they are less efficient at the capability.... The third area plays a strategic role..."

...Following the TMS, the impaired area and its partners gradually returned to their previous levels of coordinated activity, while the back-up team of brain areas was still in place. "This means, that for some period of time, there were two cortical teams operating simultaneously."

Go now. Read the whole thing.


Still think it's the random result of random mutations? You lose.
  ¶ 12:05 PM

  West coast is not part of the Globe
I've been noticing that Wash is not participating in the allegedly "global" "warming". Well, is this just Wash? Or is it a Pacific thing? Is the entire west coast of the Americas mysteriously off the "globe"?

Decided to use the wonderful TuTiempo.net again. Scanned some West Coast cities in South America until I found two that have decently long and solid records. Lima and Puerto Montt both have records since 1973 (which happens to be around the start of the recent "warming"), so I graphed them and compared with Seattle in the same period.

For each city, the top trace is Tmax, middle is Tmean, lower is Tmin. Horizontal axis runs from 1973 to 2012.


Bigger and clearer graph here. Excel files for Seatac, Lima, and Puerto Montt.

Hmm. Guess these three cities, spanning most of the west side of the Americas, are not on the "globe" at all. They have chosen not to participate in the "global" warming.

I'm getting more and more convinced that the alleged "global" warming is actually Gulf Stream changes, possibly modulated by geomagnetic weakening through the agency of bacteria.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 8:37 AM

  Showing them how it's done
While the unspeakably hypersatanic all-consuming all-destroying mass-murdering genocidal monstroids in DC continue their 23-year-long scorched-earth war of occupation on what's left of America, some state governments are showing that normal competent action is still possible. The Wash state legislature is experimenting with a unique nonpartisan coalition:

The Senate voted 25-23 to adopt new rules that will see each party chair six committees, but the Republican-controlled majority will chair the most powerful committees, including the budget, education and healthcare.

Democrats have agreed to co-chair three committees - Sen. Brian Hatfield (D-Raymond) on the Agriculture, Water and Rural Economic Development Committee, Sen. Steve Hobbs (D-Lake Stevens) on the Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee, and Sen. Tracey Eide (D-Federal Way) on the Transportation Committee.

Earlier, members of the coalition rejected a power-sharing counter proposal that would have seen a co-chair from each party on all committees. Tom, the coalition’s choice for majority leader, called for a tone of cooperation and collaboration.

“We have a lot of pressing issues in front of us and it is going to take all of us working together side by side.”

But some of the legislators still prefer insanity:

Sen. Karen Keiser (D-Federal Way) said it was a sad day for the Senate and called it “politics of the other Washington.”

“The voter’s choice apparently doesn’t matter here today,” she said.

Perfectly Orwellian, perfectly fucking idiotic, perfectly murderous. Comrade Keiser has it exactly backwards. Coalition government is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE of the "other Washington", and coalition government is at least an attempt to give the voters what they want. Remains to be seen if it will work as planned, but it's holding together pretty well at this point.
  ¶ 3:56 AM

  Babbling bacteria
A new item at Science Daily notes that bacteria need to form colonies in order to effectively process available nutrients in the ocean. When one bacterium finds itself alone, it sends out SOS chemicals. With luck, other bacteria will 'hear' the signal and come to join the first one. After they get a proper colony going, they start to digest whatever's around, including organic material and gases.

In other words, the ocean's gas content is modulated by bacterial communication abilities. A neat animation is here at the Woods Hole website.

What else do we know about bacteria in the ocean? We know they use magnetic fields to get around. They follow the lines of force in the earth's magnetic field, or sometimes steer a course relative to those lines.

And what else do we know? We know the earth's magnetic field is dramatically weakening in the last 30 years.

Hypothesis: If bacteria are having trouble getting from point A to point B, they will have trouble forming biofilms or colonies in response to SOS 'signals'. If they aren't forming as many colonies, they won't absorb CO2 as well as they did with a strong compass.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 9:17 AM

  Natural units = Better judgment
Polistra is a fan of natural and traditional measuring systems. Until the tyrannical mass-murdering French Revolution came along, most of the world used local and 'customized' measuring systems, serving the needs of each country or occupation. These traditional systems had a strong connection to human senses because they were developed through experience. (For example, the ounce is 1/16 of a pound because the hand can detect a 1/16 change in weight.)

England's current panic over a little bit of winter illustrates the evil power of metrication. England is a fairly cold place which should be able to take a little bit of winter.

"We are calling on neighbours, postmen, milkmen and paperboys to step up and help save lives by knocking on doors and reporting anything out of the ordinary."

Eastern parts of England and Scotland had more snow overnight, with as much as 17cms falling in some parts of Norfolk, and up to 5cms elsewhere.

Temperatures in London will get to around 3C, and the warmest place in the country will be Cornwall, which experience temperatures of around 8C. But as darkness falls the mercury is expected to plunge to around -8C in England and -10C in Scotland for the rest of the week and possibly into the weekend.

Oh no! 17cms! That's a wholelotofcms!
Oops, that's only 6 inches.


Oh no! NEGATIVE TENC! SubzeroC! HorribleC!
Oops, that's just 14 real degrees.








Natural units make it easier to form your own judgments. Artificial units make it easier for the authorities to rig up a panic. Which is, of course, the whole point of metrication.

Specifically, the EU-enslaved Brit government needs to generate panic in order to justify its mass murder of poor people.

The freezing temperatures, which are expected to fall to around -8C overnight for much of England, and increased heating bills mean there are concerns that the number of deaths this winter could top the 24,000 in the relatively mild 2011-2012 winter, the Local Government Association said.

THINK. The Gaian cult kills 24,000 Brits each year by impoverishing them. The Gaian cult steals money from ordinary people and pours it into the Cayman Island bank accounts of super-rich Gaian priests.

If you allow people to reach their own judgments with natural measurements, some of us might realize that we're starving and freezing and dying in road crashes from a set of conditions that should be easy to handle. But with murderous Robespierre measurements, the government finds it easier to persuade us that we're freezing and dying from EVIL KKKARBON, not because of theft by bankers and politicians.
  ¶ 3:35 AM

  Snow as organizer
Polistra and friends are thankful to live in a place with plenty of snow.


Shoveling my own yard and looking at other yards, a thought popped up: Snow encourages organization in both long-term and short-term ways.

Long-term is obvious in a historical sense: People who live in cold places have to be frugal. They have to store food carefully and think ahead. Even in a modern city there are plenty of days when you can't get to the store easily, so you need to plan your marketing. Warm-place people can grow food at any time, and can always get around easily.

Those opposite constraints, imposed over centuries, create different genetic patterns. Disorganized people die or move away from cold places. Snow strongly discourages criminal behavior, partly because the more violent ethnic groups don't like cold and wet weather to begin with, and partly because snow makes it wonderfully easy to track burglars.

The short-term aspect is a new thought. My yard doesn't have any paved driveways or sidewalks in the summer, but in winter I create paths with the shovel. Others have created graceful curves, placing a pretty 'virtual walk' where no actual walk exists.

Snow gives an immediate reward to the organizing impulse. You can create a nice sharp construction in 15 minutes and zero cost, compared to several days and thousands of dollars for the same construction in bricks or cement.

= = = = =

Bit later: the Essex Lion is out and about this morning. 15 degrees doesn't seem like ideal Lion weather, but I guess he's hungry.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 7:35 AM

  Good move. More, please.
Though Federal "judges" are tools of Satan, local and state judges often manage to do the right thing. Good example yesterday:

Attorneys Mark Vovos and Carl Oreskovich convinced Superior Court Judge James Triplet to order the return of thousands of dollars of cash and property that was seized from two owners of massage parlors that were raided last summer as part of Operation Red Light. While their clients were initially taken into custody for allegedly promoting prostitution and money laundering, prosecutors have not filed any formal charges.

“The government doesn’t have the right to sit on it … and deny my client her right to the Fourth Amendment protection to be free of illegal search and seizure,” Oreskovich said. “We are asking the court to release the property seized on July 10.”

Good. The whole "operation" was corrupt, and it looks like the case will now start to fall apart.

What happened in July was brazenly obvious. Northern Quest Casino, run by the Kalispel Tribe, ordered state, federal and local "law" enforcement to suppress its competitors in the whore trade. These competitors, mainly owned by old Korean ladies, had been running openly for decades. Everyone knew what those spas were doing. During all those years nobody found them "illegal enough" to raid.

Fact: The "American" economy now consists solely of casinos, run by three main mafias. At the national level all power and money belongs to the Jew Casino on Wall Street. At the state and local level the mafias are either Italian or Indian. None of the three main mafias will tolerate competition from small businesses.
  ¶ 3:05 AM

  Rare journalism
Good example of what real local journalists can accomplish when they actually work as journalists.

Compare two TV stations covering the same story.

KREM, owned by a national share-based corporation, takes the standard route. Listen to Commies, ignore facts:

The City of Spokane is getting tougher on homeless camps popping up under I-90. Officials plan to break up the camps later this week,but several homeless people said whatever is implemented will not last. The City said it will provide a 24-hour notice before it takes any action. Officials also want to connect the homeless with services.

The Spokane Homeless Coalition said its representatives are collecting information from people who are camping to better understand their needs and what is prevent them from seeking housing. A spokesperson for the SHC said shelters get full during the winter, and some require identification which some homeless people do not have.

That's the whole story. Just repeating what the Commie group said.

= = = = =

In sharp contrast: KXLY, owned by a local private company, started with a real question, and actually asked someone for information:

The City of Spokane says it'll get tough on a tent city that's been pitched under I-90 downtown by first offering social services to the homeless camping out there, and then giving them 24 hours to vacate.

That might make you wonder where will they go, and the answer is there are shelters in Spokane for the homeless right now that are not full.

At the House of Charity, where men can go even if they've been drinking, there's 108 beds, and they've only turned away 12 men so far this year due to capacity issues. At Hope House for single women there are 34 beds and they haven't turned anyone away this winter. At the Union Gospel Mission on Trent, the men's shelter hasn't been full since 1990, when they opened. They said they'd gladly welcome anyone from the tent city inside their shelter when they're ready to straighten up but, they added, it will take a concerted effort from the entire community to help make that happen.

"We want to end homelessness by teaching responsibility, choices and then when you make the right choices, these are the results," Union Gospel Mission executive director Phil Altmeyer said.

Altmeyer thinks Spokane's citizens have created a place under I-90 that's comfortable for the homeless so they stay. "If you feed those people while they're there, they will stay there and we want to bring them out of that," he explained. "That's why people bring them the food, they want to help them, they have compassion, but I think sometimes we don't realize we're enabling people to stay in the condition they're in." If there's no more help under I-90 they'll need to seek out one of Spokane's shelters, he added.

Corporate news-like-substance picks up Stalinist platitudes. Real journalism picks up real facts.
  ¶ 3:10 AM

  Neither snow, nor rain, nor like O-M-G
Spokane finally got some serious snow yesterday. About 7 new inches, on top of 4 remaining from last week. Lots of shoveling, and I raked the roof just in case.


(Probably more obsessive than imperative, but I SHALL NOT have another expensive ice dam. Never again!)

= = = = =

Winter may stop the mailman nowadays, but it doesn't stop the bath-salts elite!

A Spokane couple got quite the surprise on their doorstep this weekend. They woke up to find a man trying to break into their home, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. "Once we saw the image we were like O-M-G, I couldn't believe my eyes," Dianne Lavalley said.

"It was 6:41 in the morning on Sunday and the dog was barking like crazy," Dianne said. A man was trying to break into their home. The man quickly took off though and the Lavalley's didn't get a good glimpse of him but when they went back through their security camera, they saw a lot more of him than they expected.

"We were just shocked when we first found the image, it was shocking that there was actually somebody there with their pants on their ankles," the couple said. ...

The suspect is described as a white man, in his 20's, about 5'8'' to 5'10" and thin built. He was last seen wearing a two tone jacket, dark pants and a stocking cap with a fuzzy ball on top.

One on top and two below.

Which brings us to:



= = = = =

Next day: Looks like Mr Fuzzyball has been caught. He broke into an apartment and stripped, and the cops came in time to grab him.

Mist Fuzzyball he gon have fiiiiiiiine time in jail.

Hey Mist Fuzzyball, fuzzy me banana, daylight come and me wan go home.
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot BUNCH! Daylight come and me wan go home.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 6:08 AM

  More dumb assumptions
Interesting observation, peculiar conclusion.

But bonobos, those notoriously frisky, ardently social great apes of the Congo, prefer to share with a stranger before sharing with an animal they know. In fact, a bonobo will invite a stranger to share a snack while leaving an acquaintance watching helplessly from behind a barrier. "It seems kind of crazy to us, but bonobos prefer to share with strangers," said Brian Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. "They're trying to extend their social network."

Trying to extend their social network? What the fuck does that mean? And how do you know what the bonobos are thinking?

If you want to make sense, go with the well-known human equivalent. Many cultures practice intense hospitality toward strangers, and their reasons are well understood because humans can explain their motivations with words. Arabs, Slavs, and others are hospitable to strangers for two main reasons: (1) A stranger eating at your table can be watched. A stranger lurking outside your house is dangerous. (2) A stranger who has eaten at your table is slightly indebted to you, thus less likely to harm you.

These motivations don't always work, but they must have worked well enough and often enough to establish the practice of hospitality.
  ¶ 9:15 AM

  Unshaven science
Headline caught my attention because I'd been thinking about black boxes....

Biologists Unlock 'Black Box' to Underground World: How Tiny Microbes Make Life Easier for Humans

Unfortunately, they're not thinking the blackbox way. They're starting with a pile of nonsensical assumptions, and all their research is aimed at helping those assumptions.

With information about the genome (the complete set of its DNA and all of its genes) of each microbe in the soil, the researchers were able to see which organisms do what, and whether or not their functional roles are redundant or unique.

"People think you're going to pick up a handful of dirt anywhere in the world and you'll pretty much have the same bunch of microbes doing pretty much the same things," Adams said. "That's simply not true. They function very differently based on their environment. And when you have more species, you get more, and different functions."

Having several different species that do the same job might mean that if one species goes extinct then the others can pick up the slack. On the other hand, in ecosystems like deserts, where there are few species and even fewer jobs, removing some species could result in collapse, or failure of the ecosystem to provide the services we need.

Could result in collapse, but hasn't yet. We have 3 BILLION YEARS OF DATA, and during those 3 BILLION YEARS this event that COULD HAPPEN has NOT HAPPENED. How many more BILLIONS do you need, fuckhead? If removing some species resulted in collapse, there would be no life on earth. Every ecosystem has gone through innumerable tough times, periods when the climate was too cool or too warm or too wet or too dry or too acid or too alkaline or too radioactive for its comfort range. Through all those periods, life continued in every niche.

The researchers' data also may have something to say about how new species form. For centuries it was thought that geographic barriers (like mountains, peninsulas, rivers and deserts) were the primary engines of speciation. However, it could be that interactions with other species are just as important.

When you actually see speciation, wake me up. All existing evidence points to an initial wild abundance of species, followed by a gradual winnowing over the millenia. We've been observing large animals and plants closely for 3000 years, and we've been observing microbes closely for about 300 years. Among the millions of types both big and small, we've observed and caused a fair number of extinctions (roughly two per year among the birds and mammals); we've observed and caused lots of mutations and variations in gene expression; but we've never seen one new species. Not one.

These biologists need a shave. I recommend Ockham™ blades.

= = = = =

Sidenote: It's odd that anti-theistic "scientists" insist on one huge speciation for all matter and energy, which they call the Big Bang; but can't wrap their alleged "minds" around one huge speciation for living things. Why do they make up their own version of the usual creation story for inorganic stuff but reject the usual creation story for organic stuff?
  ¶ 5:42 AM

  Hmm. Didn't that happen before?
Idiot Krauts are burning books again. Classic children's books are being deleted because they contain words like Neger or Zigeuner.

Ah, but it's Wonderful and Sensitive this time because it's done for this year's fashionable totalitarianism. It was horrible and evil the other time, because it was done for that year's fashionable totalitarianism.

See the difference? 2013 fascism is Holy because it's This Year. 1936 fascism is Evil because it's Not This Year.

Planned obsolescence used to be a way of selling clothing and cars. Now it's the foundation of what we bizarrely call "morality".
  ¶ 4:34 AM

  Big county / little county
My attention was caught by an article on population decline in the Southern Baptist denomination. Runs contrary to most trends, and I wondered why. In recent times, religions that stick to their scriptures and principles are gaining, while religions that go along with Satan are failing. I'd always pictured SB as one of the former, but apparently they're starting to slide into modern immorality after all. (I knew they had surrendered to the Carbon Cult, but wasn't sure about the other modern ratshit.) Needless to say, all the comments on the article are encouraging SB to slide even faster, to "join the modern world" and rejoice in sodomy, buggery, carpet-munching bullbitchery, amorphoditism, and baby-killing.

I started looking for maps of growth among various denominations to see if my overall impression was still valid. For instance, are Mormons and Muslims starting to lose adherents as well? No, they're not. But in scanning the maps I noticed something else that I hadn't seen before. Take this map of growth among Muslims, from the 2010 US Religious Census....


Sure enough it shows growth, but all of these maps also bring out a distinct line between big counties and little counties. The line (which I drew in green) runs straight north and south. It agrees with the Kansas/Colo boundary, but cuts across other boundaries. It doesn't agree with the relevant geographical line, either. The 'dry line', which I've discussed before, is the real E/W divider of climate and geography, and runs about 200 miles east of this county divider. I've always been a map freak; was reading and drawing maps before I was reading and writing text. I've always known that the western states have bigger counties than the eastern states, but for some reason this divider never grabbed my eyes before.
  ¶ 8:37 AM

  Black-boxing the Gramscians
Black-boxing is a common diagnostic technique for everything from electronics to cars to software to humans. It's difficult or impossible to 'get inside' such objects, and even if you could 'get inside', you probably wouldn't be able to understand the wiring or code or hydraulics or organs well enough to draw any conclusions. So you apply an external stimulus in two different levels or conditions, and watch how the object responds to each level. This still requires a fair amount of knowledge and wisdom to separate your stimulus from everything else that's happening, but it will often give you a usable picture of the internal workings.


We have two different stimuli applied to the same 'input terminal' of the British government right now. The government responds quite differently to these stimuli, giving us a nice usable picture of the internal logic.

Stimulus 1:

Foreign companies like Starbucks and Amazon which have avoided paying large corporation tax bills in Britain lack "moral scruples", David Cameron has said.

The Prime Minister said he was going to make “damn sure” that foreign companies like Starbucks and Amazon which have been found to avoid legally paying a large corporation tax in the UK paid their fair share.

Stimulus 2:

A new ruling by a High Court judge - the first on the issue in nearly a decade - says that Christians have no right to decline working on Sunday as it is not a “core component” of their beliefs.

This follows on a number of similar decisions forbidding Christians from wearing a cross in public, and forbidding Muslim girls from wearing the hijab in school.

= = = = =

Both stimuli involve foreigners, and both are applied to the 'morality' terminal of British gov't. The outputs are sharply opposite.

When the foreign morality is rapacious capitalism, perfectly exemplified by the satanic Amazon and Google ("Do nothing but evil") ... the gov't makes some fruitless squeaky noises but refuses to change any laws or even enforce existing laws. Satan can steal money from British taxpayers with impunity.

When the foreign morality is Christian or Muslim, the gov't comes down hard with full force to eradicate all symbols or actions that might represent God.

I'm not picking on Britain here. American, Australian and EU governments work the same way, but these two simultaneous 'readings' on the UK government happen to provide a nice neat picture of the Gramscian transfer function.
  ¶ 5:43 AM

  Sun! Cold!


First really cold day of this winter. 10 degrees. Also the first good sun in several weeks. Beautiful walking weather!

Until today this winter has been extremely non-extreme. Temperatures and snowfall have been exactly on the average mark, with no real cold snaps and no big storms. Yet. Knock on slush.

This is pretty much what you expect from a near-neutral ENSO, but Nature usually has a surprise up her sleeve.

[Couple days later: Yup, surprise. Guess I didn't knock on slush hard enough.]

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 2:33 PM

  Bad Graphic Award .... already!


2013 is barely started, but Professor Polistra feels the need to award 'Worst Graphic Of The Year' to this awful mess in UK Telegraph.

It's supposed to be a graph of British rainfall over the last century. Maybe so, but it's completely unusable. There's no way any published graph in the next 12 months can be worse than this one, thus the pre-emptive award.

The article under the graph tries to find a cause for an especially wet 2012, but misses the most likely explanation: The Gulf Stream is changing in response to the earth's rapidly weakening magnetic field. The area where the field is switching polarity fastest is under the South Atlantic, just upstream of Britain. This change began around 1980 and has grown since then.

An excellent 1910-2012 rainfall graph is here, apparently for the month of April. This shows that 2012 is indeed unique, but not part of a linear trend. (Professor P will attempt to find or create a better annual graph.)

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 8:52 AM

  Could we return to dollar coins?
The treasury is pushing again for dollar coins. My initial response was strongly negative, probably because I don't want to carry ugly satanic Communists** like Susan B Anthony in my pocket. But I've recently been persuaded that 'moving coins upward' would be a good idea. Eliminate pennies and nickels, round off prices to the nearest dime, and make practical and attractive dollar and five-dollar coins.

In other words, move the sequence of metal currency back to 1950s standards without altering the exchange rate of the dollar. We would end up with coins for the same range of 'daily purchase' values as in 1950. You could buy a gallon of gas or a bag of groceries or a fast-food meal or a movie ticket with coins.

What persuaded me, and why do I say 1950s standards? Here's why. Been watching the few available episodes of 'Martin Kane', an early 50s detective show. Not recommended for plot or dialog, but the acting is excellent... especially since the show was produced live, requiring quick recovery from missed lines.

Following radio tradition, advertisements were a seamless and inextricable part of the show. The sponsor was US Tobacco's line of pipe mixtures, so the main characters had to smoke pipes, and had to drop into the tobacco shop for refills and gossip twice per episode. (This probably engages my positive attention more than other products because I gave up the pipe three years ago and still miss it!)

The tobacco shop has an interesting 'commercial tool' that helps to establish a personal business relationship. It's a simple tool that works with a coin-based transaction but wouldn't work with paper currency.



Just a dish, but a dish with historical resonance. Cash on the barrelhead, cash on the nail. A long tradition of transparency, enforced by placing coins in a bounded and clean location where buyer and seller can verify the transaction.

In 1951 these transactions were possible because American coins still had a useful value. The pouch of pipe tobacco cost 15 cents, a dime and a nickel.

Present prices are ten times 1951 prices, so a similar product would now be bought with a dollar and a half-dollar. (Actual tobacco prices are much higher because of sin-taxes, but that's separate from general inflation.) So a 'practical revaluation' of coins would bring transactions back to a more physical level, which humans can understand. Here Polistra holds the present sequence of coins (leaving out the quarter to make the math a little simpler) and Happystar holds the revalued or inflated sequence.


Transferring a token is the oldest and deepest form of reciprocity, understood by birds and even some insects. It's part of the basic blueprint of animals. Any step toward an instinctive resonance in commerce will help to break away from the virtual and theoretical world of fractional-reserve banking, derivatives, and Bugsy Bernanke's infinite counterfeiting.


= = = = =

**Random thought: Given the predilections of America's bureaucrats, the faces they choose will always be Satanist-Stalinists. How about taking a clue from the Monopoly board or the Post Office? Pick your preferred face or icon from a wide range, or submit your own icon if you want to pay a hefty charge for publicity. The mint could use PinScreens to build short-lived casting matrices to order for individuals or organizations. If you want to move a little house around the board, you could order a pile of little-house coins and spend them to spread your message. If you want to move a shoe around the board, you could order a pile of Manolo Blahnik coins and spend them to spread your message.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, the broken circle

  ¶ 5:52 AM

  Live on the dole?
The Australian gov't is trying to introduce a welfare reform plan, somewhat parallel if not similar to Bill & Newt's 1996 reform. The American version drew protests by the usual Commie suspects, but in the end it unquestionably worked. Lots of people who had been stuck on welfare rediscovered work and lived better.

This clip from Australia's channel 7 takes the side of the usual suspects. The specific dispute started when one gov't minister declared that she could live on the proposed $35/day. All the usual commies, including the hosts of the TV show, "prove" that you can't.

Nonsense. One person can unquestionably live on that amount. [Aus dollar and US dollar are nearly equal, so no conversion needed.] I've been doing it for ten years. A family would have more trouble, but the whole fucking point of this reform is to make trouble.

When you have lots of folks living permanently on the dole, you can see that the gradient is slanted the wrong way. It's too easy to drop away from work and stay in the dole hole. You need to turn the gradient around, make work more comfortable than welfare. And the gradient needs to be especially steep at the start to break the static friction.
  ¶ 4:43 AM

  Jail gonna be fun for this guy
A dumb-criminal story that somehow describes Spokane perfectly.....

The crime spree began mid-morning when Pryor and three other alleged accomplices stole a Honda from Automotive Specialties at 2903 N. Madelia Street... Pryor high-tailed out of the lot toward N. Ash St. And W. York Ave. and nearly struck an officer, who happened to be driving by in the area, which prompted a police chase for reckless driving. Pryor stayed at speeds of around 40 miles an hour until he began to significantly pick up speed in the West Central neighborhood.

Once Pryor reached the 800 block of N. Nettleton, three of the passengers jumped out of the car. Officers nabbed all three and detained them.

Soon after, Pryor stopped the car near the Maple Street bridge, jumped out and took down the embankment toward the Spokane River. To get away from officers who were hot on his trail, Pryor jumped into the icy waters of the river.

Water rescue crews from the Spokane Fire Department were standing by but the water was so freezing cold that officers were able to convince him to come to shore. ... Pryor was only in the water for about three minutes but that was all it took for him to need treatment for hypothermia. Police covered Pryor in blankets as well as hand warmers they got from a nearby homeless camp. In fact, one of the officers bear-hugged Pryor so that he could warm-up his core body temperature. They walked him back up the embankment and sent him to the hospital.

Yup, that's Spokane. You got your idiot druggy stealing cars and running wild, and you got your (literally) warm-hearted tramps.

Idiot druggy Pryor, with a newfound reputation for getting hugged by the cops, is going to have a special time in jail. Bring it on.

= = = = =

Meanwhile the idiot druggies in DC have avoided the fake stage-set "fiscal cliff" that they painted to fool us, and instead have run the country straight off the real fiscal embankment into the Yangtze River. Missed a chance to start solving problems, continued to commit infinite evil. Continued zero taxes and infinite spending. Continued perfect enslavement to China, continued hopeless addiction to Bugsy Bernanke's counterfeit crack. No reform, no jail, no warm-hearted tramps, no special time. China is happy, so Congress is happy. Fucking pea-brained psychopaths. How to reform? 100 megatons on DC, 100 megatons on NY, 100 on Palm Beach. Surgically remove everything east of the Appalachians. Ought to be about right.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 5:07 AM

  Scientists discover Nature!
Most of the news in "science" lately has been unremittingly dismal. Raw stupidity run rampant, the same fashionable lunacy controlling nearly all disciplines.

I finally found something to cheer in this item:

Proliferations of jellyfish can show a substantial, visible impact on coastal populations -- clogged nets for fishermen, stinging waters for tourists, even choked cooling intake pipes for power plants -- and recent media reports have created a perception that the world's oceans are experiencing trending increases in jellyfish. Now, a new multinational collaborative study, involving the University of Southampton, suggests these trends may be overstated, finding that there is no robust evidence for a global increase in jellyfish over the past two centuries.

Amazing! Unprecedented! You mean there's one change in Nature that is NOT LINEAR? One variable that RUNS IN CYCLES? One phenomenon that is NOT CAUSED BY EVIL KKKARBON? How can we possibly comprehend this? It's beyond all imagining!

The key finding of the study shows global jellyfish populations undergo concurrent fluctuations with successive decadal periods of rise and fall, including a rising phase in the 1990s and early 2000s that has contributed to the current perception of a global increase in jellyfish abundance. The previous period of high jellyfish numbers during the 1970s went unnoticed due to limited research on jellyfish at the time, less awareness of global-scale problems and a lower capacity for information sharing (e.g. no Internet).

Seriously, this is pure sanity, and the authors deserve applause for fighting fashion to publish facts.

The online article doesn't seem to have graphs or data lists available, so I can't examine the pattern more closely.... but I'll bet $11 that the "decadal" patterns are actually 11-year patterns. As in sunspots. When Nature does decades, she does 11.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 7:54 AM