Anonymous promise
The web generally does a good job of finding and preserving old recordings and old music. Sometimes it misses.



Reginald deKoven's Oh Promise Me was an instant hit in 1898 and became The Only Song Heard At Weddings in the 1920s.

For such a widely popular piece, you'd expect lots of web representation. Nope. Only a handful, and the earliest ones are awful.

This is an 1898 cylinder recording by Jessie Bartlett Davis, who was the original singer of the instant hit. Guard your ears and your stomach! Unspeakably horrible. Every note and every beat is off by a mile. This performance would flunk miserably in the average junior high now. A totally deaf singer might have more trouble with the tune, but would handle the rhythm and phrasing better than Davis.

This is slightly less awful. A 1900 cylinder by Harry McDonough. Only 80% of the notes are off by a mile. The other 20% are off by a city block.

Youtube has several modern amateur performances, which are technically okay (they hit all the notes correctly) but sort of soulless. Can't fault them for trying.

I don't think you can improve on the unnamed studio soprano in this 1940 syndicated radio show. Start at 9:50 in the 15-minute clip to get the story plus the all-too-brief perfect performance.

Those anonymous studio musicians were nearly always better than the named stars. It's too bad their names are lost to history.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Danbo

  ¶ 5:38 PM

  Muscle memory, or muscle forgetting?
Good but unsurprising article on muscle memory.

A new study in Psychological Science, though, suggests there’s even more to laptops’ negative effects on learning than distraction. Go old school with a pen and paper next time you want to remember something, according to Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, because laptops actually make note-taking too easy. The problem, it seems, is that the lightning-quick speed of typing encourages listeners to transcribe what they’re hearing without actually paying attention to what’s being said—a note-taking approach that has been proven ineffective in the past. Typing every last word that’s said might make you think you have a more complete understanding of the material, but when it comes to comprehension, notes’ quality outweighs their quantity.

An old understanding, emphasized by newer technology. Before laptops you couldn't bring a typewriter to class, so most people didn't get a chance to spot the distinction. Secretaries who wrote shorthand or typed dictation from a recording did understand the difference, but those skills were comparatively rare.

Thinking about this I realized an odd contradiction, which may be unique but probably isn't.


Taking notes helps me remember what someone else says.

Taking notes helps me forget my own thoughts and ideas.


This gets tricky when I'm in the middle of a graphics or programming project. An idea or solution will pop into my head when I'm walking or napping. If something else grabs my attention, the idea may disappear, so I try to write it down as soon as possible. BUT: writing it down tends to remove the idea from active consideration. There's no decent middle ground. If I can keep the concept circulating and spend time developing the idea while it's fresh, it will build enough internal storage to stay in the foreground whether written or not.

Best trick would be to get someone else to speak the idea to me so I could write it down and remember it. But I'm not rich enough to hire a "reverse secretary". (Miss Cranston, give a letter!)

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 1:20 PM

  No, that's not the problem
In the idiotic discussion about this senile sport team owner, the real point seems to be missed. Leaving aside all the Satan-Sharpton ratshit, this is an unfortunately common problem in organizations with a single long-term owner.

What happens when the owner grows senile and gets involved in estate-custody disputes between Trophy Wife #2 and Trophy Wife #3? What happens when the senile owner says unwise things that ruin the business for all employees?

The responsibility shouldn't fall on the senile owner. He's senile and thus irresponsible by definition. The responsibility belongs to the next level of management. If they want the company to keep going, they need to insulate the owner from contact with the public and contact with the company. Clearly the team's management should have taken these steps a few years ago.

Ford ran into a similar problem in the late '30s and early '40s. Henry had a series of strokes that left him stupid. He didn't know he had become stupid, so he kept running things with an increasingly heavy hand, making all sorts of bad technical and labor decisions. The company, which had been absolutely supreme before Henry's strokes, dropped behind Chrysler and was having trouble with defense contracts. Finally the government had to step in, ordering grandson Henry II to run the company.
  ¶ 5:25 AM

  What could possibly go wrong?
Hey hey hey! Let's hang out with this Mexican gangster who has devil's horns tattoed on his forehead! What could go wrong? Well, aside from killing our Mom and driving around with her body in the trunk while we spend her money. With that one little eentsy-weentsy potential exception, it's all fun fun fun!
  ¶ 12:03 PM

  compAPIbility
Taking a breath after several weeks of hard frustration and decent progress in 'modernizing' my old courseware....

Programming within the Windows API is like proper marriage with the support and supervision of a church. It's a lifetime commitment on both sides. If you do everything right, your code will work through successive versions of Windows. You may lose interest, or your customers may lose interest, but the contract will still be valid as originally written. You can determine in advance, in writing, whether a decision is going to keep the relationship alive or crash the machine.

The newer setup is like random sex. Hooking up. It can be lots of fun for a while, but there's no contract, no external authority holding both parties to the deal.

Making the right things happen requires lots of trial and error, plenty of wasted effort. You're constantly negotiating through unruly situations. You don't know until you try. When it does succeed, you can't be sure it will continue to work because there's no single standard. FF or IE or Chrome may decide at any time to stop supporting some particular bit of code, and they won't tell you.

And after all that trouble, your reward is NOT universal compatibility as implicitly promised by the new regime. You're still going to run on some machines and fail on others. No advantage at all. Just fashion.
  ¶ 4:49 AM

  I learned something!
Spokane's NPR station presented a two-hour public forum on Romneycare. This was a 'year-after' followup of an earlier forum when Romneycare began. Podcast of the first hour, Podcast of the second hour.

First hour was a discussion among several satans who are profiting from Romneycare, including the atrocious monster Kreidler. Predictably, these grotesqueries sang the praises of Romneycare. Our Lord And Saviour The Affordable Care Act Of Two Thousand And Ten hath Redeemed us all from a miserable life of Lousy medical care and Lousy health insurance. It's all butterflies and roses in Romneycare Nirvana!

Second hour was much more informative. Audience members tore the cheerleaders up one side and down the other. And these weren't the regular crowd of partisan talking-point-readers. These were serious 'stakeholders' who spoke from painful experience with all aspects of Romneycare.

Two insurance agents stirred my sympathy and taught me something. I had stupidly ass-u-me-d that agents were sharing in the obscene profits of the insurance companies. NOT SO. Agents live on reputation above all. They make money when clients and claimants are generally satisfied with service and fairness. Romneycare is depriving them of the ability to satisfy anyone. The agents told detailed stories of Kafkan labyrinths leading nowhere, leaving their clients uninsured but not knowing that they were uninsured.

Two doctors told similar stories. One of them ended with "You had better watch out. You have pissed off the medical profession."

Several consumers told stories that I already know. I didn't need to learn anything in that department.
  ¶ 5:05 PM

  Radar cartoons
Today's weather: Scattered palm trees. Or scattered On-Off switches, depending on your generational perspective.


  ¶ 7:50 AM

  Family, not facts
Realized this morning: It's not facts vs theory. Mostly it's family vs theory.

= = = = =

First example: Russia has it right on two levels. Immediate families are strong, and the national ethnic 'family' is strong.

Cultural references are the macro version of family inside jokes. At the macro level, everyone knows how a Matryoshka works. At the micro level, everyone knows that a reference to Uncle Jim means a hopeless drunk. Outsiders can't read the code.

American elites, who devote all of their monstrous evil energy to destroying both the immediate family and the ethnic family, don't get Russia. Non-literal language of any sort, inside jokes, metaphors, cultural codes, are racist, sexist, homophobic, objectification, etc, etc, etc.

= = = = =

Second example: The recent Spokane court case involving a homeowner who shot a car thief. The elites in the court system were defending wacked-out bonkers theories of so-called "law" and so-called "human" so-called "rights". The homeowner was defending his family. The jury found quickly and firmly for the homeowner, stunning the court and media elites. How could this happen? It's inconceivable. We don't get it.

= = = = =

Third example: This one is a stretch, but you can still see the elites being blindsided by the need to defend family and property. Elites are rapidly pulling all data and programs into The Cloud, which is vague and theoretical and indiscriminate. Just like the EU/US/UK vision of society. Everything must be snatched from personal control, everything must be integrated and smashed together into one undifferentiated blob that can be dissolved instantly when the elites give the word. This NPR feature presents The Cloud as the inevitable Arrow Of History (sounds familiar) and the only possible way to run computing. But NPR's commenters sternly resist. Gives me a bit of hope... even NPR-listening techies, who flow with the tides of leftist fashion, are firm supporters of the Second Amendment!

In case this point isn't clear, read the Federalist Papers. You'll see that the 2nd was NOT about hunting, NOT about guns. It was about the untrammeled ability to DEFEND yourself and your family and your property. These techies are saying "Pry my external hard drive from my cold dead fingers." An external HDD doesn't look much like a pistol, but both are self-defense weapons.


STORAGE IS THE KEY TO CIVILIZATION.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Danbo

  ¶ 4:12 AM

  Not the worst by a long shot
Cute article by Tom Pierson in National Post. He wrote what he calls the "worst science article ever", and submitted it to lots of journals. Many of them accepted, claiming to have peer-reviewed it. Not surprising. Science is totally corrupt. All of Parkinson's Laws have run up to an extreme that Parkinson couldn't have imagined.

But I'd strongly argue with his description of the article as Worst Ever. The worst articles are intentionally evil, like the "Global Warming" shit from alien monsters like Michael Mann or Phil Jones. They are written with the specific intention of motivating governments to kill the poor and enrich the rich.

Pierson's article is completely harmless, and could even be valuable. Here's his account of how he put it together:

I copied and pasted one phrase from a geology paper online, and the rest from a medical one, on hematology.

I wrote the whole paper that way, copying and pasting from soil, then blood, then soil again, and so on. There are a couple of graphs from a paper about Mars. They had squiggly lines and looked cool, so I threw them in.

Footnotes came largely from a paper on wine chemistry. The finished product is completely meaningless.

The university where I claim to work doesn’t exist. Nor do the Nepean Desert or my co-author. Software that catches plagiarism identified 67% of my paper as stolen (and that’s missing some). And geology and blood work don’t mix, even with my invention of seismic platelets.

Pierson clearly worked very hard to create nearly perfect nonsense, but he failed.

Seismic platelets. Think about that for a minute. What would happen if you slightly magnetized the iron in platelets then put a focused induction coil over a vessel that's jammed with plaque or fat? Would the seismic platelets break up the fat? Would they stir up some action in a clogged kidney or liver? Seems like it would be worth trying. Alternatively, what if you replaced the iron with something heavier, then did some exercise? Would the increased inertia act seismically on clogs?

Plagiarism is NOT the worst thing. It can be a very good thing if it carries a good idea or good writing to people who wouldn't have read it otherwise. EVIL is the worst thing, and too many "scientific" fields are packed with genuine and fully intentional EVIL.
  ¶ 1:05 PM

  Platforms
A point that Polistra has made repeatedly: Art and invention DO NOT start from letting it all hang out. Art and invention DO NOT start from a cultureless tabula rasa or a colorless theory. This is a mistake that America has made from the start, and in recent decades we've expanded the mistake by intentionally destroying all remnants of civilized culture. Art and invention need a platform to build on, and occasionally a platform to fight against. After you've smashed the platform, you don't even have anything meaningful to resist.

Russia didn't make that mistake. Lenin tried but gave up. Stalin and his successors put great effort into maintaining the cultural traditions of Russians and some of the other ethnic groups within the Empire.

When everyone understands a common set of references, art can start at a higher level. Example:



Silly but tremendously inventive. Building on the boundaries of commonly understood references, and building on the limits of the performers. Wonderful result.
  ¶ 4:14 AM

  Maybe there's a reason after all
Listening to BBC and NPR supporting neocon imperialism, and remembering that the same media had virulently opposed neocon imperialism a few years ago.

Maybe there's a good reason to support a Repooflican for president after all.

Next "election" will be Jeb against Hillary. Dynasty vs Dynasty, Neocon vs Neocon, Global Warmer vs Global Warmer, Open Borders vs Open Borders, Free Trade vs Free Trade, Celebrate Sodomy vs Celebrate Sodomy, Slaughter The Poor vs Slaughter The Poor, Infinitely Reward Goldman vs Infinitely Reward Goldman. Identical genocidal hypersatanic evil. The most perfect election in history from the viewpoint of the party operatives. All Americans with central nervous systems will be too busy puking and puking and puking and shitting and shitting and shitting in wild feral disgust and abomination, leaving only the vacuum-headed R-bots and D-bots. The party operatives can determine the result precisely in advance. Not one single "vote" is in doubt. It depends solely on money-raising.

But there would be ONE IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE, at least in foreign affairs and warmongering. When the warmongering is branded with an R again (especially a Bush-R), the media will virulently oppose the warmongering again, and the Bush-R president will have a slighty harder time implementing those evil policies.

However: This reason doesn't apply to economics. Satan's media do not respond to branding on economic matters. In this area they don't switch sides to make the "wrong" president look bad. They support Goldman firmly, no matter which brand of president is working for Goldman. TARP was Our National Salvation when Bush created it, and TARP continued to be Our National Salvation when Obama continued it.
  ¶ 2:47 AM

  How abstract is negative?
Further to this discussion of abstraction in our number sense. None, some, zero, three, etc.

Repeating the main point: It's easy to see why zero was a late development. Without any mental strain we can say things like "None of the cars are in my yard." This is not a zero concept. We know what cars are, and we know that cars are present somewhere, or were in the yard earlier. Cars are simply not in the yard here and now. We have more strain with a true zero, like "none of the things are in my yard." How can you possibly have a yard with Zero Things?

Extending this line of thought, we run into an oddity. Negative numbers were invented by those ancient Hindoos along with zero, but negatives haven't penetrated ordinary thought and discourse. In modern times zero is part of basic literacy, If you can read, you know how to use zero. Not so with negatives. We don't use negatives unless we have learned "higher" math, and we don't use them unless we do math for "higher" professional purposes. Negatives don't appear in newspaper articles or maps or price lists or advertisements. With one partial exception, nobody ever speaks a negative number on TV or radio. (Negative temperature is usually spoken as "five degrees below zero", rarely "negative five degrees.")

Here's the oddity: Zero is not natural, but negatives are natural. Most of our senses are bidirectional, with two directional deltas from an arbitrary neutral or center point. Cold<--->Hot, Big<--->Small, Light<--->Dark, Good<--->Bad, Smart<--->Dumb, Rich<--->Poor, High<--->Low.

Some of these axes correspond to unidirectional physical measurements that have a zero at one end, but our sensory neutral point is rarely at the physical zero point. In most cases the neutral point is mobile, simply adapted to the status quo.

In our minds and feelings, the two end vectors are distinct places with distinct personalities. The midpoint also has a distinct personality, usually connoting something like 'mainstream' or 'normal' or 'undistinguished'.

= = = = =

City maps show this tendency in a Cartesian way.

American cities fall into six major types. The first two are the far ends of the spectrum, not especially interesting for my purpose here.

(1) Ancient Euro-style places like Boston and Santa Fe. Streets may be one block long, or might wander aimlessly for a mile or two. All streets are named. No numbers at all, no perpendicularity at all.

(2) Nearly pure numerical grids like Seattle and Salt Lake. Except for some major boulevards or landmarks, all streets are numbered, with a complex set of prefixes and suffixes. Avenue 120 Southwest and 34th North Street and 247th EastNorth Way and South Place 532 East and so on.

(3) The symmetrical names vs numbers cross. Typified by OKC, copied by many smaller towns in Okla and vicinity. As shown here on little Perkins, all vertical streets are numbered, running both ways from the X-axis of Thomas. All horizontal streets are named, running both ways from the Y axis of Main. The whole thing could be turned 90 degrees, but I'll stick with one description for clarity. In math terms, this is four equivalent quadrants. The bizarre accordiony thing upstairs is my attempt to show how the numbering pattern 'feels'.



(4) The asymmetrical names vs numbers cross. I think this is the most common pattern in the Midwest. Shown here on a map of Enid. All horizontal streets are named, and have East and West directions from the Y-axis of Grand. Vertical streets east of Grand are numbered. Vertical streets west of Grand are named, with a memorable sequence of presidents instead of numbers. In math terms, you could call this a four-quadrant grid with the Y-axis separating different flavors. Again the pattern could be turned 90 degrees.



(5) The names vs numbers T-shape. This sometimes happens when a river provides a natural and effectively uncrossable zero point. Manhattan shows it nicely. All horizontal streets are named, with no West or East. They all go West from the Y-axis of the river, so 'negative' isn't needed. All vertical streets are numbered, with North and South starting from the X-axis of Poyntz. This is a two-quadrant graph.



(6) I suppose there must be some one-quadrant cities with no mirror-images at all, but I've never seen one. Some nominally four-quad cities failed to develop in two directions and ended up close to this situation, but they retain the pretense of having NSEW sections. It's hard to tell from modern online maps because lots of tiny towns have lost their original street names. The Post Office generally 'rationalizes' those towns with robotic county-based coordinates like ROAD 13840. Probably doesn't matter to local residents. Before 'rationalization' they didn't know that Charlie's house was at NE 2nd and E. Walnut. Now they don't know that Charlie's house is 54182 ROAD 13840. It's still just Charlie's house.

= = = = =

The dominance of bidirectionality, with streets running both ways from the Main Street midpoint, corresponds nicely to our sensory bidirectionality. We want to have a midpoint as 'home base', and we want to go ... or at least imagine that we can go ... either way from the 'home base'. We also want the two sides to have different flavors and different anticipations, not just a single symbol like + vs - or N vs S. Upstream, downstream, left bank, right bank.

Most cities have a single rule for odd vs even numbers. South side of horizontal streets is even, east side of vertical streets is even. (Or vice versa on each; but it's the same through the whole city.) Spokane's odd-even pattern seems inconsistent if you're just looking at a map. Each quadrant seems to have its own rule. But the pattern makes perfect sense from the upstream-downstream viewpoint. Single rule: If you're going upstream, away from centerline, you'll see even houses on your right. For example: When you're east of Division and heading east, you're going upstream, so even is on your right. When you're north of Sprague and heading north, you're going upstream, so even is on your right.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 5:32 AM

  You'd think...
Why do the Repooflicans continue to use these fake Governmental envelopes? They're close to actual fraud.



This latest one has an unquestionable Federal look. If you're the target audience, mindlessly hating all governments and taxes, you would be instantly angry to receive anything from any government. If you're not the target audience, you just feel insulted that the party thinks you're an easy mark.

I doubt that anything could turn me back toward voting for EITHER of the Goldman parties, but I'm open and even hungry for a REAL opposition party. If an envelope or a web-click gave me the idea that it represented a REAL opposition, not just another microscopically thin veneer on a Goldman front, I'd open it and respond positively. (Hint to marketers.)   ¶ 4:29 PM

  Blogstat note
Sort of a 'constants and variables' look at the stats on this blog.

Overall, this blog serves no purpose except as a personal steam vent. I try to write things that are moderately original; try to offer thoughts that aren't available everywhere, but those things don't stir any interest. People are only interested in reading the same things they can get everywhere. If everyone else is reading X, everyone who isn't already reading X wants to read X.

But there is one exception to the purposeless quality. Exactly one item on this blog seems to have been providing a tiny public service for a long time.



Way back in the third month of writing, I happily noted a positive development in my old hometown of Enid. (The first circled entry in this image.) I kept track of the development, and a few months later noted with disappointment and disgust that the positive development was false. (Second circled entry.) Since then, those two items have been hit almost every day for nine years, with keywords indicating that the searches were correctly aimed. Apparently those two items are the most direct access to a proper news item about the subject of those two posts. The subject has been remarkably active, and in recent months the activity seems to be spreading northward. Makes sense, considering the main industry of my old hometown and the current center of such industry.

= = = = =

Another oddity in recent months:


A sudden increase in access from single ordinary words. I can't see a good reason for these ordinary words leading to my blog! It's a different set each day, but always moderately common words with no particular connection to my writing habits. In today's set, 'observer' halfway connects because I'm always shouting about 'observed facts'. The others are used rarely.

One thing has remained remarkably constant since the last time I wrote about blogstats: Companies and countries are not looking for information about themselves. I've said a lot about various government agencies and various companies. Those agencies and companies pop up in the stat list sometimes, but they're never reading the items about their own agency or company. They're either looking for porn or reading some of my sciency ramblings. I write a lot about Turkey and Russia. Viewers from Turkey and Russia pop up frequently, but again they're not reading what I write about Turkey or Russia.



Picture-perfect example a few days after original post. Here's a company I talk about OFTEN, in the harshest and most factual terms. Do they care what some non-Chosen yokel says about them? No, of course not. They only read the stupidest entry in the entire 9 years of writing, the ONE entry out of all 4400 that fits into the "everybody has already read about this" category.
  ¶ 8:29 AM

  Folk tales


Global Warming has become the modern equivalent of Nail Soup.

In this strange folk tale you have to start with Climate Change as the sole cause of your problem. Doesn't matter what the problem is. War, earthquakes, extinctions, hunger, bee shortage. Then you toss in a bunch of other things. In the real world these other things would be the obvious and factual causes of your problem. Power-hungry dictators, tectonic plates, poachers, poor farming techniques, parasitic mites. But in the folk tale those other things are just optional condiments or garnishes. Climate Change is always the first and only cause.

The Nail is what makes the soup. Even after you take out the Nail, it's still Nail Soup.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Danbo

  ¶ 5:46 PM

  Changing attitudes
Two completely unrelated news items, taken together, show a promising change in Western attitudes.

(1) Locally, a 'think piece' by the Satan-Review asks "Why Oh Why did the Local Idiot Jury choose to free the normal citizen in a recent self-defense case?" Satan concludes the Local Idiot Jury was unfairly swayed by the strange and untenable notion that the ordinary citizen was afraid of the thug who had just stolen his car. This strange notion is apparently rather recent; in earlier times, Wash State was more "objective" about the Categorical Imperative Urgent Need To Celebrate The Diversity Of Car Thieves. Satan laments this loss of "objectivity".

If attitudes have genuinely changed, it's an excellent sign. It shows that normal people, no matter how carefully selected by lawyers, no longer buy the whole Diversity doublethink. They now understand human differences in a more accurate way. They understand that the best cure for a family of thugs is Natural Justice, since Official Justice no longer exists.

(2) A column by Neocon Janet Daley in UK Telegraph. She tries to follow the conventional understanding of the Cold War in ideological terms, but by the end of the column she tentatively and reluctantly accepts the reality of ethnic groups and territory.

Again an excellent sign of changing attitudes. The supposed ideological conflict between Democracy and Totalitarianism was always a bad theory. Western elites needed to base their propaganda on this peculiar theory because Western elites are Marxist wackos. Elites assume that all humans are identical inorganic grains of sand, showing different behavior only because they are influenced by different theories. To eliminate war, you simply have to force all grains of sand to operate under the same theory. Stalin didn't believe any such bizarre delusional nonsense. He continued pushing delusional bizarre Marxist shit into the heads of the Western elites because it made them crazy and weak. Stalin understood ethnicity and territory accurately. As does Putin.

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 4:09 AM

  Cold clear mornings
Nothing is better than a cold clear morning walk. Absolutely nothing.



Spokane has a LOT of cold clear mornings, all the way through Summer in most years. The Chamber of Commerce doesn't normally advertise such days, but they should, by god.

I only wish I had figured this out when I was young. All those years of living late, walking or biking in the hottest part of the day. Oh well. I've figured it out now.

Labels: Danbo, Heimatkunde

  ¶ 8:27 AM

  Snakes on a chessboard
Listening in bed to CBS News from 1943. Russia and Germany were fighting for control of Donetsk.



Of course you can't compare the total kill-everything war of WW2 with the current semi-riot semi-revolt situation, but it's still an odd inverted echo. Before 1945, Russia and America had been steady if not very friendly allies for 200 years. We had been on the same side in every war, and had fought in tandem in WW1 and WW2. [Sidenote: as our idiot media do their idiot BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG AMERICAAAAAAA REMEMBAAAAAAS shit for the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, it reminds me that we are CURRENTLY on the same side with Russia in fighting Chechen rebels. It should remind us that Russia's intel agencies TRIED to warn us about the Tsarnaev brothers well in advance, but we fucking paid no fucking attention. Fucking stupid beyond all fucking imaginable fucking stupidities as fucking always.]

But America had also engaged in tremendous trade with both Japan and Germany before and between WW1 and WW2. At the start of WW1, we had to hurriedly develop our own radio equipment and weapons because we had been buying and using superior Kraut products. At the start of WW2, Japan had to hurriedly develop its own radio equipment and weapons because it had been buying and copying superior American products.

Stalin understood this commercial tendency, and also understood that American foreign policy was wildly unpredictable and consistently fucking stupid. So he planted agents of influence and control in the American government and culture to monitor and reshape our fucking stupidity.

Some Americans quite properly disliked this subversion. Thus the Cold War. If it was a war. A close look at Korea and Vietnam shows that we were actually fighting against China in both places. We were distracting and weakening China, giving an advantage to Russia. We were playing Snakes and Ladders on a chessboard while Russia was playing chess.

In 1981 we finally turned the board around. We gave Russia a taste of the Vietnam experience in Afghanistan, and used economic trickery and subversion to hasten the collapse of the Soviet system.

Should have been a victory, but we immediately refused to learn from experience, immediately resumed our old stupid theory-based foreign policy. Instead of trying to encourage a more natural Russia, the kind of Russia that had been our semi-friendly ally before, we tried to impose "democracy" and "capitalism" in Russia. Both of these theories had already failed lethally and dismally here. They were bound to fail even harder in Russia, where they are not natural. It was then easy (and correct!) for newer Russian politicians to attribute the failure to American influence.

And that's where we stand. Putin has brought back Natural Russia without our help or assent. Now Putin feels confident enough to face down the unnatural confused suicidal wacked-out West. Now we're contending over Donetsk again, except this time America is on the Kraut side, the bonkers side.

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 2:14 AM

  Privacy by design?
Rather nice article on BBC's website. Clear and correct discussion of those 'Numbers Stations' that every radio ham and SWL has heard for 50 years. Especially clear and correct on the basic concepts of privacy, which are rarely understood today.

"In the same way spy tricks such as pretending to feed ducks around a pond might still exist, numbers stations still exist too," says Al Bolton, a radio amateur. "It is an old-fashioned means of communication but you have to think of security." "The danger with a computer is that if you get caught, the data on it is still retrievable. Whereas with a one-time pad, you can eat it or flush it down the toilet," he says. Computers almost always leave traces, whereas a paper and a pen are easy to destroy.

If you want privacy, don't communicate in public. Basic. Simple. True in 2014 BC, still true in 2014 AD. Nothing has changed. The deeply strange thing about 2014 AD is that so many millions of smart people have convinced themselves that computers and the Web are a private place. So many otherwise well-informed people were genuinely shocked by Snowden's stuff. Nobody should have been shocked. NSA didn't hide the fact that it created the Web for its own needs, and NSA didn't hide the fact that it has always monitored EVERY FUCKING THING within its reach. DO NOT INSULT MY INTELLIGENCE.

= = = = =

Okay, sorry. Old rant. I've been there before. I'm in a ranting mood today. Publisher is getting all NYC-pushy, changing rules in midstream, and I need to put the frustration somewhere.

Here's what I was meaning to say, before I so rudely Touretted myself:

Unlike the Web, radio doesn't leave a trail of packets behind. It doesn't have to pass through an infrastructure controlled by NSA. The Schrödinger notion, which does not apply to reality in general, does apply to radio. If you can hear a signal, you can record it and transcribe it. If nobody hears a signal, or nobody realizes that it is a signal worth transcribing, it practically doesn't exist. Just another tiny set of "random" wiggles in the magnetic field, here for a moment then completely gone.

Shortwave radio is uniquely suited for privacy. Ionospheric skip is unpredictable. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not. When it's there, it takes a signal up into the top layers of the atmosphere, where it can't be monitored for most of its path, then bounces it back down. In practice it's almost like teleportation. Most people in between sender and receiver can't reach the signal.

= = = = =

Just for fun, let's bring in the Grand Blueprint. Flowers exist because bees like color and smell. Why do bees like color and smell if there are no flowers? After you ask enough of these questions, you reach God through purely scientific reasoning. All of these likings and needs and purposes were designed to fit together, and each critter was left to find its own way of satisfying them. No other conclusion possible.

Apply this to the ionosphere. We know it already existed before we started playing with electricity; the earliest experimenters noticed that their circuits were doing strange things when the Northern Lights were hissing and burbling above.

Later, after we started transmitting in the range between 5 and 50 MC, we charted the ionosphere's strange habits. We understand it about as well as we understand weather. We generally know which frequencies are likely to skip best at which times of day and which seasons, but we still can't predict the detailed movements and changes of the bouncy layers.

Just recently, because we finally removed the blinders of idiot theories, we've started seeing the Biosphere. Bacteria and fungi are active in all layers of the atmosphere and ground. No matter how high or deep we look, we find life.

Plants and bacteria drink charged particles. They send out needles and wires to pick up ions. Life likes information. Life loves rhythm and patterns.


Sorry, Danbo. You're made of the same stuff as the tree, so there's no charge gradient.

Now some unanswerable questions.

During our years of greatest shortwave activity, roughly 1930 through 1980, were we feeding and fertilizing the ionosphere? Were we helping bacteria to grow stronger atmospheric layers so they could help our communication?

Did the Grand Designer want us to have radio? Did the Designer want us to create a private means of communication? Was the Designer trying to encourage us to send waves outward, so they might reach other planets with other Designed critters?

Labels: Danbo, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 5:22 PM

  Do we deserve to be in the same world with dogs?
Admittedly this comparison is unfair ... "results not typical", as the diet ads put it ... but still shows a valid difference.

News item 1:

Spokane County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Saunders was able to get away with avoiding work for months because he made it look like he was working. Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich claimed Saunders ran random license plate numbers when he was not on the streets.

Officials say he was a master at fooling his colleagues into believing he was doing honest police work. “He was running license plates, he was checking names but what we didn’t know, he wasn't running those plates out on the street. He was doing that at the lady's house,” said Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich.

News item 2:

Spokane County Sheriff’s K9 Laslo is still recovering after being attacked on April 7th by a pit bull where he and his partner Deputy Jeff Thurman were investigating a report of a burglary and assault.

On Wednesday, Deputy Thurman said Laslo was scheduled to have surgery on Monday, but over the weekend his condition improved significantly and the surgery was cancelled. Thurman said Laslo is finding it hard to sit still as he recovers, and every morning runs out to the patrol car and puts his nose to the door handle expecting to go to work.

  ¶ 1:54 AM

  Missing the point, innit?
Headline:

Cameron puts God back into politics with plea for 'evangelical' Britain

Hmm. The whole point of evangelism, as commanded repeatedly and clearly and consistently in the New Testament, is to teach by example. Jesus ordered his followers to live a life that speaks for itself, a life that doesn't need words.

What does Cameron's life say?

A squishy squirmy larva who officially requires sodomy and buggery, who makes war against countries that didn't invade Britain, who runs an economy strictly for the benefit of the money-changers.

Pretty good example of something for damn sure, but it's exactly the opposite of everything old JC wanted his followers to do.
  ¶ 1:43 AM

  Goniometry
Following up and extending the Switchover notion.

Western media and cultural organizations are unerring compasses, or more precisely goniometers. They will always point toward Satan, always pray to Satan.

Before 1989 these Western goniometers always cast an admiring eye on Moscow, and took instructions from the Central Committee in Moscow. What they were admiring and receiving was both literally and figuratively a Foreign Service, a broadcast of radio waves and influence aimed purely overseas.

Western goniometers were picking up and retransmitting a set of rules and principles that the Party designed for export. These rules and principles were specifically meant to weaken and destabilize Western families, governments, religion and civilization.

Disarmament, die-versity, avant-garde art, environmentalism, normalizing deviance, normalizing crime. Everything your TV commands you to believe. It all came from Moscow before 1989.

= = = = =

But at the same time, Moscow's Domestic Service was pushing a very different set of principles, designed to strengthen Russian civilization and ethnic solidarity. Internally, the Party was more or less rolling in sync with normal Russian tendencies. Collective ownership and collective action are normal Russian tendencies. Coop farming and coop business started when Tsar Alexander 2 freed the serfs in 1861, and easily morphed into collectives after the 1917 revolution. Strong families and strong religion are also normal Russian tendencies, and (after an initial failed attempt around 1920) the Party didn't try very hard to kill them.

= = = = =

After 1989, Moscow was initially preoccupied with raw survival and couldn't bother with ideology. It stopped sending all external messages, by radio or through money and organizational channels.

When that happened, DC and London and NYC were cut off from their source of ideological software updates, so they simply continued running Satan's ROM BIOS, continued smashing religion and families, continued freeing criminals and jailing the innocent, continued starving the poor and enriching Goldman.

= = = = =

In the last few years Putin has started sending a message again. This time the message is consistent in both directions, emphasizing the unbroken civilization and unbroken religion of Russians. This message clearly satisfies a hunger within Russia, and it stirs a hunger outside Russia.

So the situation is reversed now. Satanists in the West are no longer receiving anything. Now they're the transmitters of evil, the auto-update of chaos.



And non-Satanists in the West are starting to point our receiving antennas at Moscow. We understand that Putin is presenting an ideal, not precisely describing the messy recovering-from-collapse situation of Russia. Above all, we know that his ideal represents the correct arrow of history, the KNOWN AND PROVEN rules and principles that CREATE AND DEVELOP civilization.

= = = = =

Artistic sidenote: I've used this picture too many times before, but it actually fits this text!

Labels: Danbo, switchover, Гром победы

  ¶ 3:21 AM

  GDP/EDP
Most of our real environmental problems are caused by China's need for growth.

Pollution is pretty well controlled in US/EU. China's unfiltered coal plants are causing most of the REAL pollution.

Hunting and fishing are pretty well controlled in US/EU, which means there are no REAL endangered species in those areas. Africa has major REAL species extinctions, which are caused ENTIRELY by Chinese men seeking to extend their dicks with traditional 'medicines'.

Both cases: China's need for growth. GDP, EDP. All the same.
  ¶ 7:15 AM

  Гром победы, раздавайся!
This was the anthem of the Empire at the time when the Russian America colony was active. (This isn't the more familiar God Save the Tsar as heard in the 1812 Overture.)




Polistra loves it. An anthem about the PEOPLE, not about some abstract theory.

Semi-relevant sidenote: One advantage of a BIG classical anthem like this one, or like Uruguay's full-fledged opera, is that you can't screw it up. It takes professionals, or divinely inspired amateurs, to attempt it at all. "Singable" anthems (like Britain and France) invite sloppy or parodic performances. The US anthem is the worst of both worlds because it's simple enough to invite evil rock-n-rollers and crotch-grabbing assholes, but it's not really singable. (The tune Anacreon In Heaven was intended as a sort of 'contest piece' to demonstrate the talents of small singing ensembles. It was NOT meant to be easy!)

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 3:07 AM

  Toljaso
Headline today:

IPCC: emissions cuts are about ethics as well as economics

Good old ETHICS. To be ETHICAL you must: KILL BABIES. KILL OLD PEOPLE. KILL DISABLED PEOPLE. STARVE THE POOR. ENRICH THE GOLDMANS.

ECONOMICS, of course, is just a subset of ETHICS. It means only STARVE THE POOR. ENRICH THE GOLDMANS.

Toljaso.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 9:31 AM

  How abstract is zero?
I've noticed that older radio and TV shows were carefully grammar-checked for a few select schoolmarm fetishes, but not all. Specifically, the pre-1960 network censors were fussy about lie-lay and have and none is.

= = = = =

Lie-lay is the simplest fetish. No real speaker of English ever says "Let's lie down for a while" or "I lay there without sleeping." Lay has adopted both transitive and intransitive meanings, which is thoroughly normal and unambiguous. Lie is confusing in two directions: its present form is the same word as 'tell a falsehood', and its past form is the same word as lay. By the normal logic of language it deserved to disappear, and it did.

= = = = =

The have fetish results from a truly ignorant misunderstanding of grammar. Have is two separate words. It can be a transitive verb meaning 'possess', or it can be a verb-tense morpheme. No real speaker of English confuses these two words, but the censors do confuse them. The radio-TV censors wrote bizarre dialog like "Have you a match? Sorry, I haven't a match." In these sentences, have is an ordinary free-standing verb, so it should properly team up with do like any other transitive verb. "Do you have a match? Sorry, I don't have a match." The schoolmarms and their censorious followers confusedly believe that have is some kind of chimera, simultaneously a free-standing verb and a morpheme.

Old Miss Marley showed the construction of this confusion. She was quick to pounce on a student who said "I don't have a pencil." She would respond: "No, that is incorrect. Would you say 'I don't have gone to the store'? Of course you wouldn't. So you can't say 'I don't have a pencil.' You must say 'I haven't a pencil.' You must speak ekritly."

= = = = =

The none is vs none are question is more difficult. As mentioned yesterday, number words began as specific groups of specific things. Three-Rocks and Three-Wolves are entirely different pieces of the world, so they received different words. Generalizing to Three-Objects happened much later, and never happened at all for some isolated cultures.

At that early level of abstraction, how do you think about No-Rocks or No-Wolves? Both are purely imaginary. You can't see No-Rocks. You know what Rocks and Wolves are, perhaps you remember them being somewhere else, perhaps you remember them being here before, but you don't see them here and now.

None comes in at this point. "None of the wolves are here" doesn't really refer to Zero-Wolves. In detail it means "I know what Wolves are, and I know that Wolves are elsewhere, but they're not here at the moment." "None of the water is here" doesn't really refer to Zero-Water. In detail it means "I know what Water is, and I know that Water is around somewhere, but it's not here at the moment."

Normal speakers of English use none as a macro for sentences like those, and normal speakers of English know exactly when to say none are versus none is.

The schoolmarms insist on none is because _____ ....... Well, I can't even fill in the blank. I have no idea what strange confusion leads them to this fetish.

Perhaps they are imagining a free-standing contextless none, but this is impossible. None always refers to a specific noun that exists elsewhere. You know what this noun is, and you know whether it's singular or plural. For countable nouns, none are. For substances like water or data, none is.

= = = = =

Thus it's easy to see why Zero as a cardinal came later than the other cardinals, came first to the Hindoos who are innately strong in math, and came only as an import to most other cultures. Even after you've generalized from Three-Rocks to Three-Objects, how do you generalize to Zero-Objects? Try it: "I know what Objects are, and I know that Objects are around somewhere, but they're not here at the moment." Really? No Objects? No Things? When has that ever happened?

= = = = =

Irrelevant sidenote: It's sort of interesting that Hindoos are comfortable with a belief system in which Matter is an illusion. The concept of No-Objects seems to be generally easier for them. Chicken and egg?

Labels: Language update, Real World Math

  ¶ 4:20 AM

  Bad old
Obama is yet again pushing those tired and fraudulent numbers about female wage inequality. Says "Let's not return to the bad old workplace policies of the Mad Men era."

Okay. Here's a graph of overall income inequality, taken from Stockman's incomparable blog. I've marked 1966 for the Mad Men era.



Hmm. Bad old policies? Looks to me like those bad old policies were VASTLY BETTER for ordinary Americans, including ordinary female Americans. Ordinary Americans have been losing ground since then, both absolutely and by comparison to the Goldman class.

Well Barry, it's nice to see yet again that you are Massa Goldman's best and most loyal houseboy.

Labels: Old Economy Steve

  ¶ 7:15 AM

  Constants and variables 11
Defining a word often requires finding the constants and variables. Headline in UK Telegraph:

Ed Miliband’s hope to be Britain’s first Jewish PM

Immediately I thought "Hey! What about Disraeli? Doesn't he count?"

And Miliband immediately answered the question:

Mr Miliband said he was aware of the historical significance of becoming Britain’s first Jewish prime minister if he wins the next election, despite his atheism. Disraeli, the Conservative prime minister, had a Jewish heritage but was a practising Anglican.

Expressing the constants and variables in mathy terms:

[Jewish genes] + [hard-line Satanist/Gramscian beliefs] = [Jewish identity]

[Jewish genes] + [Christian beliefs] = [Unperson]

Or in one sentence: You don't have any identity unless you're a stark raving psychotic. Only bonkers genocidists exist.

We've seen a similar formula in America with Lorena Sanchez, "the first Hispanic" to serve in Congress, even though non-Satanist Hispanics have represented New Mexico and Arizona since statehood. They didn't exist.

And Ben "Nighthorse" Campbell was "the first Indian in Congress", even though Robert Kerr (a Cherokee) served with great distinction and productivity in the '30s and '40s. Kerr's influence and ideas made Oklahoma far more drought-resistant than neighboring states.

And of course we haven't had an Indian as President or VP yet, even though Charles Curtis of the Kanza tribe was VP under Hoover.

Those previous Hispanics and Indians didn't exist. Only wackos exist in this utterly wacked-out schizo world.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 3:55 AM

  They're at it again
Some sort of pointless event is commemorating something about LBJ and "civil" "rights" and 1965. All the commie media are relentlessly homing in on this event, as they always do. Their toxified cranial organs contain ONLY ONE SUBJECT. 1965. "Civil" "Rights". Selma Alabama. Bull Connor. Edmund Pettis Bridge. And of course


And most of all,


Look here, you grotesque monstrosities. If you're going to obsess over a subject belonging to our generation, you've got the WRONG FUCKING SUBJECT.

Only a few thousand people were involved in the whole "civil" "rights" crap, and only a few hundred were present at THE SINGLE SOLITARY ONLY EVENT IN ALL OF HISTORY, THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAPPENED.

In the beginning was the Big Bang, and then there was Selma Alabama. That's it. That's the entire history of the universe.

Could there be something else of importance? Hmm. How about Vietnam?

Every single male of this generation was affected by Vietnam one way or another. The normal guys let the draft happen, served their two years, and came back dead or disabled or drugged up or (at best) bored. The gung-ho patriot guys enlisted and served four or six years, and came back dead or disabled or drugged up or (at best) twisted. The hippieshit idiots like me chose jail over enlistment, and came back drugged up or twisted. The girls anxiously watched as their boyfriends or husbands or brothers came back dead or disabled or drugged up or twisted or (at best) bored.

EVERY FUCKING ONE WAS AFFECTED BY VIETNAM.

So what happened? Apparently it didn't happen. It's rarely mentioned. Certainly not an obsession. Instead you tell us and tell us and tell us and tell us over and over and over and over about this absurd little non-event that affected essentially nobody.

What in the fuck is wrong with you? Other than every fucking thing?

Lesus save us. Mohammed save us. Buddha save us.
  ¶ 10:17 AM

  All weapons are weapons but some weapons...
For several years Ukraine's government had failed to pay Russia for natural gas. Now Russia has shut off the utilities for non-payment.

In DC, some neocon Dalek is saying "We condemn Russia's use of energy as a weapon against Ukraine."

Well then, Dalek, I guess you should also condemn America's use of energy as a weapon against Russia in the 1980s. Our manipulation of Saudi oil prices plus our sabotage of Russia's pipelines (including the very same pipeline we're discussing now) were the weapons that brought down the Soviet regime in Russia. The Soviet regime then relocated to America and unfortunately remains in control here.

What? You're not condemning past uses of energy as a weapon? Only this one?



Well then, Dalek, you're not really condemning anything. You're just making Dalek noises.

In fact Russia is ceasing to use energy as a weapon. While the Ukrainian government was loyal, Russia subsidized their unpaid bills. That was a weapon to keep them loyal. Now that they're no longer loyal, no need for the weapon. Treat them like any other nation and require them to pay their bills.
  ¶ 3:09 AM

  SANITY WINS ONE!
YAAAAAY!

A Spokane jury took less than four hours to find Gail Gerlach not guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of Brendon Kaluza-Graham. Shortly after the jury's verdict was read, Gail and his wife Sharon embraced in the courtroom, looking visibly relieved.

Civilization 1, Satan 0.

A few hours later, the jury separately decided that the self-defense shooting was justified, which requires the idiot state to reimburse Gerlach for his legal costs.

Civilization 2, Satan 0.

It won't change things in the illegitimate "court" system. Persecuting Attorney Tucker will continue to serve Satan loyally. He is permanently and totally devoted to raw evil.

But criminals, who are generally sane and capable of learning, will notice that their loyal accomplice and consigliere Tucker doesn't have the community on his side.

I'm proud of this city.
  ¶ 2:44 PM

  Lipton's yak
Reading another stupid "study" on improving nutrition, it struck me that Portion and Serving are extremely peculiar units. They are new instances of an otherwise ancient and vestigial type of measurement.

Measurements began with specific terms for quantities of different things.

Pre-literate languages generally have separate words for three sticks, three goats, three men, three women, three yaks, and so on. Broader concepts of three objects developed much later. The separate-word stage remains in a few old industries or trades. We still have separate barrels for oil and beer and water, separate ounces for gold and pharmaceuticals, separate gallons for plant containers, and so on. All of these are vestigial leftovers EXCEPT portion and serving, which are newly created type-specific units.

When "studies" find that we now need 56,328.3169 Portions of fruits and vegetables per day if we want to survive another day, the "studies" never tell us which type of Portion or Serving they mean. Peanut portion? Walnut portion? Almond portion? Roma tomato portion? Fresh broccoli portion? Frozen broccoli portion? Campbell's soup portion? Lipton soup portion? Heinz soup portion?

This is less modern and less abstract than three yaks versus three women! It's more like having a distinct word for three of the yaks that live in Og's field, and a separate word for three of the yaks that live in Guk's field, and a separate word for three of the yaks that live in Bup's field.

= = = = =

A separate thought branching from the same general subject. Probably a weak idea, but seems interesting at the moment....

We always talk about 'new advances in electronics', and even more annoyingly we always attribute these advances to quantum crap. Nope, completely wrong. There hasn't been an advance in electronics since 1940. All the elements of digital and analog circuitry were well-developed in 1940. Every improvement since then has come from advances in materials. Junction transistors, integrated circuits, CMOS transistors, memory structures, constant shrinkage of space and increase in circuit density. All achieved through new methods for mixing and layering and processing and carving stuff, especially stuff formed into fibers.

Weak parallel: We also talk about new understandings in nutrition, and more annoyingly we attribute these advances to DNA and genetics. Nope, completely wrong. Vitamins, minerals, proteins and sugars were understood well enough in 1940, though not quite as well as electronics. Most of our recent advances have come from understanding the material properties of food. We've realized that the old dream of complete nutrition in one pill per day is impossible. Digestion depends crucially on how the nutrients are contained in the fibers and bulk of actual real meat and fruit and nuts. Our enzymes and acids and symbiotic bacteria are designed to process the material of real food into necessary nutrients. If we don't let them engage in these processes, digestion fails, and then life fails.
  ¶ 7:21 AM

  They squeezed!
Six months ago I hopefully noted an intention by UK government to issue infrastructure bonds that would meet Islamic standards.

Amazingly, the UK gov't has actually carried through on its expressed intention!

Via London's City AM:

Britain could become the first truly global Islamic finance centre if the government sets its mind to attracting infrastructure investment.

Chancellor George Osborne is raising £200m with a sharia-compliant bond, a sukuk, and is trying to encourage investors to move to London. Gatehouse Bank [an Islamic bank] expects this bond issue to show the extent of pent up demand in Britain. The bank alone expects to buy £30m to £40m of the sukuk, and predicts bids for the debt to run into the billions of pounds.

In part the problem is finding investment opportunities which meet stringent sharia standards. This requires the return on investment to be based on a hard, tangible asset – for instance, a rental property, or industrial machinery.

Repeating what I wrote earlier, which now applies definitely instead of hopefully:

= = = = = START REPRINT

(1) Tapping new investors is only a small part of the advantage. The big part is the plain fact that Islamic economics works, while the US/UK/EU Goldman System fails. (Of course Goldman economics succeeds magnificently for Goldman. The parasite destroys the host country to enrich itself.)

(2) When you disconnect the bond's return from LIBOR and those other Goldman-invented measurements and derivatives and options and futures and indexes and puts and calls, you also disconnect the power of Goldman. LIBOR was invented solely to provide a single control knob for the entire banking system, a knob that Goldman turns.

(3) When you treat government more like a business with the goal of producing a natural profit, you end up with a government that can do its proper job. When you keep a reserve and stay on the savings side of the ledger, you're not vulnerable to Goldman's crashes and commands. Failed governments operate solely on the borrowing side, which means they must obey their creditors instead of their people. Polistra has discussed this in detail before.

Islam requires investments to be based on real profit or increase from a real enterprise, not on abstract counterfeit numbers that Goldman can dial up or down. I can't find details on the nature of the 'enterprise' for this sukuk; it could be just a gimmick so the big Qatar sultan types can give lip service to sharia. Unfortunately there's a lot of gimmickry in these things. But if this sukUK isn't fake, it's an interesting start toward a sane economic system in one of the craziest countries on Earth. Now let's have MORE SANITY, PLEASE.

= = = = = END REPRINT

Well, it wasn't a gimmick. It was genuine! BRAVO!

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 3:34 AM

  Templates
One aspect of perception that hasn't been well explored is our remarkable ability to build a long-lasting template from a few occasional inputs.

Example just now:

I keep a little 40-watt incandescent table lamp behind the washer and dryer. When winter starts, I turn on the bulb and leave it on until we're safely out of hard frost. The laundry room doesn't have a proper heater, so it tends to stay about 20 degrees above outside temps in winter. The bulb is just enough to prevent the washer and hoses from freezing on the worst days.

Two days ago I decided that the hard frosts were done for this year, so I turned off the lamp.

This morning I ran laundry. As I stepped into the laundry room, I was peripherally startled by SOMETHING DARK AND THREATENING behind the washer! ACK! What was that horrible THING?



Oh. It was just the lack of light after 6 months of seeing the light every time I stepped into the laundry room.

Seeing the light from this angle is a perceptual input that happens for about 1/4 second every three days. Yet these occasional split seconds are enough to establish a firm baseline, and enough to cause a momentary panic reaction when reality differs from the internal template.

Life is all about adaptation and deltas. Brightness deltas, color deltas, spatial deltas, temporal deltas, temperature deltas, pressure deltas, hormone deltas, aroma deltas, loudness deltas, frequency deltas, change-of-frequency deltas, dialect deltas, velocity deltas, acceleration deltas, change-of-acceleration deltas..... It's deltas all the way down.

Labels: Danbo, TMI

  ¶ 5:15 AM

  Idiot Strong
Amazingly, this isn't an April Fool joke, though it is a maximally Foolish act on April 1 by the Foolishest Fool in public life.

Alleged "governor" Jay Inslee proclaimed April to be "Poetry Month" in this alleged "state", in honor of the landslide victims.



So, I guess it's time for a Poem. You can tell it's a Poem because it's spaced out all funny and it's in italics too. Otherwise it would just be crap.

April is the cruelest month.
April is the foolest month.


Oso Strong! Oso Strong! Oso Stupid! Let's build
our houses at the base of a cliff, even after
the cliff has already collapsed
several times.

Even after competent Geologists have warned
us that it's going to collapse again.
We're STRONG! We're STUPID!
And now that the cliff has
collapsed again, just as
the Competent
Geologists
said it
would,


and splattered us all into meaningless goo,
Let's build our houses EVEN CLOSER to
the base of a cliff! Let's put them
RIGHT AT THE BOTTOM!


No, let's undercut the cliff by a few hundred feet
or so, then prop it up with some recycled GREEN
rotten 2 x 4s, then put the houses UNDER
the propped-up part.__[]__[]___//////


By gosh and golly, oops I mean By Goddess And Gaia, That'll show old
Nature who's boss! We dare you and double-dare you to send
that cliff tumbling down on us NOW!


Oso Strong! Oso Stupid!
Oh so stupid!

This was A poem. Written By me.

Labels: Pluponents, STRONG!

  ¶ 3:47 AM

  Art just died.
Satan's unconditional victory rolls on.

Religion was explicitly forbidden in February. Now art is explicitly prohibited as of April 7.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from a studio that refused to photograph a lesbian couple's commitment ceremony, letting stand a New Mexico high court ruling that helped spur a national debate over gay rights and religious freedom.

The justices left in place a unanimous state Supreme Court ruling last year that said Elane Photography violated New Mexico's Human Rights Act by refusing to photograph the same-sex ceremony "in the same way as if it had refused to photograph a wedding between people of different races."

Elane Photography co-owner Elaine Huguenin said taking the photos for Vanessa Willock and her partner would violate her religious beliefs. She said she also has a right of artistic expression under the First Amendment that allows her to choose what pictures to take, or refrain from taking.

This says, explicitly and specifically, that YOU CANNOT REFUSE TO MAKE ART FOR PARTY MEMBERS. You are still free to refuse commissions or requests from Heretics, but you aren't allowed to ask or determine or guess whether the requester is a Heretic or a Person Of Gender, so in effect you can't refuse any requests or commissions at all.

On the surface this may seem like the opposite of censorship, but this is exactly how Stalin did it. If you are being paid by The Party to produce works that celebrate The Party, you can't spend any of your time doing anti-Party work. It's a non-compete contract.

Imagine you're running a studio, and you typically accept commissions for small painted portraits. An orthodox Person Of Gender minces into your studio and presents a properly filled-out purchase order. You are hereby commissioned to create no paintings at all for the next year, and the Person Of Gender is paying you $0.00 because it's zero work. YOU CAN'T REFUSE THE COMMISSION because it was presented by a Person Of Gender. You must produce NOTHING for the next year, and you must receive $0.00 for the non-work.

RIP art.
  ¶ 12:12 PM

  Crossing the strait
Polistra has previously discussed the second time when Russia and America collaborated on building and extending telegraph lines.

The first time was more consequential. In the 1850s, Britain and Russia and US were competing for the fur and gold along the west coast of North America. Britain and US were still enemies, but Russia and America were semi-friendly adversaries. Russia had taken our side in 1812, and was amenable to commercial cooperation when it served their interests.

Around 1860, Western Union and the Russian Telegraph Company developed a plan to run a line from Seattle up through BC, thence through Russian Alaska, thence across the Bering Strait to join Russia's internal telegraph system. Construction began in 1861, and by 1866 the line had reached the southern end of Russian Alaska, with right-of-way and supplies laid out further north.



The whole project stopped in 1867 when Tsar Alexander II decided to sell Alaska to us. Alexander had emancipated the serfs in 1861. Exactly parallel to Madman Lincoln's emancipation. Except that Alexander didn't feel the need to slaughter 7% of his population and burn 25% of his country to make it happen. Aside from those minor differences, parallel. Well, one more difference. Russia took effective steps to insure that the freed serfs acquired property and started up the economic ladder. Aside from that, identical.

Broadening the economy was costly, so a windfall from selling a far-removed territory was attractive.

Why was US willing to buy the territory just then? Partly because the telegraph project had explored Alaska more thoroughly, and partly because the connecting wire made the territory seem less distant and more manageable.

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 5:07 AM

  Literal Kura
Several months ago I noted this wonderful old ad for Hitachi air conditioners...


It's a modern myth in bluegrass style, with clever ideogram puns in the cartoon. Now it appears that a Chinese city has taken the myth literally, offering bags of mountain-fresh air to polluted citizens.
  ¶ 12:01 PM

  Where's the Het Rosa Parks?
Satan's total and absolute putsch rolls forward. The CEO of Mozilla has been forced out by the Rainbowshirts (or should that be Rainbowchaps?) because he had contributed to a political campaign seen as unfriendly to the Party Central Committee.

Surprisingly, most commentators in the tech world have recognized and criticized the asymmetry. Eich hadn't fired anyone for being homosexual. The homosexuals fired him for being heterosexual. The direction of discrimination is blazingly transparent.

Nothing new here. Good old Animal Farm. All forms of discrimination are abhorrent except for discrimination practiced by The Party, which is necessary and normal and not even a concept. It just is.

Nevertheless, this is discrimination, and we're supposed to agitate against discrimination.

Well then. Question: Who will dare to be the "Rosa Parks" of Het Segregation?

Answer: Won't happen and shouldn't happen.

Shouldn't? Yup. Plain fact: Segregation isn't a bad thing. Segregation, when it occurs by social means, is normal and productive. People live, love and work better when they are allowed to separate themselves by type. Different cultures will form different degrees of separation for different categories, but there will always be some separation. This is Nature.

Unlike easily visible characteristics such as gender and race, hetero/homo is usually a private type distinction. Until VERY recently, most of us didn't know and didn't care about the sexual proclivities of our bosses or employees or neighbors. Now that the homosexual political movement has turned this distinction into a public and official category, we are REQUIRED by the media and government to NOTICE and CARE, so that we can NOT-NOTICE and NOT-CARE when required. Now that this hyper-insane doublethink is forced on us, a certain degree of segregation is a normal response. Most of us don't want to be insane.

Unsurprisingly, the segregation is appearing first in churches, because the government has (SO FAR) failed to enforce its integrationist tyranny on churches. Churches with unicellular structure have been completely homo-genized. When your central office in NYC or London or Rome sets policy for all congregations, it's wonderfully easy to blackmail the central CEO, who then forcibly infects the rest of the organization. Churches with more distributed (plant-like) structure have managed to hold onto their integrity, because the individual congregations can't be automatically blackmailed through one office or one CEO.

You asked for it, you got it. In this world, complete and total segregation is the best possible response. Satan needs to learn that SOME parts of society and SOME parts of commerce and SOME parts of religion are NOT going to surrender easily to evil.
  ¶ 4:43 AM

  Super-bizarre
High-speed trading has been going strong for about 10 years. It was somewhat secret at first, but it's been PERFECTLY WELL-KNOWN since 2009. All sorts of normal news sources and normal commentators in many countries have been discussing it. If you were following British online newspapers, you would have been thoroughly acquainted with the topic several years ago. Everybody understands that high-speed trading is immoral, everybody understands that it's a complete destruction of normal commerce. Old old old old news.

Now this book by Michael Lewis suddenly brings high-speed trading into the realm of the mainstream media, and they're suddenly SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED to find cheating in the Jew Casino. Satan dba "Eric Holder" promises an "investigation" into this "brand-new" phenomenon.

Tell you what, Satan dba "Holder". Why don't you investigate the phenomenon of high-speed travel while you're discovering new things? I've heard that devices called "boats" have been moving ACROSS WATER recently, often carrying contraband. I've also heard that humans have figured out a way to move ACROSS LAND by using mysterious devices called "foots". (Some people refer to them as "feet", but this is probably an insider criminal jargon term like "Mary Jane", and deserves special investigative attention.) Just within the last few centuries, rumors have emerged of even faster travel methods, involving what might be called "rails" or "roads" or "roadrails". I'm not sure of the existence of these rumored super-advanced methods, so I don't want to go into detail, but you should investigate them as well.

= = = = =

Similar example: In all mainstream media and governmental "robust debates" on the latest mass shooting, the clear and obvious solution is TOTALLY MISSING from all discussion. As always, all fucking options are on the fucking table EXCEPT the one option that is KNOWN TO WORK EVERY FUCKING TIME. It's especially super-bizarre since we're specifically talking about SOLDIERS. The idea of letting SOLDIERS carry their guns is literally and totally unthinkable.

= = = = =

Lesus save us. Mohammed save us. Buddha save us. One of you dudes better come down here and do some serious wiping NOW. That's an ORDER, not a prayer.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 8:42 AM

  No word for it
Another piece of our dainty little milifairy lost to utter satanic idiocy:

Two years ago, Coeur d’Alene was among dozens of Western communities caught off guard when Army Corps officials said all trees on levees had to go. After Hurricane Katrina, the agency updated its national levee standards, saying that trees and bushes were hazardous to levees because they could be uprooted during storms and their roots could undermine the structures. Only grass was allowed to remain.

Communities that flouted the Army Corps’s new standards risked having their levee certification revoked. That meant they couldn’t apply for federal disaster funds for levee repairs in the event of flooding. The loss of levee certification also created problems with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which sets flood insurance rates.

The new standards led to protests and a 2011 lawsuit by the Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the River. Opponents argued that the Army Corps’ own research showed that trees can help stabilize levees and reduce erosion.

In an interim policy adopted last month, the Army Corps changed course. Trees on levees won’t disqualify flood-control districts from securing federal aid. Vegetation ratings on levees will be informational only, corps officials said in the policy revision, which is expected to become permanent.

In other words, the Corps had LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE that trees ruin levees. This is how engineers do things, and more to the point it's how SANE HUMANS do things.

But LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE is illegal now. It's the worst of all crimes in the Satanic Anglosphere. We must NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER LEARN! WE MUST ALWAYS GUARANTEE SUICIDE AND DISASTER, AND WHEN DISASTER INEVITABLY COMES, WE MUST DO INFINITELY MORE TO GUARANTEE INFINITE SUICIDE AND INFINITE DISASTER. In every single case we must enter a ferocious death spiral with maximum afterburner boost.

We're fucked. No, there isn't a word for it.
  ¶ 1:47 AM

  Drearily predictable
I knew this would happen. Last month I wrote:

Idiot Kerry is still making idiot noises. Tell you what, idiot: Why don't you go ahead and attack Russia? Maybe you can find 600 actual males in "our" milifairy, but I'll bet you can't. You'll have to send 600 mincing dancing prancing Tinkerbells, and the Russians will make mincing mincemeat out of them. Just like before.

Now today we see:

There are currently 265 Marines in Romania who have been there for years as part of the Black Sea Rotational Force, reports CBS News correspondent David MArtin. The U.S. is sending an additional 175 Marines as a forward element of a contingency force based in Spain that was established in the wake of Benghazi - i.e. quicker response to defend embassies.

The decision to put 175 Marines in Romania was made late last year. The U.S. has asked permission to base up to 600 Marines in Romania just to give a little extra headroom for when the number goes up when troops rotate in an out.

Look, DC fuckheads. We've known for decades that you are perfect reverse learners. You endlessly repeat every action that previously led to a disaster, and you mercilessly destroy every action that previously led to a success or a solution.

But really, DC fuckheads. Do you have to be so grotesquely OBVIOUS about it? Do you have to rub it in every fucking time?
  ¶ 5:57 PM

  Annoying because right vs Annoying because wrong
The latest "study" on diet and health indicates that 5000000000000000 "portions" of something isn't enough. We need to be eating at least 90000000000000000000000000000000000000 "portions" of something or other if we want to live.

I have no fucking idea what a portion is. I have no fucking idea what a serving is. I don't know what an ounce looks like. I don't know what a gram looks like. I don't know if a portion is the same for different foods, or a serving is the same as a portion, or a serving is the same for different foods.

Only professional dietitians understand these terms. Maybe.

Therefore: This "study" is purely and murderously counterproductive. It performs exactly one purpose. It helps to discredit ALL information on proper diet, and strongly encourages many people to eat badly, smoke and drink in excess.

Responsible scientists, if any such creatures existed, would either keep this "study" quiet, or would find an entirely different way of presenting the information.

Despite all of the above raw anger and frustration, I know the importance of proper diet. I proved it for myself in the last two or three years. After switching from all pre-digested (sophisticated) food to mostly home-cooked food, my health, digestion, pooping, and mood have improved tremendously. It's amazing.

Thus: I'm frustrated at idiot "studies" on diet because I know they're more or less right. When "studies" are totally wrong, like global warming or economics or quantum crap or social "sciences", I'm happy to see them presented in a way that induces raw contempt and disbelief. Those "studies" deserve raw contempt and disbelief.

= = = = =

Just for a nice contrast, here's a POSITIVE example of media coverage on a health-improving technique, from KREM TV. Today is apparently National Walking Day, which could be presented as drudgery. This article focuses on one middle-aged woman who tried walking to work and quickly realized it was FUN as well as healthy. You might think "Agh, it won't work for me", but the notion of FUN will stick in your mind, and could lead you to try an experiment later.
  ¶ 5:12 AM

  Putin has it exactly right.
From Putin's December 'SOTU'-type speech:

Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.

We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years: the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life, not just material existence but also spirituality, the values of humanism and global diversity.

Of course, this is a conservative position. But speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.

Can we vote to secede from USA and join Russia? Please?

Unfortunately, no. This part of America was nominally claimed by Russia in the early 1800s, but was never properly settled or occupied. Still, we can join in spirit, complete with a Russian America flag!




[Added the Russian America flag to top icon as well.]

Labels: Danbo, the broken circle, Гром победы

  ¶ 5:55 AM

  Counterintuitive but sensible
Some of the commenters on this ArsTechnica piece about a patent-troll court case are advocating a surprisingly sensible principle.

Leave aside previous thinking about patents. Start fresh from the notion that Patents Encourage And Protect Large Investments.

An idea that doesn't require a large investment doesn't need the heavy artillery of lawsuits, and doesn't deserve to be bullied by trolls who make large investments in trolling. In the realm of small investment, just let companies compete. Small investments usually imply local or regional sales. At this level most customers choose products or services by features or appearance or store loyalty. Products are rarely unique enough to be worth a patent fight.

If an idea requires significant investment (as in multi-millions to billions), it's worth the trouble for government to guarantee a short-term monopoly. A company that can afford large development costs can also afford the lawyers to use the patent, and deserves to know that its development costs won't be canceled out by a cheap copy.

Seems sort of anti-democratic on the surface, but actually levels the playing field for smaller operators.

What would this mean in practice? Patents should be very costly and very strictly checked, and should be issued quickly to companies that can afford them.
  ¶ 5:08 AM