Why you want a good vehicle ... here and hereafter
Fairmount Cemetery is directly west of this neighborhood, and took the first blow (heh) from the recent tightly focused microburst. Several trees were knocked down, loosening up the soil near them and starting a chain reaction...

Result yesterday: A small landslide pulled just one casket down into a ravine.

Picture here.

I expect the maker and seller of the casket are quietly smiling at the intact and upright condition of the item, and wishing they could indulge the same sales tactics that a carmaker might use.

Car analogy:



Noticed something unexpected in this Airflow promotional clip. At 3:28 the stunt driver casually buckles a lap belt without any comment from the circus-barker announcer. Lap belts weren't available in cars until 1950, but they must have been familiar to audiences in '34. Most car mags and car histories state that lap belts didn't become familiar until the late '40s as a result of stock-car racing. You'd think this newsreel would have generated some demand for accessory belts! If the belt helped the stunt driver survive, I'll bet it would help me survive too. But apparently that didn't happen.
  ¶ 5:45 PM

  I'm gobsmacked
Unprecedented in modern times:

A "study" by academic commies finds bad qualities associated with their fellow commies.

Or even simpler, a "study" by academic commies is true and valid.

I specify Modern Times because academic Marxists before 1960 were often capable of finding truth. New Deal era Marxists were basically right about most economic matters, and didn't say much about cultural matters. When they did, as with Lancelot Hogben's linguistic writings, they were generally right.

Post-1960 Gramscians are murderously wrong about everything. They no longer hold proper Marxist economic views, and their cultural views are unimaginably evil.

This "study" finds that "unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children from higher income backgrounds, with parents who are higher educated, have parents who intentionally choose to refuse or delay vaccinations out of a belief that they are protecting their children. On the other hand, children from families with lower incomes and with less-educated parents tend to be under-vaccinated because they lack access to resources."

Yes. Exactly true and correctly interpreted. Amazing! From a Professor Of Gender Studies you'd automatically expect the standard TV belief system: Anti-vaxers are white christian hillbilly fundamentalist redneck yahoo homophobe sexist Bushitler Nazi Halliburton Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch. (I've omitted a few thousand Kochs for brevity.)

Nope, they're Your Kind of Persons. There are a few fundamentalists among the antis, but overwhelmingly they're rich and well-educated and Orthodox Dawkins-Darwin Atheists.

I'm dumbfounded.
  ¶ 6:45 AM

  Splashy or smelly
Listening to PRX, one of the secondary public radio networks. I find it less wildly objectionable for background listening than most radio. PRX is leftish but doesn't HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER the satanic toxins into your ears every picosecond the way NPR does.

Still, some idiocy shows up now and then. The present program is about the problems of salmon fishermen near San Francisco. Around 2008 the fish in that circuit pretty much disappeared. Why?

Part of the answer is properly attributed to humans: Rivers in Calif have been completely consumed by various users, so there's nothing for salmon to climb. Of course the secondary cause of this consumption isn't mentioned: Calif cities haven't switched to desalination because Endangered Species, as fucking always. So this is a problem caused partly by normal human stupidity and partly by enviroterrorists, as fucking always.

Part of the answer returns to the old HAMMER. They're interviewing some idiot "scientist" who says the 2008 problem was specifically .... are you ready? "caused by El Nino. Climate Change."

YOU GROTESQUE FOOL. El Nino is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE of your fashionable genocidal mass-murdering all-destroying idiotic theory of "Climate Change". El Nino is part of CLIMATE STABILITY. It's part of an infinitely complex system of periodic ups and downs that serve to keep things generally constant in the long term and across the whole world. The price of long-term stability is short-term and localized wiggles. Some of those wiggles are inconvenient to humans or fish; some are helpful to humans or fish. Nature doesn't particularly care which way we interpret them.

ANY FEEDBACK SYSTEM CREATES CONSTANT CHANGE IN ITS PARTS TO MAINTAIN OVERALL STABILITY. Some parts of the system are constantly adjusting to compensate for externally imposed changes. When you flush a toilet, you are exerting negative feedback based on your experience of what happens to a bowl that never gets flushed. Just after the flush, the tank refills. The toilet's mechanism is exerting negative feedback based on the intelligence of its designers, baked into the ballcock mechanism. Without this feedback, the bowl wouldn't be ready to use most of the time. We understand that there are moments when the system is unusable. We don't try to poop immediately after a flush because we know the bowl is empty for a moment. We don't remain sitting while it flushes because we know the flush tends to splash.

The infinitely complex feedback loops of El Nino / La Nina are responding to a set of inputs that we haven't even started to understand. So we don't yet know when we should sit or stand, or when we're likely to make a smelly mess.

Nevertheless, we CAN understand that these changes have been going on for a very long time, and we CAN understand that the world's bowl has remained more or less habitable for a very long time, with some places being too splashy or too smelly at some times.
  ¶ 2:20 AM

  Symbolic tree trimming
A few weeks before the '96 icestorm, Avista sent around postcards saying that they were going to do preventive tree maintenance. They didn't get to the prevention, but the icestorm pretty much took down all the tree branches and wires and poles that were susceptible to being taken down by an icestorm. Presto! Announce the job, and Nature does it for you, with a bonus of several days of lost power!

Several months after the icestorm, the prevention (now postvention) finally occurred. Avista crews took down some insignificant trees and brush, including a little 10-foot maple on my lot that wasn't going to touch any wires. They skipped my fruit trees, which were still menacing the wire and had clearly been damaged by the icestorm. (Much later, in 2011, I had all of my trees cut down. Zero problems now.)

= = = = =

A few weeks before this July's superwindstorm, Avista sent around postcards saying that they were going to do preventive tree maintenance. They didn't get to the prevention, but the July superwind took down all the trees and wires and poles that were capable of being taken down. Presto! Announce the job, and Nature does it for you, with a bonus of dozens of squashed houses and several days of lost power!

Today the prevention (now postvention) finally occurred. Expensive Asplundh tree crews, with "on contract to Avista" permanently painted on their trucks, were working down the line in this area. As far as I can tell they didn't cut anything. I didn't hear any chainsaws, didn't see any climbing, and the trees look the same as before. But the crews did run their woodchipper for about 5 minutes in each location, feeding it some small pine branches.

Where did those pine branches come from? The crew didn't cut them here, and the Hank Hill types in this neighborhood don't allow loose branches to sit around.

This seems to be some kind of superstitious ritual, done more to satisfy the stock market than to prevent real damage to real wires.

= = = = =

Few days later, now that I've got time to look around: No. Asplundh didn't just play with symbolic branches. What they did was worse. They cut all the branches on one side of a 60-foot pine next to the wires, thus killing it and guaranteeing that it will fall in a typical windstorm. Really dumb. [I'm not sympathizing with the tree. I have a specific interest in this particular tree. It's the only remaining tree that could possibly hit my house when it falls. The height of the tree and the distance to nearest corner of house appear to be about the same, so it would likely be more of a slap than a crush ... but my estimate could be wrong either way.]

= = = = =

Semi-related. Got monthly Comcast bill today: it shows a month past due, plus the current month. Especially annoying because Comcast was dark for a full week after the superwindstorm in July, so in theory I should pay less, not more.

I've been highly systematic about bill paying for many years now, ever since frugality brought a constant and comfortable surplus. Now I don't need to wait for income. After earlier times of broke desperation, it feels damn good to knock out every bill instantly. Well then, maybe someone stole the check after I sent it? Oooooops. Checkbook shows that I didn't send a check to Comcast last month.

The date would have been right around the superwindstorm, so I must have accidentally tossed the bill in my jangled and overwhelmed condition.
  ¶ 5:10 PM

  Lies all the way down
Heard on news just now:

"NATO is the alliance that stood up to the old Soviet aggression, and now must decide to resist the new Russian aggression."

Lies all the way down.

Russia was aggressive in the 1700s and early 1800s under Catherine. She expanded the empire tremendously. Since then, with only one exception, Russia has been pragmatic and opportunistic. Mostly Russia has been holding onto the territory that Catherine picked up, fighting off repeated invasions by Japs, Krauts and now Yanks.

After WW2, the four big allies distributed the Kraut spoils. Russia got more territory than Britain or France because Russia had sacrificed more of its industries and men to win the war.

NATO was formed allegedly to counter Russia's bloc of semi-occupied countries. Several times in the 50s and 60s, Russia intervened in those countries to put down rebellions. You could argue that those interventions were aggressive, but then you'd have to apply the same standards to US interventions in quasi-colonies like Haiti, or French interventions in quasi-colonies like Mali, or British interventions in quasi-colonies like the Falkland Islands.... And since none of the allies wanted to apply the same standard to themselves, they correctly held back on applying the standard to Russia.

Thus: Even if you want to use "aggression" to describe those interventions in countries that were granted to Russia as quasi-colonies, NATO never stood up to those "aggressions".

The current "aggression" is geographically similar, except that this time the uprising was NOT an internal rebellion. The uprising in Ukraine was strictly and purely created by American contractor Nudelman Pyatt Chaos Partners LLC.

We are the aggressors this time, with no ambiguity.

Fact: NATO is thus deciding whether it should put down Russia's defensive action against NATO aggression. Should we double down on our aggression? And the answer will be Yes.

Oh. What's the one exception? Afghanistan in the '80s. That's the only time in recent centuries when Russia behaved as badly as America, trying to grab territory that wasn't already part of its empire.

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 8:27 AM

  Sunslot
Noticed something unique on this morning's walk. Presumably this phenomenon has been around for a week or two, but I wasn't looking. I happened to be watching the ground this morning because I had just seen another unique item: an open laptop computer in a front yard, apparently thrown from a car.

As I continued scanning the ground, I saw a sunslot. At that moment the sun was just peeking over the ridge of Shadle hill. It was illuminating the tops of trees and a few roof edges, but all of the ground was still in shadow.

Except! Along the entire 6 blocks of the boulevard that I walked, exactly one stripe on the ground was sunny. The stripe was about 10 feet wide, running from the curb to the front of one house. A driveway for the sun.



This map gives a sense of the sunslot's exclusiveness. I wonder if the people in that house realize their literally ephemeral privilege?

Sidenote: I observed another aspect of this solar edginess a couple years ago.


Bonus sidenote: If you locate the sunslot on Spokane's official property map, you'll find an unbelievably perfect aptronym.

Labels: Aptronym Alert, Heimatkunde

  ¶ 7:56 AM

  Gotta get your insults right!
Mostly bravo:

During a live debate shown last week by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Clive Palmer — whose own Palmer United Party holds the balance of power in Australia’s Senate — slammed Chinese officials as “bastards” and “mongrels” who “shoot their own people.”

“They’re communist, they shoot their own people, they haven’t got a justice system and they want to take over this country,” he said at the time. “The Chinese government wants to bring workers here to destroy our wage system … they want to take over our ports and get our resources for free … I don’t mind standing up against the Chinese bastards and stopping them from doing it.”

Palmer has his verbs right but his nouns wrong.

China is taking over the rest of the world for free resources, and China does destroy the wages of workers everywhere else.... but ONLY WHEN THE REST OF THE WORLD PERMITS IT. The rest of the world DOES NOT HAVE TO PERMIT THIS.

Wildly and importantly wrong on two nouns:

The Chinese are NOT Communists. They are ferociously Capitalist. Western countries like Australia are Communist in areas where Communism makes us weak, and Capitalist where Capitalism makes us weak. We carefully and intentionally choose whichever system will kill us faster. China does the exact opposite. That's EXACTLY why China can roll over us so easily.

And the Chinese are EXACTLY NOT mongrels. China is ferociously pure and unashamedly proud of its own ethnic group. Western countries are mongrels, busily committing suicide by Die-Versity. That's EXACTLY why China can roll over us so easily.

China understands that we have placed ourselves into a massively accelerating death spiral. Instead of protecting our workers from foreign competition, we forcibly import foreign competition and punish anyone who dares to resist. Instead of protecting our resources, we bomb our own dams and burn our own forests to "protect" some Privileged Animals who don't need our protection.
  ¶ 3:09 AM

  All uninhabitables are equal, but....
Quake in fairyland "leaves 30 homes uninhabitable". That's a newsworthy disaster, no doubt about it.

How come, then, we didn't hear anything on the national news last month when a windstorm here left about 50 homes uninhabitable? Even in the local news we never got a proper count. Around 40 trailers smashed in a Chattaroy mobile home park, and around 10 houses in this neighborhood.

I won't even bother with the two horses joke this time. Tumbril time, citoyens.
  ¶ 3:21 AM

  Subversives in BBC?
BBC is running a long and mostly accurate feature on the Tonkin Gulf lie. The announcer (who admits that he's too young to remember the events) implies that Tonkin Gulf was only recently recognized as a lie**. Flat wrong. It was recognized immediately. He also says that LBJ's White House Tapes were only recently known. Again flat wrong. The only legitimate historian, Paul Johnson, wrote about those tapes 20 years ago.

The standard satanic line is to quietly ignore LBJ's part in Vietnam and load all the blame on Nixon. Most people now "know", and often state openly, that Nixon got us into Vietnam. [Just for clarity: The FACT is that LBJ took us in and Nixon pulled us out. Nixon botched the pullout and made some unnecessary and damaging sidetrips into Cambodia and Laos along the way; but nevertheless he did take us out of Vietnam.]

I suppose I should be glad that BBC is daring to criticize a Noble And Saintly Party Member. But why bother to speak truth 50 years later, after your lie has been so perfectly established? And why exactly now, in the middle of a new set of warmongering lies about ISIS and Ukraine? BBC is enthusiastically spreading these new lies and silencing dissent.

It's a puzzle. Are there subversive elements in BBC?

**Oops. Toward the end of the hour, the documentary fully covers the immediate exposure of the lie by Wayne Morse and others. Maybe the intro was written by someone else who didn't realize what the actual program said.
  ¶ 2:26 AM

  All sparks are equal, but......
Two different headlines with the same verb.

(1) "Warm Springs woman admits sparking 51,000-acre wildfire"

(2) "Police choke-hold death sparks New York march"

In both cases the spark was human-caused.

In (1) the cause is correctly identified. Sadie Renee Johnson sparked a wildfire (while drunk and high) because her fireman friends were getting bored from lack of work. Nobody was killed, but lots of property was destroyed. She has received a jail sentence, and is officially but pointlessly required to pay $8 million in restitution.

In (2) the cause is intentionally falsified. The march was not sparked by a police choke-hold. The march was sparked by Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton has directly and personally sparked dozens of riots and protests, resulting in dozens of deaths. He has never been punished; instead, he gains more respect and fame and riches every time he kills more people.

Hmm. Wonder what's the difference between these two? Why does one 'flint' get correctly punished for causing huge property damage but no deaths, while the other 'flint' gets massively rewarded and treated as a Living Saint for causing even greater property damage plus many deaths?

Could it be that the black flint is fatter and uglier than the white flint? Nah. Lots of fat and ugly people get correctly punished. Could it be that the black flint falsely claims the title of Reverend, while the white flint is just an untitled barfly? Nah. Lots of false Reverends have been jailed.

I guess some things will always remain mysterious. Ours not to reason why, ours but to die and die.
  ¶ 2:07 PM

  When sane people hate you...
As usual, modern Western governments are taking the stupidest possible line.

The Home Secretary says she is preparing to bring in new laws that include an “anti-social behaviour order” for extremists. The measures are aimed at curtailing the activities of radical preachers, such as Anjem Choudary, whose extreme rhetoric currently does not constitute a crime.

While details are yet to emerge, the new power will be designed to restrict extremists’ behaviour and language. As with an Asbo, it could result in a criminal conviction carrying a jail term if breached.

Mrs May also discloses that she will make it illegal to join extremist groups that preach violent views, but are not directly involved in terrorism.

Well, you always need laws against violent revolution. No question about that.

But when you see large numbers of people joining serious opposition groups, it should also serve as a feedback signal. Especially when many of those people are highly educated engineers and doctors.

When logical people are turning against you, it means you're crazy. Or at least it means that the results of your actions are perceived as crazy.

As usual, FDR showed us the correct response. In 1932, America was suffering from violence and craziness perpetrated by two groups: Bankers and gangsters. Large numbers of ordinary people saw the craziness and correctly blamed the government for allowing bankers to run wild, and for creating Prohibition that spawned the gangsters.

FDR saw large numbers of people joining Communist and Fascist groups. He correctly recognized this as an error signal, informing him that the government was seen as the enemy of the people. He correctly diagnosed the sources of craziness. He cracked down HARD on the bankers and gangsters, and removed Prohibition. Soon the craziness started to subside, and with it the feedback signal of Communists and Fascists.

We have the same problems with bankers and gangsters; PLUS a crazy government that runs around creating mass death and chaos in countries that have insulted the bankers or insulted Israel; PLUS a genocidal government that uses tanks and guns and judges to SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH every conceivable aspect of civilization inside its "own" country.

Obama has encouraged the bankers and gangsters to run wild, and (after briefly showing sanity) has continued to create mass death and chaos in countries that insult bankers or insult Israel.

The UK government has done exactly the same things, maybe slightly worse. Paying bankers instead of jailing them, rewarding gangsters and punishing citizens who dare to oppose gangsters, and creating chaos elsewhere.

When you ramp up your insanity, you should expect more feedback from sane people.

= = = = =

Just for fun, a little Gedankenexperiment. It's 1934. One of Dillinger's young thugs reaches into a cop car and attacks the cop. The cop shoots the thug. Which would have happened?

(a) FDR orders the Feds to help the local cops, because more force is needed against Dillinger's thugs.

(b) FDR orders the Feds to protect local thugs against cops, and orders a special investigation into all cops who dare to arrest or shoot thugs.

If you think (b) is correct, congratulations! You are a perfect modern EU/US/UK robot. You believe everything the telescreen believes, you know everything the telescreen knows. You are absolutely immune to reality.
  ¶ 4:13 AM

  Misplaced angst
Romans are getting all het up about a silly Black Mass proposed by some play-acting "Satanists" in OKC. They're missing the target entirely. These toy "Satanists" are just Goth types. They are no more threatening than the jousters in a Renaissance Faire, or the soldiers in a Civil War Reenactment. They enjoy making up ceremonies of their own, and they especially enjoy irritating adult Romans. It's a hobby, for fuck's sake.

Meanwhile, real satanic influences are everywhere, ESPECIALLY INCLUDING Rome itself. Popess Francine has made her allegiance perfectly clear. No doubt which team she's on.



For clarity: I use words related to Satan a LOT. I don't mean the bright red dude with horns, just as I don't mean the bearded old white guy when I say God. I'm spiritually retarded, incapable of having faith in either side, but I can see the objects of faith fairly clearly.

I do see a fast-growing body of SCIENTIFIC evidence for some kind of Big Intelligence that formed living things, and an equally fast-growing body of evidence that this Big Mind gave us internal instructions about its PURPOSES. When we disobey those instructions, we receive error signals via emotions and diseases. We also have a set of reference manuals and user's guides written by people whose connection to the Big Critter was especially strong.

I also see a strong body of evidence that the opposite Intelligence exists in some form. Organized disobedience to our internal and written instructions always looks the same, just as obedience always looks the same.

At this moment, most of the governments and "churches" in the West are strictly following the negative intelligence, which might as well be called Satan if we're going to call the positive intelligence God.

The standard terms typically include some characteristics that I don't see any evidence for. Nevertheless, both terms are convenient as icons, and both are reasonably well fitted to the observable behaviors of organizations that pick each side.

Most Romans are firmly on God's side, but they're too accustomed to obeying a central human authority. When the authority switches sides, they obviously don't know what to do about it. Obeying central authority is NOT one of God's instructions. Nothing in Nature works this way. Everything is decentralized. Look and learn.
  ¶ 5:17 PM

  Techbullies
Been noticing something for a while, wasn't sure if it was a definite tendency or just a personality quirk of one or two people. As of this week, I've seen it consistently enough to be sure it's a tendency.

Here it is: In tech-oriented forums, the first 10 answers to EVERY question are bullying aggressive non-answers. The first 10 answers always reduce to "Why the fuck would you want to do that?"

These bullies pop in every time EVEN THOUGH the original poster has always explained carefully why he needs to do that.

I'm shaping up a new computer after my old one got twitchy as a result of a lightning-related power surge. (Fortunately I'm pretty strict about backing up important data, so nothing meaningful was lost.)

One of the programs that I reinstalled brought in Java Runtime 7 automatically. I knew that 7 wasn't needed, and I knew that Java 6 was needed by another program. So I tried to roll back to 6 and ran into all sorts of obstacles. Looking up each of these obstacles** online, I saw the same pattern in every forum. The OP explained the situation, which was often similar to mine. Sometimes it was a much bigger problem, as in a company with lots of legacy progs running on Java 6, making a complete switchover prohibitive.

No matter how big or small the reason, the techbullies always swarmed in with their insistence that YOU MUST ALWAYS USE THE LATEST SUB-VERSION OF EVERYTHING. You must auto-update everything to the latest millisecond via GitHub and SourceForge. If you are not up to the millisecond, you are trash. Legacy programs are trash. Anything that keeps you from Running With The Milliseconds must be tossed into the Memory Hole. It doesn't matter if you're managing IT for a large company that will collapse if you follow our fashions. You SHALL follow our fashions.

This is an exact parallel to the bullying in political and cultural realms. If your words and attitudes are not PRECISELY in line with the Kardashians, if you are not fully evolved into chaos and sodomy and mass slaughter and wild-eyed hyperlunacy, you are trash. Any person who prevents an organization from Running With The Milliseconds must be tossed out.

Do these attitudes coexist in the same people, or are they just accidentally similar phenomena? Is a tech bully also a political bully? Ask Brendan Eich.

= = = = =

Now let's see if we can stretch the analogy to the breaking point.

In technology, every specific program or mechanism has a peak version. It improves steadily up to the peak version, then declines as its developers feel the need to add more crap and complexity. When you're aware of this curve, you watch carefully to find the peak, then stay with it regardless of fashion. When your technology is crucial to life or existence, you stick even harder. Medical technology, bridge engineering, and air traffic control are prime examples. The techbullies can complain forever, but a device or technique that works well is not going to disappear easily. Same in culture, except that culture has been developing VASTLY longer than tech. The long process of experimentation and improvement peaked around 4000 years ago. Every change since then has been either pointless or backwards. Since 1914 the West has been accelerating downward, and now we're way beyond the point of recovery.

Russia has been vastly more cautious. Orlov explained it perfectly in the tech realm. Soviets stuck with "inefficient" streetcars and vacuum tubes because they are repairable. When your tech is both durable and repairable, you're more self-sufficient and you have more jobs for ordinary people. When you zoom forward into non-repairable and delicately balanced equipment that depends on software and constant Net contact for updates, you are no longer self-sufficient. You are jobless and hackable.

Russia has also been more cautious in the cultural realm. Christianity remained strong, traditional rules determined by millenia of experimentation remained in place. Crazy theories like feminism and globalism and Die-Versity never gained traction there.

And of course the Islamic world has stuck with experimentally proven and data-driven culture as well.

The West is currently making war against both Russia and Islam, aiming to smash the entire world with our wicked and completely disproved GitHub theories.

Russia will survive because of their long-standing and consistent self-sufficiency. They know what they're doing, and they're lucky enough to have a leader who rules with their consent.

I'm not so sure about Islam. It's decentralized, which makes the conqueror's job much harder; but it doesn't have the technological prowess to withstand the tech side of our war.

There's a third front in this war, the financial front. Goldman dba USA wants to make the world safe for derivatives and index bets. On this front Islam has a better defense than Russia. Islam has always used real-value economics, laid out by Mohammed and repeatedly proved by 1300 years of experimentation. Everything in sharia law is designed to resist Goldman's GitHub innovations like derivatives and CDS and MBS.

Russia resisted the 1930 depression because it was decoupled from Morgan and Rockefeller, and is resisting the current set of sanctions the same way. But Russia doesn't have its own economics. Soviet central planning** wasn't a system, it was just an ad-hoc way to keep things running. Jeffrey Sachs replaced it with a parody of Goldman banking, which has enriched a few men tremendously but still isn't a system.


= = = = =

** Footnote on the Java question: There are plenty of suggestions that may or may not help, but what finally worked for me was deleting all instances of java*.exe from all parts of the computer. Uninstall all Java; then remove java.exe, javac.exe, javaws.exe, and all similar items; then install the desired version. The uninstallers do not remove these exe files, and their presence seems to confuse the installers.

** Footnote on Soviet central planning: Ignorant! Later I started reading a wider variety of info and acquired a much better understanding.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, switchover, Гром победы

  ¶ 4:33 PM

  Holes
Quick thought. Polistra likes to look at current events in terms of Parkinson's Laws. Bureaucracies create riots and wars to provide problems that need solutions; then the same bureaucracies can increase their budget and workforce to "solve" the problem by aggravating it so they can increase their budget and workforce to "solve" the problem by aggravating it so .... ad infinitum.

There are two ways to create a problem: semantically and physically. Semantically: Pass a law that eliminates logging in forests, so the Forest Service can increase its firefighting budget and state welfare agencies can increase their clientele. Or define a "disease" like autism to include every living child, so Social Services and Big Pharma can increase their profits. Physically: Stir up a revolution in every country that dares to succeed without bankers. Or stir up a riot in every city where racial peace is getting too costly. Guarantees vast increases in police and FBI and DHS budgets, and creates an opportunity for more police-weakening laws to make future riots easier to start.

Simpler metaphor. Dig a hole and fill it. Like the old (mainly false) stereotype of Army KP or city street workers. All current events are nothing more than digging holes and filling them.

One difference: When the Army told its soldiers to dig holes and fill them, it didn't cause thousands of deaths. Modern bureaucracies, both military and civilian, do cause thousands of deaths.

= = = = =

Closely related:

Headline "Police, protesters collide again in Ferguson"

The word Protesters is a complete satanic fraud. All protesters are attempting to start a riot. The folks on the street don't always know this, but their leaders do.

According to ACLU, commie protesters are always "petitioning government for redress of grievances." Poppycock. Petitioning was a privilege guaranteed by the Magna Carta, and it meant literally and specifically bringing a petition to the officers of the King. It did not mean marching in the streets peacefully or otherwise.

In modern times the feedback function of the petition is carried out effectively by lobbyists. If your interests are shared by enough people to be worth the time and trouble of the legislature, your interests are already being represented ably by some combination of lobbyists. You can contribute money and support to an appropriate organization if you want your interests to have slightly more force.

Protesters thus serve no feedback function. They serve only to advance the satanic power and budget of SharptonJackson Riot Partners LLC.
  ¶ 6:41 AM

  Words failed a long fucking time ago
In today's fucking news:

(1) "The last dam will be blasted out of the Elwha River sometime next month, cementing the hopes of generations of advocates and tribal leaders who fought to make it happen."

(2) " Iraqi and Kurdish forces recaptured Iraq's biggest hydroelectric dam from Islamist militants with the help of U.S. air strikes to secure a vital strategic objective "

Inside this country we use bombs to blast hydro dams. Outside this country we use bombs to protect hydro dams.

National suicide.

There have been plenty of collapsing empires through history. Collapsing empires often fail to protect their own citizens and infrastructure because they simply lack the money and discipline to make things happen.

This is brand new. This collapsing empire is ASSISTING INVADERS and DESTROYING INFRASTRUCTURE within its own borders while REPELLING INVADERS and PROTECTING INFRASTRUCTURE in enemy countries.

No word for it.
  ¶ 3:39 PM

  Satan rolls forward
Satan rolls forward.

There's nothing new about using courts to practice partisan politics. Everyone does it to some extent. But the FEDERAL indictment of Perry stakes out new territory in this brand of tyranny. What was his crime? Using his normal powers to cut a department's budget. Why did he cut the budget? Because the department head was operating illegally and refused to resign.

More important question: Why did Satan Holder decide it was necessary to criminalize this particular budget cut, when every governor and mayor and president cuts budgets at various times? Because Perry is EFFECTIVE and SUCCESSFUL. Under his rule Texas has become a major MANUFACTURING area, with plenty of REAL jobs for people MAKING REAL THINGS.

Satan cannot allow manufacturing. Real jobs with real results compete with Satan's own economy, which runs on pure numbers.

Satan's purpose is to starve the poor and enrich the Chosen.

Perry's purpose is to let the poor have jobs to feed themselves.



Erdogan turned Turkey into a manufacturing power with little room for banking. NudelmanPyatt Chaos Partners LLC tried to destroy Erdogan with a revolution. They failed.

Perry turned Texas into a manufacturing power. HolderSharpton Chaos Partners LLC are trying to jail him. They may or may not succeed in convicting him, but they have already removed him from power. He's done.

Satan has no competitors. You may think you're working against Satan, but you won't last long.
  ¶ 2:06 AM

  Relief
After two months of oppressive heat and two weeks of full-fledged disasters, Nature is finally relaxing around here. Returning to normal summer. People seem to feel it as well. Crime and auto accidents and fires are down to normal levels.

This morning I noticed a roofing crew working on the extremely steep modernistic Eero Saarinen-styyle roooof oof Saaiint Chaarlees Chuurch. The roofers were casually strolling up and down the long 45-degree saddle-shaped slope, carrying tools and shingles. As I walked a few blocks away, I heard one of them shout "Look Ma! I'm on TOP OF THE WORLD!"

Cocky. Nature don't like cocky. I waited for the inevitable tumble and scream. Nope, no tumble or scream, just laughter from his coworkers.

Relaxed indeed.

Sidenote: This picture of St Charles Church during construction in 1960 is well worth a peek. Shows the same roof occupied by a different type of roof-maintenance crew.
  ¶ 5:59 PM

  Silly study
A rather silly study on the power of prayer:

But when it comes to easing symptoms of anxiety-related disorders, prayer doesn’t have the same effect for everybody, according to Baylor University research.

What seemed to matter more was the type of attachment the praying individual felt toward God. According to the Baylor study, those who prayed to a loving and supportive God whom they thought would be there to comfort and protect them in times of need were less likely to show symptoms of anxiety-related disorders — symptoms such as irrational worry, fear, self-consciousness, dread in social situations and obsessive-compulsive behavior — than those who prayed but did not expect God to comfort or protect them.

This does seem to be the standard Christian response to worries and anxieties. I don't know why anyone would even try it, let alone study it. Experience and secular advice agree on a different approach: Face the worry. Take action. Gain control. Do something to solve the problem, or at least do something that feels like a solution. Even if you know that the action won't really solve anything, do it anyway.

This made me curious to see which way Islam advises. Normally Islam is more scientific than Christianity. Islamic answers are generally based on an accurate observation of human nature.

When faced with distress, harm, worries and anxieties, they try to resist them and reduce them as much as they can, and they react with befitting patience to the things in which they have no choice. They gain a lot of benefits as a result, such as: resilience and toughness as is appropriate; useful experience, strong willpower, patience, the hope of reward, and many other benefits which reduce the distress felt. Thus their anxiety is replaced with joy and the hope of blessings and reward from Allaah.

... Thus the Prophet established a link between, on the one hand, his command to strive for beneficial things in every situation, seeking the help of Allaah, and not giving in to feelings of inadequacy which the harmful kind of laziness, and, on the other, giving in to regret for things in the past which are over and done with, and thinking about the will and decree of Allaah.

He described things as being of two types: things which the slave can strive to achieve either in totality or as much as he can, or can protect himself from them, or lessen their impact, by making an effort and seeking the help of Allaah; and others about which he cannot do anything, so he should accept them and be content. Undoubtedly, paying attention to this principle will bring about happiness and dispel worry and distress.

Yup.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 2:57 AM

  Plus ca change.... sometimes.


A 1962 version of Polistra, listening to the NBC program Monitor from New Year's Day '62.

What is she hearing? Pretty much the same events as today, but told from an exactly opposite official position. Nice evidence of the 1989 Switchover, the transfer of Sovietism from Russia to America.

1962:

We are able to bring you a prediction by a famous Italian scientist. He predicts that a new glacial age may come about in 10000 years, and among the cities that may be buried under 1000 feet of ice are London, Moscow and Chicago. And here you are, worried about the snow in your driveway. (Note the newsman's healthy dismissive tone toward the "scientist".)

2014:

Antarctica May Lift Sea Level Faster in Threat to Megacities

1962:

Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges says that the national economy improved by 3% last year, and hopes to see a 4% increase in 1962. Hodges foresees no tax cuts, and urges caution on increases in wages and prices. The President's leading tax proposal for next year is a tax credit to increase industry spending on new plants and equipment. (New plants and equipment in the US? What a strange and incomprehensible concept!)

2014:

"Not just Argentina: 11 countries near bankruptcy"

1962:

DNC chairman John Daley predicts the '62 congressional elections will be a test of political strength between Democrats and what he calls "right wing extremists" of the Republican party. He accuses the Republicans of forming a new political axis with what he calls the "reckless radicals of the far right".

2014:

DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz says "Speaker Boehner is gravely mistaken if he thinks this will placate the swell of impeachment talk in his ranks. The far right of the Republican Party has not been swayed by rejection at the ballot box, scared by their fool's errand in shutting down the government, or chastened by jeopardizing the full faith and credit of the nation."

1962:

In the middle east, an attempt by Arab rightists, supported by Army backers, to seize power in Lebanon, was put down today in Beirut.

Reports reaching Baghdad say Kurdish tribesmen in northern Iraq have renewed their rebellion against Iraq's president Hassan. Hassan called the uprising suspicious in view of the tense situation over his claims to the oil-rich sheikdom of Kuwait.

2014:

Same problems but now we're on a different side, at least temporarily.

"E.U. Foreign Ministers Back Military Support for Kurds in Northern Iraq."

1962:

Britain has been hard hit by blizzards which covered the island in deep snow and paralyzed all transport. Drifts up to six feet blocked roads, airports were shut down, and trains ran late or not at all. A cold winter continues to plague much of this country east of the Rockies. A new flow of Canadian air fed new snowfalls in the Great lakes area.

2014:

No direct equivalent. In 1962 weather was non-political. It was simply weather, not a sign of the coming Ice Age that the idiot "scientists" believed then. Now every single weather event is a sign of the coming Flood Age that today's idiot "scientists" believe in.

1962:

College students joined by a few adults picketed the White House today to open a 24 hour vigil and fast in support of disarmament and against nuclear tests. Participants are from the Student Peace Union and Peace Action Center.

2014:

Students are no longer protesting against Federal policies, even though the government is still making aggressive war against innocent countries all over the world. Why? Because the current President counts as one of their own for some unspeakably stupid reason. Instead, the students are mindlessly obeying Al Sharpton:

"Protesters outside chanted slogans – No Justice, No Peace and We Want Answers – and some carried signs that read Stop Police Terrorism and Disarm The Police."

Disarm the police. In other words, allow Vibrant criminals to rule the cities.

Idiots. You think you're rebels, but you're running in precise unison with the government:

"U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson said Sunday that Attorney General Eric Holder had instructed attorneys in the department’s civil rights division to monitor developments."

1962:

War in the Congo is heating up. UN forces are attempting to bring peace, but so far with little success.

2014:

Congo’s wars over the last two decades have cost over five million lives.

Well, it's nice to know that the UN finally succeeded in its real mission. Raw bloody chaos everywhere.

1962:

East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht calls closing the Berlin border a "great victory in the fight for peace."

2014:

"The World Health Organization announced Monday that it is urging countries affected by Ebola to conduct exit screening at international airports, seaports and land crossings."

Or,

"Mexican Children Nabbed Crossing Border Try Again and Again"

Or,

"Ukraine refugee convoy hit by rockets, says military"

Biggest item of all. I was just as happy as everyone else when the Berlin wall went down in '89. I was WRONG. We were all wrong. Ulbricht was RIGHT. If you want PEACE AND HEALTH, you need BORDERS. Strong borders. Walls with machine guns in some places. This is Nature's way. Every cell and organ and organism and hive and city has strong well-defended borders, allowing only desirable things to enter and allowing only waste to exit. Without borders you get chaos, poverty and Ebola.

Labels: switchover

  ¶ 2:11 AM

  Like a machine? No.
Heard a PSA from a union-based group trying to restore full time work to retail and other areas where corporations have been ruthlessly 'temping'.

The ad uses Henry Ford's famous idea that a worker should earn enough to buy the product he makes. Seems odd for unions to cite Henry, since he turned into a literal union-basher later in life ... but his original idea is still wonderfully valid.

Historically, Henry wasn't the first exponent of this notion, but he was the biggest, so I'll use his name for convenience here. As Polistra has often noted, Social Economics was a full-scale movement. Some companies may have picked up the idea as a way to deter unions, but they soon found out that it was better for everyone. Unions couldn't move in when workers were satisfied, and profits increased when workers felt secure.

My first thought in response to the ad: Henry figured out that you could use a man like a machine by treating him like a man. Other employers were treating men like machines, which simply doesn't work. Didn't work then, doesn't work now.

Second thought: No, wait. The analogy is backwards. When you have a useful machine, how do you actually treat it? You don't kick it out the door at the end of the day and assume that it will maintain itself. You don't loan it out to others. You don't throw it away the first time it makes an odd noise.

Instead, you keep it carefully in proper storage when it's not being used. You oil it and repair it and protect it from thieves and hackers of various sorts. You want it to remain useful as long as possible.

This is the Ford secret. Treat men more like machines, and they will serve you well.

We have been bamboozled by the corporatists into seeing this form of employment as "slavery".

In fact this form of employment is the only form that has ever worked. Maintaining your servants, feeding them, housing them, caring for them when they're old or sick. THIS IS NORMAL through nearly all of human history, and it's still normal in many parts of the world.

Through nearly all of human history, we've had two simultaneous work systems:

(1) The independent trader or craftsman, offering his wares or services. At least nominally, he has control of his life and soul and work. Before the evil invention of anti-discrimination "laws", he could choose not to sell his wares to people who made him uncomfortable, or people who required him to sell his soul along with his work. Now, in the Age of Holder, Satan reigns supreme and you are required to sell your soul if you want to survive.

(2) Servitude. If you preferred security, or your skills weren't appropriate for an individual craft, you became part of someone else's household or manor. You plowed his fields or cooked his food or swept his floors, and in return he cared for you like a machine.

Employment solely for money, with no maintenance or other permanent connection, is an extremely recent invention. Sola pecunia infested Western Europe and America from 1700 to 1880. After 1880 the Ford style began to pull us back toward NORMAL employment. From 1880 to 1970 the Ford style and the Morgan style competed. (Morgan wasn't the inventor of sola pecunia, as Ford wasn't the inventor of Social Economics; but through this period Morgan and similar pirates bought and smashed every company that succeeded by the Ford method. So his name is also a convenient icon.)

Since 1970 the Morgan style is universal and unchallenged in the West. The Japs and Koreans picked up the Ford style when we dropped it, and unsurprisingly their employees are more loyal and effective than ours.

= = = = =

Time for Polistra's prime question.

What does Nature think?

Nature has two forms of work and payment.

(1) The souk or marketplace, with plants as the sellers and animals as the buyers. Plants advertise their wares with color and smell and flashing digital reader boards. Their wares provide real nutrition and addictive chemicals to keep the customers loyal. Animals pay by helping plants complete their sex acts, and by spreading the plant species to new locations. (It's a bit like prostitution with the incentives reversed!)

(2) Servitude or symbiosis. In a few situations like beehives or ants keeping aphids, Nature's servitude is identical to human servitude. More often it's metaphorical, with microbe symbiosis like our gut bacteria or the luminous bacteria used by fish and pyrosomes.

Does nature have employment at will, with disposable employees? Nope. Not at all.

= = = = =

Well then. If the Ford style means treating men like machines, what does the Morgan style mean?

Treating men like numbers.

When you use a number, you don't keep it around. It serves you briefly as a written or imagined or digital symbol, and then it's gone.

Not surprising that the modern Morgan-owned corporation with its infinite drive toward infinite abstraction and infinite greed prefers abstract employees. If wetware workers are unavoidable because they're the cheapest alternative, they must be kept on the other side of the world where we don't have to look at them. Ideally we'll just replace them all with pure software that doesn't need to be paid at all.

Purely unnatural. Purely evil. Purely Satan.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Smarty-plants, the broken circle

  ¶ 3:51 AM

  Nice news
Nice news:

Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics' equivalent to the Nobel Prize. The professor at Stanford University in California was among four Fields Medal recipients at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Seoul, and the first female among the 56 winners since the prize was established in 1936.

"This is a great honour. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Ms Mirzakhani was quoted as saying on Stanford's website.

Ms Mirzakhani, 37, was born in Tehran and lived there until she began her doctorate work at Harvard University. She said she had dreamed of becoming a writer when she was young, but she pursued her enthusiasm for solving mathematical problems.

"It is fun - it's like solving a puzzle or connecting the dots in a detective case. I felt that this was something I could do, and I wanted to pursue this path," she said.

What? No! No! This cannot be! Everyone knows that Islam ruthlessly oppresses wyyyymmmyyynns!

'Everyone', of course, is in the satanic grip of the monstrous neocon delusion.

FACT: Non-Arab Muslim countries like Persia and Turkey have a long tradition of female intellectuals. It's nothing special. Islam encourages this.

FACT: Some Arab countries discourage women from taking certain jobs. This is an Arab cultural thing, not an Islamic thing.

Note also the age of Mirzakhani. She grew up after the Revolution, supposedly in the most "repressive" times. She doesn't use the occasion to make a grindingly dull political speech about "glass ceilings" and such nonsense, as a Western female intellectual would. She only discusses the joys of mathematics, as a real intellectual would.
  ¶ 2:59 AM

  Why is phone service immune?
We're expecting a third windstorm tonight. Three in three weeks. This one looks more like the 'usual' 50 MPH gustfront, which usually doesn't cause much damage.... but with so many trees bent and weakened by the 7/23 storm, the effects will likely be larger. I sent a FYI to my publisher, warning them that I may not be able to make the usual Wed morning conference call if phone service is cut.

Then I realized something. In 24 years of frequent windstorms and one big icestorm, the electricity has failed several times and Comcast Cable has failed several times. But the phone service has NEVER failed.

Why? The phone lines share the same poles that carry the power and cable. Why don't they get cut?

Some parts of the phone system are underground, which may be the answer.

Update next morning: The wind part of this storm missed us. Ended up with garden-variety thunderstorm. Plenty of rain, which we needed. THANKS, weather gods!
  ¶ 3:06 PM

  Let cremains and kitties vote!
The usual suspects are throwing around the usual arguments about Voter ID.

The whole issue is completely fictional. Null and void. It doesn't matter who you include or exclude from voting rolls.

You could open up voting to all people living and dead. Vote as many times as you want, vote on behalf of your long-gone great-grandfather, vote on behalf of your never-to-be-born great-granddaughter. Dogs and cats vote.

Or you could restrict voting to white male property owners over 35.

Doesn't matter. Results would still be the same, because the 'retail' end of voting is no longer a variable. All the action is in the district boundaries and the mechanical operations of the reliable votebots. Nobody else is interested, nobody else wants to get anywhere near this horrible corrupt monstrosity called Politics.

Examine the three most recent attempts to open up voting.

(1) 1919. Progressives brought women into the voting booth, hoping to insure more Progressive victories. What happened? Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. A solid line of big business Repoofs.

(2) 1965. Progressives brought more blacks into the voting booth, hoping to insure more Progressive victories. What happened? Nixon.

(3) 1968. Progressives brought 18-year-old hippies into the voting booth, hoping to insure more Progressive victories. What happened? Nixon again, followed by Carter, Reagan and Bush. We didn't get a president who even sounded progressive until Obama, and he has turned out to be the most loyal Wall Street slave in history.

These three instances don't prove a negative correlation, because "lots of other shit was happening", as they say. But they solidly prove that altering the voting population won't give you the results you want.

The usual suspects are smart enough to know this. They don't give a happy horseshit about voters. They just need another fake issue to bring in more money for their own operations. They need a project that's guaranteed to fail, so they can blame the other side when it fails.
  ¶ 5:10 AM

  Blip
Meteorologists often talk about a warm surge getting pushed ahead of a cold front. I'd never noticed the phenomenon before.

Yesterday the morning radio hosts were reading the area temperatures, which are normally boring. Not much difference, not worth reading separately. Most were around 63.... but Pullman showed 80. The host said "That can't be right! Must be a bad sensor or a computer glitch or something." (Pullman is typically a few degrees below Spokane. Higher altitude, no Urban Heat Island.)

I looked at the NWS site, and sure enough it was right:



Now this morning the same little warm surge reached Spokane:



Remains to be seen when the cold front will arrive. Let's hope it isn't as dramatic as the last two.

[Tech note to self: Looks like the scaling on my PaintShop is set wrong somehow. Lately it's been pixelating like this. Probably need to return it to default.]
  ¶ 4:00 AM

  I just learned something!
Most news articles are sources of negative knowledge. You learn nothing true, and often a truth is sucked out of your mind and irresistibly replaced by a lie.

Here's an article that taught me something! Headline: Remains of 5 Jonestown victims were found in a Delaware funeral home.

Background: The military cleaned up Jonestown and took the bodies back to Dover, just as it does with dead soldiers. From there the remains were quietly returned to families and friends. A few were cremated and kept in a funeral home in Dover, with no claimants for 44 years. The funeral home closed last year, and the bank just now got around to checking the inventory.

The AP reporter tried to make it seem scandalous but failed. It's just sad.

Now the positive learning:

It's not unusual for families to authorize cremation and then leave the ashes unclaimed at funeral homes, said Torbert and other Delaware funeral directors. "I'm going to say most all funeral establishments have cremains in storage that people have not come to collect," said Harvey Smith, secretary of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association.

Think about that. Mortuaries are willing to spend money on maintaining and organizing containers of ashes, potentially forever, because respect is their stock in trade.

Nice to see a business focusing on respect and reliability, and thinking beyond the next microsecond, in this cold hard derivative world.

Almost serious sidenote: Since funeral directors are the only businessmen who still have the proper attitude for banking, and since bankers are no longer in the banking business, maybe undertakers could sort of sidestep into banking. Offer prepaid funeral accounts with optional interest-bearing surplus, and offer loans for cemetery plots with optional house on separate lot. The former could be called Certificates of Death-posit, and the latter already has the right name. (Look up the etymology of Mortgage.)

  ¶ 5:52 PM

  Parkinson = profit.
A quick thought that seems pretty good at the moment.

Was pondering why the operational side of Romneycare (website, fact-checking, payment, etc) is so totally fucked up. It's not government vs private, as Repooflicans would have you believe. Or rather, it is government vs private but the other way around.

The Feds have several agencies that constantly manage applications and payments and questions from everyone and do it beautifully. They don't lose millions of applications, they don't have to guess how many people paid.

IRS and SS have highly functional and helpful websites. Even Selective Service, which has been dormant for 30 years, has a splendid website where you can find clear answers quickly.

Why do they work while Romneycare fails?

Parkinson's Law. Bureaucracies exist to expand. The driving force of a bureaucracy is to increase its budget and workforce. When IRS works properly, it takes in more money FOR ITSELF. When SS works properly, it ends up with a larger trust fund FOR ITSELF. Therefore IRS and SS work properly.

Translate Parkinson into the private sphere and it's just another name for the profit motive, another name for life itself. When you are working for your own expansion, you work effectively.

This is missing in Romneycare. The profit is going to a few large insurance companies, who are NOT responsible for the 'exchanges'. If the exchanges work well, it means more money FOR SOMEONE ELSE. The system has absolutely no reason to work.

Not accidental. Romneycare was designed by idiot Repooflicans who believe that government should never receive money. It should never run a surplus, never keep money for a rainy day. It should magically do very little and make no profit at all. It should have no motive for running efficiently or serving the people.

So: Romney introduced a system planned by Randians, a system that violates the basic laws of any organization. Obama then duplicated the system at the federal level.

Result: Terrific waste, ruination of the entire health care setup, and lots of unnecessary deaths.
  ¶ 5:01 PM

  Penny wise
Presumably somebody in the Ferguson police dept must have turned down a request for dashcams on the grounds of saving money.

Really really stupid. For lack of a dashcam they ended up with a riot and 2 injured officers. Infinitely more expensive than the dashcams.

How could this happen? It's not a lack of information.

JacksonSharpton Riot Partners LLC have been manufacturing riots since 1965, for fuck's sake. No mystery about their methods.

And the satanic media have always worked for JacksonSharpton. Media will always protect the criminal and hate the cop.

Plenty of other police departments are using dashcams and helmet cams, and their experience is perfectly well known. When the criminal is lying (i.e. 99.99% of the time) the video exposes the criminal and stops his defenders. When the cop is truly at fault (0.01% of the time) the video will help the criminal to sue the cops, which is justified in those rare cases.

When you have a weapon like the dashcam that defends you ... however incompletely and imperfectly ... against all of those evil forces, why not use it?

It's a safe bet that JacksonSharpton knows which cities are cam-free zones, just as mass shooters know which places are gun-free zones.
  ¶ 11:48 AM

  Gotcha, BBC
BBC mentions that Turkey is modifying the form of its government somewhat, switching the top office from PM to President. Current PM Erdogan is among the candidates for the new office, and is generally favored to win today's first direct election. [Later: He has definitely won. Yay!]

BBC described Turkey as a key pivot point between East and West, which is geographically and historically obvious. Then: "Turkey is right in the middle of the chaos of recent years, from Tunisia to Ukraine."

This is an intentional distortion. Failed to mention two basic FACTS: (1) Satan's media constantly try to depict this chaos as an unstoppable force of nature. Nonsense. In all of those countries chaos was explicitly generated by Nudelman Chaos Partners LLC, or by similar contractors paid and controlled by US/EU governments and financiers. (2) The same EU/US/Goldman contractors TRIED to generate chaos in Turkey but FAILED. Why did they fail? Not because Erdogan squashed them. His police controlled the crowds with reasonable force. Chaos faded away, and Nudelman gave up, because Erdogan runs a competent government that has brought success to his country. Students are always ready for a riot when properly stirred up by Agents Provocateurs, but nobody else joined them.

Zero Problems wins again.

Incidentally, the short clip accompanying BBC's article shows Zero Problems in action. The reporter is doing the usual standup in front of a polling place. As he discusses the candidates and the supposed problems, lots of people walk in and out of the building. All of them, young and old, look moderately prosperous and moderately happy. As he describes the "tension" between Islam and a secular state, a Muslim lady in hijab and a fancy blond Western-style lady walk past, chatting cheerfully.

Labels: Turkey, Zero Problems

  ¶ 3:54 AM

  Megachutzpah
News item 1:

The U.S. unleashed its first airstrikes in northern Iraq against militants of the Islamic State group Friday amid a worsening humanitarian crisis.


News item 2:

The United States warned Russia on Friday that any further intervention in Ukraine, including under the pretense of delivering humanitarian aid, would be viewed as "an invasion of Ukraine."

I really thought Obama was slightly different, slightly removed from this neocon madness. In his first term he often spoke and acted rationally about foreign matters, without all the usual doublethink and doublespeak. This was the main reason he got elected in 2008, and it didn't appear to be a false reason.

At some later point the neocons, spearheaded by Victoria Nudelman, took power again. Perhaps it was a deal to get a second term, or perhaps his independence was just a deception.

For comparison: Obama never even pretended to be different in the economic realm. Before the 2008 election he made a few anti-casino noises but firmly supported TARP. After that, anyone who voted for him in the belief that he would fight the banks was self-deluded.
  ¶ 3:39 AM

  First world problem
Because Safeway is rearranging its shelves this week, I couldn't find Gatorade. So I had to drink plain unflavored water today instead of water with some Gatorade added.

Waaaaah! My life is horrible!
  ¶ 5:44 PM

  Not "made by", but "purposed by."
The ID'ers at Uncommon Descent are discussing an initially interesting question, but as usual they've zoomed away into a stratospheric level of academic abstraction that loses the meaning. Question: Did God leave a message in life, something akin to "Made By God"? If so, how and where would we look for it, and how would we decode it?

Seems to me that the focus on manufacturing is misplaced. Life is purpose. Everything in the genome is expressed as a purpose or function or verb, with structures and nouns being incidental and mutable ways of reaching the purpose.

Illustration in yesterday's local news. Homeowners at Newman Lake have been surprised by jellyfish in the lake. Apparently freshwater jellyfish are fairly common, but hadn't been 'seeded' in this particular lake until recently.

KREM ran a feature, including a NEAT piece of underwater video.

Note the moment around 1:09 where the jellyfish elongates into a fish-like shape to swim horizontally.

Are radial and bilateral really distinct types of structure, or are they just purposes? Radial when you need to be sessile, bilateral when you need to move forward? Jellyfish says yes to purpose.

Now back to the "Made By God" question. It seems more likely that God gives us messages about purpose, using the language of living structures to form the instructions.

One of God's deepest and most pervasive purposes is DECENTRALIZATION. Subsidiarity. Modules operating within their own walls, interacting with other modules in a STRICTLY limited way. The jellyfish shows us how this works. It has no brain or central ganglion, and some of its parts are essentially separate organisms. Yet it flaps and swims in perfect rhythm and synchrony. No conductor needed for a properly-trained ensemble.

Recently we've been violating this rule in all sorts of ways. God is attempting to give us negative feedback in a language that we can understand. Ebola is a disease that functions by breaking cell boundaries. Why do we have a spreading epidemic of Ebola? Because we've broken too many other boundaries. Porous borders between countries ---> porous borders between cells.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:48 AM

  Constants and Variables 18 / Inferred Intent
A new application of Polistra's Law of Inferred Intent.

The law: Pay no attention to words or descriptions or job titles. Pay attention to actions. Actions tell you what people want.

New application: As more "news" or "science" websites limit online comment more strictly, it becomes easier to determine which articles have some slight truth content and which are pure propaganda from government/culture/corporations.

When commenting was available on all articles, it was a constant. It didn't tell us anything. Now that commenting is a variable, turned off or on per article, it becomes an action that tags the article accurately. If comments are open, the article is trivial and may accidentally contain some facts due to hurried or superficial editing. If comments are closed, the article is official output from government/culture/corporations. Everything in it can be treated as inverted facts and upside-down logic.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 1:46 AM

  Vanity wind
Half-listening to radio while working, I thought I heard something about "Hurricane Excel" hitting Hawaii.

I thought: Aha! NWS has finally figured out how to make a profit by selling negative product placements! Obviously some competing software firm has paid big bucks to name this year's #5 storm Excel. I sympathize, since I've been wrestling with the stupid interface of Excel. Wonder who the competing company is, so I can buy their spreadsheet?

Later I read the news on the web. It's Iselle, not Excel. Aw. Too bad. NWS didn't get smart after all.

You could organize it the way some states do for vanity license plates, with an auction process, a hefty non-refundable deposit, and a premium on the first 10 storms, which are the most likely to firm up. If your name makes landfall, you pay extra to have all the media bemoaning death and destruction under the name of your competitor or enemy.
  ¶ 4:52 PM

  SPOKANE STRONG!
This was inevitable. I shouldn't get pissed. By now I should be accustomed to the fact that all governmental units in this miserable former country are pure mass murderers, pure raw evil, pure genocide, pure Satan.

I can't get used to it. Slaughtering innocent people is never right. Even when it's ordered in the name of Gaia. Even worse when commanded in the name of esthetics. Mass murder is beautiful? I guess so, if your brain is terminally diseased and toxified.

City of Spokane lead arborist Jeff Perry said the trees that went down were among the tallest in the park, but because they were so tall, they had more leverage. Those physics combined with rocky soil below caused the trees to snap at the roots and pivot in a socket.

The city takes inventory of every single tree on public land or in the right-of-way, and in the coming weeks Perry will be revisiting hundreds of sites to help update the inventory of trees lost. Perry said, over time, they will replace each lost tree with two new trees.

One weapon is never enough for a banal bureaucracy of genocide. Murder expands to fill the budget available. Every bullet must be replaced with two bullets so we can shoot twice as many the next time. Every noose that gets stretched must be replaced with two nooses so we can hang twice as many the next time. Every oven must be replaced with two ovens so we can gas twice as many the next time. Exponential genocide.

We shall never never never learn! We must repeat and redouble our stupidity and redouble again and redouble again!

SPOKANE STRONG! SPOKANE STRONG! SPOKANE STRONG! SPOKANE EXCEPTIONAL! SPOKANE EXCEPTIONAL!


= = = = =

Later thought: Actually the Arborist Perry method of operation would be a wonderful way to run ALL the departments of a proper Bloombergian City. When the cops put a drunk driver in jail, import two new drunk drivers to take his place. When a murderer is arrested, spring two murderers from prison to replace and redouble his efforts. When a kid accidentally drowns in a swimming pool, force two other kids to drown. When an elderly citizen dies of cancer, kill two other wrinklies. When you see a fact, squash it and replace it with two lies.

I must write this up as a proper proposal and send it to Bloomberg's Best Bitch Condon, the illegitimate alleged "mayor" of this illegitimate so-called "city".

Gives a whole new meaning to Arborist, just as "Motorist Rodney King" gave a whole new meaning to Motorist.

Labels: STRONG!

  ¶ 9:20 AM

  How does that happen?
Was reading this story about schools moving away from the latest iPad technology. Makes sense. Though I have a vested interest in classroom tech, I'd rather see it minimized. Kids should have their HANDS on REALITY as much as possible, aided by appropriate tools only when crucially necessary.

This paragraph snapped me to attention.

We’re doing as much as we can to move it from a school responsibility to home,” said Debbie Karcher, head of information technology for Miami-Dade County Public Schools. For now, only parents who work within the school system are eligible for credit-union loans to buy devices at the district’s bulk rate pricing. (About 30 percent of Miami-Dade schoolchildren have a mother or father employed by the district.)

30 percent have a mother or father employed by the district.

Whoa Nellie! The writer slid right past that number, but it's an astounding number.

Thinking back to my high school: We had about 1000 students, 50 teachers, and 20 administrators, janitors and lunch ladies. At most 10 percent of the kids could have been descendants of school employees, but in fact exactly one was a descendant. Son of the administrative secretary. Might have been an unusual situation, because the teachers were at a 'generational juncture'. Half were about 65, half were about 25. Only three teachers were the right age to have kids in HS, but none of them had kids.

Even allowing for that peculiarity, I can't see 30 percent. It just doesn't make a plausible picture.
  ¶ 7:10 AM

  Franz Fer ... Lusita ... Tonkin Gu ... Mai ... Fort Su ... MH1 ....
Just noticed something. For two or three weeks the downed Malaysian plane in Ukraine was the new Lusitania, the guaranteed (fake) cause for the next War To End All Wars, the next War To Make The World Safe For Sodomy. The drums of war were beating, beating, beating, bea

Flatline. Silence. All gone. No more Lusitania.

What happened? Did the neocons realize they weren't gaining any traction? Did they realize that the plane was shot down by Ukrainian forces, or by American forces working quietly in Ukraine?

We'll never know, because we aren't entitled to know anything.

We can just thank our stars that SOMETHING stopped the banging.
  ¶ 4:23 AM

  Club Car Special
Got out ahead of the onrushing publishers for once, and felt a rather desperate need to touch base with Polistra and friends. The non-graphic world is getting dry and gray. Color is necessary!



We're listening to a rather strange radio series from the late '30s: Club Car Special. This was a dramatized version of a few humor columns from the previous week's Hearst newspapers. Hearst "humorists" were highly paid: O.O. McIntyre was making $200k in those years, equivalent to $4 million today. But they weren't funny or sharp or perceptive. Much as I hate to diss my old homie Will Rogers, he was the least funny and least wise of the bunch. Apparently his "humor" consisted of saying uninteresting things in a western dialect.

Nevertheless, this program enhanced and decorated the mediocre humor with cheerful and clever acting. Above all, the music was purely wonderful. A small brass ensemble played fast and lively with the 1930s articulation that has been completely lost since. Pulled you into the luxurious world of a private railroad car.... or at least your vision of such a car, since you'd never been in one. [The best articulation and worst humor are in this episode.]

After you'd listened to the dramatic version of a Will Rogers joke or a Milt Gross cartoon, your experience of reading Rogers and Gross in the paper was bound to be richer. Radio enabled you to build a sensory world around the written word.

I suppose the nearest modern equivalent would be videogames built around books, providing 'synergy' between the two forms.

Labels: Danbo

  ¶ 3:23 PM

  Unhandled
Just an observation that someone else might find worth exploring.

When I need to relax my brain, a form of acupressure helps. Every muscle has a pressure point. If you can find the right point, push a knuckle into that point until it hurts, and hold for a minute, you'll release a spasmed muscle. My skull muscles are constantly tense, probably part of the positive-feedback cycle of tinnitus, so this release helps to break the cycle.

After I hit the release button, there is usually a simultaneous release of something in the brain itself. I have no idea what this something is; might be a squirt of hormone, might be an artery opening up. Whatever it is, it causes a fresh idea or solution to emerge, or pops out a sharp-edged memory from long ago, a memory that I had never recalled in the intervening years.

Last night one of those unhandled memories popped out. It was from a family 'vacation' in 1964, a visit to mother's father who was dying of alcohol-induced throat cancer. To make it seem more like a 'vacation', parents did some 'vacationy' things. One of those things was riding in a horse-drawn carriage in a park near Detroit. Over the years I'd repeatedly handled a few other memories from this 'vacation', but this horse-drawn carriage had been completely absent from my consciousness between 1964 and 2014. A perfect memory, just sitting there in some mysterious form, maintaining itself for 50 years while all the protoplasm and proteins supporting it were regenerated millions of times. Waiting until it was called for.

Amazing things, these nervous systems.
  ¶ 6:11 AM

  Sign of a very narrow life
Safeway has been rearranging its aisles lately, for no particular advantage. The new arrangement is not more logical than the old, it's just different. The work of moving stuff and building new shelves is done by Corporate-looking strangers who seem peculiarly out of place in the store.

Now I'm having terrifying dreams about living in a giant store where all the aisles are rearranged in unexpected ways; and Corporate-looking strangers are using Excel spreadsheets to explain how I can rearrange my life.

Probably a sign of insufficient variety and stimulus in my life. Not going to rearrange things, though. Like an old cat, I'm content with a small and unchanging landscape.
  ¶ 9:01 AM

  Interesting fact, loony conclusions
Reverse causation as usual. Minorities, women hit hardest as usual.

The fact: Adding more math and science courses causes more students to drop out. Seems to be a pretty good correlation, and the arrow of causation is probably valid within these two variables.

But as soon as the "scientists" depart from the observation, they roll out the standard multiply-wrong multiply-reversed hyperdyslogic:

“Many students were ill-prepared for the tougher standards,” said Tate... "Going forward, state policymakers must understand that students can’t take more math and science courses if they quit school.”

“High school education is very highly correlated with health outcomes ... Individuals who drop out of high school report more health problems and lower quality of life. Higher dropout rates also can strain the welfare system, which can affect people’s health.

No, idiot. Preparation isn't relevant. Only one thing is relevant: ANYONE CAN LEARN ENOUGH MATH AND SCIENCE WHEN MATH AND SCIENCE ARE TAUGHT PROPERLY. But you're not going to teach properly. You're going to continue teaching shit.

Plunk said the study shows that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to educational requirements is not ideal because the effect on various demographic groups, states and school districts is likely to be very different.

Right, idiot. We need to lower the standards for Officially Privileged Minorities, of course without ever counting the Officially Privileged Minorities except that we have to count them so we can know when we've lowered the standards low enough, which we won't know because we aren't separating their scores except that we really are separating their scores without letting ourselves know. Orwell's word doublethink was wildly understated. What we have now is infinitethink.

What’s certain, he explained, is that when educational policies produce an unintended consequence like larger numbers of dropouts, the effects of those policies reverberate far beyond the classroom.

“Communities with higher dropout rates tend to have increased crime,” Plunk said. “Murders are more common. In fact, a previous study estimated that a 1 percent reduction in the country’s high school dropout rate could result in 400 fewer murders and 8,000 fewer assaults per year. Unfortunately, our finding of a 1 percent increase in the dropout rate suggests we are going in the wrong direction.”

Right, fuckhead. Dropping out causes crime.

Tell you what, fuckhead. Part of the reason I dropped out of college is that I saw where college would lead: it would turn me into a fucking idiot like you.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 5:23 AM

  Real philosophy!
Before bedtime I like to peek at the sleeping dogs in the Pet Collective channel. Sleeping can be contagious. These live channels draw a typical variety of Youtube comments, mainly multilingual aaaawwwww with a mixture of attempted nastiness.

Last night a truly profound comment appeared among the usual.



Nice to know that a real philosopher is around. Especially while the professional "philosophers", always fantastically stupid, have outdone themselves with this piece of unspeakable multi-level craziness and outright infantile retardation.
  ¶ 1:30 AM

  One-two punch
Spokane got whomped again. The effects of this storm are worse than last week's storm, even though the actual wind wasn't as strong. This neighborhood was Ground Zero for the previous punch, but got spared this time. No new treedrops, and we have power and cable service despite a WHOLE FUCKING LOT of outages nearby...



Last week's wind was recorded as 66 at the airport; more like 75 here. This time the records show 48, which is a fairly common speed that rarely breaks anything. I'd guess this neighborhood didn't get above 40.



Presumably lots of tall trees were weakened by last week's blow, and this one (from an unaccustomed direction) finished them off.

As usual the "local" "media" are barely covering the storm. Doesn't fit their template. It was all north of the river in Here-Be-Dragons-Land. No rich commie neighborhoods or vibrant neighborhoods were affected, so nothing happened. As usual the Spokane-News facebook page tells the serious story with real pictures from real people who don't give a fuck about templates.

The lesson is the same, but our idiot "local" "government" won't learn it. Tall trees are killers. Don't put tall trees near houses, don't put houses near tall trees.
  ¶ 2:25 AM

  Common beliefs, rare actions
Just noticed a sort of reverse parallel.

(1) Over and over, I'll feel that my beliefs are unique. I'll growl "Doesn't anyone else STOP TO THINK about these things? Am I the only remaining SANE OBSERVER?" .... And then I'll go and read Pat Buchanan or David Stockman, and quickly find that plenty of others are observing the same facts and reaching the same conclusions. I'm nothing special after all.

(2) Over and over, I'll run into a problem in programming or graphics, and I'll think "Well, this seems like a common problem. Lots of people must be bumping into this obstacle, so there must be lots of solutions available." .... And then I'll read various online forums, and quickly find that I'm nearly unique. Generally there will be two or three people who asked the same question at various times in the past, with no solutions or answers. I'm on my own.

= = = = =

A minute later: Writing (1) above reminded me that I hadn't looked in Stockman's blog for a while, so I looked.



Okay, Google. This is creepy. I know that you monitor what I write here, because blogspot.com is part of Google. But how did you know that paragraph (2) above resulted from writing a Python script to solve one of those unique problems? I didn't mention Python. The PyCharm 'assistant' might or might not help with today's specific problem, but it's an uncannily precise ad target, going beyond what I mentioned online. Are you monitoring my offline work as well?

FWIW, today's specific problem: I've got about 50 little SCO-module folders, one for each lesson. Scorm requires everything to be modular like this. As I debug and respond to the publisher's desired changes, the JavaScript and SVG parts of all 50 folders need to be updated. A few specific files must change when the file of same name is updated in the main source folder. I looked at so-called file sync software, which seemed to do this kind of job. After buying and installing one of those file syncers, I discovered that they DO NOT perform this job. The file sync software propagates from ONE main source to ONE destination. (Why in the fuck would you need software to do that?**) You can supposedly write scripts to make it propagate into many destinations, but why should I learn another scripting language and write a script that might not work? I already know how to do this sort of thing directly in Python. So I did. Took a half hour to write, and it will save me one hour of tiresome and HIGHLY error-prone copying every time I use it from now on. It sync's all 50 folders at once, in less time than stupid Win 7 takes to locate one fucking directory listing.


**Footnote: This is stupid in the same way that Excel is stupid. You don't need a spreadsheet to apply a formula to ONE cell by default. If you want to apply a formula to ONE variable, or ONE set of input variables, there are already things called CALCULATORS to perform that task. The SOLE FUCKING REASON for using a two-dimensional table is to apply the formula to ALL rows at once. This should be the default automatic behavior, and it should be difficult and complicated to handle only ONE row.
  ¶ 5:00 AM

  Ethics = Murder as always
A remarkable article in online Newsweek shows yet another example of "ethics" as genocide... and it shows yet another example of African improvisation beating out Western bureaucratic idiocy.

On Thursday Brantly was given a shot at survival: a 14-year-old male Ebola patient who had been under Brantly’s care, and survived, donated a “unit of blood” to Brantly, according to Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham. “The young boy and his family wanted to be able to help the doctor that saved his life.”

The idea—novel, though not unprecedented—is that the blood (plasma, in medical parlance) of a survivor, full of antibodies proven to be strong enough to fight off the disease (i.e., immune), when transfused into an infected body, might help that body become immune itself. Though it sounds a bit like something Hollywood might have cooked up, there’s some science behind it—and an historical precedent that offers hope.

No, it doesn't "sound a bit like something Hollywood might have cooked up." It sounds like a variant on a vaccine, and it sounds like a procedure that might work. But does it work?

[In a 1996 ebola epidemic] a nurse at Kikwit General Hospital, who had volunteered to care for a pair of Ebola-infected Italian nuns, developed symptoms of Ebola.

...Some of the medical professionals there who had suffered through and survived an earlier infection wanted to donate some of their blood to the nurse. “The Americans and Scientists from the States didnt believe it could work,” ... but the Congolese doctors did it anyway. The same blood transfusion procedure was repeated for seven others who were ill, the final group of Ebola-stricken patients in the hospital.

The results were staggering: seven of the eight survived.

So, why hasn’t the CDC, the WHO and the rest of the public health organizations worldwide jumped all over immune plasma infusion for Ebola? Why are we still scrambling for an Ebola treatment 20 years later? The answer is that it has been essentially impossible to test. Why? Because Ebola only pops up occasionally, infects a relative few, and kills most.

TEST? It's already been TESTED.

Oh. I see. You don't really mean TEST. You mean FOLLOW THE HIPAA PROTOCOLS and OBEY THE RULES OF BIOETHICS. You don't want to save lives. You just want to diligently obey the Holy Scripture laid down by Your Lord And Saviour Edward M. Kennedy [pbuh].

EVIL MONSTERS. MASS KILLERS.

Meanwhile, Western media constantly ridicule the natives for "failing to understand the disease." If only the natives "understood the disease", if only they had the benefits of Postgraduate Education In Critical Queer Theory, we could easily train them to behave properly.

Raw bullshit. The natives ACCURATELY OBSERVE that the Western doctors ALSO fail to understand the disease, because the Western doctors are not curing anyone. Given a choice between foreign rituals that don't cure the disease versus your own rituals that don't cure the disease, might as well stick with your own rituals.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 2:15 AM