Umami and Whorf
A local radio 'Money-Talk' commentator, a sensible and firmly grounded man, was discussing the stock gurus seen on CNBC. "Now you need to take everything these prophets say with a shovelful of salt."

Old metaphors, even when their literal origin is lost, have strong foundations. You can put lots of weight on them, even cantilever a new meaning off the edge, and the metaphor still holds.

Why don't we have metaphors with new foundations?

In the realm of taste, we have plenty of sayings about salt, bitter, sour, and sweet. Many are found in the ancient Book of Proverbs. Some are quite modern, like the spoonful of sugar that makes Mary Poppins go down. Those four tastes are semantically active and generative.

We haven't written any sayings about umami, and it's a safe bet that we won't, even after umami becomes better known. Too many cooks spoil the broth comes close but doesn't qualify. It's about the cooks. You could change it to Too many cooks spoil the cake and it would still be the same saying.

Considering the tight coupling between umami and coziness, this is an odd gap. As soon as you understand what umami denotes, it rings a whole universe of home and hearth, affection and healing. Umami shouts UNIVERSAL SATISFACTION.



The basic problem is not the newness of the word, it's the postmodern nature of the concept. Neurologists still haven't settled the exact location of umami on the tongue or the exact connection to the brain. It seems to be everywhere and nowhere, a fleeting and ephemeral universal.

Most new concepts are intentionally slippery. They are trademarks held by a strident group of O'Brienists who have sole power over their use, and who switch the Approved Vocabulary every day. If you try to form a saying based on any cultural concept at all, the corresponding group of Offendedists will burn you at the stake.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 5:25 PM

  Honest ad
NPR is running a promo spot for Morning Edition. The promo is cleverly produced, consisting mainly of three sound effects that outline Your Busy NPR Morning.

First sfx: Wakeup. Espresso machine. (I think. I've never actually consumed the stuff, so I've only heard this sound on radio.) Definitely fits the Starting Line of Your Busy NPR Morning. Iconic and aspirational for NPR types.

Second sfx: Eating. Clinking of forks and plates. Nothing iconic here. Same for everyone who actually eats breakfast. ... though I suspect most Busy NPR People don't actually eat breakfast.

Third sfx: Getting To Work. Aha! Here's where we Cure The Delicate Fragile Endangered Vulnerable Planet's Burning Burning Burning Burning Halliburton Bushitler Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Koch Fever!!!!! We hear the sound of a barefoot runner, with the unmistakable swish of Recycle-Sourced Spandex and the SIRI voice of an Apple FitWatch giving your vital statistics and stride timing (in metric units of course)? Or we hear a Hybrid Solar-Powered High-Speed Light Rail System? Or an Advanced Uber-Dispatched Biofueled Individual Subway Module? Or a Tesla S549/39i8xT? Nope, it's none of those. It's the unmistakable sound of a big fucking V-8 roaring to life in the engine compartment of a big fucking SUV.

Here's where we switch smoothly from Aspiration to Truth, and I'll bet the sound is so natively defaultly familiar to NPR Types that nobody even noticed it.

When it comes to Escalades, Fox viewers may talk the talk, but NPR listeners ride the ride.
  ¶ 4:08 PM

  Snakes on a cosmic disk
Torley's conclusive destruction of HL Mencken's undeserved reputation as a reporter reminded me of something.

Torley focuses on the snake-handling Holiness types of Tennessee. In 1925 as now, the snakers were a small group, way off the mainstream of solid Baptists and firmly disdained by the Baptists of Dayton. Mencken intentionally conflated the snakers with the solid Baptists and tarred all of Tennessee with a style of religion that had a few dozen adherents. Modern commies continue to do the same.

The distinction between solid Baptists and undomesticated country folks was a big theme in my father's ancestry. He was two generations UP the ladder from those non-housebroken types, and those two steps had been Doozies, as he was fond of saying. His father had made the hard jump into solid domestic Baptist, and my father had sprung up from solid Baptist to college professor.

Sometimes his grip on the top rung must have felt tenuous.

I'm thinking of the only time I ever saw him do something sneaky and cruel. It was 1962. He had bought a nearly new house from a strange character I'll call Harold Odom. Harold was a flipper long before flipping had a name. Once a year he would buy a city lot, buy a prefab house from National, throw the house together, and sell it. This provided a decent living and a 'free' house for his family to occupy while doing 'sweat equity', again before it had a name. Harold thus had more free time than most men in the 1950s, and he filled it with odd Organic Food and Spiritualism theories. He sold Cosmic Disks**, which were supposed to reverse the counterclockwise vibrations that cause diseases. Think Gribble in King of the Hill, and you've got Harold Odom.

These odd religions and lack of 'regular' work clearly stirred the old Snaker genes in my father's blood, and he needed to slap them down by slapping Harold down. So he spent considerable energy convincing Harold that a cactus in the house's back yard was really a Christmas Cactus, about to bloom for the only time in our lives, and that Harold was losing the chance to see it bloom by selling the house.

Strange! Sneaky! Pointlessly cruel.

I doubt that it worked. Most likely Harold went along with the gag to get the house sold. Harold wasn't nearly as dumb as my father thought. He'd found a way to make enough money while spending plenty of time with his family. Smart.

= = = = =

** Footnote: Cosmic Disks looked a lot like Rose Rocks. I don't know if they were actual barite rocks or just made to resemble ... but real Rose Rocks have a similar reputation in modern times.
  ¶ 1:26 AM

  Neoteny?
Paul Ryan declares his candidacy and makes a few public appearances, basically mentioning Reagan several hundred times and saying phrases like Morning In America and Happy Warrior. After he gets a mixture of yawns and disgust from his own side, he gives up.

Then Vulture Romney declares his candidacy and makes a few public appearances, basically mentioning Reagan several hundred times and saying phrases like Morning In America and Happy Warrior. After he gets a mixture of yawns and disgust from his own side, he gives up.

Everyone goes through a stage of trying things to see if they will work. I did a lot of that crap between age 13 and 25. After 25, I was able to generalize from those failures. When I got an impulse to try something new, I could predict accurately whether it would work or not. I didn't need to spend weeks or months miserably failing.

How come these two dudes are still unable to generalize and predict at age 45 and 67 respectively? What's wrong with them?

= = = = =

Later thought: There is a good side here. In previous years the Repoof cheerleaders were unwilling to yawn and puke at poor candidates. All candidates were welcome, as per (yet again) Reagan's 11th commandment. Now it appears that the cheerleaders have finally grown tired of empty Reaganolatry, and have started to provide error-correction signals to shitty candidates.
  ¶ 11:25 AM

  Stupidest move of the century
Boris has just produced the stupidest and most counterproductive statement of the year. Maybe the stupidest of the century.

You don't need an "MI5 study" to figure out that Unacceptable males often become radicals and terrorists. It's always been that way, at least in societies where Sexual Acceptability Is The Only Thing That Matters. I'm not sure that any societies were ever otherwise, but one can always hope.

Boris's statement is a pure content-free taunt. Schoolyard bully laid bare, expressed in the crudest and most infantile terms.

Smart bullies make sure the Loser Loser Nyah Nyah Nyah is unarmed and incapable of responding before issuing their taunts. At this moment in history, ISIS is extremely well-armed and well-organized and eager to apply

justice to a dumb bully.

Unfortunately justice will not be applied accurately. Boris is presumably protected both officially and mercenarily, so the justice will splatter onto a number of innocent Londoners who had no part in his genocidal evil.

You'd think the UK authorities would have learned something, but obviously they haven't.
  ¶ 3:21 AM

  Reassuring ad
Seen on Zerohedge:

= = = = =





= = = = =

Gives you that nice solid sense that your investments will be carefzlly calcuqated.
  ¶ 2:03 AM

  WWPD? 2
We still say "Fight like a man!" but we no longer do it. We no longer understand the word man. When we're discussing nations, a more appropriate command would be "Fight like a plant!" (Could also add Govern like a plant! ... though that's not a cliche.)

Western lunatics are genuinely shocked by ISIS/ISIL/IS/IslamicState. Why? Because ISIS is fighting wars and governing the old-fashioned natural way. The way Westerners used to fight before 1950.

In other words, ISIS is fighting like a plant, not fighting like a brain-damaged drug-addled Goldman-slave fairy.

How do plants fight?



Government and force structure: Strong subsidiarity. Roots, leaves, flowers, all distinct modules connected by stems and stolons. Each takes care of its own cells, contributing a percentage to the whole plant and relying on the whole plant for defense. Each part is detachable. If it rots or starts spreading bad stuff, it falls off.

Military fortification: Thorns, unpleasant or toxic chemicals spread within 'national boundaries' aka the dripline.

War: A leaf detects activity by herbivore insects or parasitic fungi. It develops its own chemical weapons to kill or deter the invaders, and signals the rest of the plant to start up their own weapon factories. After it fights a specific invader, it forms a valid stereotype. It remembers the relevant characteristics of the invader so it can be more careful the next time.

Taking territory: After a plant clears out the immediate area, it sends roots or stolons into immediate neighborhoods, and sends seeds via wind and birdshit into more distant areas.

Keeping territory: A plant uses colorful flowers and tasty fruits to set up a hopefully permanent 'culture' in its immediate area. It persuades bees and humans to pollinate and preserve it.

Sane nations follow the same principles. US was fully sane before Lincoln, partly sane after Lincoln, went fully psychotic under Wilson, regained sanity briefly, then lost it permanently under LBJ.

ISIS is fighting like a plant. Decentralized leadership; fortification; detecting activity by Islamivores or parasites and eliminating them; watching for Islamivores; taking territory by establishing roots and sending out propaganda; keeping territory by serving the ordinary people.

Later thought here.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 3:19 AM

  One small good indication
A while back I noted with disgust that the Army Corps of Engineers had abandoned common sense. ACE is in charge of checking levees on major rivers. For many years ACE had required levees to be free of trees, because one tree can break a levee when wind or disease crashes it. Enviroterrorists sued and ACE surrendered.

Amazingly the Corps has regained common sense. I don't know how this happened; normally the Feds blindly obey Gaia. Now they're back to the old requirement, and now the locals are grudgingly obeying.

Still no victory for common sense on a similar front. City Genocidist Jeff Perry is still in office, still promising to replace every discharged wood weapon with two new weapons after one weapon has performed its assigned lethal task.

The whole fucking point of CIVILIZATION is to create a ZONE where humans can live. This sometimes requires EXCLUDING various types of animals and plants and humans from the BOUNDED ZONE. Trees are wonderful where they can't squash a house or breach a levee. Grizzly bears and wolves are wonderful where they can't reach humans or cows or sheep. This idea used to be so fucking obvious that it didn't even need to be stated. Now it's heresy.
  ¶ 3:14 AM

  LDS ===> FDS
The Latter-Day Saints just dissolved their church and surrendered to Satan. Latter-Day Saints are now Former-Day Saints.

"The church is promising to support some housing and job protections for gays and lesbians in exchange for legal protections for believers who object to the behavior of others."

The "exchange" will not happen. Satan does NOT reciprocate or negotiate. When you yield one Angstrom to Old Scratch, you have yielded EVERYTHING.

Clean out your desks and burn your Secret Underwear. No more Mormons, only Lesmons.

DEAD SERIOUS NOW:

This shows why a church or organization with one top-down headquarters is lethal.

DECENTRALIZE.

SECEDE.

SEPARATE.

SAVE YOUR FUCKING SELF.

NOW.
  ¶ 5:39 AM

  Romans and juries
Boston Romans are upset at being excluded from the Tsarnaev jury. Too fucking bad. Recent Roman teaching is strictly opposed to justice. The last two Popes, and the current Antipope, have intentionally misread the commandments to forbid self-defense. This is loony and suicidal. God didn't say "Don't take human life under any circumstances." He said "Don't commit murder."

Based on my life experience and jury experience, I'd be inclined to exclude educated Romans for a completely non-religious and non-ideological reason. Jesuit colleges train students to be tenacious and expert debaters, willing and able to deploy all sorts of gambits and tricks to keep an argument running. When I served in December, two of the jurors were Gonzaga graduates who used this training to great effect. Every point and subpoint took an extra hour to settle because these two expert arguers kept hammering on all sides.
  ¶ 4:43 AM

  Intonation and deltas 2
A couple days ago I speculated on the absolutely flat speech intonation of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Today RealClearScience points to this brief note on the same general subject.

Their hypothesis:

"Tonal languages are remarkably rare in arid regions like Central Europe, whereas languages with complex tone pitches are prevalent in relatively humid regions such as the tropics, subtropical Asia, and Central Africa. Humidity keeps the voice box moist and elastic, allowing it to produce correct and complex tones."

Geographically this agrees with my specific observation. My No-Tone Zone is in Central Europe. But these maps of relative humidity don't agree. Admittedly these maps come from the Carbon Cultists of East Anglia, which makes them dubious; but with that caveat, they show the No-Tone Zone and most of China as the same 75% range. Sweden, which has developed a sort of tacked-on tonality, is in the 100% range, which does agree with their hypothesis. But England and Ireland are also 100% at the same latitude as Sweden. Both have 'average' intonation and haven't developed tonality.

Korea and Japan are more humid than most of China, and their languages share an origin with Chinese. Basically the same syllables as Chinese (allowing for the usual sound shifts) but without the music.

In other words, no correlation. Humidity may be part of the picture, but it's NOT the main driver. You don't get more vocal delta by living on a river delta.

I'm pretty sure tonality is always tacked-on. It's a habit that develops for a variety of reasons, then gets locked in by status and education. The China/Korea comparison shows that tonality is not phonemic. Koreans accomplish the same communication with the same underlying set of syllables, and they do it without tones. In fact, young Chinese males seem to have dropped the tones, and they are presumably understood by other Chinese people.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 3:06 AM

  Bad cliche 2
Lately I've been strongly aware of the power of ancestral genes. When your genes contain a command, you need to understand it correctly!

What happens when you fail?

Oliver Holmes: Don't shout "Fire" in a crowded theater!

James Holmes: Fire in a crowded theater!

Jimmy boy, you should have tuned in your head-voices more carefully. Or at least you should have checked the genomic punctuation before acting.

And now the idiot court system is spending millions and millions of dollars to select a jury and run a trial, knowing full well that the trial is completely meaningless. The verbal form and punctuation of this "sentence" doesn't matter. Simple fact. Jimmy is going to spend the rest of his life in jail. Not gonna go free, not gonna be executed. Those millions and millions of dollars could have been spent on ordinary police and court activity. Now they won't, which means many more people will be killed through insane negligence.
  ¶ 2:13 AM

  Bad cliche 1
Listening to an 'answers' program on EWTN, the Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary network. One of those old and dumb questions about forgivable ignorance vs unforgivable ignorance. It's dumb because we can't claim to know what God thinks about these matters.

We do know what God created. Science has finally discovered Genesis, though science won't admit it.

We do know what God wants us to do, from experimental evidence gathered in Leviticus.

But we have no evidence at all (yet) about the afterlife, and the various sections of the reference manual offer no consistent guidance. So all of these refined and detailed distinctions are pure guesswork.

Nevertheless, the Answer Man gave his platitudinous guesswork with great certainty. "If a child born in Papua New Guinea dies before he's baptized, he's forgiven. He never had a chance to learn about Christ."

Whoooopsie!

Chart from Pew surveys, after a bit of scrunching to leave out columns that are zero for Papua.....



PNG is a TOTALLY Christian country. Every denomination has thousands of churches, and PNG has dozens of Christian and Catholic radio stations.

You shouldn't be worrying about the kid in Papua. You should be worrying about a kid in New York or London or Berlin or San Francisco. In those genuinely primitive places you can pass through your entire life without encountering a single indication that Christianity exists. Such indications are strictly illegal. In fact your only chance of hearing the word is an accidental meeting with an immigrant from Papua or Ouagadougou or Timbuktu or any of those tritely 'primitive' places. The immigrant will be full of joyful living Christ, and will be happy to tell you about it.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:27 PM

  Fulda Gap? No, LBO
Modern mediasatans and governmentsatans are trying to rewrite WW2 as evil aggressive Russia attacking poor vulnerable endangered delicate Germany. This theme keeps popping up in various levels of subtlety or blatancy. It will be the accepted settled unquestionable fact in a few months.

We shouldn't need a reminder of how WW2 really happened. We shouldn't even need a reminder of why BOTH America and Russia put so much effort into occupying our respective parts of Germany afterwards.

Toward the end of Cold War I, Americans were already rewriting our occupation as "preventing Russian tanks from roaring through the Fulda Gap."

Pure nonsense.

Here's a straight statement of truth from a 1950 radio news broadcast.

In Stuttgart, US High Commissioner McCloy has warned Western Germans to stop attacking the allies, and to remember their guilt for the war. He has reminded them that "We Americans are not here exclusively to feed the German people."

Governmental sanity. What a peculiar concept. All gone now.

If you doubt the logic, simply consider what actually did happen in 1990 when both sides ceased their military occupations. Did Russia come roaring through the Fulda Gap? No. Germany came roaring back into At Your Throat mode. Germany resumed the same empire-building tricks it had been running in the 1930s. Imposing "austerity", or more accurately Leveraged Buyouts, on countries like Italy and Greece.

= = = = =

Later thought: Rewriting WW2 in Europe is well underway, but rewriting Pearl Harbor to blame Russia hasn't started yet. Our satans LONG AGO removed Japan from the official picture of Pearl Harbor. It's just a thing that mysteriously happened, perhaps some kind of GLOBAL WARMING CLIMATE CHANGE HALLIBURTON KOCH EXTREME WEATHER BOMB!!!!!! and then with NO JUSTIFICATION AT ALL the evil Americans rounded up all the delicate flower-like Zen peaceloving endangered vulnerable Japaneseses Indigenouseses Peopleseses, and later on for NO REASON AT ALL we aggressively decided to use our evil KOCH KOCH KOCH HALLIBURTON HALLIBURTON SMALLPOX BLANKETS bombs on the delicate flower-like Zen peaceloving endangered vulnerable Japaneseses Indigenouseses Peopleseses. This picture has a great big hole in it, which is just waiting to be filled by Russia. I don't know yet HOW our satans will make this strange connection, but I'll bet $1000 they're getting ready to do it.
  ¶ 1:27 AM

  Intonation and deltas
The World Radio Network rotates through several SW broadcasters in English. Listening to the daily hour from Radio Slovakia right now. As with any broadcast, there are soundbites of local politicians, translated to English. I'm always struck by the absolutely flat music of Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian. No other languages are so completely free of intonation. Czech and Slovak are very closely related; could be called dialects instead of separate languages; so their shared tendency could have "evolved" from a common ancestor. Vertical gene transfer. But Hungarian is completely unrelated, so the habit must have spread through listening and copying. Horizontal gene transfer.

Typically but not always, lower-status people copy manners and habits from higher-status. I don't know which way the copying ran in this case, but it must have been powerful to create such a precise little No-Tone Zone.

The Slovakian announcers when speaking English make a point of adding more music to sound more appropriate. It doesn't quite work, just as a Hindoo's attempt to flatten out his extreme music doesn't quite work.

Does actual music sound "more musical" to a Slovak?

Later: No, I guess not ... or if it did, we'd have no way of knowing. Czech and Hungarian composers didn't produce notably wider or narrower ranges of melody than other Euro composers. It's sort of like the stupid El Greco astigmatism controversy. Even if El Greco did have distorted lenses, it wouldn't have affected his painting. He would have made the image on the canvas match the image he saw in reality, which means the paintings would be normal. His preference for vertical stretching had to be intentional and stylistic.

Getting a bit mathy: Assume his corneas or lenses multiplied height by 2. We could write a formula
HeightInBrain = HeightInReality * 2.
Or the other way around,
HeightInReality = HeightInBrain / 2.

He would put the image on canvas so that the resulting HeightInBrain would be the same as the HeightInBrain from the real world.

So HeightOnCanvas would also have to equal HeightInBrain / 2.

Even more mathy, these formulas really should be using Aspect Ratio instead of Height, but this is already too much work for an argument that wasn't needed in the first place!

Labels: Real World Math

  ¶ 5:13 AM

  Who's outrageous and impermissible?
Grimly predictable.

Japan is following the lead of USA STRONG in dealing with CIA-created hostage-takers. Don't pay, don't negotiate, don't do any fucking thing to protect your own people. Just bring out John Kerry to blare overmodulated repetitive noises. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record. Broken record.



What is the net result of this grotesque suicidal-genocidal hyperinsanity?

1. Your own people die.

2. The CIA-created enemy gets a huge propaganda boost.

3. This gives you a psychotic "justification" to kill thousands of "enemy" civilians.

4. The CIA-created enemy gets even more pissed.

5. The CIA-created enemy takes more hostages.

6. Loop to infinity.

SUICIDE! GENOCIDE! BLOOD! YAAAAAY! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! SUICIDE! GENOCIDE! BLOOD! YAAAAAY! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! SUICIDE! GENOCIDE! BLOOD! YAAAAAY! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! SUICIDE! GENOCIDE! BLOOD! YAAAAAY! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! SUICIDE! GENOCIDE! BLOOD! YAAAAAY! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! USA STRONG!

= = = = =

None of this is necessary. We know from ACTUAL FUCKING EXPERIENCE that another approach is available. Turkey quietly negotiates, pays whatever is necessary, doesn't make any noises at all.

What is the net result of Turkey's sanity?

1. Your own people return alive.

2. Nobody gets a propaganda boost.

3. Nobody gets a "justification" for genocide and suicide.

4. That's all. No loop.

ZERO. FUCKING. PROBLEMS.

Labels: STRONG!, Turkey, Zero Problems

  ¶ 4:31 AM

  Just print it.
As long as I'm in random mode this morning.... Why do some 'magazine-type' websites insist on using video or audio instead of simple text? Video makes sense when the subject is visible and dynamic. A pretty girl or a tutorial with a sequence of screencaps. A live physics experiment or an animated graph. Video makes no sense for some old academic-type dude reading a text that HE ALREADY FUCKING WROTE IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE. An audio 'podcast' never makes sense under any circumstances. Utterly useless.

The text is already written. Just print the fucker.

Video goes beyond annoying when it fails. The Big Think website is a major offender in this category. It has some articles that seem potentially interesting from the title and subhead. I'd gladly read them if they were just plain fucking printed. This morning I tried to open a stupid video that should have been a fucking text, and got this:



Text doesn't cause PLAYER_ERR_TIMEOUT. Text ALWAYS displays, though it sometimes gets weirdly distorted by bad Responsive Web Design.


Later: Speaking of pretty girls and animated graphics ... KREM's weathergirl was having computer troubles, so she simply drew in the Warnings and Watches by hand.



I love it when people find ways to GET THE DAMN JOB DONE regardless of Corporate Format Requirements.
  ¶ 1:55 AM

  YED > YEC
The Bulletin of Atomic Spies has pulled its usual minutes-to-midnight shit. A very old joke that was funny for a couple of years. Now it's just tired, as BAS throws in all of this year's fashionable idiocies along with the supposed threat of nukes. Global Warming, overpopulation, continued existence of religion, males standing up to piss, etc, etc, etc.

No matter how tired and cluttered the joke gets, Mediasatans blindly obey.

Mediasatans go along with the metaphor of minutes when their God orders it, but reject the metaphor of days when the other side's God uses it.

Young Earth Creationists are Crazy, but Young Earth Destructionists are Holy.
  ¶ 1:23 AM

  Observation verified
Reprinting something I wrote in November:

= = = = = START REPRINT:


After the July gustnado, I started to notice a wood-related smell around here. It's neither a burning smell nor a turpentinish sap smell. More like a dark sugary woody smell. Maple, brown sugar, molasses. Somewhere in that realm. Translated to music, it might be by Sibelius. Brand new smell, never sensed it before.

Observations:

It was all-pervasive from August until last week's deepfreeze. It stopped during the 10-degree week. Now, with temps in the 30s, the smell is returning but not as strong.

It runs well up into the air. When I'm coming down the Shadle hill on Hoffman or Rowan, the smell starts about halfway down. (Since Shadle hill is about 100 feet high, halfway down is treetop level for this neighborhood.)

It's strongest near a broken tree, whether the tree is still in the ground or laying in a trailer.

I've never caught this smell near a deliberately cut tree. Only a violently torn tree.

Unavoidable hypothesis:

This is a tree's cry for help. More likely given the strength, it's a response from other trees to the presence of an injured tree, something like the ethylene signals exchanged by fruits.



But what's the purpose? Healing? Sedation? A last lullaby to a lost friend? Or more prosaic, just sweetly inviting carpenter ants to finish the job?


= = = = = END REPRINT.

Looking up some newer articles about plant signaling and plant self-defense, it's clear that my observation fits into a known pattern. From Heil and Land:

Among others, wounded plant cells release VOCs .... These VOCs can prime systemic parts of the locally damaged plants for future attack and trigger resistance to herbivores and pathogens in neighboring plants.

This hypothesis is also in line with the observation that the response to sterile damage in plants is usually correlated with the number of damaged cells: treatments such as the application of leaf homogenates, punching multiple holes with needles or squeezing leaves usually elicit detectable responses, whereas cutting off parts of the leaf blades or entire leaves with scissors or razor blades leaves few damaged cells on the plant and, thus, causes no response, or a response that remains below the detection limit.

Note the distinction between clean cuts and ragged rips.

From Karban:

Some plant responses to herbivore attack are used as cues by the predators and parasites of herbivores as they forage for food. Plants release complex volatile blends that differ in composition depending upon whether they have been attacked and upon the specific nature of the attacker. The predators and parasitoids that are attracted by herbivore-induced volatiles have been shown to increase rates of predation and parasitism and decrease levels of damage inflicted by herbivores under natural field conditions in some, though not all, instances.

Note the possibility of attracting 'helpers' as well as parasites.

= = = = =

A metapattern shows in the reference sections of these articles. Darwin and his immediate contemporaries were highly interested in plant intelligence. Darwin himself did LOTS of work on the subject. After 1900 the subject turned into CHARLATAN! PSEUDOSCIENCE! DENIALISM! SKEPTIC! TROLL! HALLIBURTON! KOCH! KOCH! It wasn't "rediscovered" until 1998 or so. Thus the references include some dates in the 1870s and 1880s, then a long gap, then dates after 1998.

This pattern recurs over and over and over and over in science. Simple conclusion: The 20th century was a Dark Age when SCIENCE WAS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN. Only mass-murdering all-consuming bloody psychotic genocide was permitted and INFINITELY funded.

Something happened in the 1990s that allowed real science to cautiously pop its head out of the fallout shelter and start moving around again. But only in a few areas like microbiology and plants. In most disciplines real science is still TROLL! HALLIBURTON! KOCH! KOCH! KOCH!

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 4:14 AM

  Swaddling Orlov
Accidentally mentioning Mongolia and Tannu Tuva got me thinking about those places. I'd always been fascinated with them on the map, but never knew much about them. Started looking for info and video, and found something especially notable about Mongolia.

Many parts of the USSR were time-capsuled in culture and economics and technology. I've often discussed the tech side, following Orlov's lead.

In some places the time capsule preserved a bad setup. Mongolia got the good end of the capsule. It was treated as a sort of display case facing China, so the Mongolians inside China would look over and say "Hey! Why can't we have it so good?" It was well governed and basically left alone.

This little clip is about a charity helping a young paraplegic mom to stay independent... but it's salient as an unstaged closeup view of a capsuled culture that obviously WORKS.

Note the lack of tension between male and female. Everyone has their correct headdress, and everyone knows their place in the system. All perfectly comfortable. Note especially the fully swaddled and fully calm babies. Have you ever seen such quiet babies in a Western situation? They're also easier to handle when wrapped. Like burritos. Hmm. If we call it a Wrap instead of Swaddling Clothes, could we sell it as The Latest Greatest Thing?

Seriously, Orlov's theme applies to all aspects of life. Just as the USSR preserved solid and maintainable streetcars and radios, it preserved solid and maintainable cultures.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Гром победы

  ¶ 7:33 PM

  Pot glut
Local news: Grass has been legal here for about a year, and now the growers have managed to oversupply the sellers by a factor of 3 to 1.

Harry Anslinger and Bob Dylan were both wrong. Legalizing pot emphatically did NOT lead to a totally mellowed-out population. Turns out the pre-legal users (the fake "medically necessary" users) were all of the pot-ential users. Those "patients" were exclusively old hippies, no matter how loudly they proclaimed otherwise.

Must admit this is genuinely puzzling. When alcohol is legally available and socially approved, nearly everyone drinks. When tobacco is legally available and socially approved, nearly everyone smokes. Pot doesn't work that way. Its appeal is self-limiting.

= = = = =

Later: Specific verification from a pot-shop owner. Says almost all of his customers are in the 40 to 80 age range.
  ¶ 8:19 AM

  Midget policepersons

I've always been puzzled/annoyed by unrealistic depictions of houses. Good example in the publicity for a new see-through radar being sold to police. This is actually a bit less annoying than most; the perspective is reversed and the front part is impossible, but the back part is plausible. Obviously they used some type of 3D digital software to make this image, so maybe the fault is in the software; but the exact same type of stupidity showed up in hand-drawn pictures long before digital models.

It's not hard to find more realistic models.



For instance (ahem) my free model of the Default Spokane House. This is the same sort of basic '50s house that the five midget policepersons are monitoring in the unrealistic image.

Descriptions on the radar maker's own website reveal a vastly more important type of unreality. The radar can see through non-metallic house materials. But aluminum siding is common in the white working-class neighborhoods where midget policepersons do most of their monitoring, and older houses often have foil-encased insulation in the walls.

My house has aluminum siding. I've always seen it as a mixed blessing; it protects the house from external combustion (forest fire embers, teen dickheads throwing firecrackers) but it hinders radio reception. Now I can see the latter as an advantage!
  ¶ 4:36 AM

  Retraction coming shortly
A very large survey of asthma among kids has reached a conclusion that will NOT be allowed to stand.

The theory that certain features of inner-city life -- including pollution, cockroach and other pest allergens, exposure to indoor smoke, and higher rates of premature birth -- increase children's risk of asthma has existed for about 50 years.

While these factors do boost asthma risk, they may no longer be restricted to inner-city areas. The researchers pointed out that there is increasing poverty in suburban and rural areas, and that racial and ethnic minorities are moving out of inner cities.

"Instead, we see that poverty and being African American or Puerto Rican are the most potent predictors of asthma risk."

The first assumption was obviously wrong from the start. It's been known for at least 100 years that asthma is an immunity problem. In general you stir up asthma when your environment is TOO CLEAN. Your immune system doesn't develop normal responses to dirt, so it goes wild when it finally encounters dirt. Any theory that starts with TOO DIRTY or TOO MUCH POLLUTION is delusional. It's easy to see.

The second part of this study is amazing and refreshing, but it won't be allowed to stand. All "Scientists" know that

Any "study" that reaches a conclusion based on race MUST BE LIQUIDATED.

Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, I'm dubious about the conclusion for different reasons. Race certainly does exist, and race certainly corresponds with all sorts of definite differences. If black families who move into new environments are still more prone to asthma, it may be racial in a genetic sense, but I'm more inclined to blame different baby-raising practices.

I'd start with bottle feeding. Breastfed babies get a solid start on immunity, picking up both bacteria and immune cells from Mama. Bottlefed babies miss this part of Nature's plan.

Under current insane suicidal conditions, breastfeeding is a luxury practiced mainly by wealthy white Commies who have enough money to let the wife stay at home. Poor women have to work because the wealthy white Commies have used Free Trade, Environmentalism and Die-Versity to eliminate the factory jobs that formerly allowed a poor man to support a family.
  ¶ 2:01 AM

  Peculiar headline
Numerically speaking, there's something odd about the headline released in hopes of swaying the Davos monsters.

"Report: Richest 1 percent to own more than half world’s wealth by 2016"

The problem of inequality is huge and urgent, but this peculiar phrasing tends to downplay the problem, tends to lose focus. Inequality is dramatically clear and dangerous, and it's been clear and dangerous for at least 10 years. Doesn't matter when the 50% mark will be crossed by one particular dubious measure.

There's simply NO WAY to reach this level of precision. Let's split the world into three groups to demonstrate the problem. The middle group can be measured with some precision, but the top and bottom can't.

= = = = =

Looking at a typical member of each group.....

= = = = =

Top: We'll call him Morris Goldfarb for no particular reason.



What does Morris own? NOTHING. All of the properties associated with Morris are owned by an infinitely complex structure of corporations, companies, partnerships, LLCs, LLPs, Trusts, etc. We might be able to estimate the value of the properties and income sources. It would be a number with at least 8 zeroes. But any attempt to measure would instantly trigger a response in the chain of corporations, LLCs, etc, which would move the properties beyond range of the measuring instrument.

How much tax does Morris pay for this wealth? Dumb question. He pays NOTHING. The sole life purpose of a Goldfarb is to suck in MORE THAN ALL money in the world and pay LESS THAN NOTHING. Like a black hole.

= = = = =

Middle: We'll call him Happystar for no particular reason. Happystar is probably at the low end of Middle by US standards. What does Happystar own? We can figure this with considerable precision and certainty. Maybe not to the nearest dollar, but easily down to the nearest thousand.



One small house: Value $40k.
Furniture, computers, etc. Value $1k.
Money in bank: Value $105k.
Total: $146k.

How much tax does Happystar pay for this wealth? Last year $1800, federal and county.

= = = = =

Bottom: We'll call him Mohammed Ogunbukwe for no particular reason. What does Mohammed own? As with Happystar, his property can be listed, but unlike Happystar, his property cannot be neatly quantified in money.



One grass hut: Value 0.
One stick: Value 0.
Three metal pans: Value 0.
One loyal wife: Value INFINITE.
Three obedient children who help with the farmwork: Value INFINITE.

Numerically Mohammed owns zero. In real human terms he's vastly richer than Morris or Happystar.

= = = = =

See the problem?

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 2:40 AM

  It's all there.
I've been using several snippets from Emerson (via Schwellenbach) on the GIF icon above. Finally decided to read the whole Emerson essay On Compensation. Turns out I've been stupidly "reinventing" almost everything in it, at least since 2007. Before that I was mainly reheating one brand of prepackaged Establishment thought, not trying to think from scratch.

Here's the section that Schwellenbach was quoting, which provides a definitive and dispositive rebuke** to Wilson/Bush/Obama neocons and exceptionalists, including all of their economic and imperialistic monstrosities.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. ... The varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others. ... This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It will not be balked of its end in the smallest iota. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Though no checks to a new evil appear [at first], the checks exist and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial can endure. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character remains the same; in Turkey and in New England about alike.

I'm glad I didn't read the whole essay earlier. The process of "reinventing" has led me through some productive chains of thought. If I'd known the end result was already there, I wouldn't have done the thinking.

Oops, or meta-oops. Emerson already said what I just now said...

For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs can be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely knowledge and virtue, cannot be stolen.

On the Grand Blueprint:

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity -- all find room to consist in the smallest creature. So do we put all our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

Bear in mind that this was written before Darwin was published. Darwin's followers led science astray from this basic truth for 150 years, and most parts of science are still lost, still ferociously slaughtering the truth. Appropriately, the return to truth is led by microscopists who finally removed their Random Variation blinders when examining the WHOLE genome. They are finding exactly what Emerson said they would find. LIFE IS PURPOSE. All functions are available to every living thing, though some are not implemented. Plants have eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, and resistance.

On bullies and support groups, which I've been jabbering about lately:

As no man had a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had a defect which was not somewhere made useful to him. ... Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has first contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances and talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help; and thus like the wounded oyster he mends his shell with pearl.

It's all there. I've been writing glosses and annotations on the original text without reading the original text. ... Which in itself proves Emerson's point yet again, doesn't it? Aaaarrrgggh!

= = = = =

** Footnote: I should call it a prebuke instead of a rebuke. No politician in Emerson's time was crazy enough to invade other countries because their governments didn't fit his personal Procrustean Bed of "Democracy". When George Washington advised later presidents to MIND OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS, he wasn't arguing against this craziness, which didn't exist. He was only opposing the sane but unwise idea that we should spend lives and money to defend "allies". 80 years later, Wilson implemented the Democracy shit and firmly demonstrated its looniness. He invaded Europe for Democracy and gave us Hitler. Most Americans learned the lesson. Schwellenbach was representing most Americans in 1938 when he used Emerson to make the point.

Later thought: By defending 'democracy', Schwellenbach seems to have missed Emerson's main point. Emerson wouldn't have defended 'democracy' or 'dictatorship' as systems or ideologies. He said that conditions in any system are ultimately controlled by Nature and by the innate and cultural demands of local people. When ideologies attempt to reshape these forces, they fail. Schwellenbach understood the latter point for sure; he may have been using 'democracy' as a code for 'decent government' to aid understanding. Can't read his mind at this late date!

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law, Smarty-plants, the broken circle

  ¶ 4:21 AM

  Radartoons


How did Spokane move to Mongolia? And how did Tannu Tuva arrive at Grand Coulee?
  ¶ 7:39 PM

  By hand
Wired.com has a somewhat interesting but predictably Communized article on the logistics of computing by hand, before adding machines and Comptometers and later Electric Brains came into fashion. Connects with something I'd been looking at....

Hearing the constant ads for Equitable on the old FBI radio show led me to pursue more technical info about the company in those days. I know from direct experience that the ads were honest. Equitable's agents were in fact excellent citizens, bending the rules to help families whenever possible. Did virtue appear in company documents? Were agents given 'bendable' rules, with instructions about permissible 'range of motion'?

Found and bought one internal document on Ebay: an agent's pocket guide to rates and dividends from 1959. It doesn't answer the question either way; it's just a book full of tables and legal definitions.



The agent had left a few pages of his** scratchpad in the book. Those pages revealed more about the agent's life than the book itself.



How does this compare with modern tech?

On the multiplying and dividing, the new way wins without the slightest doubt. Huge win. Note the repeated calculation. Agent was clearly trying out various payment schedules for a client. This is a job where a slide rule wouldn't have helped, because you want all the decimal places. A pocket calculator with a simple memory would have been a blessing.

On the rate table, I think the old way wins. A computer can certainly store and retrieve billions of data points, but the retrieval side is clumsy. I've done it both ways with data related to my work, and I've watched insurance agents trying to get info from their computers. It always involves frustration and cussing. Do I hit Ctrl-F5 to reach the Age 42 page? How many times do I hit it? Oops, just went past. Do I go back by Alt-F5, or is it something else? It's hard enough on a desktop with a nice big screen, but it would be nearly impossible on an iPhone that would fit the same pocket as this little book. Touch keyboards are way beyond clumsy.

Ideally there should be a way to make retrieval work as smoothly as a book, but I haven't seen it yet.

In any case, I hope this Equitable agent lived and worked long enough to use and appreciate newer technology.

= = = = =

** Footnote: More likely her. The handwriting looks feminine to me. Equitable had quite a few female agents in the '50s, and made a point of featuring them in ads.
  ¶ 3:50 PM

  Right the first time
NPR announcer: "Mitt Romney is considering a third ter ... uh, a third BID for the Presidency."

Right the first time. Mitt has been President for two terms now, and he's considering a third. He's fulfilled all of his promises, so his supporters should be happy to re-elect him. Open borders. Infinite freedom and infinite welfare for Wall Street. Infinite monopoly and infinite welfare for insurance companies (aka Romneycare). Attack and slaughter every country that displeases Our Lord And Saviour Binyamin Netanyahu.

Pres Romney has added a couple of unpromised actions, such as killing cops and killing Christians, but those were solid parts of Bush The Father's program, so they're not out of character for his political type.
  ¶ 7:11 AM

  Demisteration
Noticed one salient small fact in the stories about the latest FBI Stingee. He has adopted a fake Muslim name, and he wants to be known as Mr Ubaydah.

Skip the fake name. Focus on the Mister.

That's the story. An Unacceptable boy who is accustomed to being treated as a Non-Mister by his peers, especially by females.

The story would be different ... or rather it wouldn't be a story at all ... if he had felt more like a Mister in previous years.

Similar to the Korean dude who shot up Virginia Tech. He was Unacceptable, and had apparently run into an especially steady stream of frustrations and de-Misterations. The last straw was a visit to a whore, who refused to fuck him for money because he was Unacceptable. After an experience like that, you have two choices. Suicide, or suicide plus massive revenge. He chose the latter.

Changing the behavior of Cool people isn't the answer because it won't happen. Cool people are getting everything they want, so their behavior won't change.

Changing the attitudes and expectations of the Unacceptable is the only recourse. You have to understand HARD AND FAST that you are permanently Unacceptable to humans. Nothing you can do will change this fact. You have to find your satisfaction elsewhere, in work or art that doesn't require a lot of human contact.

As I've said before: Don't let a bully knock you down, and don't let a support group pick you up. In the modern Western tyranny, support groups are often Stingers and Agents Provocateurs.

Labels: Age of Stings

  ¶ 3:57 AM

  Simple logic
We have another big hullabaloo about an alienated boy following the FBI's carefully laid blueprints to "create" and "plan" a "terrorist act". Some of the media may finally be weary of this shit. They're quoting the boy's father, who tells the plain truth, and they're not censoring or TwoMinutesHating the father. Might be promising.

Let's do a simple logic exercise.

Every one of these "foiled terrorist plans" that reached the public eye has been created by FBI.

It's likely that several unsuccessful plans were formed without involvement of FBI agents, but if they were abandoned before any action we'll never know about them and they effectively didn't exist. Just a dude who thought about buying guns. Schrodinger.

Within the realm of publicly known actions, what is the common factor among these "foiled terrorist plots"? Following FBI plans.

Therefore: FBI is the Terrorist Mastermind.

Everyone says we need to capture and imprison Terrorist Masterminds. Well?
  ¶ 4:59 PM

  New SES
True self-explanatory sentences are fairly rare these days, because the discourse we hear on the media has completely departed from all contact with reality or logic. Explain is nearly extinct. Explain presupposes that behavior and motive are rational, and that the link between behavior and motive can be expressed in words.

Here's one from BBC this morning. Interview with "retired" MI5 type.

Q: After all the Snowden revelations, why didn't the public rise up in protest?

A: Well, all of that was pretty much shrugged off by the public; so far as can be understood from the media.

Self-explanatory sentence! Tells you all you need to know about the speaker ... and need to know is especially appropriate here. The satanic media and the satanic intel industry are the same thing. Both understand the world in the same infinitely delusional way, and neither has the SLIGHTEST contact with the public. Intel "understands" the public from the media, and the media "understands" the public from intel.

Non-delusional version of the same Q/A exchange:

Q: After all the Snowden revelations, why didn't the public rise up in protest?

A: Because the public already knew the Snowden stuff, if not all the exact details. Because the public understands that protest is a guaranteed way to lose your job, reputation, and freedom. Because our efforts have succeeded magnificently. We own everything.
  ¶ 1:32 AM

  Benchmarking a reversal
Dictators in the early stages of modern communications (1920 to 1990) often relied on 'closed-circuit' media. Stalin and Khrushchev and Dear Leader Kim all used fixed-tune radios, or cable radio systems that were essentially intercoms. Orwell's telescreen wasn't meant to be a wild sci-fi prediction; it was just a slightly altered version of current reality.

As Orwell and other dystopians observed, holding onto the truth is hard work. As McLuhan failed to observe, it's easier in print. Reading involves a certain amount of pre-processing. You can spot a pothole or slippery spot at the edge of your headlights and start evasive maneuvers: either skip over the section or prepare your internal defenses to disprove the shit. You can't do that with audio or video media, unless they're organized like a lecture ... but that's exactly the opposite of expert propaganda. The whole point of TV is to slip the Cognitive Dissonance shitknife into your mind before you see it coming.

As the tendrils of tyranny penetrate more and more aspects of media, I've been narrowing my input step by step to save my sanity. I gave up reading novels and watching TV a long time ago. Until recently you could stay with 'money-talk' or Christian radio for background noise. You could be sure you wouldn't get HAMMERED with government-commanded toxin. Not now. Every available live channel blares the standard overmodulated duckspeak of Dear Leader. Thanks to Antipope Francine, even the EWTN network is no longer a refuge. The next GOTCHA is always around the corner.

At this point I'm down to self-selected OTR recordings if I need verbal input; if I'm not wanting words, I'll use the Muzak-like classical feed on a local educational FM station.

Benchmark. As of this year, the only NON-propaganda channels are closed-circuit feeds.
  ¶ 1:51 PM

  War on reality
The satanic West is waging a final War on Facts. No reality shall be allowed to exist. All words and thoughts must conform to Official Delusion.

A typical and instructive small battle: Our Lord And Saviour Binyamin Netanyahu is Royally Displeased with Erdogan's statement of simple facts about Gaza. Our Lord And Saviour Binyamin Netanyahu calls Erdogan an "anti-Semitic neighborhood bully."

Neighborhood bully.

What do bullies do? They attack others and expand their own power.

When was the last time Turkey expanded its territory? 1521. FIFTEEN FUCKING TWENTY ONE. Since then the Ottoman Empire faded and collapsed, and post-WW1 Turkey had exactly no territorial expansion or ambitions.

When was the last time Israel expanded its neighborhood territory? Today. And yesterday. And the day before that, etc, etc.

How is Turkey "bullying" its neighborhood? Taking in refugees from wars started by Israel and its Western slaves. Supporting anti-Assad rebels in Syria, who are also getting support from Israel.

So. We have an Official Newspeak Definition. Helping refugees and helping our own side in a war is "Bullying", provided you are not Our Lord And Saviour Binyamin Netanyahu.

Labels: Turkey

  ¶ 3:35 AM

  Trying to be optimistic
Trying to get away from my grumpy mood of the past few days....

One good thing about the media's 100% focus on the French CharlieLusitania fraud. This switchover has completely removed their attention from the previous fraud. They've stopped sucking Al Sharpton's murderous cock, stopped forcing gullible young thugs to kill cops in the name of "I Can't Breath."

Impossible to quantify a difference of this sort, because mass movements of idiots tend to fade out anyway ... but I'll bet a dozen cops have already been saved from injury or death, and a dozen riots have been averted, by this one change of satanic focus.

Labels: switchover

  ¶ 3:19 AM

  Anti-which-government?
I've been roaring lately about the idiocies of USA STRONG, with good reason.

Listened this morning to a local Repooflican radio talker, who was also roaring against the government in the usual Repoof style.

My roar and the Repoof roar are equally loud and equally futile, but the actual subjects are COMPLETELY SEPARATE AND DISJUNCT.

Repoofs will constantly bash the 'mechanical' parts of govts. IRS, IRS, IRS, IRS, IRS, IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Drivers License, Post Office. They never criticize FBI or Defense or CIA or Federal Reserve. They occasionally say mildly unpleasant things about the EPA Terrorist Army, but when in office the Repoofs expand the EPA Terrorist Army faster than the Dems do.

I've never had the slightest problem with those 'mechanical' parts. All of them have worked perfectly and smoothly and accurately, providing a reasonable amount of customer service when needed.

I pay my taxes. IRS sometimes finds errors. They refund or ask for payment depending on which way the error runs. No problem. All fair and friendly.

Lately I was comparing the performance of SS with the performance of Group Health. I've been using GHC health insurance for about 7 years now. My address and employment haven't changed during those years, but GHC has made 4 mysterious changes of program or format or something. Each time I've had to re-enroll from scratch, involving huge piles of paperwork and several months of confusion and uncertainty, with no indication that they remembered my previous enrollments. The recent switch from individual coverage to Medicare Advantage was the paperworkiest and confusedest of them all.

SS never gave me a single problem. I got my SS card 50 years ago and still have the same card in my wallet. Since then I've run through about 30 addresses and 15 jobs. SS kept up with all of those changes WITH NO EFFORT ON MY PART. When I hit 62, I used their website to 'turn on' SS payments. The process took a few minutes, no paperwork, no confusion. Since then the checks have been coming every month, automatically adjusted downward to compensate for my other income. When I turned 65 last month, Medicare clicked in WITH NO EFFORT ON MY PART.



SS has been doing the same near-perfect job for about 350 million Americans since 1936, making it look easy.

That's an unbelievably magnificent level of performance. [Sidenote: This article shows how SS was fanatically devoted to perfect sorting and filing from the start, always looking for the best coding methods and the best storage and recovery methods. As a former office manager and current programmer, I find it inspiring. Too bad the NON-GOVERNMENTAL contractors who run GHC and Romneycare weren't inspired by the same spirit of service.]

= = = = =


Conclusion: USA STRONG is an Alzheimers patient. The heart and lungs and kidneys are still pumping vigorously and properly, but his judgment is fucked. He's expertly driving the wrong way down the interstate at 120 MPH.

After feeding those organs for 50 years with my taxes, I appreciate the way they function on the output phase, and I hate the fucked judgment. Repoofs hate the functional parts and LOVE the Alzheimers part. More blood! More squash! USA STRONG! USA STRONG! USA STRONG!

Labels: STRONG!, Zero Problems

  ¶ 12:49 PM

  Stop this shit.
Satan's media are still rattling on about "extremist attacks on our freedom" and "we have to be better than them" and all that shit.

This is INTENTIONAL POINT-MISSING.

What al-Qaeda wants is extremely simple, and can be explained in terms of old-fashioned territorial war. Osama has explained it openly and clearly.

Since 1990 the West has been repeatedly and aggressively invading Arab and Muslim countries without any provocation. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are counterattacking.

That's all. Nothing about "freedom", nothing about "religion". We are megascale bullies and the victims are responding in microscale. We've killed a million Muslims so far, and the response has killed a few thousand.

If we want to stop the response, we should stop our attacks.

We should simply


That's all.

The jabbering about "freedom" keeps the public mind pointed in the wrong direction so the governments can continue killing millions of Muslims for no purpose except raw bloody sadistic aggression. .... Well, no, that's only part of it. The practical purpose, as Parkinsonianly always, is infinite expansion of the budget and workforce of the military and intelligence forces, and infinite power for the US/UK/EU governments.

  ¶ 3:42 AM

  Exponential

Meanwhile, here in the Land of the so-called "Free", the illegitimate monstrous alleged Spokane "City" "Council" is busy destroying religious freedom.

Existing City law forbids blocking public streets with a protest. The illegitimate so-called "Council" has expanded the law to forbid blocking driveways as well. On its own this sounds like a miscellaneous bit of editing, but it's done with the explicit purpose of moving back protesters against abortion at one specific Planned Genocide abortuary.

A large crowd of meaningless bipeds spoke out firmly against the amendment, but the alleged so-called illegitimate "Council" went ahead and voted for it.

This piles on top of a more substantial piece of Satan passed by the same so-called "Council" last week. The latest monstrous "police" "chief", a New York egregiosity calling itself FRANK STRAUB, decided to stop asking illegal immigrants about their immigration status when arrested. The illegitimate "Council" formalized Egregiosity STRAUB's illegal act, thus advancing their own blatant illegality.

It's clear that the illegitimate "Council", operating with the full filthy approval of Bloomberg's nasty little Repooflican slaveboy Condon, is performing a coup d'etat for Satan. Having vanquished all internal resistance, they are moving faster and faster, ever accelerating, in a familiar pattern. We've seen this over and over in "churches" and other cultural institutions, and we've seen it in the Federal "government". The same exponential acceleration toward total victory.
  ¶ 3:21 AM

  Grandma was right #543789574895743897
"Local" news is busy covering the latest Lusitania fraud in Paris, and (more justifiably) a mass shooting in nearby Moscow by a Korean guy. [Sidenote: Koreans are becoming experts at mass shootings, aren't they? Three in the last few years. Way overrepresented.]

"Local" news completely missed a HUGE science story right here in downtown Spokane. I caught the story in UK Telegraph, then found a better write-up in the Eurekalert science feed:

WSU Spokane scientists have found a brain protein that boosts the healing power of sleep and speeds an animal's recovery from the flu.

Research by WSU Regents Professor James M. Krueger has determined that a brain-specific protein is uniquely involved in sleep responses triggered by the influenza virus in mice. Without the protein, animals develop more severe symptoms of infection and die at higher rates than regular or control mice.

Krueger said the discovery could lead to alternative treatments for influenza and other infectious diseases, possibly by using intranasal sprays to stimulate the production of the brain protein, called AcPb.

Major point isn't the possibility of a nasal spray, though a patent on such a medication would be a fine profit center for WSU. The big science point is that the flu virus alters our behavior by acting directly on the brain. It forces victims to stay awake longer, worsening the infection and increasing the time when you're out and about sneezing and coughing and spreading the virus.

Knowing what the virus wants, you can fight it effectively by getting more sleep through any means necessary. Just like Grandma said.

Makes a nice connection with another recent Grandma-vindicator: The finding that cold air does make you more vulnerable to viruses.
  ¶ 5:34 PM

  Subtle but effective
Websites try all sorts of methods to keep you captive. Most don't work well. Metro.co.uk has figured out a subtle but effective trick that works BEAUTIFULLY ... at least for me.

In the standard arrangement of main pages and articles, you are enticed to click into an article by its sexy or annoying or tantalizing title. You read the article or not, then you hit the back arrow or the backspace key to fall back to the main page.

Metro allows you to function that way, but invites a different method. After you reach the bottom of the article, you see more interesting stuff already scrolling up from the bottom. You keep scrolling until you bump into another interesting title. You click on this title and read or not. When you reach the bottom of this article, you see more interesting stuff already scrolling up from the bottom. .... Scroll forever.

It's a bottomless cup of interesting-looking stuff. You never have to put down the cup and refill. You don't get a chance to say "Whoa! Do I really need this?" You just keep drinking. The stuff coming up from the bottom includes some articles you've already handled, plus more that you haven't seen.

Remarkably clever! Of course there's more to it than web coding; a lot of the stuff is genuinely interesting, and presented in a just-long-enough format to keep you wanting more.
  ¶ 7:01 AM

  Very interesting but wrong
Some "social" "scientists" have been running through the raw data of the famous Milgram experiment. Milgram's binary division of Obedient vs Disobedient, though practically valid, didn't capture what was really happening between the disembodied Command Voice and the Operator. In fact there was a wide range of responses and considerably more resistance than the binary categories have led us to believe.

Actually LOOKING at the fucking DATA? What a novel concept. It's GOOD SCIENCE, extremely rare in the "social" "sciences", and worthy of intense praise.

Unfortunately the "social" "scientists" return to standard form when suggesting how this insight can be used.

If people could be trained to tap practices for resistance like those outlined in Hollander's analysis, they may be better equipped to stand up to an illegal, unethical or inappropriate order from a superior. And not just in extreme situations, according to Maynard.

"It doesn't have to be the Nazis or torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or in the CIA interrogations described in the recent U.S. Senate report," he says. "Think of the pilot and copilot in a plane experiencing an emergency or a school principal telling a teacher to discipline a student, and the difference it could make if the subordinate could be respectfully, effectively resistive and even disobedient when ethically necessary or for purposes of social justice."

The first quoted sentence tells you exactly where Maynard is coming from. Situations with a Republican in charge automatically require resistance. The same actions are ANGELIC AND MANDATORY when a Democrat orders them. When a Democrat gives the order, YOU SHALL OBEY UNQUESTIONINGLY.

Pilot and copilot? Nope. That's one situation where you don't want negotiation or discussion. If the pilot is competent, he has absolute power. If the pilot is steering the plane into a mountain, the copilot needs to knock him out and grab the controls.

School principal? Negotiation is appropriate, but Maynard is predictably delusional. "Principal telling a teacher to discipline a student" is NEVER the problem. I will GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE YOU that it has NEVER happened. NOT FUCKING ONCE. This disagreement ALWAYS involves a student who needs discipline and a principal who tells the teacher NOT to discipline.

Ethics? We know what Ethics means. Total genocide, total tyranny, floods of blood. Ethics always requires slaughtering the innocent and deifying the criminal.

Social justice? Nuff said.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 3:54 AM

  Demise and rebirth??? of Everyman
Youtube has been popping me with ads for Elio, a proposed three-wheel microcar. It looks a bit like a Messerschmitt, will supposedly be American made, will supposedly cost around $6800.

Google clearly understands my tastes. This is a purchase I could consider; American-made is the clincher.

Beyond my own tastes, this is interesting as a possible return to the old concept of Everyman's Car. The Model T was, of course, the gold standard. After the T, all major automakers moved upscale and stayed there, leaving Everyman territory to smaller companies.

Crosley was the last halfway successful Everyman's Car, running from 1939 to 1952. Powel Crosley began with an Everyman's Radio in 1920, then grew into a major appliance maker. His fridges were not Everyman material. He continued to dream the Everyman dream and finally got there with his car. The Crosley was super-basic and super-tiny, built with fridge-style metal forming technology, lacking all amenities. Its list price in 1939 was $325.



1930's prices generally multiply by 20 to get modern prices. $325 * 20 = $6500.

Hmm. Does Elio know the resonance of its price? I think so.

= = = = =

Why did the Everyman concept disappear? Because Real Value disappeared. When you are running a real-value economy, with money directly representing labor, you provide simple things for poor people at an affordable price. You pay the poor people to make these things, which means the poor people are now less poor and can afford simple things with real labor-exchanged money.

In Crosley's era, America was a real-value economy. We actually paid people to make things, which meant they could afford to buy simple things with real cash.

In a false-value economy, you fool people into thinking they can buy fancy houses and fancy cars. You counterfeit borrowed "money" to help them "buy" these things, and you hire robots or super-cheap foreigners to make the fake fancy things. Very little real value is created by the hands of poor people, and very little real value ends up in the hands of poor people. Their intrinsic satisfaction is low, their pay is low and their "possessions" get repossessed.

I'm going to watch Elio closely. It may be the first sign of a new dawn, or it may just be vaporware. [[ Later: Vaporware. ]]

= = = = =

Irrelevant sidenote: I'm looking at the Elio website. Their default color is 'Creamsicle', which takes me directly back to my first experience with a Crosley.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 4:33 AM

  Black-boxing the dream generator
Once in a while I'll get an indication of the inner workings of the brain, in the transition periods between sleep and wake.

The motor side of the sleep shutdown is pretty well known. During REM sleep most voluntary muscles are disconnected, which leaves them free to twitch occasionally. On waking the muscles reconnect. Some people become fully awake before the muscles turn back on, which is apparently a scary experience. And some have full muscle control while still dreaming (somnambulism.)

The sensory side isn't as well documented.

This morning I caught a specific example that can be timed fairly well. I always run a playlist of OTR shows during sleeptime. Lately most of them have been episodes of This Is Your FBI, a high-quality drama from 1945-1953. Archive.org has LOTS of episodes, which makes it an excellent playlist item. I can always find a 'new' episode to keep my thoughts tied up at the start, then run 'old' episodes during actual sleep.

Within the dream I was working along with some generic dude on a technical problem. We were trying to get some generic electronic stuff properly wired and connected. After we got everything plugged in properly, I handed him a little vial and told him I'd had this stuff made to achieve a particular aroma. What did he think of it? He opened it and said "Nothing special. Sort of meh." I laughed and said "Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought too."

At that point the little vial became a microphone and his voice became distorted like a bad public address system. He was giving directions to a "bungalow at the bottom of the hill as you approach the city."

I saw the bungalow, and then the dream went away and I slipped into wake mode. After waking I checked the playlist and listened to the currently selected program. The distorted speech had been coming from a scene in the FBI show where the agents are driving around looking for a fugitive, talking via two-way car radios. They were giving directions to a "bungalow at the bottom of the hill as you approach the city".

I know from long previous experience that audio signals are shut off or diverted at a fairly high level, because a sound that implies danger will always bust through and wake me up. Danger sounds are not necessarily loud. Anything that seems to be coming from the front door will wake me, but door knocks in the radio shows will NOT wake me. (There are a WHOLE LOT of door knocks in old radio shows!) This implies cognitive filtering. It's not just the waveform of a knock, it's some combination of realness, nearness, and location. So the shutoff is not in the outer levels of the auditory pathway, it's way up inside the cortex.

Using this morning's sequence to black-box the sensory mechanism, I can add one more piece to the diagram. The two-way radio was not a danger sound, it just happened to be present shortly before a normally scheduled wakeup. New knowledge: The dream generator knows what's coming in before it actually inserts the sound into the dream. The nonsensical business with the vial was pushed into the stack to provide a prop in Generic Dude's hand that could be turned into a microphone. The dialog about 'sort of meh' was definitely not part of a 1947 radio show, and it's not the way I talk or write.

Does this imply a gradual gate-opening that propagates up the chain, or does it imply that the dream generator somehow operates 'outside of time'?

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 3:09 AM

  Le Chutzpah
Radio news is playing soundbites of Frogs singing the Marseillaise in response to Muslim "slaughter" of "journalists".

I guess it's appropriate, since the Marseillaise represents about 40,000 intentional assassinations of innocent Frenchmen in 1792, including at least 20 writers of "satirical weeklies".

I assume the Marseillaise is intended to spur stronger efforts by the current set of lame lukewarm revolutionaries. If they intend to match the magnificent works of Hollande's ideological ancestors, they need to get their Arab asses in gear FAST! Twelve down, 39,988 to go.

= = = = =

Later thought: Trying to figure out why this particular terrorist incident got all the elites up and roaring. It's not the first recent incident in France, and it's certainly not the largest quantity of deaths. Not by a long shot. Think I've got it. These particular dead people were the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of elite hypersatanic monstrosity. They were the Chief Inquisitors. Their job, like the job of all "satirists" and "comedians", was to torture and impale and burn heretics. Anyone who showed the slightest doubt toward Satan's Mighty Empire, anyone who showed the slightest micromemory of the virtues of religous belief, was SMASHED. Modern Chief Inquisitors charmingly pose as "rebels", but their function is identical to good old Robespierre or Savonarola.
  ¶ 10:11 AM

  Real Value
In writing the previous brief note, I used my RiotGrrl and GoldMaan cartoons as background for calling the hacktivists 'fake rebellious'. Looking at the text of that item now, I see a connection to a broader point that I've been hitting lately.

In the cartoon, RiotGrrl was quoting the usual hippieshit slogans and GoldMaan the bankster was agreeing completely with each.

This exchange started me thinking about Real Value in both social and monetary terms:


RiotGrrl: Social change, not climate change!

GoldMaan: Agreed on both points.

First, we love it when social structures break down. Religious traditions encourage people to save for the future, to live cautiously, and to enjoy work, community and faith. Broken societies must desperately try to enjoy the present moment with commercially produced stuff and commercially produced entertainment. It never works, so a broken culture is hopelessly addicted to spending and borrowing! Beautiful!

Second, the 'climate change' bubble is one of our proudest creations. We funded fake research and forced governments to set up cap-and-trade arrangements, so we could profit from trading the Indulgences.

= = = = =

More recently I've been putting together a broader notion of Real Value = Natural Law. Real Value economies will stand a better chance of survival because, tautologically and obviously, they rely on Real Monetary Values AND Real Social Values.

Charts of household debt show exactly what GoldMaan was saying.

This interactive map at City-AM.com includes more countries but doesn't let you see the whole picture at once.

The charts in this article by the AWARA Group, though sparser, give a better simultaneous picture. Chart 9 is probably the most appropriate.

Note the near-perfect correlation between Real Value economies and Real Value social systems. The cultures and governments that adhere most closely to Satan (i.e. Scandinavia) are also the economies with the highest personal debt. The cultures that run closer to Natural Law (Russia, Turkey) have the least personal debt.

= = = = =

Sidenote 1: The low debt in Russia and other former Soviet countries is partly cultural and partly an unsung legacy of Communism. The government owned most businesses and houses, which meant that borrowing wasn't necessary and money wasn't the primary goal in life. When the gov't collapsed, it allowed high officials to take the businesses AND allowed the occupants to take the houses and apartments. The former turned out to be a problem, while the latter turned out to be a blessing. Now most Russians own their residences free and clear, which means that borrowing still isn't necessary and money still isn't the primary goal in life.

Looking at it from another angle, Communism isn't really an independent variable. Russian Communism was shaped by natural Russian tendencies. Collectives and cooperatives were already going strong when Lenin took over. He bureaucratized and brutalized them, but the basic sense ... community matters more than profit ... is part of Russian culture.

= = = = =

A later rambling on a related subject here.

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

  ¶ 3:40 AM

  Non-puke
Everyone in USA STRONG is enthusiastically puking and shitting on the innocent old word "freedom". Even the fake rebellious 'hacktivists' are puking and shitting on "freedom".

Amid all the puking and shitting, Glenn Greenwald finally speaks the truth.

I can't speak the truth because I live in USA STRONG. Greenwald can speak the truth because he lives in Brazil. Brazil ACTUALLY HAS FREEDOM OF SPEECH, as Greenwald demonstrates both (1) internally by showing lots of cartoons that were already published without destroying the cartoonist; and (2) externally or meta-ly by simply writing the truth and surviving.

Labels: STRONG!

  ¶ 2:25 AM

  Not new
The tech commies and the Repooflicans are united in their hatred of the Post Office. Both insist that it's better to let Google and Twitter handle all of our communications.

Nope. For the class of jobs that are traditionally done by governments, private monopolies are always worse than public monopolies.

Consider the current furor about cyberstalking. Celebrities and would-be celebs are barraged by threats of death and violence. There's no clear and definite way to handle this, because Twitter and Google and other carriers have separate rules, often designed to fit EU norms. This means that speech promoting religious belief is harshly punished, while speech that doesn't invoke religion is okay.

Stalking of celebrities is not new at all. It's always been around. Louella Parsons discussed it in 1947:

I'm on my soapbox tonight to praise the Hollywood studios for the manner in which they protect their players from poison-pen letters. There isn't an important star who hasn't been a victim of threatening or obscene notes. But these letters never reach them because they are immediately turned over to the postal authorities. Case in point: for months Rita Hayworth didn't know that the FBI was searching for a man who threatened to throw acid in her face and kidnap her child unless he was paid off. On the other hand, sincere and genuine letters are always given to the stars.

One part of the picture is constant. Stars within the modern equivalent of the studio system have an equivalent filtering arrangement. But semi-celebs who are operating on their own have a problem that didn't exist in 1947. They can't simply tell the 'postal authorities' and get action. They have to handle an unlimited number of legal and semi-legal communication channels.

Basic point: When government functions properly, its resources are equally available to rich and poor. When government hands basic tasks off to corporations, only the rich are protected.
  ¶ 3:35 AM

  Why now?
Obsolete symbols and metaphors tend to fade as the origin fades. When new symbols and metaphors arise, they're based on new concrete images.



Why, then, have TV weathercasters JUST NOW started using a lighthouse as an animated icon for fog? Lighthouses are firmly obsolete, replaced first by radio navigation like LORAN, and finally by GPS techniques.

Somewhat atypically, the Weather Bureau has adopted a more modern and directly understandable icon:



This is the third winter in a row that we've endured freezing fog through Dec and part of Jan. Freezing fog does no harm to houses, but it makes walking nearly impossible. I'm getting cranky from lack of exercise.

Previous two winters finally switched over to snow in mid-Jan, and ended up with a near-average snowfall amount. We had one decent 4" snow last week; finally a good excuse to rake the roof under my fanatical ice-dam prevention protocol. Exercise felt good. Maybe this indicates an impending switchover to snow.

Later, in spring: Nope. Never reverted to mean. Ended up as a low-snow winter. 17" total. Not the lowest ever, but close. NOT COMPLAINING!

Labels: Heimatkunde, switchover

  ¶ 5:17 AM

  Wild question 2
Carrying forward from this entry but not necessarily using those wild assumptions as prerequisites. This wild idea runs in parallel but could be true on its own.

This new wild thought started when I heard a commentator on EWTN (the Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary network) bashing the constantly splitting denominations of the Protestant world. He said that two new denominations are spawned every day! I don't know if that's true, but I DO know that it's healthy.

Basic unquestionable fact: NATURE HATES CENTRALIZATION. Everything works better when it finds the right level of local control, which isn't necessarily total local control but pretty damn close.

Applying this to religion, it's blatantly obvious that decentralized religions work and grow, and one-man cults like Rome or Canterbury do not work. When you grant total control to a central bureaucracy, you are exactly and specifically giving your soul to Satan.

Now ... Constant splitting ... two denominations every day ... Hmm. What does that remind you of?

Yup.

Here's where the wild hypothesis starts.

Consider religion as a behavior-altering symbiont of the human animal. Perhaps via the gut biome as I proposed before, perhaps through some other mechanism.

How does a symbiont extend its spread? Two main ways. (1) It can reproduce into newly hatched host animals. (2) It can be a virus, or use a virus, to transfer genes without transferring the actual symbiont creature.

Religious symbionts use both. (1) is pretty much automatic, so the variation is on (2). Judaism refuses (2), relying solely on absolute secular power and infinite wealth. Rome emphasizes (1) by encouraging large hatches, but tries (2) sometimes. Muslims and Protestants strongly emphasize (2), occasionally even forgetting to do (1). (eg Shakers, Grahamites.)

= = = = =

If a symbiont wants to maximize its spread, it should alter the host's behavior in ways that improve the health and extend the life of the host; and it should adjust its own genome to match variations in the host.

Unsurprisingly, belief symbionts that stick closely to Natural Law are the best spreaders. The Natural Law recorded in Leviticus, as I've said 67,145 times now, is just a synopsis of long experimentation to find what works.

Also unsurprisingly, belief symbionts that adjust their own genome do a better job of spreading the genome. Human communities thrive in all sorts of different geographies, with different diets and different languages and different cultures. Any successful plant or animal or bacterium switches on various parts of its genome to fit different geographies and cultures. Same with belief symbionts.

Rome's effort to keep one unadjusted genome under the absolute command of one Satan-infected autocrat is doomed to fail. Similar efforts by "mainline" Protestants have already failed because they didn't inculcate the habit of large hatches. Beliefs that spawn a profusion of denominations will survive and grow.

Final question: Do those variations improve communication with God? Communication requires constant searching for the best propagation path. In radio you're seeking a frequency and antenna angle that maximizes skip. In language you're always trying to find the vocabulary and sentence style that will resonate your message into the receiver's tuning. Does the belief symbiont adjust its genomic details (ie liturgy, music, prayer forms) to maximize coupling between this set of humans and the Big Receiver?

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 4:59 AM

  Not Lincolnshire


Something reminded me of the old 'Lincolnshire Poacher' clandestine broadcast. I don't think it's ever been properly explained.

Here's a nice rendition of the entire Grainger 'Lincolnshire Posy' suite by a young Japanese band. This version has plenty of the 'articulation' that is too often missing from modern Western performances of classical-type stuff.

Turns out the tune I always heard on shortwave was NOT the Lincolnshire tune. No connection at all. It's not anywhere in the suite!

Here is my MIDI transcription of the basic tune that I heard in the early '60s. It changed subtly all the time. Audio steganography based on the deltas in notes and timing?

= = = = =

Sidenote on Grainger: As I was listening to various versions on Youtube, I noticed a strong and consistent theme among the comments. Everyone who had ever played the suite in school band praised Grainger's 'gift' to their particular instrument. I doubt that any other composer spread so much joy among the performers AND the audience!
  ¶ 4:43 AM