Tech was never the point
This article on tech in ed is peculiarly written, and stupidly ignores racial differences, but uses constants and variables properly to reach one important conclusion:

The most recent OECD-PISA report ... found no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics, or science in the countries that had invested heavily in information and communication technologies (ICT) for Education.

Yup. This was already true in the '70s when the first teaching machines were a fad. After a couple years of intensive use, no discernible improvement in performance.

Technology does matter to some extent. Basic math needs to use calculators, and writing needs to use full-size keyboards. Without those devices you're wasting a terrific amount of time. There is a good muscle-memory argument for handwriting, but it's sort of luxurious. Shouldn't worry about it until the more important things are in order.

What's the important thing?

CURRICULUM.

And I don't mean details like which evil avant-garde authors to read or which falsely described historical periods to focus on. Authors and history shouldn't be part of school, except possibly as optional outside reading or special projects.

I mean just TWO QUESTIONS.

1. WHAT DO YOU DO?

2. WHEN DO YOU DO IT?

The correct answer to 1 is WORK. Real-life activities. Practice various jobs, practice housekeeping, practice running a family, practice running a business.

The correct answer to 2 is WHEN KIDS ARE READY. All school activities should be staged in the context of real life, but talent for occupations appears at age 9. That's when the serious practice starts, that's when the divided tracks split, and that's when you start the gradual expansion into subsidiary skills like effective communication and math.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 3:39 PM

  Trigger warning triggers
The latest idiot Trigger Warning: If you're giving out non-allergenic treats for Halloween, paint a pumpkin "teal" and put it on your porch. "Teal" is apparently some kind of blue or green color.

First, there's no such thing as non-allergenic. Everything is deadly according to the allergy freaks. Food, water, air, smells, light, dark, noise, silence, thinking, not thinking... all deadly.

Second, what if you're allergic to paint? I am. Fresh paint is the only thing that gives me asthmatic symptoms.

For me the warning would be the trigger.

Sidenote: Just realized there's a whole fucking bunch of PAINT on this page of the blog. This entry itself, and this and this. Meaningful? Probably not.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 7:14 AM

  Good mix of algo and human
Looking at Wunderground's radar last night to see if I could spot the next area of wind.... scanning across the Seattle area...



Huh? Whole lotta wind on Vashon Island but nowhere else.

Clicking on the flag:



Hmm. Do you suppose that's an instrumental error?

Wunderground's symbols are an excellent tool for pattern recognition. The colors make it easy to spot a bad temperature, and the flags make it easy to spot a bad wind reading. An algorithm would have a much harder time singling this out. It's entirely possible for a hilltop location to have 60 mph wind while a nearby valley has 15. Where does the algo draw the line? Why not 137? And why not 296 inches of rain? Global Warming tells us we're all going to float up to the moon sometime around next Tuesday, but this total immersion will NOT cancel out a drought. Drought never goes away; it just becomes a seafloor drought. Still dry as a bone. We all know Gaia is the only Goddess and Michael Mann[pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh][pbuh] is her Prophet. We must obey.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Metrology

  ¶ 1:13 AM

  Regeneration 4

Part 4 of a series, following from 3 and 2 and 1.

I've been discussing manual regen controls, manual chokes, manual ignition timing.

This line of thought originated from a specific conversation with Grandpa in 1962. Grandpa was dying early from alcohol and tobacco, and the family went to visit him one last time. As we hung around Grandpa's house, or visited nearby parks, Grandpa kept saying true things, and parents kept trying to Rectify him, nervously painting over the facts with conventional leftist crap. I wasn't sure what to think. Grandpa's observations matched what I saw with my own eyes, but didn't match what I'd always heard from parents and TV and books.

I think Grandpa got tired of being painted out. At one point he decided to go for beer and cigarettes (yeah, those were killing him, but it was too late to stop) and took me along. No parents, just me. I don't remember most of the conversation but I remember one emphasized item that seemed to summarize his intentions.

We were talking about his old '52 Ford Mainline. I must have been asking why anyone would want a plain car with no power steering, no radio, no automatic, none of the 'exciting' stuff that 'everyone wanted' in 1962.

Grandpa pointed to the manual choke. He told me that Ford was the only car that still offered a manual choke. He said it was important to have a simple car that you could understand and fix by yourself, and it was important to have direct control over the car.

Extend car to life, and there's the message.

Same as Carver's message.

Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Talk to them. Let them talk to you.

Dying old engineer trying to pass the key to young potential engineer. He succeeded. I've done a shitty job of following his advice, but I've always remembered and tried.


As implied before, this inherited desk reinforced the message. Earlier this year I decided to 'regenerate' the desk as a workplace to get my direct-control hands back into action after years of frustrating jelly-nailing software work. I pried off a compartment that interfered with my soldering iron and vise. The compartment revealed a couple of insignificant letters that had been hidden in 1938, probably by kids playing games. The letters didn't hold any secrets, but their postmarked presence helped to turn an old family story toward Grandpa's side, which had been painted out.

Labels: Carver, TMI

  ¶ 5:10 PM

  Meth lab smell?
Rain and wind today. We need the blessed rain, not so much the damned wind. Shouldn't complain about the latter as long as we're getting the former.

When the wind comes from the south, I pick up a STRONG paint thinner smell. It's not just my elderly nose because the much more familiar wounded-wood smell is coming from other directions. Judging the gradients and vectors as I walked around, the paint thinner is somewhere south of Wellesley, maybe around Heroy and G Street?

Supposedly paint thinner smell indicates a meth lab venting. I suppose it could be from a can spilled by a painter, but that seems sort of implausible given the strength.

Later thought: A strong smell from a hard-to-locate "somewhere south" often turns out to be from the city's sewage plant, which is about 3 miles directly south of here. I don't know why the sewage plant would be venting this smell. Maybe it's doing a cleanout or something.


12 hours later: Hmm. This is north of me, but it does seem to be a meth lab that went wild and exploded.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 10:00 AM

  Wrong Satanists
A school football coach in Bremerton was caught doing the WORST THING IN THE WORLD, i.e. being C_______n. He was p_____g on the field before games, and students were joining him. Awful! Unthinkable! Intolerable! All options on the table!

So the school board suspended him pending "investigation", which means he's toast.

Students have been pointlessly protesting. They haven't figured out yet that "petitioning for redress of grievances" means "If you are Vibrant you're free to riot and kill cops without consequence. If you are not Vibrant you are not free to breathe."

They are learning rapidly.

Now the situation has gotten strange, as some students invited a local group of "satanist" worshippers to pray at the same time as the coach, and both sides got a little rowdy. It's not clear what the students hoped to prove; news doesn't tell us if the inviters were Strictly Orthodox Establishment types who wanted to help the government smash the coach, or misguided C_______ns trying to pull a bankshot.

In either case they've missed the point. These "satanists" are not the Satans you need to worry about. They're just grownup Goths, adult cosplayers. Not really on Satan's side. The closest they come to evil is trespassing in a cemetery.

The true Satanists are the school board, backed up with the full force of Satan Inslee and the Mafia Thugs criminally posing as the "state" "supreme" "court". Inslee and the "court" are full-force infinite evil, raw bloody crime, working fanatically hard to obliterate all life on earth.

And there's not a fucking thing you can do about it, except GET THE FUCK OUT. Find a private school, which will provide a temporary sanctuary until the Satans notice it.

Labels: defensible spaces

  ¶ 2:31 AM

  Rigor mortis
This might be a Big Idea or it might be trivial. Can't tell. In any case I'll splat it out while it's fresh. Formatted sort of like a syllogism.

= = = = =

1. The hostility between America and Russia has almost always come FROM America. Consider those Russian engineers designing cars and radios, happily using American ideas along with their own developments.

Americans have NEVER followed Russian ideas, EVEN WHEN RUSSIAN IDEAS WERE SUPERIOR. We hated those Russkies so much that we couldn't possibly allow their ideas to have any value. Don't feed the trolls.

Sputnik was supposed to wake us up. Didn't. We speeded up our rocket project, but we didn't ask why Russia got there first. We moved faster into raw destruction in math and science ed, explicitly ignoring the OBVIOUSLY SUPERIOR Russian methods.

Now we're behind again in rockets. Our Deluxe Elon Musk HyperLoop GoogleRockets blow up on the launch pad, and we have to ask Russia to rescue our astronauts and equipment. We can't even copy our OWN shit after we got it right 60 fucking years ago. We have to advance ever deeper into idiocy.

Syria demonstrates that we're behind in military tech. We've been spending trillions on useless self-driving jets and self-losing blimps, but we send our soldiers out with non-functional old cars that the soldiers have to armor up on their own. We don't even let them have Toyotas.

[We did, however, RElearn how to make cars from Toyota in the '90s after we had forgotten how to do it and handed the auto industry to Japan in the '70s. So we are capable of learning in some circumstances!]

= = = = =

2. Newer historical research, both Western and Russian, has established that the 1933 famine in Ukraine wasn't as big as previously assumed, and it wasn't intentional genocide. Stalin was responsible for lots of unnecessary deaths, but NOT because he was trying to kill the kulaks. He was just being brutally stupid, forcing peasants to plant wrong crops, preventing them from moving around the country.

Our similar crop failure in those years wasn't nearly as deadly because WE ALLOWED OKIES TO MOVE, and we allowed them to find different jobs in Oklahoma.

= = = = =

3. Here's the idea, big or trivial: We are quickly becoming just as rigid as Stalin. Our government can't stop slaughtering foreigners, our bankers can't stop slaughtering normal business, our media can't stop slaughtering cops, our "scientists" can't stop slaughtering all life on Earth to serve Gaia, and our people aren't allowed to make enough money or save enough money to feel comfortable about moving and adapting.

Formerly the cushion of stored value, or the potential of earning value, enabled us to take risks like starting a business or moving to a location with better jobs or cheaper housing. These paths are still legally possible, but they're closing down fast. Self-employment is steadily decreasing, economic mobility is decreasing, physical mobility is down.

Now we are the brutally stupid side. We could learn something about this by comparing the fate of the 1933 Okies and the 1933 Ukies, but we won't. Can't feed the trolls.

In simple Natural Law terms: Nature's response to bad situations is RUN! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! Plants do it with seeds, animals do it with legs or wings. GET OUT! OUT! OUT!

Our official response to all bad situations is LOCKDOWN! NO FENCE, NO DEFENSE! MAXIMUM VULNERABILITY! Pin the normal people in place so the government-sponsored criminals or migrants or invaders can kill us.

Labels: defensible spaces, switchover

  ¶ 4:08 PM

  Bad ad placement... no, it's good.
Every year a local jewelry store has a two-day Special Event featuring a load of Super-Jumbo Diamonds. I wrote up a good analysis of this a few years ago, in the context of my tenth anniversary of frugality and debt-free living ......

= = = START REPRINT........

A local jewelry store is advertising some kind of special two-day event featuring a load of Super-Jumbo diamonds. The biggest one weighs 17 carats, normally $500,000. Now reduced to $250,000.

I don't get it. Can't begin to understand it. The ad tells you straight out that the diamond has no meaningful price. They were able to cut the "original" price in half without any trouble, and you can be sure they've got plenty of room for deeper cuts. Thus you have no assurance of any particular resale value.

What's the actual value of that material? Quick calculation: 17 carats is the same as 3.4 grams. If you bought the same weight of carbon in the form of coal, you'd nominally spend about 0.00025 dollars. That's 25 thousandths of a cent. $250000/$0.00025 = 1,000,000,000.

Would you rather pay the actual value, or ONE BILLION TIMES the actual value? Really? Why?

Coal is crude, so let's try a more appropriate comparison. A pencil lead is mostly graphite, and involves a considerable amount of processing and manufacturing. It's about the same weight as the 17-carat diamond, and costs about 5 cents. In this comparison the diamond costs only FIVE MILLION TIMES as much as the equivalent manufactured piece of carbon. Wow! That's a great bargain comparison, in comparison to the coal comparison! I'm going to rush out and buy one of those diamonds right now, before the price goes down even more!

= = = = = END REPRINT.

This year's Super-Special is being advertised during Dave Ramsey's show. You hear one of Dave's Debt-Free celebrations... a young couple managed to knock down $250,000 in debt in four years, specifically by eliminating all foolish spending on diamonds and carpets and hot tubs.

Immediately after "We're Debt Freeeeeee!" you hear the ad for $250,000 worth of idiocy.

Pretty sure those ads during Dave are a waste of money, but don't tell them! I'm glad to see idiots wasting their money.
  ¶ 2:04 PM

  3 x 5
Supposedly the purpose of the Web is to have LINKS that lead you to a deeper or more original source. This story about an overly literal math teacher fails the Web standard. Every iteration of the story includes this bit:

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in the US defended how the paper was marked, saying it gives students a better understanding of the problems they are solving. "Part of what we are trying to teach children is to become problem solvers and thinkers," said Diane Briars, president of the NCTM. "We want students to understand what they're doing, not just get the right answer."

but no iteration includes a link to the NCTM's actual statement. Google doesn't get there by any keyword I can think of.

If this is ALL Briars said, she's flat wrong. I doubt that this is ALL she said, but I can't find the rest of it or the context.

There's nothing new about using rectangular arrays to show addition and multiplication. Normally the WHOLE POINT of doing the array thing is to give the student a strong visual feel for the commutative property, the idea that 3 x 5 and 5 x 3 are always going to give you 15. It doesn't matter if you see the array as 3 groups of 5 or 5 groups of 3. It's 15.



The teacher is blowing the WHOLE POINT of the array method by marking the kid wrong for switching the rows and columns. Switching the rows and columns is EXACTLY WHY YOU DO THIS EXERCISE.

= = = = =

Footnote for clarity: I'm not intending to bash the teacher. I suspect she's inexperienced and overwhelmed by CC. She may have made a simple mistake. I'm bashing Briars of NCTM, who has issued an authoritative message approving this mistake on behalf of all math teachers. Not in my name, Briars!


= = = = =

Few days later: Some tech-tyrant asshole tried to defend the bad marking. He cited two vague connections: (1) Equal isn't the same thing as Equivalent in Javascript. Huh? That has nothing at all to do with math. It's solely about Javascript's peculiar and inconsistent ways of converting strings to numbers. (2) Matrix multiplication is not commutative. Valid in itself, but irrelevant for a 3rd grade class. At this stage you need to get a FIRM GRASP on the commutative property, because it's crucially necessary for all sorts of algebraic manipulations. If part of your mind is thinking non-commutative, you'll be lost in algebra.

I've been programming about graphics and waves for 30 years, and I've NEVER had to use matrix multiplication. I use the basic properties of sin, cos, tan, and polar-to-rect conversion every day. You could say those are closely related to matrices, but I've never felt the need to do actual matrix ops.

Nearly all the commenters soundly lashed the tech-tyrant asshole from a wide variety of angles. Refreshing and reassuring.

Labels: Danbo, Experiential education

  ¶ 2:39 AM

  LeSaaaaaabreeeeee
Got a new read-while-eating book from Alibris. A coffee-table picturebook about Russian limousines. It has lots of familiar pix of the Packard line, starting with the ZIS110.


American car writers have been Rectifying** this car lately, attempting to erase all past alliances with RUSSIANAGGRESSIONAGGRESSIONAGGRESSION. The facts were formerly well known in both countries, and Russians never tried to hide the facts.

From the book:

This vehicle came about after Stalin held discussions with American leaders, including the President, about the use of tooling and equipment to create a new limousine for state occasions, and to enhance Soviet prestige at home and abroad. The result led to permission to use aspects of the design of the Packard 180 for the new model. ... In 1942 a Russian delegation, believed to be from Amtorg, was dispatched to USA to arrange the purchase of body dies and presswork from Briggs Body, and the design rights from Packard.

Clear, with lots of details.

The book has some less familiar and purely weird cars.

The ZIS111 departed from the Packard line. This is a nice design, not a direct copy, though it has a strong Caddy/Buick flavor. (Would a '56 LaSalle look like this?)


The GAZ12 was pretty much a '52 Chrysler limo with a Buickish front end, and with pure Dodge Fluid Drive.


Russian designers let their imaginations run wild a few times, but still with American inspirations. This sportster is clearly a Liiiiiincooooooln Zeeeeeephyyyyyyr. Or maybe a Continentinentinentinental.


And this one is Harley Earl's LeSaaaaaabreeeeee dream car turned into something like a ute. Or a nightmare.

= = = = =

Later, after reading more of the book ... Some of the American influence is simply copying. Flatout plagiarism. But the Buick and Earl influences are not plagiarism. Harley was hired as a consultant by the first Soviet auto company in 1932. The immediate result was the Leningrad L1 limo, which was a '32 Buick. The book doesn't say if Earl continued to consult, but it's a reasonable assumption.


= = = = =

** Footnote on rectifying.

Attempted revision, from Collectible Auto mag, February 2007, article on all '46 cars:

Legend persists that the senior dies were transferred to Russia where they were used for the ZIS, but comparison of surviving ZIS cars to the Packards shows that their contours are significantly different.

But they weren't even reading their own previous texts. From Collectible Auto mag, April 2006, article on the Packard Proving Grounds:

Altz, who worked at the Proving Grounds from 1934 to 1956, recalls another near-accident soon after the war. "I was checking a ZIS, a Russian Packard, at high speed, probably a little over 100. This guy was running across the infield in a Packard at a pretty good clip and must have fallen asleep. At the last minute I realized he wasn't going to stop. I slammed on the brakes and he ran right across in front of me. That was a close one."

Why would Packard be testing the ZIS if there wasn't a contractual arrangement? A contract is not a legend.

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 5:23 PM

  Unmoored


It's just so darned reassuring to know that the trillions we spend on defense are busy defending us against RUSSIANAGGRESSIONAGGRESSIONAGGRESSION and ISIS and ISIL and IS and Islamic State and Daesh and Tiede and Swaen and Rienso Bleue and Doeve and MeenMawTheCountryThatSomePeopleStillReferToAsBurma and Christians and Southerners and Evil Carbon and ... well, gosh o' golly, just every dratted thing that threatens Our Freedoms and Our Perfect Justice System and Our Perfect Education System and Our Perfect Health System and Our Perfect Democracy.

Dead serious now: America's epitaph.

HOLY FUCK! IT'S A DRUNK BABY WHALE, BRO! IT'S HURT, BRO!

Labels: Danbo, Гром победы

  ¶ 3:49 PM

  Little Orlovian thought
Thinking along Orlovian parallel collapse lines.

Obama is Gorby. Last man in the dynasty, understanding that the system is fucked but wanting to stay alive.

I can understand and empathize. 50 years old, pretty wife, decent kids, tolerable mother-in-law. Do I want a life of perfect security, or do I want Fort Marcy Park? Should I try to expose everything, or should I just fiddle around the edges hoping to do a little good?

Easy choice, especially because the Fort Marcy choice would be so ferociously Rectified that my bravery would be turned upside down into treachery.

Yup, Gorby.

Well then, who's Yeltsin? Aha. One of the successors looks and acts a lot like Yeltsin, doesn't he? Not drunk but otherwise similar.
  ¶ 12:20 PM

  Middle ground lost
Article on IBM at Wolf's blog:

Instead of blowing tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks to engineer its financial reports and pull, in cahoots with Wall Street analysts, a bag over investors’ heads with its per-share metrics, IBM should have invested those funds in actual engineering and in people, which might have helped it become great again. But this is unlikely to ever happen, given that Wall Street dominates the show.

Unquestionably true. In the current situation, the stock market is purely destructive. The only way a company can function properly is with strictly private, preferably family-based, ownership.

But this wasn't consistently and perfectly true before 1980. Look at the auto industry in the '30s.

GM had been a stock play from the start. Billy Durant was all about mergers and acquisitions, and didn't especially care about cars. GM began to succeed when it got rid of Billy the second time. It was able to concentrate on improving cars.

Ford had been private from the start, and remained so until 1956. Freedom from Wall Street enabled Henry's Social Economics vision to transform the company AND THE COUNTRY. But by 1930 Henry was getting senile, and his rigid vision was interfering with normal development. The company was declining fast because nobody had the power to kick Henry upstairs.

Nash was Wall Street from the start, but Charles had learned a strong negative lesson when working for Billy. Don't let the casino dominate. He acted like a private company, carefully saving and investing instead of borrowing and gambling. Nash got through the depression in better shape than any of the Big Three.

So: In those years the market was a somewhat negative influence, but it was possible to run a company sanely even while offering shares to the public.

Now there's no middle ground. The Casino is unstoppably evil. If you sell your soul to the Casino, you're totally lost.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, the broken circle

  ¶ 3:51 AM

  Absolute shit.
Via UK Telegraph as usual for this sort of shit:

Dean Frenkel, a public speaking and communication lecturer at Melbourne’s Victoria University, said “drunken Aussie-speak” was formed generations ago but has continued to be passed on to children by sober parents. Mr Frenkel said poor communication was “not related to class” but was evident among all sectors of Australian society. “The average Australian speaks to just two thirds capacity – with one third of our articulator muscles always sedentary as if lying on the couch; and that's just concerning articulation,” he wrote. “Missing consonants can include missing ‘t’s (impordant), ‘l’s (Austraya) and ‘s’s (yesh), while many of our vowels are lazily transformed into other vowels, especially ‘a’s to ‘e’s (stending) and ‘i’s (New South Wyles), and ‘i’s to ‘oi’s (noight).”

Pure 100% nonsense.

First, 'impordant' is not a "missing consonant". All English speakers reduce an aspirated voiceless stop to a brief voiced stop in running speech.

Second, the elided Ls, or L moving to W, are also a natural process in many dialects. This clearly comes from London, not from alcohol.

Third, I doubt that Aussies say "yesh" by itself. They may palatalize or flatten the S depending on the following vowel. Again perfectly normal in all dialects. (More to the point, Aussies never say Yes OR Yesh. They ALWAYS say Yeah, which sounds to American ears like Yair.)

Fourth, the vowel changes are also from London, not from alcohol. In terms of tongue musculature, 'stending' takes the same effort as 'standing'. 'Wyles' takes MORE effort than 'Wales', because the tongue starts from a low /a/ instead of a mid /ɛ/. /ɔɪ/ takes MORE effort than /aɪ/ because the lips are rounded for /ɔ/.

Vowels always shift over time and between dialects. There's no such thing as laziness in language.

= = = = =

BIG POINT: As fucking always, the supposed checking mechanism of peer review doesn't work. This Expert who works for a major university tosses a pile of instantly disproved nonsense, and nobody at the university stops him. Even worse, the Expert is violating "consensus" facts, which are basically correct in this subject. In the above disproof I was using orthodox "consensus" facts. So peer review doesn't enforce a good "consensus". It only enforces a satanic genocidal "consensus" like Global Warming. Peer review is mass murder.

= = = = =

SMALL POINT: The professor may be running parallel to a valid argument, without ever intersecting. You could argue that Aussies are consistently more casual and slangy than either Brits or Americans. Americans, especially west of the Appalachians, were strongly influenced by the Noah Webster tradition in schools. We try hard to be formal and 'correct', which usually ends up being hypercorrect. I don't detect this tendency among Aussies.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Language update

  ¶ 5:01 PM

  Truth day!
By fucking god, this is an amazing day. Earlier we had FBI head Comey stating a plain truth about violence. Now we have Trump stating TWO plain truths at once.

Both men have established a considerable record for truth-telling, but both have blown out their previous records today.

From CNN:

Trump, delivering a riff in New Hampshire about how American foreign policy had destabilized the Middle East, said that it was hard to square that interventionism with what the foreign people actually want. His case: The coverings worn by some Muslim women on their face -- or, as he called them, the "you know what."

"I saw a woman interviewed. They said 'We want to wear them, we've worn them for a thousand years. Why would anybody tell us not?' They want to!" Trump said. "What the hell are we getting involved for?"

Truth 1: Normal sane people like their own cultures. Our insane genocidal wacked beyond wacked beyond wacked culture is not even good for us, let alone for others.

Truth 2: Therefore we should MIND OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS.

EXACTLY. EXACTLY. EXACTLY. PRECISELY.

ON. THE. FUCKING. DOT.

FUCKING TRUTH, FOR THE FIRST FUCKING TIME.

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 2:36 PM

  outraged outraged outraged
CIA head John Brennan is OUTRAGED OUTRAGED OUTRAGED that people are SPYING on other people! How dare they! Spying is IMMORAL AND IMPROPER! Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's email!

Jesus.


A bit later: Think of this in vocational terms. Brennan's job is spying, yet he's OUTRAGED that other people are spying.

Would I get OUTRAGED to find out that other people are programming? Or designing and building electronic stuff? No. I will compare my work with the other guy's work. Might say "Shit. I can do much better." ... or ... "Damn! That's ELEGANT! No way I could approach it." But I'd never be OUTRAGED that other people were doing the same job.
  ¶ 10:54 AM

  Y U No speechread? No mystery.
This method of manual speech-reading seems to be widespread among deaf-blind in South America. Note the speed and efficiency. Clear DIRECT communication with no translator needed.


Vastly better than the spelling-in-hand method used in North America. Slow, inefficient, error-prone, and requires a translator.

No point in suggesting a change; the Deaf Culture tyrants prefer the indirect method because it creates maximum isolation and maximum opportunities for commie activism.
  ¶ 7:52 AM

  Rectifying
Was thinking about Orwell's use of rectify. Was he acquainted with the technical meaning? Hard to tell. His career is all about words and culture; no indication of anything like Signal Corps in his army service. He grew up in India, so rectified butter = ghee was the more likely source of the metaphor.

In any case, the electronic Rectifier is a powerful analogy for the process he described.



Showing a simplified power supply or detector circuit. Input (reality) is a complex waveform. The rectifier grabs only one side of reality, then the filter drastically simplifies the wave, remaining strictly on the 'correct' side.

Rectified and Filtered info, as provided by modern media, is purely one-sided and purely predictable. Anyone can write the media story on any event with 100% reliability. We know which side of the wave will pass through the diode, and we know which frequencies will be favored by the filter.

Looking deeper, a contradiction appears.

Life is diodes. Not just the one-way part but the whole conductance curve.

Tanh, of course.



The silicon diode responds to the difference in charge between its ends. When the charges gathered at its left end exceed the charges gathered at its right end, the valve starts to open. As the difference in available charge grows, the flow increases. But this increase is NOT linear. In a simple resistor, doubling the difference in force doubles the flow. In a diode the pattern is tanh, with a sharp threshold around 0.6 volts or 600 millivolts. Below 600 mv, no flow. Above 700 or so, complete flow.

Cells also rely on one-way valves in their walls to admit good stuff and expel waste.



A neuron responds to the difference in charge between its ends. When the charges gathered at its synapse exceed the charges gathered inside, the valve starts to open. As the difference in available charge grows, the flow increases. But this increase is NOT linear. In a simple resistor, doubling the difference in force doubles the flow. In a neuron the pattern is tanh, with a sharp threshold around 0.06 volts or 60 millivolts. Below 60 mv, no flow. Above 70 or so, complete flow from the axon.



Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Most multi-celled animals have one-way digestion and one-way movement. Move forward, bring in food at the front, digest, leave waste behind.



= = = = =

Apparent contradiction: Since life is all about rectifiers, why shouldn't media and history also be rectified? Why is one-sidedness bad in this one situation?

Solution: Media and history WILL always be rectified. Good or bad is a moot point. In fact their predictability is the SAVING GRACE.

A more subtle aspect of all nervous systems PROTECTS us. At all levels, from the retina and cochlea up to the mysterious cognitive processes, nerves are HIGH-PASS FILTERS, CHANGE detectors. We REJECT sameness and SEEK sharp differences.



The perfect predictability of modern "news" thus guarantees its rejection by our input filter. We may keep the radio burbling all day, but we know what's happening at every moment so it doesn't get beyond the cochlea unless we detect something truly different and new.

As "news" gets more and more predictable, we ignore it more and more perfectly.

Smart propagandists know how to fake newness and break rhythms, but we soon learn to reject each new trick. It's a losing battle for the propagandist.

Thanks, Ralph.

Labels: Emersonian justice, Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:56 AM

  Not with a bang but with a
News or something:

A mysterious space junk is heading towards Earth and will plunge into the Indian Ocean next month, a report in the science journal Nature has said. To be precise, it will hurtle into the Indian Ocean, about 104 km or 65 miles off the southern tip of Sri Lanka on November 13 at around 5pm. What makes this unusual is that no one has any clue regarding the source of this space debris named ‘WT1190F’ except that it is man-made. And researchers claim that it is sheer coincidence that the unknown object had ‘WTF’ in its name.

Nuff said.
  ¶ 3:35 AM

  Remarkable sanity!
Current FBI head Comey has turned out to be an extremely sane and courageous man. He knows what's happening, and he's not afraid to say the truth.

Comey waded into the thorny issues at play in a speech Friday at the University of Chicago Law School, his alma mater. He has expressed worry about the spike in the number murders in some cities, and for the first time said it could be at least partly linked to what he called a "chill wind" police are facing in the wake of Ferguson.

"Far more people are being killed in America's cities this year than in many years -- and let's be clear: far more people of color are being killed in America's cities this year. And it's not the cops doing the killing," Comey said.

Perfect realism, perfect truth. The only thing missing is the pointed finger of blame. Who's responsible for this chill wind? Eric Holder and Al Sharpton, and ESPECIALLY the genocidal media who continue to commit Sharpton's murders without any specific orders from Sharpton.

Comey doesn't really need to name those names. Everyone knows.
  ¶ 3:10 AM

  Unnecessary question
Pointless article in Popular Anti-Science.

Headlines:

Who Will Driverless Cars Decide To Kill?

A question that will plague the autonomous car industry

Author is discussing the "trolley problem", Game-Theory nonsense that bears less than zero connection to human reactions and morality.

Reality doesn't use Game-Theory. Just simple physics.

Which force is designing self-driving cars? What's the KNOWN AND PREDICTABLE vector of this force?

After answering those, the stupid headline is automatically answered. We know who GoogCar will kill, and we know that GOOG/AAPL will NOT be "plagued" by the decision. GOOG/AAPL will be deliriously happy. Fulfilling their sole purpose for existence.

The cool will always kill the uncool.

Autonomous cars can't distinguish all the characteristics of Unpersons, but they can detect two reliable shibboleths of Negative Externalities.

(1) Pedestrians who are NOT carrying an iPhone are uncool. Non-iPhoners are either old, Luddite, or strictly religious. All perfectly uncool, all perfectly killworthy.

(2) Pedestrians who move slowly and irregularly are uncool. Old and/or disabled.

Killing the uncool is called ETHICS. See Peter Singer for more details.

Labels: Asked and answered, Ethics

  ¶ 2:19 AM

  Saluting Poland
"Democracy" may be extinct in US and UK, but it's still alive in parts of Europe. Poland now joins Hungary with a solidly nationalist and pro-life government! Opposed to EU migrant invasion, inclined to pull away from the EU though not necessarily committed to an exit.

The people were given actual CHOICES. Candidates promised to move in DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS. As an American I find it difficult to grasp these concepts. Our infinitely superior system needs no choices or directions. All is perfect here. Best health care in the world, best education in the world, best justice in the world, best economy in the world, best Die-Versity in the world, best stings in the world, best total self-destruction in the world. The only imperfect thing in America is the Benghazi. We need more Benghazi. Or less Benghazi. Or a different brand of Benghazi. I still haven't figured it out.

Even though I don't understand this "election" thing, I have an odd feeling that Poland needs to be saluted. This feeling is probably

so I will undoubtedly need to be re-educated by the best education system in the world.



Slightly later: BEST PART OF ALL!

EU officials fret that PiS, which has vowed to keep Poland's subsidized coal mines open and defend its high-carbon energy mix, may undermine the bloc's common negotiating position at the U.N. climate conference in Paris starting next month.

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 1:20 AM

  Carson returns to chickenshit
After a brief moment of hard realism, Carson returns to his odd set of illusions about the job he's applying for.

He states a firm opposition to abortion. Good. This is the only MORALLY justifiable position and the only SCIENTIFICALLY justifiable position. Real morality and real science agree here, as they do on most important questions.

The mediasatans pounce on his slavery analogy which is standard stuff in pro-life circles.

Their response is equally standard stuff in satanic circles. HOW DARE YOU COMPARE THE INFINITELY HOLY SACRAMENT OF ABORTION TO THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD?!?! SELMA! 1965! EDMUND PETTIS BRIDGE! LESTER MADDOX! AX HANDLES! LIVING SAINT JOHN L. LEWIS! SELMA! SELMA! SELMA!

The real problem is that Carson doesn't go beyond expressing an opinion. He specifically states that he will do nothing at all about abortion. He suggests that he might choose black-robed satans more carefully, which is utterly and totally meaningless. The Senate, ESPECIALLY THE REPOOFS, will automatically reject any genuinely pro-life judge. All senators are owned by Planned Parenthood. Even if he miraculously or accidentally got one or two choices through the Senate, they would be totally powerless. Simple math. 99% of the federal court system is satanic. Replacing one or two judges every four years cannot change anything in the projected lifetime of the universe. Each new judge will automatically "grow" and "evolve" into demonic insanity before the next one can be appointed.

Again Carson misunderstands the proper definition of the job. A president can make any policy he wants, and can enforce the policy with military force. Plenty of presidents have done it, creating and enforcing policies that were uniformly immoral and counterproductive.

If he's serious about ending abortion, he would do it the same way Eisenhower ended school segregation. With the Army. (But even that wouldn't work now, because the Army has been completely satanized. This hypothetical president would have to hire a private army, perhaps from an African country where morality and science still exist.)

"Law" is a myth. Only force exists. Occasionally force is used for good. This could be one of those rare instances. But it won't.
  ¶ 4:01 PM

  Just like home
Lots of neighbors are going all out with Halloween shit. Fake spiderwebs, fake gravestones, fake skulls. The big deal this year is full-size skeletons clad in shrouds, sitting in plastic lawn chairs, with motion-activated voice output. "I seeeeee yoooouuuu! Hahahahahaha."

On my morning walk I triggered several of these egregious idiocies. Reminded me of old times, running the gauntlet in a school hall or prison range.

Not a pleasant memory.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 7:34 AM

  Thanks, Ralph 17
It's interesting that Syria was the 'bridge too far' in terms of worldwide chaos, mass destruction and raw lunacy, giving Russia and Persia a chance to SOLVE A PROBLEM.

Syria may also be the breaking point for the infinitely evil EU. The Greece mess didn't bother Goldman-Claude Juncker and his fellow demons. Greece didn't cause an INVASION of the rich countries. Goldman-Claude could solve Greece by normal methods. Kill more poor, enrich more Chosen.

Syria is causing an INVASION, and Goldman finds that the natives are finally getting restless, even in Max Satan Holland and Krautland.

Slovenia, which said on Friday it would consider putting up a fence on its border with Croatia unless a solution is found on Sunday, said the EU "must ease the burden on the most exposed countries." It called for "EU action that would stop the uncontrolled migration flows on the outer borders of the EU." Almost all the migrants are entering the EU via its poorer members in south-eastern Europe and heading north to seek asylum in countries including Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Leaders of the richer Western states worry that large-scale immigration will boost support for the xenophobic far-right.

Hear that last sentence? Classic DemonSpeak.

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!

When the trolls (ie normal reality-based humans) reach a power level that the mediasatans can no longer safely Rectify, there's real Trouble in Satan City.

HOLY SHIT, JAY! WE DONE JUMPED THE FUCKIN BABY SHAWK, BRO!

Labels: Emersonian justice, Zero Problems, Гром победы

  ¶ 1:31 AM

  More Alinsky prequels
Speaking of early versions of Alinsky principles....

This episode of Strange as it Seems depicts an organization overloaded and bankrupted by too much of a good thing. In 1929 a will gave a large trust fund to the Humane Society, requiring them to furnish horse troughs for any city that wanted one. The HS was massively overburdened by the demand, and had to spend far more money than the will provided. Gotcha. (Segment starts at 9:00 in the clip.)

Reality appears to have been less dramatic. George Bills had been active in the HS, and his trust fund was nicely prearranged, no surprise or burden. One of Bills's relatives made money by building and shipping the troughs.

The Strange version is more inspiring and evocative. Basically a legally enforced DDOS.
  ¶ 2:26 PM

  Thanks, Ralph 16
Woke up from a strong dream of admonition. Though expressed indirectly through characters and dialog, the message was clear.

Emerson didn't know Alinsky, but he knew the type. Utopian tyrants were trending in 1840. His advice still stands.

Loudly supporting evil is part of what evil wants. Loudly opposing evil is the other part of what evil wants. Revolution leads only to worse tyranny.

I know these things and I often say these things, but I don't always obey.

Message of the dream: Knowing the truth is sufficient. Have more confidence in the ways of Nature, and stop pulling so hard in one direction. It's wasted effort and maybe worse.

Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear.

= = = = =

The dream didn't include this part, but it's a fact:

The checks HAVE APPEARED.

For a couple years I've been praying for Russia to step up and resist the USA STRONG bully. USA STRONG has been operating without resistance, and is running wild. I wasn't hopeful because Russia's natural tendency is non-interventionist.

Now Russia HAS stepped up, and is doing exactly what this bully needs. In Syria the bully has been creating permanent chaos and arming terrorists while pretending to be "fighting terrorism". Russia is actually fighting terrorism and halting the chaos.

After a bully is surprised by serious resistance, his balloon of arrogance starts to collapse ... not just in one place but in every place.

So: My prayers have been answered. I should be GRATEFUL instead of pushy.



Thanks, Ralph. Thanks, Nature. Thanks, Russia. Thanks, Putin!

Labels: Emersonian justice, Гром победы

  ¶ 12:53 AM

  He was right.
Five years ago I asked why Stalin felt it was necessary to subvert US society and government after WW2. Based on Robert Parker's "Headquarters Budapest", plus some radio commentaries in '46, I concluded:

[As seen from Europe,] our military had saved Europe's ass in WW1 and WW2, but before and between the wars our government had failed to form an intelligent and coherent foreign policy. Would we hold steady after this war, helping the other Allies to conclusively and decisively punish Germany? Or would our financiers and industrialists fall back to their natural preference for Germany, carrying Congress with them as they had done in the 1930s?

From this angle it's easy to see why Stalin wanted to have a firm hand on American policy, wanted to insure that the United Nations Organization served Russia more than America. From this angle, letting America return to normal meant letting Germany return to power. It wasn't mainly about Communism; it was mainly about Russian and European national interest.

In 2010 the result wasn't clear. Now it is. The new Axis is US/UK/DE. The new Allies are BRICS.

Joe was right. We did end up collaborating with Kraut tyranny again. The new Axis doesn't have the same organizational chart. Old Axis was Germany trying to kill everything. New is Germany killing Europe and USA STRONG killing everything else. (Except Israel, of course.)
  ¶ 4:24 PM

  Not the interesting part
UK Express has an article about one of NASA's pictures from Mars. Somebody claims to see running water in the picture. Could be, but it looks more like sand blown into streamlines behind the rock structure.

The rock structure is the interesting part! Look at all those cylinders. These limestone rocks were either placed by an intelligent "hand" (like a honeycomb); or formed as shells by some cylindrical creature that later died (like coral). I can't imagine a pure mineral process forming so many definite cylinders. If you saw this pattern on Earth, you'd instantly assume it was the ruins of an old forge or stone oven.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 6:39 AM

  Random thought on Italy
Why is Italy so poorly represented on the Web?

I was looking at an Italian page yesterday, following a link from ZeroHedge. Felt completely unfamiliar. Realized that I NEVER see anything written in Italian, and never see .IT domains. Other Euro countries are well-represented. I constantly read stuff in French and German, constantly follow links to .FR and .DE pages. I see a fair amount of .ES and .PL and .PT, but no .IT.

This sparsity is way out of tune with Italy's economic power. Fiat runs a major part of the world's economy.

Before 1980 Italy WAS a major player in electronics and computing. Olivetti competed with IBM for a long time.

Damn! I was thoroughly familiar with Olivetti's adding machines and typewriters, but I'd never heard of the Programma 101, the first true desktop computer, made in 1964. Bumped into it just now while trying to find why Olivetti faded. An unbelievably elegant and advanced design, using ATM-type magnetic cards to hold programs, and a mechanical torsional delay line for memory. BEAUTIFUL!

I WANT ONE! I WANT ONE!

But what happened to Italy's tech leadership? Still dunno.
  ¶ 4:40 AM

  Why no great black scientists?
WSJ asks why there aren't more Great black scientists.

I don't need to read the article. I know it's wrong.

The correct answer is somewhat complicated. I'll take it in three parts.

= = = = =

(1) We have redefined "Great Science" and "Great Scientist". There are plenty of people doing outstanding real science, in materials and microbiology and agriculture, but we don't honor them or even recognize their existence. "Greatness" is reserved for extreme abstraction and total disconnection from reality and life and morality, qualities that are relatively common among Orientals and Ashkenazi Jews, but rare among blacks and non-Jew Caucasians.

= = = = =

(2) Die-Versity makes it far more difficult for black students to achieve their proper potential. (Also non-Jew Caucasians, but I'm focusing on blacks here.) Our genocidal insistence that genes don't exist forces everyone into the same highly abstract forms of training. Africans are strong in concrete understanding and strong in moral intelligence. They are not strong in abstraction.

Before the 1954 integration, black students had a better chance to achieve their potential because their teachers and administrators were also black. The separate system was able to apply appropriate methods. More concrete training, more Call And Response. (Again, most of these methods SHOULD have been used in white schools as well, but the white schools mindlessly pursued insane abstraction because it was cool.)

= = = = =

(3) Every effort at school "reform" has gone the wrong way, farther from African skills and closer to China. Sputnik and SMSG. Classic case of the abstraction pathology. We had a chance to use our true strength in education. At that time our true industrial strength was easy to observe. We were strong and successful because we were using those concrete skills. If we had observed these facts, we could have redone math ed in the correct direction. Most egregious of all, we could have observed that the Russians were beating us because they had a SUPERIOR MODEL OF MATH ED. The Russian model was IDEALLY SUITED to our population of goys and blacks.

Nope. We didn't observe facts. We didn't follow our own model OR the Russian model. As fucking always, we mindlessly followed the academic hyperloonies, all the way out into the ionosphere of "Set Theory". We ruined an entire generation.

= = = = =

Fuck us. We are pure evil, pure crime. Every fucking time we have the fucking CHANCE to do something rational and proper and successful, we turn the other way and seek bloody mayhem and suicide.

= = = = =

LISTEN. TO. CARVER.

Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you. Talk to them.

Labels: Asked and answered, Carver, Experiential education

  ¶ 3:09 AM

  Thanks, Ralph 15
I'm sort of misusing my sequential title this time, because it's not an issue I give a fuck about. Still, it's a neat example of good old Compensation.

Repooflicans have spent the last THREE YEARS saying NOTHING but Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi.



I never figured out the meaning of this magic incantation, but it was clearly aimed somehow at Hillary.

I also don't understand why Repoofs are opposed to Hillary. She is the strongest of all neocons, the invadingest and invitingest and bombingest and occupyingest of all the invaders and inviters and bombers and occupiers. She makes McCain look like a Mennonite. Hillary is also the strongest supporter of Goldman and Morgan. Everything Goldman wants, Hillary gives.

So Hillary should be the absolute Platonic ideal Repoof candidate. Why oppose this Doubleplusalpha Male with weak slithery Batman-loving quasi-males?

Now the Benghazi magic act has finally hit Broadway, with the Big Show on Capitol Hill. Hillary had to face the Benghazi magic, whatever it is.

Did the Benghazi magic destroy Hillary? Nope. Her poll numbers are up, her funding has jumped. No fucking surprise.

This should have been obvious from the start. The 1998 pointless "impeachment" against Bill had exactly the same result. Lots of people who had solidly supported the Repoofs after their successful welfare reform got disgusted and turned away.

Did they learn? Nope. Another total defeat, another three years of totally wasted effort. Opposing their best candidate with three years of incomprehensible nonsense. Best Repoof wins, but the Repoofs are still unable to support her.

Thanks, Ralph.

Labels: Emersonian justice

  ¶ 2:22 AM

  Dueling trivialities
Since I'm stuck in random imbecile mode today.... We have a nice comparison of trivialities, paired on radio news. Again a clear distinction between Executive and ?????.

= = = = =

Trump's triviality: "I'll always say 'Merry Christmas'. Happy Holidays goes into the trash."

Unimportant issue, but AS FUCKING ALWAYS Trump is telling us WHAT HE WILL DO. He is specifying an ACTION.

= = = = =

Jeb's triviality: "My favorite superhero is Batman."

Nuff said.
  ¶ 1:25 PM

  Why no Ronco Pocket Baby Shawk Rod, bro?
Watching the irresistible Sunfish Bro yet again. Who does he sound like?

Billy Mays! Ronco! FUCKING POCKET FISHERMAN, BRO!

Already lots of remixes on Boston Bro, but as far as I can tell, nobody has done a Mays or Ronco remix yet. Surprising.
  ¶ 12:14 PM

  Chain of thought 2
Grumbling and growling about an idiot establishment columnist who seemed genuinely surprised when Biden decided not to run. Columnist gave some bizarre mechanistic reasons about Biden's positioning or whatever.

No surprise at all. Biden was never an executive, and he has made it pathetically clear that the ONLY thing he is now is a devastated parent. He never acted like he wanted the Presidency. For 8 years he's been completely out of public view, which is extremely abnormal. Typically the VP is the traveling salesman for the P, attending funerals and disasters so the P can concentrate better. In this admin, the P has done the traveling as well as the concentrating. Among current officials, Kerry is the only one who acts like he's running for P.

Sad dad is NOT a qualification for executive work. As I've noted before, only Trump is auditioning for the properly defined job of Chief Executive. He describes problems and offers hard decisions aiming to solve the problems. That's what an executive does.

In business, the exec's decisions are supposed to strengthen the company, increase its profit, so its employees will have a better life. In government, the exec's decisions are supposed to strengthen the country, increase its security, so its people will have a better life.

NO. WAIT. That's hopelessly old-fashioned. Modern corporate executives don't pursue those goals, and modern national execs don't either.

PING.

Just as our corporations have switched from profit-based to share-value, our country has also switched.

Modern corporate execs DO NOT WANT EMPLOYEES at all. They do not seek profit. Instead they pursue mergers and share buybacks, to increase the wealth of a few Chosen shareholders. In some cases they want to do the buying, in others their sole job is to make the company look good to a buyer.

Modern USA STRONG execs DO NOT WANT CITIZENS at all. They do not seek security. Instead they pursue worldwide chaos and QE, to increase the wealth of a few Chosen shareholders. In some cases they want to do the invading, in others they invite the invaders to kill their own citizens.

Most of the candidates this year are targeting the shareholder goal, which is why they don't make any fucking sense to me. Trump is targeting the old-fashioned security for citizens goal, which is why he makes sense.


50 DAYS SINCE START OF FINAL PURGE.

Labels: STRONG!, the broken circle

  ¶ 11:33 AM

  Debit where debit is due
Trump's first bad idea:

"Donald Trump said he would absolutely shut down U.S. mosques to defeat Islamic State militants, although he conceded that might not be legal."

Skip the part about "legal", whatever that strange sequence of letters might mean. We don't need no steenkin "laws" in this country. The only question is whether it would work. And the answer is NO.

ISIS was not developed by mosques. ISIS was developed and funded by the War Department as a way to make Islam look horrible. If you want to shut down ISIS, stop funding and training it. Shut down the War Department.

Labels: Asked and answered, STRONG!

  ¶ 3:57 AM

  The rest of the system

I bought this little solenoid from Jameco, thinking it might be useful in my attempt to redo the Phono-Faradic device. It wasn't useful, and I ended up using a plain old loudspeaker for the vibration source. The experiment failed anyway ... or more accurately it worked too well and scared me shitless.

The solenoid is a puzzle. It clearly isn't meant to be free-standing, because it doesn't have a return spring or even a limit on the shaft. When energized, the shaft snaps into one position and doesn't vibrate as I wanted; when unpowered, the shaft is just free to move and free to fall out in one direction. Obviously it was meant to be part of a specific system, but I couldn't envision the system.

I tried using it as a simple electromagnet for a different project, but it didn't work that way either.

Finally figured out what the solenoid is FOR, and now I know why it doesn't want to help any of my projects!

Been thinking and writing a lot about rigged systems lately. Most discussion of rigging, whether in oil markets or LIBOR or central banks or VW diesels, makes the peculiar assumption that the rigged-ness only happens when the rigger is "in control", and the system is honest or natural or free-market when the rig is off. This is nonsense.

After you know that a rig exists, you have to treat the entire system as a crime, because you DON'T KNOW that the rig is actually "off" at any moment. The only cure is to discard and rebuild with complete separation from all sources of corruption.

I wanted to use roulette wheels as a physical example of the principle, but didn't know the details. I'd only seen and heard stuff about foot controls vs electric controls.

Detailed discussions are revealing. Foot control was basically a brake on the wheel, requiring considerable skill by the croupier. Earlier electric systems energized a magnet below preferred numbers, attracting the steel ball. Modern electric systems include little solenoids under each number, powered by a digital radio-controlled module that rides completely inside the hub of the wheel. The real operator can be in an upstairs booth, or the system can be automatic so the croupier knows in advance which numbers are locked out (popped up) and which are preferred (unpopped) for this spin.

This solenoid is obviously one of those digital gaffs. That's the system it belongs in. No wonder it doesn't like my projects!

= = = = =


Current example of the once rigged = always rigged principle. Is al-Qaeda an American agent? We know that AQ was our gaff from 1980 through 1990. We built it as a brake on Russia's Afghan wheel. It appeared that AQ was acting against our interests from 1996 to 2006 or so. Since 2010 we've been explicitly arming and training AQ again, and now we're explicitly complaining that Russia is fighting against AQ. Only possible conclusion: It's always been our gaff, and it's always been aimed at Russia. During the times when it appeared to be "against us", we were releasing the pedal for our own purposes.

= = = = =

Graphic sidenote: It's appropriate that the looping GIF has become the dominant animation form in the Age Of Infinite Perseveration, the Age Of Total Rig. No need for quaint unenlightened Neanderthal devices like plot, suspense, or surprise.

Labels: defensible spaces, STRONG!

  ¶ 12:46 PM

  Sympathy for the city
I have nothing but contempt and hatred for the demonic genocidal Bloomberg-slave LEADERS of this unfortunate former "city", but the ordinary bureaucrats and employees are still just ordinary people doing competent work. They have to deal with classic idiots like this:

The streets no longer roll up at 6 p.m., but some residents on the South Hill say Spokane is becoming the City that Never Sleeps – because it’s too bright.

“You walk out in the street and it’s like a football stadium,” said Chris Oxford, a homeowner in the Rockwood neighborhood. On Monday, Avista replaced the sodium orange streetlight outside his house with a brighter, whiter LED bulb. “It just feels like you’re in a prison exercise yard,” Oxford said.

You've never been in a prison exercise yard, richass Rockwood fuckhead. Prison exercise yards are not lit at all because inmates are kept inside at night. You're just an ungrateful richass Rockwood fuckhead. If it's too bright, you can easily afford shades or blinds. Install them. Use them. Or instruct your servants to install and use them.

Of course ungrateful and richass and Rockwood and fuckhead are all the same word, so I'm a little inefficient here.

Given the choice, NORMAL HUMANS prefer good clear white light. Orange makes things harder to recognize and creates a gloomy mood. Regardless of color, ANY streetlight is BETTER than NO streetlight. NORMAL HUMANS are grateful for streetlights regardless of color. Many bankrupt cities are turning off their streetlights because they can't afford the electricity.

Why do I call this idiot classic?

Listen and learn. Fibber, 1948. Same idiocy.
  ¶ 2:34 AM

  laziest robbery ever
this has to be the lowest energy robbery

saunters in

says got any cash

clerk says no

robber says ok

saunters out
  ¶ 5:29 PM

  Unvictims
"News" is yammering about a settlement of Madoff's theft. Madoff was caught and jailed, of course, because his victims were People Who Count. "News" described this theft of 17 billion as the "biggest financial crime in history." Well, it's big. I'll grant you that. And the victims are actually victims, though most of them were rich enough to CHECK OUT a scam that looked too good to be true.

But the SIZE of Madoff's crime is microscopic compared to the crime still being perpetrated by the ZIRP central bank.

Trying to quantify the crime.....

The total of all money-market (savings) accounts is hard to find via Google. This may or may not be correct:



Table is on p 100 of this PDF. The three highlighted rows seem to be savings account type stuff, though I may be misinterpreting terms. These three rows total about 12 trillion in most of the years on the chart. (Looks like 2 + 8 + 2 trillion typically.)

Taking 12 trillion as the total, ZIRP has stolen:

5% of 12 trillion per year = 600 billion per year.

Not compounding, just multiplying by the 8 years since 2008 = about 4 trillion total.

That's the amount of money STOLEN by ZIRP banks since 2008. Ordinary people would have been able to spend 4 TRILLION EXTRA during those years, if banks had been operating LEGALLY. That's 4 TRILLION REMOVED from real wealth. You dare to fucking WONDER why ZIRP and QE didn't ADD any fucking wealth effect? Chutzpah. Monsters. Of course you don't really fucking wonder because you egregious murderers KNOW exactly what you're doing. Killing the poor and the middle.

My own personal share of the robbery is about 24k, or two years of typical living. The Fed Mafia owes me two years of income that they STOLE.

Wouldn't you say that 12 trillion is bigger than 17 billion? To be exact, it's 700 times bigger. But most of the victims of this crime are Unpersons, so it's an Uncrime.
  ¶ 8:00 AM

  That's a negatory, Agent Rosenbaum.
FAA has decided to clamp down on drones.

Interesting parallel, illustrating the NRA point that it's not the tool but the user.

As a technology, drones are 100 YEARS OLD. The gov't experimented with remote control planes in WW1, and radio-controlled miniature planes have been a widespread hobby ever since. Regulation wasn't needed because the RC hobbyists were squares.

Now that drones have been adopted by Randian fuckheads who are interfering with all sorts of normal activities, regulation is needed.

= = = = =

Parallel: Ham radio vs CB.

Hams also began formally in 1914. They have always operated with very light and cooperative regulation by FCC, because hams are squares. They work hard to maintain a culture of civilized respect for the property of non-hams.



The CB band is right next to the 10-meter ham band, and CB was officially supposed to stay within a 5-watt power limit, just like Novice hams. Exactly the same technology, and for many years a quiet lightly regulated backwater.

When CB became coooooool in the '70s, the Randians took over. Power limits disappeared, and the usual limitations on splatter and interference also disappeared. You can't watch TV? Your garage door is zooming up and down all day? Your pacemaker is running at 2300 bpm? Tough shit, LOSER TAKER MOOCHER NEGATIVE EXTERNALITY. I AM GOD. I WIN.

Because Randians are evil, the law had to get hardass.
  ¶ 3:19 AM

  Countering Cameron
A pretty good counter-vector to Supersatan Cameron's perfect recipe for infinite terrorism.

This is from Bernardito Auza, a Filipino bishop who serves as the Vatican ambassador to UN. Coming from a poor country, he actually understands humanity and gets at least PART of the truth.

“We must dry up the swamps where terrorism breeds: by education and mutual respect; by perseverance in dialogue at all levels; by the rule of law and good governance; by engaging entire local communities most at risk of radicalization and achieving their satisfactory social integration; by creating job opportunities, especially for the young, who are susceptible to terrorist propaganda,” he said.

Tabulating his points:

Irrelevant shit:
Education, dialogue, "engaging", "integration".

True:
Rule of law, RESPECT, JOB OPPORTUNITIES.

False:
None.


Considering his careerist handicap, a pretty good record. He gets the two big points right, adds a bunch of ethereal nonsense, and does no harm. Education can be a ferocious negative when done the US/UK way, but I'm pretty sure Auza doesn't mean Critical Queer Studies when he says education.

Labels: Asked and answered

  ¶ 2:10 AM

  Desaluting Canada


Second desalute. Both of the temporary recaptures by God's side have fallen back to Satan. First Australia, now Canada. The bizarrely Orwellianly termed "Free World" is now strictly Satan's property.

God still firmly controls Africa, and Russia, though not entirely God's property, is fighting HARD on God's side.


48 DAYS SINCE START OF FINAL PURGE.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 1:43 AM

  Ideology vs purpose
Latest hyperbonkerness from Cameron.

The government says the new strategy is intended to disrupt extremists, pursue those responsible for radicalization and address some of the social reasons that have allowed extremism to flourish. But critics say they worry that the new measures may be seen as heavy-handed and exacerbate the sense of alienation and resentment among young British Muslims, which is itself a driver of radicalization.

Mr. Cameron, who has described the battle against terrorism as the struggle of his generation, hopes the measures will bolster the influence of moderate and mainstream Muslim voices. He is also expected to restate the case for updating Britain’s laws on electronic surveillance.

“We know that extremism is really a symptom; ideology is the root cause, but the stakes are rising, and that demands a new approach,” Mr. Cameron is expected to say, according to comments released by his office. “So we have a choice: Do we choose to turn a blind eye, or do we choose to get out there and make the case for our British values.”

"Critics" are correct, as fucking always.

Key falsehood in Cameron's approach: "Ideology is the root cause."

No. "British values" are the root cause.

"British values" = "American values" = death fetish, infinite greed, infinite imperialist aggression, infinite obliteration of truth and logic, infinite smashing of normal human life, raw bloody infinite evil.

Root cause of the falsehood about ideology is, as always, the commie myth that humans are passive mechanical identical grains of sand. Under that false assumption, changing ideology is the way to change behavior.

In fact humans are living social mammals with a PURPOSE. We have an internal compass, an innate sense of right and wrong. The innate sense doesn't include all the details of Natural Law, but it can instantly discern that "British values" are pure suicide.

What happens after this discernment is the real variable.

Some people have a weak compass. Some are locked into a comfy cushy career path that provides enough power and money and sex to counteract the pull of the compass.

When you have a strong compass and no status, you start thinking.

= = = = =

Language sidenote: Some languages have special verb forms used only by the nobility or upper caste. English never had those specific forms, but now a specialized verb tense has appeared, marking the accession of a new level of royalty. Is expected to say is strictly reserved for the Prime Minister. All of his speeches are released in advance, and all newspapers publish his speeches in the is expected to say tense, rather than the vulgar common says tense. NYTimes has picked up this reserved tense from Telegraph, Guardian, etc.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Make or break

  ¶ 5:03 AM

  Chain of thought
Chain of thought ....

Reading car book as usual while eating. Open to '38 Buick. Text says "Revised Dynaflash engine and new coil-spring suspension were Buick's big news for 1938."

DynaFlash. Later DynaSlush. Auto marketers really like Dyna things, don't they? Dyna implies youth and sportiness and all that. Sell a young man's car to an old man. Why no Stat- names? Why didn't anyone ever target customers who understand that stability is a good thing? Well, Nash did. When a critic teased Romney that his cars were usually seen in the right lane, Romney said that was fine as long as he sold a lot of them.

Ping. George Romney was a man who constantly observed REALITY and constantly SAID TRUE THINGS. No delusions. He spoke truth about car buyers. He spoke truth about union thugs. He spoke truth about outsourcing long before the trend was obvious. He spoke truth about Vietnam and got purged for it. Utterly destroyed, Unpersoned.

So far Trump has resisted the destroyers. How long can he continue?


47 DAYS SINCE START OF FINAL PURGE.

  ¶ 3:01 AM

  Bound to happen
Jesus himself was arrested. Preachers have said it would happen if he came back, and sure enough......



I was idly scanning the mugshots and bumped into this odd-looking name. At first I tried to read it as Slavic or maybe Albanian, then I realized. This dude changed his name to the correct and proper name of Jesus in correctly spelled Latin! Must be a story behind it. Correctly spelled Latin doesn't correlate well with aggravated battery.

I'm guessing his middle initials are actually N R, not just N. Official computers tend to standardize names.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 5:47 PM

  Not a Robust Debate!
This is genuinely interesting..........

Trump, in an escalating feud with Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush, continued his assault on the legacy of former President George W. Bush.

"Jeb said 'we were safe with my brother.' 'We were safe.' Well, the World Trade Center just fell down," Trump continued. "Now, am I trying to blame him? I'm not blaming anybody. But the World Trade Center came down. So when he said, 'we were safe' -- that's not safe. We lost 3,000 people."

For the FIRST FUCKING TIME IN THIRTY FUCKING YEARS, major politicians are ACTUALLY DEBATING. They are making ARGUMENTS ON OPPOSITE SIDES of a hugely important question. This is not the universal Robust Debate, where both "sides" implicitly accept the same absolute genocidal lies and argue about how many trillions we must spend and how many millions we must kill to "solve" the infinitely false "problem".

Trump is (as usual!) saying something TRUE. Jeb is (as always!) defending absolute lies. Jeb still doesn't know how to deal with .... Okay, okay, it's trite but unavoidable:

Jeb, you can't handle the truth. Or more precisely, you've never encountered a truth-TELLER and you don't know how to handle a truth-TELLER.

= = = = =

Semi-related barking/nonbarking: I notice the mediasatans have tamped down their Two Centuries Hate against Trump. They're no longer using the word GAFFE for every true thing he says. Still CONTROVERSIAL, which means the same thing, but not GAFFE. But the brand-R talkers have NOT changed their tune in response to Trump's correct reading of the public mood. They're still running full Rand. I just heard a second-string Repoof talker say specifically and explicitly that you are a LOSER if you aren't making 50 million dollars. You're lazy and untalented.

Of course it's fun to watch evil politicians choking on their own toxic goo, but I still keep hoping for a tiny twitch of intelligence from one "side" or the other. Stupid hope.
  ¶ 3:52 PM

  I take it back
I've said some hard things about Economist Deaton in the last few days, based on mediasatan interpretations of his work, and based on the fact that the Nobel Genociders considered him worthy of an award.

Listening to an interview with Deaton on BBC right now. I take it all back. This is an economist who ACTUALLY OBSERVES FACTS and UNDERSTANDS how humans work. He understands and uses the logarithmic basis of perception, which other economists completely ignore.

Possibly the ONLY valid economist.
  ¶ 4:01 AM

  Not that it's needed 2
Think Britain still exists?

Taxpayers are facing a bill of almost £150 million to defend British soldiers who are being sued by enemy fighters for breaching their “human rights”. More than 2,000 separate compensation claims and judicial review cases have been prepared by lawyers in the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Suspected Taliban bomb-makers and insurgents captured by British troops on the battlefield are among those who have begun legal action against the government.

Nope. No more Britain.

Any "nation" that would think for even a picosecond about ALLOWING this to happen is no longer a nation.

What is the response of utterly demasculated totally fagged "Britain"?

By the end of the year, a major strategic security review will determine the future shape and size of the Armed Forces as the government plans how to combat new threats from terrorists, Russian aggression and “rogue” states.

But this isn't the real problem. The real problem happened BEFORE all of this unimaginable shit. If we hadn't been CREATING terrorists and INVADING Russian territory and RIPPING Arab states into shreds, we wouldn't have to worry about "terrorists" and Russian DEFENSE and "rogue" states.

All of this shit was purely our own creation. UK obeyed US, US obeyed Our Most Noble And Radiant Prophet Binyamin Netanyahu.

If we had been MINDING OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS since 1989, there would be some actual terrorists and some actual rogue states because those things are always present, but the magnitude and direction of their vectors would be drastically different. The small number of terrorists would be making trouble inside their own countries, and the few rogue states would be making trouble for their own people. And of course Russia would also be minding its own business because Russia ALWAYS minds its own business UNTIL it's attacked by some psychopathic genocidal satanic hypermonster like Napoleon or Kaiser or Hitler or Bush or Obama or Cameron.

Labels: STRONG!

  ¶ 2:29 AM

  Blathering, mathering
Pointless article, interesting comments in Reason.com.

Science Denier Ron Bailey was blathering on about something or other, related to the latest Nobel Genocide Econ prize. Reason readers being nerds, they grabbed onto this point:

The anomalous sex ratio in many poor countries must be the result of other dynamics, such as ... the use of contraception once the desired number of sons is born.

and worked on it math'ly.

My attempt isn't nearly as mathy as most, but it reaches a firm set of conclusions.

This py prog creates 10,000 'families', all on the assumption that the parents will keep going until they get a boy. If no boys, I stop each 'family' at 21 kids, which is extreme but not impossible. A more ordinary max for American Catholics is probably around 13. I've known a couple families with 13 kids.

Results are nicely consistent.

Total number of boys among all families is EXACTLY THE SAME as total number of girls. Each run of 10k 'families' is unequal by no more than 200 either way, and the off's clearly balance out over repeated runs.

Another SOLID convergence: 2/3 of families are odd, 1/3 are even. The random variations are TIGHT on this proportion.

Max family size is 16 among all the runs I've done. I don't think there's any firm stop on this, but I haven't seen it go above 16 yet. 13 seems to be the highest halfway common number, which sort of agrees with my Roman observation.

The math may be wrong, but the REAL problem here is that the rule itself is unrealistic.

By the given rule half of all the families will be one boy and no girls. The others will have a varying number of girls and always exactly one boy. So the total of boys is exactly the same as the total of families. The girls add up to approximately the same number for a reason that I can sort of dimly see, but won't even try to parse. Probability makes my brain itch.

All of this is irrelevant anyway. Natural Law families aren't going to stop at one and aren't going to run up to 20, no matter which gender the last kid is. Natural Law families like to have lots of kids because kids are useful around the farm or business. A boy can carry heavier loads, so he's somewhat more useful. Parents start with a goal in mind, usually 4 or 5, and extend the goal by one or two if they don't get a boy. This rule can't be mechanized or calculated.

FWIW, here's the code.

import random

# Assume parents want boy and will continue having kids until boy
# happens.  Run up to total of 20 kids, pretty much the practical limit...
# 1 is boy, 2 is girl

maxlen=0
runs=10000
totkids = 20
odds=0
evens=0
boys=0
girls=0

for run in range(runs):
    allchoices=[]
    for index in range(0,totkids+1):
        choice=random.randint(1,2)

        if choice==1: # got boy. stop.
            allchoices.append(choice)
            boys=boys+1
            break

        else: # got girl. continue
            allchoices.append(choice)
            girls=girls+1

    chlen=len(allchoices)
    if chlen>maxlen: maxlen=chlen
    if chlen % 2 == 0: evens=evens+1
    else:              odds=odds+1
print "max len %d odds %d evens %d boys %d girls %d" % (maxlen,odds,evens,boys,girls)

# end

I've also placed it in this little zip.

Note: This doesn't apply to the Chinese one-child-policy situation where parents were KILLING or aborting all girls to end up with one boy. In that case you don't need algorithms to see that the result will be heavy on boys.

Labels: Metrology, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 4:31 PM

  Who doesn't know?
Quoted at Common Dreams:

“Globalization cannot be allowed to become the grand global casino where investors rig the system to guarantee that they always win.” UN human rights expert Alfred-Maurice de Zayas doesn’t mince his words when it comes to the new generation of trade deals like TTIP.

CANNOT BE ALLOWED? WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK? Globalization is exactly the rigged casino. That's the WHOLE FUCKING POINT. It wouldn't have happened at all if it didn't guarantee constant wins by the riggers.

This is like saying "Dancing cannot be allowed to become a system where people move their bodies and arms and feet rhythmically for pleasure and sexual satisfaction." "Mathematics cannot be allowed to become a system where calculators rig the system to guarantee correct answers."

A UN "human" "rights" expert is the ultimate insider. He knows GOOD AND GODDAMN WELL what globalization is. We know he's lying.

Now if we heard an outsider like a taxi driver or a waitress saying the above sentence, maybe we could assum............

NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. I'm wrong. We could NOT assume the taxi driver or waitress was unaware of the sole purpose of globalization. The taxi driver watched his Dad die of alcohol after losing his excellent steel-mill job to Tata Steel. The waitress is waitressing because her boyfriend lost his excellent programming job to Tata Teleservices. Both of them know globalization in their long-suffering BONES.

Well then. Insiders know globalization because they're running it and infinitely profiting from it. Outsiders know globalization because we're dying from it.

Who does that leave? Maybe some insulated academic economists and journalists? People who never encounter the actual victims? People who profit from carrying the lethal lies of "human" "rights" monsters, and thus have a bias toward believing?

Labels: Asked and answered

  ¶ 6:30 AM

  Do we need a Comma Liberation Front?
UK Telegraph does it again.

From an article about a book on WW1 camouflage and trickery:

One photograph shows a mustachioed soldier attempting to read a map from within a makeshift tree stump, made from chicken wires and leaving him “simultaneously cramped and horribly exposed”.

Why was the map made from chicken wires? And what are chicken wires? Wires shaped to look like chickens? Wires made from white meat? Fried connections? Cowardly conductors? Draft resistors?

Fortunately the picture clears it up. Contrary to the written sentence, the tree stump was made of chickenwire.
  ¶ 4:32 AM

  Can we catch word-weapons early?
Returning yet again to a basic question. Why do SOME government agencies manage to violate Parkinson? Why do SOME corporations and NGOs disappear when their purpose is gone? How do we make this happen more often? Clearly the Bush/Obama neocon monsters asked this question when they were planning to repeat Wilson. They found the differences and used them for evil purposes, to guarantee that war and tyranny will be permanent and self-maintaining. Nobody has ever used the difference for good.

This is a question that wasn't touched by earlier writers of charters and constitutions. The 1787 boys assumed that competition and sweetness would keep the parts of gov't in check. Fantastically stupid assumption. When an agency or NGO or corporation gets big enough, it can simply destroy all other players.

The problem was clearly visible and recognized in 1890. Populists and 'progressives' managed to pass federal anti-trust laws (now extinct), and the few state constitutions written after 1890 attempted to use referenda as an external feedback mechanism. Referenda still work as negative feedback on trivial matters where none of the monster players care about an issue. On important matters that could possibly threaten the infinite wealth of a Mafia, the Mafias can reliably count on the agencies criminally and fraudulently described as "courts" to overturn any referendum that threatens their monstrosity.

It's clear by now that any effort to directly halt corruption in agencies and corporations is doomed. Any institution large enough to combat the devils will be instantly controlled by the devils. We need to focus on defending our souls. Well then, how about a revolutionary movement aimed at defending WORDS from corruption? Lexical Liberation Front? ** Orwell understood the power of the dictionary, and it has turned out to be the tyrant's strongest weapon. We've seen it work beautifully on terrorism and marriage and ethics and rape and evolution and science. All of those words have been flipped and weaponized in the last 20 years. Too late to recapture them.

Can we catch a word-weapon in its early stages?

Here's one that hasn't quite 'gone national' yet:

Their research found Spokane County's rate of homelessness is 33 percent higher than state average. Of the nearly 3,000 homeless children in Spokane County schools, 76 percent of them are doubling up with family and friends due to evictions and other financial issues. Oelrich said when people think about homelessness, they think about people sleeping under bridges or holding signs, but homeless students are much less visible.

STOP AND THINK. If you're "doubling up with family and friends" you're NOT HOMELESS. You're an extended family. Nothing special. Historically normal. It sometimes indicates poverty, but it is NOT HOMELESSNESS.

Clearly we're observing a weaponized word in its early stages here. This is pure Parkinson. A naked power-grab and budget-grab through deceptive definition. THIS IS FRAUD IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AS KITING A CHECK. Erasing the figure that was written on the valid check and replacing it by a new figure with the aim of taking money you don't deserve. Literally and specifically and chargeably uttering a forged instrument.

= = = = =

** Footnote on Liberation: Language has its own Natural Law, which is STRONGLY DEMOCRATIC. When tyrants are not allowed to meddle, words and grammar and syntax are naturally formed by a slow-moving consensus. Definitions often shift by this natural process. So a movement to release the claws of tyrants would be pro-democracy in a deep and perfect sense. One problem: Standard-brand conservative types don't understand this part of Natural Law. They insist on enforcing a peculiar set of rules that were never actually rules, and definitions chosen at arbitrary points in the past. Those pseudorules and antique definitions simply can't be enforced and shouldn't be enforced. So the LLF would need to recruit mainly from absolutely fed-up "liberals" in the tradition of Orwell himself.

45 DAYS SINCE START OF FINAL PURGE.

Labels: defensible spaces, Ethics

  ¶ 3:32 AM