Unusually skilled photos
A new item at KSHS. A set of photographs from 1912, taken with a much more discerning eye than the usual amateur snaps. Most are focused on work and skills.

These caught my attention:

#4 is a cobbler with the specialized tools of his trade mounted on orange crates.

#9 is either a print shop or a telegraph office; or putting those two together, the newspaper. There's an expensive typewriter mounted on an orange crate with a neat homemade sound-stopper pad; and a possible side-paddle telegraph key on the table. Hard to tell, but it does have a wire coming from it. The two men look more newsish than telegraphish.

#10 is the Camera Shop, photobombed by a cat.

#12 is the town dog, who has clearly built up a nice useful set of friends.

#25 is a complete boggler. A man is proudly standing in front of a barber shop with his fantastic homemade portable machine. He's clearly vending something.... but WHAT? Not popcorn. Mini-donuts? Pecans? But if pecans, why all the bricks or ingots that appear to be inputs to the machine? Vending gold nuggets? Nah. [Later after fiddling with the photo: I guess it's popcorn after all. Still doesn't explain the ingots.]

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 5:48 AM

  An odd shared lie
Convective thought, triggered by this.

Christians and "scientists" disagree on many matters but share one STRONG contradictory belief-pair. Both parts of the pair are false, and the two sides of the pair are mismatched.

(1) Humans are innately identical AND (2) Humans are totally different from other animals.

In reality:

(1) Humans are innately different AND (2) Humans share many** characteristics with other animals.

Most people understand reality quite well, even while verbally assenting to the Christian or "scientific" lies.

The Christian reason for adopting this belief-pair seems to make sense to Christians. Apparently Christians need to treat normal behavior and criminal behavior as identical because Original Sin; and Christians need to assert that we're made in God's image because ??????. I can't begin to comprehend any of this. It's word-salad.

The "scientists" adopt the belief-pair in order to fulfill the prophecies of their strange Statistics cargo cult. The Stats God requires a null hypothesis to misguide your experiments. For #1 the null hypothesis requires all humans to be identical. This is at least internally consistent at the verbal level. For #2 the null hypothesis states that animals don't share any of our characteristics. This is a reverse use of the null but doesn't get noticed. The real need for #2 is simple ego and arrogance.

= = = = =

** I suspect many is extremely close to all, but there's not quite enough evidence for all yet. Rapidly converging.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Grand Blueprint, Shared Lie

  ¶ 5:00 AM

  Same thing, isn't it?
Article in RT discussing the Western war against Russia. One Russian made a point about our propaganda from RFE/RL...

They don’t seem interested in the ordinary Russian. They are aimed at people like me. The one or two percent who speak English well enough to understand their content. Their Russian-language stuff is very poor. Anyway, they just bombard us with stuff about how terrible life in Russia is. They obviously hope the English-speaking, and well-traveled, elite will rise up against our government, out of embarrassment or something. It’s stupid. They’d be much smarter if they targeted us with reasons why America is so great, if it really is so. Telling us how awful our own country is makes us want to love it more.

Sounds familiar. It's the same approach they're using against TROLLS of all sorts, and currently against Trump fans. Insult us deeply, hurt us, spit on us, try to make us feel ashamed. Doesn't work. It only shows us the horrible evil of USA STRONG.

When you have truth, you speak truth. When you have nothing but lies, you insult the truth-tellers and turn them into permanent hardass enemies.

As usual it comes down to idea-based nation vs people-based nation.

In the '50s RFE used more effective methods, focusing more on telling the truth about America. Truth was possible in the '50s for two reasons. (1) In the '50s life in USA was generally better than life in USSR. (2) USA and USSR were both idea-based. We thought our idea was better. No matter which was superior, a war of ideas made sense when both governments were riding on ideas.

Now USA STRONG is collapsing BECAUSE IT'S BUILT ON IDEAS. Russia, freed of dependence on ideas by its own previous collapse, is just the nation of the Russian people, and Putin rules on that basis.

Orlov again. Russia was able to pick up the pieces because it was originally a people-based nation before Lenin tacked on the ideas. America has never been a nation coinciding with an ethnic group. It began with contradictory and nonsensical ideas, so it has nothing to fall back on.

Labels: switchover, Гром победы

  ¶ 3:14 AM

  No, that's not the status quo.
A pretty good writeup of the unsurprising "discovery" that reptiles have REM sleep just like mammals.

"The status quo, until our study, was that these features of sleep only exist in mammals and in birds," neuroscientist Gilles Laurent told the Christian Science Monitor. Laurent is the director for the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and an author on the new paper. Although birds, mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor — birds, being descendants of dinosaurs, are actually more closely related to lizards than they are to us — it was thought that the former two may have evolved their sleep patterns independently, since reptiles didn't seem to share it.

Actually, no. Laurent and the author are both missing the MOST INTERESTING part of the status quo. Cuttlefish and octopuses also dream, in a way that looks remarkably like our dreaming... with an extra bonus that you can see the dream from the outside on the dreamer's LCD skin.

And that blows the "evolution" crap all to hell.

For ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE the only possible answer is that ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE were present in the original design. Some animals use more of the original, some use less. The blueprint was drawn just once, and it includes provisions for partial or modular construction.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:47 PM

  New approach
1912: Inland Empire interurban builds hydro dam at Nine Mile Falls, boasts that it has two separate 66KV lines running from Nine Mile into Spokane.



2016: Along the same Nine Mile-to-downtown corridor, Avista is repairing and replacing some poles, supposedly to make recovery easier after a windstorm. They have evolved a new version of the two-line method. Cut off the old pole, leave the part that holds the Comcast and phone lines, add a new pole next to it for the high-voltage line. Senior pole, junior pole.



= = = = =

I was already thinking about this corridor since I'm "building" another set of interurban-related Poser scenes. One of the pieces is a semi-realistic version of the Inland frequency changer substations. These cottages contained dynamotors that converted the streetcar's high voltage DC to 110V AC for household use.





Unlike most of the crap I "build", these cottages still exist in this neighborhood. After the streetcar system died in the '30s, WWP/Avista continued to maintain them as storage buildings, finally sold them to private buyers around 2007. One of them was immediately occupied and expanded without ruining the original part. The other was remodeled in an overly ambitious Wrightian style on spec. It was occupied for a little while but has mostly been vacant. Moral of the story: When a building is already right, don't try to make it Wright.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 9:18 AM

  Sane China
China has joined Russia in banning foreign NGOs. This is proper national behavior. Many of these NGOs are run by Soros, others are basically spying for USA STRONG. All are bad for China. (These particular NGOs are bad for EVERYONE, but that's not relevant to the main point.)

If we had any sense we would have banned Chinese "visitors" and "students" a long time ago.

We don't have any sense because we're locked into the old genocidal leftist lie. Because we can't allow ourselves to see ethnicity, we misunderstand all human behavior.

Nations based on ethnicity are sane and long-lasting. An ethnic group NATURALLY wants to defend its own territory and integrity, so a nation that coincides with a tribe is working in resonance with Nature. China is basically monoethnic. Its western provinces include other tribes but those tribes don't participate in government. They are occupied colonies and they behave accordingly.

Nations based on ideas are crazy and temporary because ideas are crazy and temporary. USA STRONG was able to fight hard in WW2 because FDR had replaced Wilson delusion and Morgan greed with a government that was SERVING ITS OWN PEOPLE. After 1960 the USA STRONG governments returned to Wilson delusion and Morgan greed, and soon lost legitimacy. Nobody has a strong natural desire to defend "Democracy", especially when "Democracy" is obviously dead. When you see the alleged representatives persistently serving China and Mexico and Israel after repeated "elections" that tried to alter their actions, you cease to believe in "Democracy".

Labels: defensible spaces

  ¶ 4:14 AM

  Here's how
Idiotic governments and NGOs are meeting yet again, supposedly to think of new ways to stop elephant poachers.

Needless to fucking say, they will think of new ways to make the trade even stronger and more profitable. This is their goal.

If a government really wanted to stop the ivory trade, the correct method is as follows. Flood the market with poisoned ivory. Use the warehouses of ivory that the value-raising idiots have been confiscating. Instead of burning it to guarantee maximum value, infuse it with anti-Viagra. Send it back out through the black market and earn a little money as a nice side-effect. Make Chinese dicks permanently uninflatable, transform Chinese males into genderless uncompetitive souls who HATE GAMBLING with a lavender passion. In other words, turn them into Swedes.

That'll do it. Ivory will immediately lose all value.

Labels: Asked and answered

  ¶ 2:40 AM

  Where are they?
While most of the traditional 'conspiracy theories' have turned out to be perfectly true and even worse than the schizies imagined, the Martian style is still unproven. I'm waiting.

Convective thought.

Martian believers have been around for a long time, but until ~30 years ago they were remarkably functional. Now they go around shooting people.

Thinking back to the 40s and 50s, among my distant relatives and among the parents of friends, I can count four women who were solidly outside of reality. One was a classic Martianist, all were schizy. These four women were NOT in institutions. They functioned as mothers and wives, with some help from husbands and kids. In fact their kids ended up stronger and saner than most because they had to take real responsibility early in life.

What's the difference? Why so many functional Martianists 50 years ago and so many terrorist Martianists now? Where are the moderate Martianists?

Gone to Haldol every one. Modern psychotropic drugs. Once you get on them, you can't get off; and if you miss a dose, everything runs wild. The bounceback effect.

In objective terms the Martian belief system is no different from the Christian or Dawkins belief systems. Each system attributes a single cause to phenomena that aren't immediately obvious, and each system builds a ladder of logic to connect the single cause to everything else. It's Martians all the way down, or it's Jesus all the way down, or it's Random Evolution all the way down.

Martians and Jesus and Random are equally** nonexistent, but we give wildly divergent status to their believers. Martianists end up in institutions, Christians end up unemployed and suicidal, and Dawkinsians end up in charge of everyone else.

= = = = =

**Well, it's unfair to say 'equally'. Martians haven't been observed yet, but as we learn more about Mars through the rovers we grow more certain that Mars contains some form of life. Jesus was an actual man but the current ghostly version of him is unobserved and unlikely. Random is TOTALLY DISPROVED NONSENSE, therefore its believers have the highest power and status.
  ¶ 5:55 PM

  No DOI
BBC briefly mentioned a new MRI study that shows remarkable similarity in semantic mapping.

A longer article in 'The Scientist' went on to ask a more interesting question.

It's not overly surprising that seven Berkeley grad students and their professor have similar brain patterns. College is a sieve, and grad students in such a high-falutin subject have been sieved with great precision to match the prof himself.

Example: The short piece in BBC says "Volunteers - including lead author Alex Huth - listened to more than two hours of stories from a US radio programme while remaining still inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner."

Ping. "A US radio programme" = The Moth Story Hour. My semantic mapping is close enough to these folks that I was able to map the vague description into the exact referent.

And sure enough, the longer article verifies.

More interesting question: 'The Scientist' did some actual journalism, asking several unconnected researchers about the GOOD trend away from theory-driven research toward data-driven.

Anjan Chatterjee ... The fundamental issue with data-driven approaches is they “can ferret out patterns, but that tells you nothing at all about the meaning of those patterns.”

Well, yes. That's called SCIENCE. Picking out the meaning of those patterns is what you're supposed to do. In fact, that's what the semantic-mapping section of your brain is supposed to do. The theory-driven approach never leads to meaning; it only leads to finer and finer slicing of a question, which keeps the grants rolling in. The question is never answered, because that would stop the grants.

This small piece of data does lead to an interesting hypothesis. If categories of things resonate in standardized areas of the brain, it means that the things we make or use were written into our brain before we made or used them.

Let's check earlier research:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

I can't find a DOI number for this research, but I'm pretty sure it answers the relevant theoretical question. We knew the parts of our universe ab initio.

= = = = =

Closely related sidenote: You don't even need to adduce language to see the need for an innate classification of objects. Food tells the story more directly. As Polistra discussed earlier, we had to know innately what's good to eat. We're no different from any other animal in this respect. If we had to wait for culture and language, we would have died long before we ever reached culture and language. If each individual had to learn from scratch that rocks and sticks are not good eating, while apples and tomatoes and bird eggs ARE good eating, each individual would die immediately. This requires an innate set of categories.

= = = = =

Distantly related sidenote: Using MRI to map the structures of the brain is fine, but using MRI to map activity in the brain is dubious. We've known since 1880 that applying magnetic fields to the brain CHANGES what the brain is doing. This knowledge was suppressed by the Freudians and the pill-pushers, but it's been re-"discovered" recently with effective and curative results. Mapping the brain's activity while shaping the brain's activity is like measuring a car's top speed uphill without noticing the hill.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:36 AM

  Tiny house advocate gets it right
Local:

Hansen says the average person can build a tiny home for around $20,000, and if you use recycled materials the cost is even less. Building a tiny home isn't just for the experts as just about anyone can do it. "Anyone can do it, anyone can have it, and you can do it in probably a year or less," Hansen said. He's working to develop a blueprint that would give specific instructions and a list of materials needed to build your own tiny house. He's also working on one of his own, which he'll give to his sister.

The tiny house began as a project at Riverside High School. Students were learning to build the home in exchange for credits in math, science and English. That program is now on hold but Hansen says teaching students how to build a tiny home could empower them to live debt free.

"A high school student if they started when they were a freshman, they could have something like this when they graduate high school," he said.

That last sentence is the best part. If the house becomes the central project for your school time, you will actually LEARN something in school. You'll graduate with a place to live and skills to live with.

Beautiful idea!

Most tiny house advocates are either pointlessly serving the rich or stupidly serving the homeless. (Recreating tramp camps. NOT what the homeless need.) Hansen is REALISTIC.

Labels: Experiential education, skill-estate

  ¶ 5:00 PM

  Not just an act?
Trump is back on solid ground after either (1) allowing new adviser Manafort to get out of control, or (2) letting Manafort play a head-fake. Can't tell which.

In any case, his foreign policy speech today is a clear and solid and consistent statement of POPULISM. Everything must be calibrated to the INTERESTS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, not to the interests of BANKS or CORPORATIONS or SOME OTHER FUCKING COUNTRY.

That is exactly and totally what Populism means. Jennings Bryan would approve. Bob Taft would approve.


  ¶ 3:43 PM

  Shoot for the stars, Spokane!
Nice bit of comic timing on the Spokane-News facebook page....

= = = = =

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 12:20 PM

  Small victories
In Spokane itself, Satan took over the "City" "Council" several years ago, driving out a couple of weak non-satans and forcibly replacing them with satans.

Now the Valley council is working the other way. Voters picked a majority of non-satans, and the two remaining satans have voluntarily quit, spewing the requisite megagallon of toxic tourette sludge across the landscape.

This is EXTREMELY UNUSUAL. Satan rarely retreats.

I hope the majority non-satans have the guts to forcibly replace the satans with new non-satans.
  ¶ 7:12 AM

  Status morse
Curbside Classic has a feature on a peculiarly mismatched '64 Chevy this morning. Got thinking about GM's long-standing habit of marking status by adding more elements to a sequence. It's an ancient technique but still functional. More notches on your bow, more ribbons on your uniform, more feathers in your headdress = higher status. For many years you could reliably distinguish Chevy's top model by counting taillights. You could distinguish Buick's Roadmaster by counting portholes. Chrysler got into the game briefly and halfheartedly, with one light for Plymouth, two for Dodge, and three for DeSoto. Ford, the populist company, never played the counting game.

Studie played it just once but it was hardly worth the expense.



For some reason I started reading those lights in Morse.

Chevy hit the Morse Aptronym jackpot in '65.



The Chevy II had .. .. = ii.

The SS (and other Impalas) had ... ... = ss.

If you read vertically and diagonally, you can see more complicated patterns.



'60 CaDDy = DD. '57 Plymouth = NA. The absolute zenith of Morsable cars was the '42-48 Buick. If you start from the reflector and read through taillight, directionals/stop, taillight and reflector, you get ENKAE. Doesn't spell anything, but it's complex enough that it could have been used for steganography. Some modern cars with patterns of LEDs and sequential flashers could send whole paragraphs.

Polistra is talking about Caddies.



Question: Is there a car that could spell its own name if it wanted to? I can't find any 'serious' examples. All four-cycle engines are 'Otto-cycle' engines, especially in German; but no actual car was called Otto. [Oops, spoke too soon. Google spinoff is developing on Otto-nomous truck!] Brazil had a modified Lotus called the Emme. That's about it for fully symmetrical names. I think the longest Morse palindrome is 'waiting', but that's an unlikely car name except maybe in Japan. Austin comes DAMN close with just a slight gap in symmetry.

Labels: Aptronym Alert, Danbo

  ¶ 5:13 AM

  Patient world vs Goldman world
Bloomberg says "analysts" were surprised that Persia has returned to its pre-sanctions oil production levels after a couple months. "Analysts" assumed that it would take a year to get running again, and assumed that pre-sanction levels couldn't be resumed.

Graybill's Law. The "analysts" are operating in a free-trade Goldmanized world. In Goldman-occupied territory, any industry that fails to bring infinite returns to Goldman is permanently shut down, and the equipment and skills are smashed.

Patient Persia was forced to operate in non-free-trade mode, and certainly wouldn't let Goldman occupy it under any conditions. Patient Persia was focused on self-sufficiency, not infinite Goldman share value. Persia maintained its equipment and skills so it wasn't hard to bring the system back up to full operation.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 4:29 AM

  Something wrong with this
The feds are mounting a campaign for better re-entry of prisoners after release. Basically a good idea. This part doesn't sound right:

Lynch is asking governors (and in D.C.’s case, the mayor) to allow inmates to use the identification cards they are given behind bars, as well as official release documents, as the primary identification they need to obtain a state ID card. Without access to birth certificates or social security cards (or the money to purchase copies), it can be nearly impossible for the formerly incarcerated to get ID — and a lack of identification is an additional barrier to successful reentry into society.

Without access to birth certificates and SS cards?

You don't lose those documents in prison. My SS card is the same one I got at age 16.

Prison authorities kept it in an envelope along with the other stuff that was in my pockets when arrested. (Pencil, keys, billfold, pipe.) I didn't carry my birth certificate around, so it wasn't in that envelope. My parents had it, and the authorities didn't confiscate it.

This sounds like a sneaky attempt to automatically naturalize illegal immigrants. THOSE are the people who don't have an SS card or birth cert.

[Later sidenote: When I glanced at the picture above without reading the context, my instant first thought was "Oh, this must be one of those Kansas State Historical Society artifacts... but I don't remember writing about this one." A fifty-year-old piece of paper, preserved by jury-rigged Scotch Tape lamination at some point.... Yup, artifact. Like its owner.]

Labels: coot-proofing, TMI

  ¶ 3:27 AM

  Declining wages: purely modern
One of Polistra's main missions is to find a proper understanding of the 1930 Depression. Recently some articles have been appearing in Stockman and ZeroHedge, claiming that the current long-term loss of wages and manufacturing is similar to what happened in the '30s. It's just another case of supply and demand. When jobs are scarce, wages go down.

= = = = =

Nope.

This graph is 'total compensation per hour worked' for manufacturing workers.

Steady upward climb. Nothing special about the '30s. The number of JOBS certainly decreased for a while, but the pay for workers who HAD jobs continued to rise. If you lost your job, it was worth your time to look for another job in the same industry. Employers were NOT trying to drive down wages by firing people. They didn't want to fire people, and wanted to get good workers back when conditions improved.

= = = = =


This list shows the pattern in finer focus. In these specific job areas, wages went down in '32 and '33, then started back up in '34.

= = = = =

Under the current Free-Trade regime, REAL VALUE work has been losing both jobs and wages for 30 years. If you lose your job, you don't have a chance of getting it back. Your skill is no longer needed, which means YOU are no longer needed. Your friends who are still working are making less every year, so you don't see much point in even trying.

Result: Alcohol, oxycontin, crime, suicide.

= = = = =

Another chart from the same series, reinforcing the notion that employers WANTED to keep going in the '30s:

Number of operating businesses went down some in '31-'32, then resumed growing, roughly where it would have been without the bubble of the 20s. (I added a suggestive dotted line.) Number of firms went down more strongly in WW2. Reason obvious. Boss and workers are all in the Army; even if they aren't, there's no raw material available to process or sell. This graph seems to be peaking and turning down after '60. I can't find a more modern continuation. Census data has graphs for 'number of establishments', but those graphs don't match this one.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 3:44 PM

  Which horseperson matters most?
Polistra likes to observe the interactions of the Three Horsepersons.
The three are:

1. Global Warming / Enviroterrorism;

2. Free Trade / Outsourcing / Migrant Invasion;

3. Die-Versity.

Occasionally they come into conflict, requiring a court or government to pick the most destructive.

DW reports, favoring the invaders as always, on a dispute in Hamburg. Führerin Merkel is invading Hamburg with "migrant" "Dreamers" to slaughter German citizens. The invasion belongs in Horseperson 2, but also loudly invokes Horseperson 3. Misguided locals, who peculiarly dislike being raped and slaughtered for some XENOPHOBIC BUFFOON reason, tried to bring a court case against the invasion based on 1, environmental concerns. The site of the invasion is a forested park, which will be clearcut to build houses for the invaders.

Court said no. You must be invaded and slaughtered, and you must pay to be invaded and slaughtered. Environmentalism leads to slow starvation and freezing. Slow starvation is uninteresting now that we've tasted the blood of direct and immediate mass murder.
  ¶ 3:38 AM

  Ultimate SES
This may well be the ultimate app-killing Self-Explanatory Sentence.

Police said McClain robbed his own store, paid for sex with the prostitute with the Girl Scout money then gave her a bush baby named Gooey as a tip.

The 'rest of the story' would be bad enough by itself, but it's anticlimactic after the first SES.

On March 17, police found Gooey with an out-of-town prostitute at a hotel in the Eugene area. Then, on March 19, Oregon State Police arrested McClain in the parking lot of the OSP office in Albany because he walked out of a porn shop next door to the police department and was apparently under the influence of methamphetamine.

"and was apparently under the influence of meth" is a completely unnecessary phrase.

Later: The one aspect of the story that DOESN'T immediately follow from meth, the one part that really deserves more explanation: Why did the prostitute ACCEPT a little monkey as a tip? Was she Vietnamese?
  ¶ 10:07 AM

  Rare bird
Language preservationists have a strange fetish about split infinitives. They write horrible ambiguous shit like You must learn how quickly to switch lanes.

Still, there are RARE and nearly unique cases where an infinitive truly shouldn't be split. I encounter such sentences once a year or less. Here's one today, from NPR's website:

Sanders and his team seem to now be getting that reality.

Easy fix:

Sanders and his team seem to be getting that reality now.

If I had the task of editing, I'd cut the seem:

Sanders and his team are finally getting that reality.

Not quite the same meaning but easier to read and say.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 6:33 AM

  Low skill?
I'm puzzled by the recent behavior of insurance companies.

They were somewhat dubious about Romneycare but supported it anyway.

They haven't lobbied against ZIRP which DESTROYS them.

Now that the consequences of Romneycare are becoming more clear, insurers are backing out fast. [Specifically: When you have to cover everyone, you have to charge huge premiums. Many people and companies are simply unable to pay huge premiums, so they go without insurance. Cranking up the penalty won't help if the money ISN'T THERE.]

Both decisions are puzzling because estimating the future risk of financial decisions is EXACTLY THEIR BUSINESS. This is WHAT INSURERS DO FOR A LIVING.

GM would catch the meaning of a Federal prohibition of automobiles. Intel would understand the consequences of a 100% sales tax on integrated circuits. They would lobby ferociously and successfully against such proposals.

Why did insurers allow ZIRP to happen? Why did they take 6 years to see the inevitable outcome of Romneycare?

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 3:29 AM

  See what happens when you LOOK?
Headline: Scientists discover coral reef near mouth of Amazon

What makes this noteworthy is the estimated size. 3800 square miles. That's about the same as Jamaica or Puerto Rico or Connecticut.

The reef appears to be healthy, full of all sorts of fish and shrimp and so on.

Why was a Jamaica-size reef hidden in such a busy location?

It's muddy down there.

Nobody bothered to look through the mud before.

And you "scientists" still want us to believe all of your ratshit about SETTLED SCIENCE and CONSENSUS?

Try a little fucking humility for once.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 2:54 AM

  Stream of something vaguely resembling consciousness
Looked at weather.com radar, saw rain approaching, with a couple of fading red areas. Thinking about possible t-storms. [Fortunately the t-storm missed this part of town.]

While washing dishes, started thinking my usual dumb auto history stuff. Ford didn't need the Edsel because it already had FOUR distinct cars in 1957. The smaller Ford Customs, the slightly larger Fairlanes which used a different body, the Mercury, and the Lincoln. This was more ACTUAL variety than GM at the time. But what about the T-bird? Where does that fit....

Wait. T-storm. T-bird. Same word, same abbreviation. Which came first?

Google's Ngram thingie answered the question with surprising sharpness.



T-bird came first and set the example for T-storm. Nobody wrote T-storm until 1956.

And we'll have rain, rain, rain, till Gaia takes the T-storm away. No.

Sa-Sa-Sa-Storm storm storm, storm is the norm. No.

I am a little T-storm short and fast, here is my graupel, here is my blast.

NO!!! ENOUGH!!!

Labels: Asked and answered, TMI

  ¶ 4:53 PM

  Just an act
Just an act.

I'm disappointed but not shocked. I didn't let myself get phaselocked this time, remembering what happened with Gene McCarthy.

At first I thought Trump was just pulling a publicity stunt. He's done it before. Play campaign for a few weeks, stop, profit. But when he took it all the way through major primaries I dropped that hypothesis. After several months the stunt was counterproductive. His brand was ruined. Rich fuckheads, his main clientele, had shouted their bigoted hate to the world, declared that they would rather die than look at the XENOPHOBIC BUFFOON's name ever again. Maybe he was serious, maybe he meant to take power and solve some problems?

Nope. Just an act after all.

Still doesn't make a lick of sense, except as the X-treme final prank of a dying man.

Invite everyone to speak the truth, watch as they push each other into positions they can't back out of, then say J/K.

Now the powerless know without a picodoubt what the powerful think of us, especially the powerful Repoofs who have been giving us lip service while slaughtering us.

Now the powerful know without a femtodoubt what the powerless think of them. Ready for revolution.

Let the fun begin! The prankster will be dead before the whole thing boils over, and he can die satisfied. The huuuugest fuckyou in history.

Can't think of a better explanation.
  ¶ 8:07 AM

  Aptrocity alert
Speaking of Wanted and Unwanted .... The only consistently Wanted part of this blog is the one and only entry that makes a specific reference to a current TV program. The accidental hits on this one entry never lead to longer reads, which makes sense. TV=ADHD.

Latest hit on the TV item has a perfectly appropriate city.


  ¶ 4:28 AM

  4/19 musings
4/19 has always been an important date for me, along with a few other 19s, arising from my jail experience in '69. Those dates are resonating more than usual this year. It's not a round-number anniversary. Maybe the Trump affair reminds me of the Gene McCarthy affair. Who knows.

The whole mess taught me everything about human nature, civilization and government. Broke the leftist lie about genes; learned that criminals and non-criminals are innately different, whites and blacks are innately different, wanted and unwanted are innately different. Learned that my innately determined place in human civilization is at the bottom of the stack. Occasionally useful but never wanted as a friend or mate.

Part of this learning arrived late. My parents had always blamed me for their need to leave Ohio and find a lesser job. 30 years later I learned that my father had been fired before the whole mess started. Tenure-track job, didn't publish anything.

The draft and the cops taught me everything about government. My wealthy housemate was never arrested or even bothered, though the cops found most of the pot in his room. Wealth deletes all sins. The cops who had arrested the "notorious narcotics ring" were later jailed for corruption. Among the "notorious narcotics dealers" who did end up in prison, the only one who had a previous record got out before the rest of us because he was a football player and couldn't miss summer practice. His #life mattered. The one who was most politically active served a year more than the rest of us.

All you need to know.

I remembered most of this advanced education, but I forgot the part about government for a long time. In the '90s, after 20 years of correct understanding, I picked up the Wilsonian/neocon bug and stayed with it until 2007. The return to normal was assisted and reinforced by the TARP thing in 2008, but basically doesn't require an explanation. The departure from sanity in 1992 is a complete puzzle.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 2:08 AM

  Did this become the '69 C10?
An older issue of Collectible Auto featured these sketches, made in 1953, for Studie's next generation of trucks. If Studie hadn't been dissolving in its own stupidity at the time, this probably would have been the '55 model. (The lower two are Studebaker's actual '53 trucks.)



Note two things:

1. Widebed. The big three had also been thinking about widebeds for a long time until Ford finally hit the mark in '57, with instant public appeal. Narrowbeds immediately receded to a specialty item. Studie could have scooped Ford in '55 with this model.

2. Sharp angles. No other truck looked as sharp. The big three remained round until Chevy finally hit this mark in '69.

In fact, leaving out the Larky McLarkface grille, Chevy's '69 looks a LOT like this design. I suddenly remembered a coworker in '74 who commented that GM had stolen their '69 from Studie. Dude was a storyteller who liked to spend hours narrating his dubious "Navy Seal" career, but he just might have been right about this.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 4:56 PM

  Does it work in real life?
Following on this proposed experiment, using magnets to destabilize 'hot blobs' in ocean water. Providing a prosthetic magnetosphere to substitute for our weakening field.



Got thinking. Has this already been tested? Is there an existing real-life situation where magnets could change the pattern of bacteria? How about dental implants? Some of them are held in by magnets. Do they affect plaque?

INSTANT answer from a 2005 dental research journal:

... however once again plaque accumulation has found to be increased around magnet retained overdenture abutments.

Googlebooks won't show a long passage, and I'm not sure what an overdenture abutment is, but the connection is clear. The author was familiar with the problem. "Once again."

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 4:21 PM

  Can we re-use this idea?
Ad from a 1908 streetcar trade journal:



Nice straightforward honesty. These two dudes look like they can get the job done. But note that the job is NOT bashing heads of strikers. A company can hire its own thugs for that purpose easily. Waddell and Mahon are offering a deterrent to strikes in the form of a complete substitute workforce, always maintained and ready to travel. When a union knows the company can call in Waddell and Mahon for an instant plug-n-play replacement, the union's strategy changes.

Could we use this idea the other way around? Our government has been on strike since 1989. It has been refusing to do basic tasks like defending borders and maintaining infrastructure. Instead it has been smashing its own people with intentional invasions by foreigners, breaching dams, stealing savings and pensions through ZIRP, eliminating jobs and skills, and invading foreign countries for no purpose except mayhem and murder.

When we consider replacing a striking government, we hesitate because there is no real replacement force. We need a Waddell and Mahon, a ready-made set of bureaucrats and generals and politicians, who can instantly take the reins and start performing CORRECT duties after the revolution.

Labels: switchover

  ¶ 3:01 PM

  Routine business
Unlike most USA STRONG and UK media, Reuters has a refreshing habit of telling the truth without twisted words or scare quotes.

Russia accused the United States on Wednesday of intimidation by sailing a U.S. naval destroyer close to Russia's border in the Baltics and warned that the Russian military would respond with "all necessary measures" to any future incidents.

Note the sentence structure. Reuters acknowledges that the USA STRONG destroyer WAS SAILING CLOSE TO RUSSIA'S BORDER.

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute pressed Russia about the incident, warning it had been dangerous. The United States has said the guided missile destroyer USS Cook was on routine business near Poland when it was harassed by Russian jets.

Routine business. Cute. What is routine business for a missile-bearing destroyer? Cooking, like its name implies? Delivering pizzas? Fishing? Whale-watching? Entertaining tourists? Spying?

NO. Routine business for a destroyer is CARRYING MISSILES UP TO THE SHORE OF OTHER COUNTRIES AND THREATENING THEM WITH DESTRUCTION. Routine business is MAKING WAR.
  ¶ 10:10 AM

  Eunuch vs Man 2 (and Viva Fidel!)
Via NPR:

Expectations had risen lately that economic reforms allowing for private businesses might be expanded and that a younger generation could take over key leadership positions.

But Ted Henken, an expert on Cuba at New York's Baruch College, says those hopes have been squashed by what he calls the Obama effect. He says the Cuban leadership got spooked after President Obama was widely welcomed during his historic visit to the island last month.

"And instead of opening in response to Obama's opening they seem to be doubling down on the kind of top-down control because they are fearful that this new dynamic with Obama is a Trojan horse," said Henken.

As mentioned before, Cuba is the prime specimen of Graybill's Law. Deprived of most trade, it developed its own skills to a high level. When USSR collapsed Cuba had a few hard years, but regained its equilibrium BECAUSE IT KNEW HOW TO LIVE INDEPENDENTLY.

You neocons want to talk about Freedom and Liberty? This is it. Using your own resources to the hilt.

A new USA STRONG government has a chance to do the right thing. A Trump or Sanders admin could show how to run trade without the imperialism of outsourcing. Buy Cuban sugar and cigars; allow USA STRONG citizens to use the superior Cuban medical and educational systems at a profit to Cuba; but don't allow USA STRONG companies to set up plants for outsourcing. Protect both sides from Graybill.

Labels: defensible spaces

  ¶ 3:11 AM

  What STA is aiming for
Spokane Transit is trying yet again to bring back buses or fake streetcars to Coeur d'Alene, with taxpayer funding. A hundred years ago the Inland Empire interurban (separate from the city streetcar system) ran to CDA, and also to Pullman/Moscow and Hayden Lake.



Important difference #1: In 1907 you couldn't get to those places by automobile. Cars were still a toy. The interurban was the only way to get there, so it was a successful business.

Important difference #2: In the 2000s STA is mainly tax-funded. The old system was mostly capitalist, with some implied subsidies from right-of-way easements and such. STA is trying to re-do the CDA service by taking money away from its normal service for poor people in the city. Tax funding is appropriate for a service that gets poor people to their jobs. It's not appropriate for a luxury.

Fucking idiots never learn. Never never never never never learn. Even after two consecutive bond failures, they just keep on whoring after the COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL ones. Being COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL is infinitely more important than providing service.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 2:38 AM

  Toldja so
Headline:

Record floods linked to jamming of giant airstreams

"Study" done by insane Carbon Cultist Rahmstorf. Because Rahmstorf is a psychopath, he blames "warming" for the halted waves. It makes far more sense to attribute both the halted waves and the mean warming to a change in the earth's magnetosphere.

In any case, it's good that apocalyptic religious wackos are finally starting to see a tiny piece of reality. I saw it 11 years ago, and presumably other non-wackos saw it earlier.



Wild hypothesis: Could the present mindless perseveration (jammed thought streams) in human behavior be another side-effect of the same magnetosphere formation? Ocean currents and clouds are partly shaped by bacteria, who are definitely magnetotropic. Our behavior is also partly shaped by our internal bacteria. The magnetosphere is weakening in most places and concentrating in a few spots, probably in preparation for a pole reversal. A persistent maximum over North America has weakened over the last century. Note especially this graph (Fig 2) showing that the magnetosphere's strength was rising and falling regularly on a AHEM!!!!! 33-year cycle, until 1974 when it switched to a much faster and weaker alternation.

= = = = =

Suggested experiment: Magnet Dragnet. The next time a Hot Blob forms in the Pacific, like the blob that gave us a superhot summer in 2015, try repolarizing the field. Trawl a BIG magnet back and forth over and through the blob, to give the bacteria a different motivation.



Similarly with clouds, which are largely nucleated by bacteria.



= = = = =

Bit later: Checked to see if other experiments verified. Sure enough, bacteria will follow a magnet like the Pied Piper.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 1:46 AM

  The curse of poll-trickery
Warning from history, to the British research organization that opened its naming to the public. Here's what happens when you offer a contest and then toss it away:

In 1950 Henry J Kaiser pretended to ask the public to name his new compact car. He showed off the car with "Name-The-Car" on its nameplate...



and then ignored the result and named the car after himself. Result: Poor sales. Cursed car!

In 1957 Henry Ford II pretended to ask writers and poets to name his new big car. He didn't bother with the "Name-The-Car" shit, but again ignored the contest and named the car after his late father Edsel. Result: Poor sales. Cursed car!

The NERC should remember the curse, especially since its boat bears the nameplate "Name Of Vessel", echoing Kaiser's cursed nameplate.

If you ignore the public and name the boat anything other than Boaty McBoatface, the boat will be cursed forever with the damnation of Henry J and Edsel.

You have been warned.

Of course the boat is cursed anyway, since it's a waste of British taxpayer money to create more false "data" for the Carbon Cult. It deserves to burn and sink with all evil hands on board.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 5:39 PM

  Am I a collapsing empire?
Just a few hours after bashing the dying USA STRONG empire for mindless perseveration, diligently pursuing nonexistent goals, I found myself doing the same thing. Focusing on process and ignoring purpose.

Reading this clickbait in UK Express. Headline: "Man who cut off partner's head and flushed it down toilet jailed for life."

My only thought: Wait! A head won't fit into a toilet! This doesn't make sense!

Read further...."having decapitated his wife, the defendant began to break her head into pieces with a mallet and a metal bar. He then flushed the pieces down the lavatory."

My only thought: Oh, that's more like it. Makes sense.
  ¶ 5:33 AM

  Better question
Isaiah asked

Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Why do they imagine a vain thing?

(Or at least that's the version used by Handel.)

Those questions are easy. No need to ask. Money and status. Parkinson.

When you're seeking status and money, you want RELIABLE results, not ERRATIC results. Granting agencies and careerist social structures enforce RELIABLE results. The only way to get RELIABLE results is to imagine vain things. Carbon-caused warming, quantum quackery, quantitative easing, transsexuals, transubstantiation, evolution, economics, "social" "science".

When you operate in the realm of pure math and pure ideology and pure theology, you can always get the answer you need. You learn to avoid all connection with reality. Avoid physical experiments.

Even if you feel the need to approach physical reality, you can always make your work self-perpetuating by pursuing vain things.

In politics, make useless wars that can never achieve "victory" because "victory" is a totally null concept for a useless war. "Victory" is always just over the horizon, so you have to keep fighting harder and harder, pouring more and more money into military contractors.

In economics, make useless moves like QE and ZIRP that are guaranteed not to achieve the nominal goal, while reliably enriching the Chosen. Spending actually decreases in response to ZIRP, so it's a perfect addiction. More, more, more.

= = = = =

The hard question: On the RARE occasions when nations DON'T furiously rage together and DON'T imagine vain things, why do they violate all of Parkinson's Laws? How do leaders break out of the tight positive feedback loop of status and money?

When FDR decided to fuck economic theories and make the economy work for ordinary people, what drove him to leave status and money behind? When Ike decided to fuck the Wilsonian ideology and pull out of Korea, what drove him?

Even harder question: After a leader breaks the loop, how does he survive? Most don't. Nixon tried to break out of Vietnam and got kicked to the curb. In academia and business, nearly everyone who tries to break out of the status loop gets fired FAST. Two very recent exceptions: In medicine, Parkinson drives harsh diagnosis. Everything must be cancer so we can spend trillions treating it. But now important medical groups are removing some tumors and lesions from the cancer definition, conforming to reality and experiment. Some organizations in the area of diet and nutrition are finally admitting they were lethally and knowingly wrong about cholesterol for 50 years.

What's different about Ike and FDR? What's different about these loop-breakers on cancer and cholesterol? Why are they able to resist the temptations of grants and status without getting fired?

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 2:39 AM

  Nothing beats it
The primary symptom of a dying empire is absolutely brainless perseveration. Never quit, never learn, never pause to ask "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE???????????????"

Just keep on doing what you're doing, and keep finding new ways to make ____________ happen. Never ask what ____________ is. Just do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do do and do and do and do and do and do and do

Life is purpose. Perseveration is mechanical purposeless action, typical of inorganic machines. No living thing can match a dying empire when it comes to brainless perseveration.

Prime example here in Spokane. North-South Corridor. This is a major bypass that was badly needed in 1945 when the Kaiser Aluminum plant was a major industry. Kaiser was up north in Mead, about 6 miles north of the city limits. There was no easy way to get there from the southern or central parts of the city. Thousands of war workers created terrible traffic jams.

After 1980, the EPA Terrorist Army and Free Trade reduced Kaiser to a small rolling mill. It's still there but it employs dozens instead of thousands.

THEREFORE we started building the bypass to Mead in 2000. Only fifty years after it was needed badly, and only twenty years after it ceased to be needed at all. Mindless perseveration.

At this point the North-South Corridor is partly completed, carrying two or three cars per hour. It's been stuck in this condition for several years.

Now a new obstacle, or more precisely a new excuse to feed the EPA Terrorist Army more trillions in blackmail tribute, has been "discovered". There's a gallon or two of leftover oil under the next section of proposed construction. THEREFORE we must build a 30-foot-high viaduct for several miles to stay over the few gallons of oil.

This makes sense if you're a dying empire. It wouldn't make sense for anything with the reasoning ability of a bacterium. A living thing would simply say

Close the whole fucker down, turn it into a Living Museum Of Imperial Idiocy. Build exhibits featuring Condon's Pits of Despair, Inslee's Glorious Arson, NYC Straub's perfect leadership, Arborist Perry's Exponential Murder System.


= = = = =

Oil in the soil, highway in the sky .... Would make a good song. Where's Merle Haggard when you need him?

Labels: Carbon Cult, STRONG!

  ¶ 11:09 AM

  D side catches up
The brand-R monsters have been stupidly trying to generate fear about Trump by telling us all the "horrible" things he will do.

Normal humans hear these horrible things and say "Yes, that's what we need to do. I didn't realize Trump was planning to do it. Thanks for the endorsement!"

Until now this strange phenomenon hadn't popped up on the D side. Now it has....

Bill Clinton joked Friday that Bernie Sanders' supporters would "shoot every third person on Wall Street" if given the chance

Yes, that's 1/3 of what we need to do. We need to bomb EVERYTHING related to Wall Street. Eliminate the whole evil structure. Thanks for telling us that Sanders is on the correct track, though regrettably weak and moderate.

= = = = =

Update a few days later: Sanders is getting stronger and closer to the truth! Now he wants to make the big banks smaller. That won't work. Only total obliteration of the entire system will work. Still, he's pulling in the right direction.
  ¶ 8:09 AM

  ERRATIC again
Earlier I noted the constant use of ERRATIC to describe Trump. I hypothesized:

Ideology is RELIABLE. Theories are RELIABLE. Experimentation is ERRATIC. Try something, see if it works, then try something else when it doesn't work. Theoreticians in science or politics always see experimenters as ERRATIC. FDR was constantly described as ERRATIC.

Maybe it's simpler than that. ERRATIC is popping up again in official statements about Russia's normal and sane defense of its own territory from our vicious unprovoked aggression.

The alleged “interception” occurred on Thursday, Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for European Command told CNN. He said the Russian Su-27 "performed erratic and aggressive maneuvers," only 50 feet (15 meters) away from the US aircraft. The US Boeing RC-135 aircraft was "intercepted by a Russian SU-27 in an unsafe and unprofessional manner," Hernandez said.

Four words for sane self-defense: ERRATIC, AGGRESSIVE, UNSAFE, UNPROFESSIONAL.

AGGRESSIVE is not new; we've made AGGRESSION a part of RUSSIANAGGRESSION's name. The other three are new.

An ordinary criminal understands that everyone wants to defend himself. He tries to win the battle and take the money or sex, but he grudgingly respects an adversary who defends well.

Only a psychopath views an adversary's defense as ERRATIC, AGGRESSIVE, UNSAFE, UNPROFESSIONAL.
  ¶ 4:21 AM

  No duh
Headlines: Pope visits Lesbos

Well, yeah. A pope, especially an antipope like this one, is going to spend some time with nuns.

Wake me when he talks with normal humans.

Linguistic sidenote: It's fun to watch newsreaders struggling with this name. Like Antichrist Francine, they are far more familiar with Lesbos than with normal females; but they don't want to let us know. So they make a point of devoicing the S as in Lessssbossss. Unnecessary; they could make the same point better by simply using the modern Greek pronunciation, Lesvos. Greek softens most stops into fricatives.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 2:50 AM

  Think mink
Thinking about the Salish prank on Chinese tycoons.

Most tribes have a set of Trickster stories. The Salish trickster is Mink, an arrogant fellow who thinks he can get away with breaking Natural Law. Nature tries to instruct him but he never learns.

In this case China is Mink, and the Salish arranged things so Mink would bump into his own limits.

We no longer tell trickster stories, just as we no longer have TV or radio shows depicting rackets and scammers. The racketeers are in charge, so we can't hear stories that might help us understand them.

Trump's secret is that he understands tricksters because he is one. He arranges things so the Minks of the media and the RNC are constantly bumping into Nature's limits, constantly showing their arrogance and stupidity for all to see.

Labels: defensible spaces

  ¶ 7:08 AM

  Smart injuns
ZeroHedge has been focusing on the Chinese use of foreign real estate as offshore banks. The practice seems to work nicely in London, but not so well in Vancouver or Frisco or Spokane. Most of the North American properties have been left to rot. Nature's NIRP.

Today ZH notes videos made by a Vancouver 'urban explorer':

Fieldwalker said he understands he’s trespassing and takes responsibility for it, but believes that because the properties are on unceded Coast Salish territory, they can’t truly be owned. Many have sat vacant for five or more years as investment properties.

Sounds like the Salish are considerably smarter than the Chinese. Sell the foreigners a property that can't be owned, so the foreigners can't cash out. Perfect illiquidity.

Maybe we should hire some Salish as trade policy advisors.
  ¶ 5:24 AM

  The one wall they can't break
Nature is walls.

Modern satans break all walls, all boundaries.

What is the strictest and most unbreakable boundary of all, the highest wall?

Time.

There is no way to break out of the current moment. We're always stuck in it.

Our dear satans still can't break this one but they keep trying. They constantly violate a proper understanding of time, and Nature fights back.

Satans try to spread out the current moment to infinity in both directions.

We have delusional dysunderstandings of everything. Crime, genes, gender, economics, physics, everything is exactly wrong. We might be able to learn just how perfectly wrong we are by comparing with previous periods when humans got most of these things right. We might be able to read the lab notebook of human experimentation in the Old Testament.

But we aren't allowed to do that. We must simply treat all previous eras, up to [Current picosecond - 1], as

We either blot them out entirely or assume that the sane people of earlier periods were Unenlightened Barbarians. We find the rare idiots who suffered from modern-style brain disease, and we call them Pioneers or Prophets. We blame the sane people of previous eras for punishing or ignoring Our Prophets.

If we had a little more empathy, a little more understanding of The Other, we might be able to draw proper conclusions about our current behavior. We might be able to see that our current behavior has failed every time it was tried. Again, this applies to all realms of behavior. Religion, government, economics, family life. Because we can't see The Other in 300 AD or 1500 or 1860 or even fucking YESTERDAY, we have no feedback mechanism. We only see ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW. We aren't able to adjust our behavior to avoid disaster. Like Gulliver's Laputans or the The Monarch Of Pointland, we are tightly locked inside our little bubble of pure delusion. We have built a WALL between us and reality. We think THIS wall, unlike all the walls we joyfully smash, is impenetrable. Nature knows better.

= = = = =

Footnote on ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW: The spatial side of this infantile sprawl, the ME ME ME part, is expressed best by Neocons and Exceptionalism. I've discussed this many times.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 3:21 AM

  Thanks, Ralph 383 and 384
Two nicely matching pieces of Emersonian justice.

(1) Die Führerin finds it necessary to prosecute a comedian named Boehmermann who did what all comedians do. Boehmermann wrote a nasty poem and a nasty song aimed at the most fashionable TROLL of the moment, Erdogan. Comedians always enforce current rigid orthodoxy with far more fierceness than any government. Boehmermann was serving the Fourth Reich loyally.

BUT: Germany had an old law left over from the Second Reich, forbidding satires of foreign leaders. Krauts are enforcers of law. All of Hitler's executions and gassings were strictly legal by Kraut law. Die Führerin of the Fourth Reich has to enforce the law of the Second Reich, and the comedian must be punished at least with a fine.

Beautiful justice. Kraut tyranny forces Kraut tyrant to punish an agent of Kraut tyranny for aiding the Kraut tyranny.

(Linguistic sidenote: I thought about putting comedian in quotes as I normally do when an innocent word needs to be shielded from its satanic use ... but comedians are satan, so the word is perfectly at home in this context.)

= = = = =

(2) Heimatssicherheitsdienst, acting for the US version of the Fourth Reich, decides that Applesatan's old QuickTime format is subject to malicious capture. Applesatan is forced to order users to uninstall it. Probably a moot point, since no active users still have QuickTime on their systems. Applesatan's armies of lawyers had halted all attempts to turn QT into a usable format. You couldn't play MOVs on generalized media players and you couldn't convert MOVs to playable formats.


Thanks, Ralph! Twice!

Labels: Emersonian justice

  ¶ 2:52 PM

  Might have a point. Prove it.
A semi-official piece of Rome has issued a totally confused and jumbled statement about abandoning Just War Doctrine. It's possible that some of the participants may be thinking logically, but the statement just sounds like old dried hippieshit.

Marie Dennis, an American who serves as a co-president of Pax Christi International, said she and the conference group "believe that it is time for the church to speak another word into the global reality." Dennis also said she understands that people may raise concerns in rejecting the just war theory over needing to stop unjust aggressors. Her group, she said, agrees that violent aggressors have to be stopped.

"The question is how," said Dennis. "Our belief would be that as long as we keep saying we can do it with military force, we will not invest the creative energy, the deep thinking, the financial and human resources in creating or identifying the alternatives that actually could make a difference."

"As long as we say that dropping bombs will solve the problem we won't find other solutions and I think that's feeling more and more clear to us," he said.

Leaving aside the apparent trans-ness of Mr/Ms Dennis/Marie, there's a valid point in this mess.

Aggressors have to be stopped. Okay.

War is bad. Mkay.

We need to identify alternatives? Sounds good but seems impossible, UNLESS...

Unless you can identify a non-violent alternative and SHOW WHERE IT HAS ACTUALLY WORKED to deter or halt an ACTUAL AGGRESSOR. Creative energy and deep thinking are NOT methods that have ACTUALLY WORKED. Massive force, or a convincing threat of massive force, works every time.

After you specify WHICH SIDES of current wars you view as unjust, and after you specify an alternative that HAS ACTUALLY WORKED, then we'll listen.
  ¶ 5:10 AM

  Security and freedom yet again
One of those old FBI shows had the usual ad for Equitable Assurance at the end. This ad started out:

Security is one of the most meaningful words in the English language. According to the dictionary it means freedom from fear, anxiety or care; freedom from doubt or uncertainty. To one man, security calls up a picture of a little house which he owns free and clear, so that nobody can ever take it away from him. Another man thinks of protection against the hazards of illness and accident....

Obviously written by an insurance company, but still POWERFULLY TRUE.

Freedom from fear, freedom from uncertainty.

In other words,

SECURITY IS FREEDOM FROM THE PEOPLE WHO WANT FREEDOM.

As I discussed before in the context of prison, the wall-haters who want freedom above security are criminals and psychopaths. The job of civilization is to keep criminals and psychopaths from ruining security for normal people.

Government pushing Our Freedoms and Individual Liberty has given us freedom for psychopaths, which is tyranny for normal people.



Constant fear caused by fake "terrorists" and invading armies of "migrants", constant fear caused by ordinary criminals who can't be held in prison or executed, constant fear caused by debt instead of savings. Constant doubt and uncertainty caused by light-speed switches in culture.

The freedom-lovers, the criminals and psychopaths, have everything now. On the financial side they are free to steal everything, so they do. On the cultural side they are free to assume any gender or race if it gives them an advantage, so they do. On the governmental side they are free to burn down a state, so they do.

Labels: Age of Stings, defensible spaces, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 2:23 AM

  Converging convergences
Until a year ago, I could count on two convergences in the web world:

1. Every combination of words that I used in looking for something on Youtube converged to the name of some obscure rock band. Rock bands had used up all the words.

2. Every combination of words that led to an item in my blog, as seen through Statcounter, converged to porn. Sometimes I didn't know the porn term, but looking it up verified.

= = = = =

In the last year those convergences have faded out, replaced by a converging convergence.

1. Every combination of words that I use in looking for something on Youtube leads to a LONG gameplay clip. Gameplay has used up all the words.

2. Every combination of words that leads to an item in my blog, as seen through Statcounter, relates to gaming. Sometimes I don't recognize the connection, but looking it up verifies.

It's all gaming now. No porn, no rock bands. Just gaming.

= = = = =

Separate year-ago note. I've been leaving my phone bell turned on this week, playing phone tag with a contractor. The last time I turned on the phone with any regularity was a year ago, when I was working on courseware and doing weekly conference calls with the publisher. Obvious similarity from a year ago: Most of the incoming rings are junk calls from call centers. Noticeable difference: All of this year's junk calls start with a 5-second dead-air delay. Both the recorded and human versions start with a blank period. The human callers seem unaccustomed to it, so I'm guessing it's a fairly recent addition. Last year's junk calls started immediately, whether synthetic or human.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 10:44 AM

  Unspeakably stupid
Good and useful journalism by Fusion webzine.

The reporter found that a farm near El Dorado was receiving all sorts of odd attention from various law enforcement agencies and criminals. He looked into it, and found that an idiot company absurdly called MaxMind is responsible. MaxMind is one of the IP-mapping services. When it can't locate a specific IP, it gives you ... no, not an error message. It gives you a SPECIFIC LOCATION WHICH IS WRONG. For all USA STRONG locations, if the IP can't be pinned down, MaxMind quietly returns a location which is "close enough" to the center of USA STRONG.

Using the actual center would still be totally wrong, but at least the actual center wouldn't bother civilians. The actual center was turned into an official monument (complete with a cute little chapel!) a long time ago because people were always trying to access it for official or touristy reasons. No, that's not stupid enough for MaxMind. MaxMind rounds off the lat and long to [39.0,-98.0] which is 150 miles south of the center, and happens to be a farm near El Dorado.

The Butler county sheriff had already realized something weird was going on, because the actual residents of the farm aren't criminals. (Bravo to the sheriff for understanding the difference!) But he didn't know exactly WHAT was going on until the Fusion writer told him. Non-located IPs are especially common among criminals, so a whole bunch of cops and criminals were being told that their target was on this farm.

Jesus. This is not Programming 101, it's more like Programming 000. Programming NaN. Programming null. If your result is going to be used for ANY ACTUAL PURPOSE other than your own jacking off, you take EXTREME EXTREME EXTREME PAINS to guarantee that EVERY CONCEIVABLE ERROR SITUATION gives an INSTANTLY READABLE AND INSTANTLY MEANINGFUL error response. You NEVER give a response that could be taken, by machines or by humans, for a relevant and meaningful answer.

I'm a low-level semi-pro hillbilly hippie programmer, waaaaaaaaaaay below the paygrade of these assholes, and I know how to do this. Just one example from an earlier courseware version. At the point where the teacher is reading the student's grades into a printable list, the data becomes 'official'. It can affect a student's graduation in a small way. So I don't simply fill in 100 or 0 or 50 for a missing answer or a response that seems to have been changed by external factors. I print out a clear error indication:

   if (Sum != GradeLine.s.CkSum)  
     {  
      sprintf(gEntry,"Lesson %.2ld-%.2ld, !!!!! ALTERED ENTRY !!!!!",LsnHi,LsnLo);  
     }  

Every system has some provision for indicating errors. This is not a new computer-style problem. When you called an unassigned phone number, Bell gave you a recording WEEEE'RE SOR RY THE NUM BER YOU HAVE DI ALED IS NOT IN SER VICE. Bell didn't arbitrarily ring up an actual customer whose number was "close enough" to the number you tried, and didn't round off 723-1234 to 700-0000. Jesus.

Labels: STRONG!

  ¶ 5:04 PM

  Should have been
Previous item about blushing reminded me of something from the dim past....

In the '50s there were a lot of things that had to be done. These things weren't required by law, and as far as I can tell NOBODY wanted to do them, NOBODY appreciated them or enjoyed them.

Adults had to play bridge with the boss and coworkers. Nobody liked bridge. It was pure hell.

Nobody was impressed by the Correct Martini, but everybody had to know how to make the Correct Martini.

Kids had to show off their tricks. Piano playing, handstands, art. The showed-off kid was FIERCELY humiliated; the home-team parents were bored, the visiting-team parents were counting the seconds until it was over.

WHY did these hellish experiences continue?

I'm pretty sure these obligations have vanished, for which I thank god. 'Show us your trick' now turns into a Youtube fail clip, which is where it should have been all along.
  ¶ 9:53 AM

  Eyes built for blushing?
One of those "Something you should know" segments on radio just now. Claims that the spectral sensitivity of human color vision "evolved" to match the colors of blushing, so we could detect emotions in others.

Seems unlikely to begin with. Color vision serves a WHOLE BUNCH of purposes, most of which are more important for survival. Even if we take this assumption as true, it leaves the converse unanswered as usual.

If our vision was shaped "gradually" and "randomly" to detect the PRE-EXISTING action of blushing, why did blushing develop? Altering circulation in the face makes no sense as part of an emotional response unless our friends and enemies can detect it.

Advocates of "evolution" always leave these converse questions unanswered.

With a few scattered exceptions, every output matches an input and every input matches an output. You can't assume that one side "evolved" first and then the other side "evolved" to match. Doesn't matter if you assume input or output came first. There's no point in having auditory perception tuned for vowel formants if our speech doesn't produce those formants. There's no point in speaking if our friends and enemies can't understand it.

Only one conclusion is possible. The whole setup was designed all at once.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 5:27 AM

  Due by average
Wandering through KSHS again, found this collection of documents left over from the founding of Bluemont College, which became K-State after Isaac Goodnow finagled a state purchase. Goodnow was an IPO man in modern terms, picking up capital by crowdfunding and then cashing out at a profit. Roughly half of the documents are 'share certificates' for the donors, and the other half are invoices from Eastern companies for schoolbooks and other academic supplies.

This 1861 invoice caught my eye:

Fantastic turbo-Palmer cursive. Some of the cursive, such as the firm name Ivison Phinney & Co, appears to be part of the printed form via woodcut, and some appears to be done by the clerk. The style is so similar that it's hard to tell.

Ivison Phinney was at 48 Walker St in NYC. Googlestreet shows an old-looking building at that address, but Zillow indicates that the current building dates from 1915. It's currently an extremely haute couture store with condos upstairs.



The phrase due by average was foreign to me. Like most commercial jargon it's poorly represented in dictionaries, thus hard to find in online searches. An 1841 Commercial Arithmetic text provided an example if not a proper definition:



When an account included frequent purchases and frequent payments, each monthly bill calculated the average of the due dates for each side and then subtracted the two sides. This Ivison bill includes two debits (To Merchandise) and one credit for payment made in kind (By Merchandise). Though it's not stated, I doubt that Goodnow was paying in wheat; more likely this was a return for refund. Both transactions were in Dec 1860, and the bill was sent in July 1861, so Goodnow was expected to add interest to his payment 'by average'. The method is just as complex and impenetrable as the Palmer cursive! No wonder both died out.

These amounts look small, but $82 would be around $2000 now by general inflation. A meaningful amount. Textbooks followed a much sharper curve. 1860 college books were $2, so Goodnow was buying 40 books on this invoice, assuming shipping was COD. 2016 college books are $200, so an invoice for 40 books would be $8000.

= = = = =

Sidenote 1: Goodnow's crowdfunding was based on the premise that he was helping to set up an anti-agrarianslavery educational outpost in the new territory. He was probably more committed to profit than to abolition. Still, I wonder what Isaac would think of this effort by Pearson, a modern 'educational publisher and bookseller'. Pearson is setting up educational outposts in places like Philippines, explicitly designed to turn out call center employees. Spreading the latest form of slavery, taking jobs from Americans instead of training Americans for jobs.

Sidenote 2: Ivison Phinney's cursive apparently caught so many eyes that they gave up publishing and specialized in pens!

Labels: Alternate universe, skill-estate

  ¶ 2:40 AM

  Nuff said
Headline: Government vehicle stolen from homeland security office.

  ¶ 9:30 AM

  Ghost files?
Vaguely related to yesterday's item about UV mapping. A few months ago I bought a copy of the UU3D uvmapper, after Cox's UVmapper prog ceased updating its registration. I still use the simpler version of Cox's prog for most purposes, and occasionally use UU3D for fancy stuff like equal-area mapping or 'perpendicular to face' mapping.

UU3D does one extra fancy thing that I've never seen in any Windows program for any purpose. It picks up the innards of an OBJ file before it's loaded into UU3D, and persists in holding the originally fetched innards after I load a revised version.

Example for clarity: I built this simple rack thing in Amapi.



The original output, as sorted in Kedit, had these Groups and Materials:



I DIDN'T LOAD this original into UU3D. Following my usual workflow, I immediately edited the names down and eliminated some 'dummy' stuff that Amapi always leaves. I want the vertical parts to look like wrought iron and the horizontal rods to be silvery. So I only need two Materials.



After this editing, I loaded the file into UU3D. and here's what UU3D sees as the materials:



It sees the PRE-EDIT names.

For comparison, the basic Cox UVmapper reads the edited version correctly:



This has happened several times now, and I've verified it SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY with an intentionally made file, just in case I've been unconsciously loading the 'usual' files. What's going on? The edited OBJ file does NOT contain any remnant of the discarded names. I looked at one in a binary viewer. UU3D doesn't appear to be running in the background where it could grab things quietly. So where is it getting the pre-edit OBJ file? Must be using the File Descriptor Table to locate the penultimate version of the file instead of directly loading the ultimate version as all ordinary programs do. Why would you want to do that? (Especially strange since UU3D stands for Ultimate Unwrapper, not Penultimate Punwrapper.)

= = = = =

Sidenote: While checking the link for Cox's UVmapper, I noticed that Cox has finally re-entered the arena with a new update after several years of absence. I updated and paid full freight. In theory I could try for an upgrade price, but the full price is WORTH IT for a prog that I've been using every day for 10 years. Yay. Good to have a proper tool back in the toolbox.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 6:04 AM

  The little war that never ends
Though the founding documents give a moment of approval** to Natural Law, the USA fed gov't has always been run by aristocratic demons who hate Natural Law. Their opposition was cautious at first, now it's total and all-consuming.

Two aspects of Natural Law were targets from the start.

Natural Law is strict about sanitation and diet, strict about the duties of male and female, but it does NOT say that slavery and polygamy are wrong. Natural Law provides rules for two basic forms of employment: the independent trader or artisan, and the owner / serf arrangement. It also provides rules for both monogamy and polygamy.

Our NY aristocrats disapproved of the Dixie version of serfdom because it competed with the NY industrial version of serfdom. Dixie serfdom offered lifetime security, while NY preferred disposable serfs who live in constant fear and die when no longer useful. They turned this brand competition into a "right" which served Lincoln well when his blood fetish ran strong and he needed to kill 30% of his country.

Their hatred of polygamy was equally powerful, but the targets refused to satisfy the NY blood hunger. NY tried making war against the Mormons in 1840, but LDS was smart enough to give way and maintain survival. This low-level war has never ended.

Still running:

The appeals court ruling reversed a 2013 U.S. district court decision that determined the state violated polygamists’ right to privacy and religious freedom. While polygamy has essentially been decriminalized since that decision, this new ruling brings back a law prohibiting married people from living with additional partners even if they are not legally married to the other “spouses.”

Note that the WaPo demon uses quotes around multiple "spouses" in the same way that fact-loving people use quotes around the NY same-sex "spouses".

= = = = =

**Footnote: Just realized.... the only reference to Natural Law in the founding documents states that the "laws of Nature" require the North American colonies to split from the British government. This is a dubious claim. The controlled experiment proved that the split was an unnecessary waste of lives.

The document doesn't use Natural Law as the basis of anything but independence. Needless to say, Madman Lincoln smashed the basis when Dixie tried to re-use it. So even this limited reference is no longer valid.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, STRONG!

  ¶ 2:53 AM

  The illumination of the snail
Bumped into this while looking for something else. The picture is definitely a search-stopper! Hundreds of tiny hydras fastened to the shells of snails, each hydra with its own luminescent endpoint like LED lights on a Christmas tree.

Reminds me of this.
  ¶ 6:02 PM

  Outtake
Finishing up a big Poser scene. Somehow the UV mapping came 'unglued' on the sides of this hotel building......



Tubular, dood! Psych-O-Delic, daddyo!

Fortunately it was possible to 'glue' it back in place.....



The interesting part of the error is the irregular organic look. Flat spots and wide spots. I tried to reproduce it with cylindrical mapping, but cylindrical gives nice equally spaced radial lines and circular circles, like polar graph paper. Those squashed areas seem to indicate that the UV mapping algorithm was running out along each radius to the edge, then bouncing back toward the middle to average out the flatness on angles where it hit the edge. Or something like that. Seems awfully complex for a 'default' algo.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 4:52 AM

  Progress, maybe
Chinaman charged with spying for China while "serving" in US Navy.

shockshockshockshockshockshockshockshockshockshock

What in the HOLY MOTHERFUCKING FUCK do you EXPECT? Chinese are Chinese. Their sole purpose in other countries is to serve China. That's not a sin, it's a virtue. The sin is our failure to recognize the simple fact.

I shouldn't be pissed. At least they caught this one and straightforwardly charged him. They didn't play the idiotic Wen Ho Lee game. Maybe we're actually making progress.
  ¶ 2:26 AM

  College is hazing
College is hazing.

We don't usually put it that way, but that's how it is. Frats and sports and band tend to have more physical forms of hazing. We've recently started punishing them for their highly effective methods. We don't punish math profs or pre-med profs or Critical Queer Theory profs for their equally effective forms of hazing, which can be even more damaging to the soul and sanity of the rejects.

Basically the four years of undergrad school are designed to select OUT the students who don't have the peculiar set of talents and temperaments for each specific discipline. After the successive layers of sieving out the dross, the sharply tuned remainder is given actual training in grad school.

Jesus. What a fucking waste.

Community colleges and for-profit tech schools don't do much hazing. Their mission from the start is training, not sieving. Only the worst behavior problems get kicked out.

Why is the hazing necessary in 'real' universities? Because we're stuck in the idiotic leftist lie that all humans are identical.

Because we're delusional, we waste the years from age 9 to 18 for everyone, then waste 19 through 22 for many.

If we broke out of the lie, we could place students in appropriate tracks or paths at age 9 when everybody shows what they're meant to do. By age 16 everyone would be ready for immediate jobs or further training, depending on type of talent. The longest training could be finished by 23 instead of 30.

Best part: This would eliminate universities as now designed. Universities have proved themselves to be virulent and pestiferous sources of corruption.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 2:56 PM

  What do they imagine?
I'm just continually puzzled by things like this. What do they think they're achieving? Do they really imagine that Trump fans will see this and think .... "Oh my goodness! I have been wrong about satanic monsters like the Boston Globe and NYTimes! I see now that the Globe and the Times HATE Trump, therefore I must also HATE Trump. The Globe and the Times have been uniformly 1000000% wrong about 1000000% more than everything for my entire lifetime, therefore I know they must be RIGHT about Trump."

This wild dyslogic may work in a Globe or Times "brain", but it doesn't work in a human brain.

These monsters are paid to do journalism, which is a branch of advertising. Their job in the simplest sense is to advertise products. If they were advertising beer or hamburgers, they wouldn't make the same elementary mistake. They wouldn't push beer by showing gory pictures of drunk driving accidents or diseased livers. They wouldn't push Whoppers by showing the bloody floor of a slaughterhouse with cowshit and snouts and tongues scattered around. So why do they push Romney by showing the blood-soaked fangs of Romney's fans and admirers?
  ¶ 10:35 AM

  Three or four?
I'm wondering if I should add a fourth Horseperson to my existing Three Horsepersons of the Modern Apocalypse. All of them work together to kill the poor and enrich the Chosen.

Existing three:

(1) Open borders / free trade / outsourcing.

(2) The "Climate Change" crime.

(3) Die-Versity and the underlying belief that All Humans Are Identical Passive Machines.

The EU implements these Horsepersons most ferociously, often combining two or three for supercharged destruction. Current example: the loss of Britain's last steel plant because of Chinese competition. EU forced this destruction of British citizens and skills through Free Trade, and helped it along by using Carbon Credits to subsidize Chinese cheap steel.

= = = = =

I'm trying to figure out whether automation and robots belong in the list.

It's not clear yet whether robots are really meant to replace all human work. So far the attempts to replace drivers and waitresses and soldiers have failed. Research in AI and robotics has been active for 60 years, but still hasn't jumped into the next level of intelligence. We have lots of precise drills, lathes, assemblers, etc. None of them are "smarter" than the Jacquard Loom. The 3D printer is a Jacquard Loom. Nothing more.

Outsourcing is a big step backward from automation. Carolina textile mills and Pittsburgh steel mills used Jacquard/CNC level automation for the most repetitive and precise processes. When the elites moved those industries to Bangladesh and China, the automation level jumped back by at least a century.

What's the obvious endpoint of all the AI research? Providing services like agriculture and maintenance to the elites so they can finish killing the non-elites. Terraforming terra.

Big problem: the current rate of genocide in poor countries, plus attrition by contraception in advanced countries, is going to eliminate the Negative Externalities before robots are ready for all important jobs.

Either the elites don't know what they're doing, or they have something else in mind. Former condition is impossible. Latter condition must be true. But what's the something else?

First guess: Robots serve the same purpose as immigrants. Even though they aren't going to be successful, the threat of replacement enables employers to lower wages and impose slavery. This doesn't fix the Big Problem, so it's probably wrong or at least incomplete.

Second guess: Total obliteration isn't the goal. The elites enjoy torture more than death. Reducing an entire ethnic group to terminal despair and chaos and alcohol is the fun part. After that, it doesn't really matter if the ethnic group goes ahead and dies. In fact it's better to leave a small ragged remnant as a drive-thru museum and petting zoo for the elite. Tomahawks and textile mills become harmless exhibits. (cf Huxley)

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 2:39 AM

  Is Hillary onto something?
Idly reading an article about Hillary's Listening Tour. Ready with my usual supply of Hmphs and Mmmmmm-hmmmms. The article knocked me off my high horse. Or high hmph.

Democratic presidential campaign news: Hillary Clinton just visited the Buffalo Transportation Pierce Arrow Museum. ... she launched off in a van that was unfortunately named “Scooby,” meeting at an Iowa auto mechanics classroom, then holding a small-business round table at a family-owned fruit company. The biggest drama came in Maumee, Ohio, when she visited a Chipotle and failed to leave money in the tip jar.

Pierce Museum. Iowa auto mechanics class. Family-owned fruit company. Maumee.

Those are EXACTLY the places I'd want a candidate to listen. Lost manufacturing, business development, vo-tech training. The Iowa auto mechanics class is a place where I might have been teaching in a slightly changed universe.

Is Hillary actually listening? Is she adjusting her priorities accordingly?

This bears watching. Yes, it's calculated and scripted, but it still puts Hillary in direct contact with the truth about working-class white America. As with Bill's accurate understanding of black America, truth is truth regardless of motive.

Labels: Experiential education, skill-estate

  ¶ 4:51 PM