Constants and variables 87, Trump Jump edition
I stopped listening to SOTU sideshows a long time ago. Several clips of Trump's SOTU have accidentally reached my ears, and my ears have made a quick and strong judgment.

This dude is SERIOUSLY DEPRESSED. Trump sounds the same way I sounded 35 years ago when I was broken and useless and ready to stop breathing. Each sentence seems to use up all the remaining soul and spirit.

Maybe he considers this to be a dignified speaking style. No matter what he considers, it's exactly the wrong intonation and prosody for a president who wants to ENCOURAGE and STRENGTHEN a nation.

Compare with FDR's second fireside chat. It's a good comparison because both men are New Yorkers and both are speaking about infrastructure projects. FDR was a clumsy writer and unaccustomed to radio, but his voice carries a resonant ring of CONFIDENCE, and his sentence intonations push us UPWARD instead of DOWNWARD.

Trump's intonation says "The only thing we have to fear is missing the bridge railing."

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Constants and Variables

  ¶ 4:52 PM

  Shocked by beauty?
UD cites one of those typical Earlier Than Thought items, where archeologists were Shocked to find that stone age inhabitants of England used pigments to make things beautiful.

If beauty is shocking and incomprehensible, what does that tell you about our current mindset? What will a later archeologist find when our current era has become just another stratum in the wreckage? Would the proverbial Martian archeologist consider that the current era was capable of beauty?

I doubt it. The strata would show an abrupt switch from beautiful shapes and colors to black and white rectangles around 1910 AD, and then a total takeover by solid black rectangles around 2010 AD.

It's nearly impossible to find a consumer product that ISN'T a solid black rectangle. Even within the little microworld of web design the same trend shows up. In 2000 webpages were shapely and colorful, with a wide variety of fonts and textures and pictures. Now we have sparse black rectangles surrounding light gray text on light gray backgrounds. No beauty, no information. Just rectangles.

Labels: From rights to duties

  ¶ 10:51 AM

  Anti-gravity food
Feature on how Abkhazian lavash is made. Lavash is just another form of flatbread. Every culture claims its "own" flatbread, but flatbread is flatbread. Lavash is like the others in its ingredients. What makes it unique is the direction of cooking.

Every other food in the world, liquid or solid, is cooked in accordance with gravity. Sitting on a pan or grill above a flame, or on a sheet inside an oven.

Lavash is cooked on the SIDES of a bottle-shaped brick oven, facing almost downward. How does it stay there? Why is it made that way? The article doesn't explain.

Later: This video shows how it's done. Note especially the amazing ergonomics of the workplace!

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 4:00 AM

  Layerleth
Convective thought. I've approached this point often but didn't quite hit it before.

Amid all the fake hullabaloo about surveillance by governments, AppleGoogle, etc, one important factor isn't being discussed.

Surveillance or monitoring can be a good thing or a bad thing. How can you tell? By the number of layers.

A living thing is PACKED with surveillance of all types. All of it is layered and modular. Each cell monitors its DNA and its inputs and outputs. Each tissue monitors the quality and survival of its cells. Each organ monitors the condition of its tissues. The entire organism monitors the organs and the outside world.

A profit-making business (before the evil era of Share Value) keeps track of its customers and suppliers. If the business is small, like a one-celled organism, the monitoring will be direct and layerless, which is fine in that situation. Larger corporations like carmakers formerly monitored their customers indirectly through dealers.

A functional nation monitors its provinces. Each province monitors its counties. Each county monitors its townships. Each township monitors its cities.

A functional computer program surveils its top-level classes or methods. Each method surveils its subroutines. Each subroutine keeps track of its own variables.

= = = = =

Layers tend to prevent tyranny because each module can ONLY control the pieces that it innately understands and empathizes with. A subroutine understands its own variables. A township understands the culture and geography and economy of its cities. A car dealer knows the peculiar tastes of his own customers. Each layer's decisions are tailored to advance and improve its components, because the layer itself improves when the components increase their quality.

In a layerless system like NSA or EU or Windows 10, the top controllers have total access to everything that happens everywhere. The top controllers can't possibly understand or empathize with the culture of Tirol or the workflow of a graphic artist. The only thing they understand is TOTAL OBEDIENCE TO THE MIND OF THE CONTROLLER. Their governmental decisions or UI/UX decisions are guaranteed to make life EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for Tirol or the courseware-maker. This is completely irrelevant to the top controller.

Labels: defensible spaces, Leth

  ¶ 3:03 AM

  Still the wrong response
The bureaucrat who triggered the false nuke alert in Hawaii has been fired, along with several top officials of the department. According to the latest version of the story, he had a long history of making the SAME mistake.

Again it's the wrong response. If ANY employee can make the same mistake repeatedly on an important decision, your system is fucked. The mistake should trigger a MURPHY TESTING PROCESS which you failed to perform initially.

Emergency management provides a good controlled-variable experiment. In some states the setup still works well. In other states Parkinson has killed it. Meaningful mission gone, agency finds other shit to do. Here in Wash the EAS serves SOLELY to give Good Parent Alerts. Whenever a real parent is determined enough to repossess her kid from state-ordered fostering, we get a quick and clear alert over the entire state, carefully phrased to make the real parent sound like a random stranger. Emergencies like windstorms and firestorms get nothing at all, or at best a minute of garbled incomprehensible noise AFTER THE EVENT IS OVER.

I'm glad to be informed that we were just destroyed by a BEEPBEEPBEEP SSKHFFTPPPWQQQQFTTTKXQSHHHHHKKKKK BEEPBEEPBEEP. I thought it was a windstorm. Stupid me.

Actually the Civil Defense mission was a vicious racket from the start. USA STRONG has always ignored the safety of its people. The purpose of Civil Defense was to keep us vulnerable and fearful of Currently Defined Fake Enemy, not to help us defend ourselves.

Labels: Constants and Variables, defensible spaces

  ¶ 1:23 AM

  The utopia gaff
Here's one of JR Brinkley's competitors that I hadn't heard of before..



This was the 4/14/23 issue, so April plus oysterless made me wonder...

But it's true. Zion City wasn't just oysterless, it was pretty much everythingless:

Wilbur Glenn Voliva (1870-1942) took control of the community of Zion, Illinois — a religious community which taught Flat Earth doctrine (through the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church) — after Alexander Dowie resigned due to poor health and scandal. He kept tight control over the community and broadcast his Flat Earth agenda from a 100,000-Watt radio station in the town.

Irving Wallace interviewed Voliva in 1932. Voliva declared that the Bible was his entire scientific library. Astronomers were 'ignorant fools'. The sun, he said, was only three thousand miles away and only thirty-two miles in diameter. When asked why he thought the sun so near the earth, he said: "God made the sun to light the earth, and therefore must have placed it close to the task it was designed to do. What would you think of a man who built a house in Zion and put a lamp to light it in Kenosha, Wisconsin?"

Here's an account of life in Zion City, which sounds like a thoroughly modern puritan utopia:

The trouble lasted for a long time, but eventually the police authorities triumphed. They arrested some of the violators and fined them. The defendants appealed and lost, the court holding that the city could prohibit smoking in crowds. That broke up the practice, except for a few isolated cases – stubborn persons, who wanted to know what constituted a crowd, but the police magistrates and the judge of Zion City soon settled that little point.

To-day it is legal for a person to smoke in Zion City as long as he isn’t in a crowd. The smoker is walking along the street unaccompanied. The policeman spies him smoking and walks up and arrests him, and he is guilty of violating the city ordinance which prohibits smoking in crowds – the crowd in this instance being made up of the smoker and the policeman. There are very few arrests any more for violating the ordinance against smoking.

Paradise for tech types. Admittedly they prefer the round-earth theory at the moment, but they have perfected the techniques of breaking and violating all laws of math and logic and behavior to fit their own theories, so they could do a much better job than Voliva on the flat-earth theory.

Later: Here is an objective 1939 article on the rise and fall of Zion City, as seen from a radio perspective.
  ¶ 3:18 PM

  Multi-layered gaff
Occasionally I get emails from old software companies that I scarcely remember. I must have bought something from them 15 years ago, but I'm no longer sure what it was. Cadkas.de is one of those. I bought a PDF editor from them, used it once to make help files for an early edition of courseware, then lost the product.

Now Cadkas is joining the blockchain bubble:

Dear customer,
I want to inform you about our new project.
Reference Line Coin ICO
We bring the reference line into the crypto world.
Anybody who receives or sends a lot of money from their cryptocurrency wallet will know this problem. You have no idea where the money actually comes from. The good old reference line known from traditional bank transfers is not available for existing cryptocurrencies. We want to change this!
What we want to create
We want to create a new cryptocurrency based on an own blockchain which supports reference lines. Of course, you are free to leave the reference line blank if you want.
We currently raise the money to create this new cryptocurrency. You can participate in the ICO if you simply send some Ethereum to us.
Please note, that we currently do not have the actual coin ready. We want to use the money raised by this ICO to create the coin.
https://www.referencecoin.co

Okay. How does this differ from the standard "Nigerian" scam? We're trying to do something which may be helpful to you. Send us money and we won't promise any results.

I guess we're looking at a two-stage sucker filter. If you're already a Nigerian sucker, you're accustomed to sending money by wire transfer. If you're already a Nigerian sucker AND a Bitcoin sucker, you've noticed that the Bitcoin fraud lacks one of the familiar elements of the Nigerian fraud, and you want your scams to be consistent.

In other words, we want DOUBLE suckers to fall for this product. If you're not already a multi-layered sucker, you will disregard this message and we won't have to waste our time cultivating you.
  ¶ 11:43 AM

  Inspiring!
Fontdiner, which has been producing good digital fonts for 20 years, is expanding BACKWARDS into making physical fonts for letterpress work! Woodcut display fonts!

Analog returns. GOOD NEWS.



Polistra approves!

Labels: defensible spaces, defensible times

  ¶ 9:54 AM

  From General Winter to Wintersmith
Struck just now by a connection. Yesterday I noted that demonic NYC was forced by frigid "global warming" to ignore its own demonic sanctions against Russia and buy two tankers of Russian LNG.

Today:

With this year’s frigid winter, they’ve finally relented and will begin buying gas directly from Gazprom again, now that their legal challenge was settled by the Stockholm Arbitration Court.

This is what is driving European politics populist. It, along with insane immigration, is eroding the political power of the globalists who run the EU. Gazprom, despite all of the rhetoric, supplied a record amount of gas to Europe in 2017 and will likely increase those deliveries by another 6% in 2018.

In previous centuries Russia won wars because it knew how to endure winter, and knew how to weaponize winter against warm-country invaders.

Now Russia is winning the economic war because it knows how to deal with the economic consequences of winter, and knows how to weaponize sanctions against the demonic sanctioners. (How? Break Graybill's Law. Expand your own skill set.)

Same basic principle. Now the emphasis is on skills instead of simple endurance.

Russia is now the wintersmith.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 2:22 AM

  Blinders
Yesterday I was in a dental surgeon's waiting room in an unfamiliar part of town. There were about 12 people in the room. Most were yoots, probably there for braces. Two were the moms of the yoots. Two (including me) were old coots. All of the yoots and yoot-moms were locked into their cellphones, both thumbs tapping. The two old coots were phoneless. Typical.

An unexpected aspect of the yoots was the suddenly universal optical style. One year ago I showed the standard Sorosian glasses:



Those trapezoids are already passe. The ONLY permissible glasses now are Anti-Trump Squares:



All the COOOOOOL persXns, As Seen On TV, are wearing this style. It removes all evidence of gender and species from your appearance, and it blocks your view of reality, focusing solely on the rectangle of the iPhone screen. Tres chic.

Labels: Nonzero problems

  ¶ 1:49 AM

  The formula gaff
A couple of detective shows featuring a fake System for betting have similar-sounding fake formulas in the System. Considering radio and TV writing schedules, the two episodes would have been written almost simultaneously. Wonder if the same writer was involved in both?

Earlier one: A 1952 episode of Let George Do It. George is investigating the murder of a bettor who supposedly developed a System to beat the roulette wheel. He finds a piece of paper with the calculations, and his Girl Friday reads it out loud:

"... the square root of C3D over A plus B equals the square root of C3D parenthesis A plus B over parenthesis A plus B times C...."

Later one: A 1953 episode of Racket Squad, where a conman displays his fake System and sells its "secret" to "carefully selected" suckers. As he calculates the winning order for the fourth race, he mumbles:

"A squared plus B squared divided by two pi R squared equals the square root of M."

Neither formula makes sense, but the latter writer seems to have been trying a bit harder.

Math could possibly help with the wheel, but it would necessarily involve factorials and derivatives, not square roots. Math wouldn't help at all with horses, but a System based on astrology could bend the odds. Horses, like all living things, respond to moon phases, and we know now that birth season shapes the epigenes. You could correlate the moon response to the birth season of a horse, conceivably leading to a prediction of better or worse performance at various moon phases.
  ¶ 3:17 PM

  What if
Fairly typical Spokane News item:

1400 West 11th area, Reporting several subjects fighting and one person armed with a bat

Bats and swords seem to be more popular than guns around here.

What would happen if drug dealers started using the other kind of bat? A trained flying vampire would be a remarkably effective deterrent.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 3:08 AM

  What's that blue stuff on the map?
ZH features a severe water shortage in Cape Town. The commenters make the usual assortment of pointless points but miss the FUCKING OBVIOUS.

Cape Town is ON THE FUCKING OCEAN. When you are ON THE FUCKING OCEAN, you don't need to depend on variable rainfall and leaky dams. Desalination has been around for thousands of years. It requires more energy than a dam, but after you get it running your water supply is essentially infinite.

Los Angeles has the same idiotic "problem". Los Angeles is also ON THE FUCKING OCEAN, but continues to steal expensive water from the Northwest instead of using the FUCKING OCEAN.
  ¶ 2:48 AM

  Kipling
Via RT:

Every day we add more sanctions against Russia for the crime of being our Official Witch. But when "global warming" chills NYC to the bone, and NYC needs more natural gas than it can get from the former American petroleum industry that NYC has been SMASHING AND SMASHING AND SMASHING FOR 40 YEARS, suddenly there are no sanctions. NYC has bought two tankers of natural gas from Russia, which is a CAPITALIST COUNTRY with a NON-SMASHED petroleum industry, always ready to sell products for a good price.

Kipling said it best.

For it's Commie this, and Commie that, and Commie wait outside!
But it's "Thank you Mister Putin" when the tanker's on the tide.

Time to show the colors. Update: It worked. Thanks.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Гром победы

  ¶ 1:00 AM

  Wrong innovation, wrong disruption
The founder of IKEA died. IKEA is an odd crossover, and the comments about his death on various websites show the confusion. For some reason IKEA is strongly popular among NPR progressive types, and the founder gets credit for "inventing" the idea of unassembled furniture.

Ratshit. Unassembled furniture has ALWAYS been common. When I was a kid, most of the furniture in our house was bought in kit form and assembled by my father. (He was an excellent carpenter, so the assembly was super-easy for him.) Right now, all of the non-antique furniture in my house was assembled from JC Penneys kits in the 1980s. (I have ZERO wood skill, so the assembly was quite an achievement for a retard.)

None of this stuff came from IKEA, which wasn't operating in USA STRONG in those years.

What is IKEA's real innovation? TAX EVASION. Both personally by the founder and corporately by IKEA. Nobody beat IKEA's tax evasion talents until Bezos came along and beat everybody in history.

So IKEA is idolized by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The founder should be a hero to Randian Repooflicans, not Bernie/NPR types.
  ¶ 12:20 PM

  Unafraid of corporate influence
A Canadian prof is complaining about corporate influence in higher education. He's got it backwards twice. Corporate influence is NOT the problem, it's the solution; and corporate influence is NOT growing, it's shrinking. The valid parts of higher education (medicine, agriculture, business, engineering) have ALWAYS maintained connections with the commercial sector. They are paid to train employees and solve problems FOR business, and they often succeed. Unfortunately the useless parts of higher education, the parts that CREATE problems for the rest of society, have more influence with administrations and accrediting agencies and foundations, so the SOLVING part has to fight for its existence.

= = = = =

This 1935 book lists all licensed educational broadcasters as of 1935. There are 200 listings. About half of the licenses never went anywhere; a group of students at some college or high school acquired a license then lost interest or graduated. About half of the licenses were purchased by local businesses who turned the station commercial. Many of those commercial stations are still on the air now. Only a dozen were truly active as educational broadcasters in 1935, and a few of them are still running now.

Among the choice few is KSAC in Manhattan. I knew something about KSAC because I did a summer internship there in 1962. Here's a piece of its history I hadn't heard before:



KFKB in Milford was JR Brinkley's station. It was among the most powerful in the country, so KSAC began life in a big way. JR was a major vendor of hooey. Goat gland surgery and a collection of magic elixirs. I can't properly classify him as harmless hooey. Surgery is always harmful and sometimes fatal; it should be used only when the likely good exceeds the likely harm. Brinkley's goat glands did no good at all.

Nevertheless, K-State wasn't afraid of using Brinkley's studios to GET SHIT DONE, even though Brinkley was immoral and illegal. Brinkley's high power enabled K-State to establish a national footprint quickly. When KSAC got its own transmitter, it had an immediate audience for programs like these....



... which were still being offered in the '60s when I listened and briefly worked there. All aimed at SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS for real farmers and housewives.

Here's another neat innovation:



Low-tech courseware!

The mention of 'remote control', if accurate, is also interesting. Did KSAC's student engineers rig up a way to send commands and programs to Milford by telephone?

= = = = =

Later: Here's a more detailed description of a similar remote operation at about the same time. This was an electrical power substation in Indiana, controlled by phone from the main plant.

Labels: Alternate universe, Experiential education

  ¶ 4:41 AM

  NGDAgency
There is a predictable donnybrook about a T-shirt saying "Slavery gets shit done."

Why argue? It's a fact. Not ironic or contradictory or horrible. Just a fact.

Remove the vile anti-Natural-Law propaganda that NYC has been feeding us for 200 years.

Remove the words and leave the functions.

Natural Law recognizes two forms of work, and recognizes that each form has a place.

Ownership, with permanent lifetime obligations on both sides, gets big shit done. Organized massive shit like pyramids and railroads and cars.

Independent workers get small shit done. Specialized and personalized shit like plumbing and haircuts and art.

Around 1800, London and NYC capitalists developed a new setup that breaks both rules. Debtism spawns big organizations WITHOUT permanent loyalty on either side. The boss can fire anyone for any reason, and the boss can work you to death and toss your carcass into the forge.

London and NYC propagandized this bad setup by stigmatizing the balanced system of ownership. You're supposed to work hard in the new system because you're "free". You have "God-given rights". You can start your own company any time you want. You can move up in the ranks.

Those claims are legalistically true but Naturally untrue. In Natural fact most people are not independent artisans. Most people are not leaders. The NYC system puts your focus on a goal that AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN. Everyone spends their energy in a futile pursuit of position instead of getting shit done.

Parkinson recognized the converse of the latter problem. A bureaucracy always tends toward the pursuit mode, but when SHIT IS ACTUALLY GETTING DONE, the jockeying for position is suppressed.

Men want to be useful. Men want to make things. When the making is gone, men will spend their energy seeking POSITION instead of ACCOMPLISHMENT.

And that's where we are now. Our goals are no longer aimed at making more life, more value, more beauty. We are solely focused on BEING instead of DOING. We tell youngsters that they can BE anything they want, including Gender #47 or God or Boss or an Artist or a President. These BE-promises are flatout lies. Everyone has a fixed set of skills and a fixed status. When you KNOW your position, when you KNOW your skills and your status, you can then focus on GETTING SHIT DONE, which is the GOD-ASSIGNED REASON FOR OUR EXISTENCE.

= = = = =

UncommonDescent has been quoting linguist Neil Rude lately.

Rude is observing one side effect of this corrosive focus on BEING. He notes that 'ambitransitive' verbs are getting more common in English. I don't think the ambi-ness is the main point; it's the spread of INtransitive and middle voice. We're losing the basic relationship of subject-verb-object that belongs in a DOING culture. We're replacing it by BEING forms, where the verb indicates a condition or action without an actor. Sharp-pointed example:

Transitive: I'm driving my car.
Middle voice: My car drives fast.

In languages with more verb inflections, this change shows up as a shift toward reflexive verbs, which have a form like My car drives itself. The meaning is the same.

It's no coincidence that the Sorosian parts of the world, where the fraudulent goal of BEING is firmly established, have languages with caseless nouns, while the non-Sorosian areas have distinct noun cases. From Poland to Hungary to Turkey to Russia to China to Korea, the siren song of Soros gets little traction.

When the giver and receiver of action sound different to your ears and feel different to your tongue, it's harder to lose sight of PURPOSE.

Labels: From rights to duties, Make or break

  ¶ 1:36 AM

  Mechanical? Random?
Each cell in a multi-celled animal is performing internal tasks at roughly this level of complexity....



....all the time.

Each multi-celled animal has about a trillion cells, each performing as above. There is no conductor. Each cell is listening to the total performance and transposing keys or improvising cadenzas to enhance and sustain the total performance.

Mechanistic? Random? Useless words.

Labels: Asked and unanswerable, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 4:55 AM

  Pisa = Soros
BBC briefly mentions an OECD standardized test for various educational abilities. One section of the test is called the Pisa Test of Global Competence. BBC says that several countries, including UK and US, have decided not to give this section.

What is Global Competence?

A few samples from the test itself: [Direct link to PDF.]

First question pretty much gives the flavor:



In fact the first choice in the first question covers it. How well can you "explain how carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global climate change?" Since carbon dioxide is actually a RESULT of global climate change, this choice judges your ability to "explain" a criminal fraudulent falsehood that enriches Soros and empowers Deepstate. You are not allowed to "explain" a fact or question Sorosian orthodoxy.

There's a lot of self-evaluation, which is always dubious... and these self-evaluations are stacked toward Satan. Note the direction of all these choices:



and



Scariest part is an invitation to snitch on your teachers. There are six questions like this:



There's a separate test for teachers themselves:



And another questionnaire for parents:



Hmm. Do we notice any common theme here? Do we notice a set of attitudes and activities that are Newthink and another set that are Unthink? Nah. Couldn't be.

Labels: infinite evil

  ¶ 2:21 AM

  It's not forbidden. It's perfectly common!
Languages with real verb inflections often have distinct endings for several types of imperative, depending on who's receiving the orders.

These distinct forms always include 2nd person singular and plural. Sometimes 3rd singular and plural. Often 1st plural. NEVER 1st singular, because supposedly you can't give orders to yourself.

Nonsense. 1st singular imperative is probably more common than the others, especially in the context of memos and reminders.

I hadn't thought about it until just now. After I figured out a time-saving trick, I wrote a Note To Self in my Reminders file for the current project:

While building a LSN that requires lots of splitting and reuniting of text pages, avoid constant renumbering of the PAGES list by simply capping it with END PAGES after the point where I'm working.

What caught my attention was a dissonance. My sense of grammatical regularity insisted that the last few words should be where you're working because avoid is an imperative, and imperatives are always 2nd person. But there isn't any you in this situation. The imperative is an order to me, not an order to you. Therefore, in this sentence avoid is a 1st singular imperative, though English doesn't mark any of these forms explicitly.



= = = = =

Later thought: This little piece of grammar is sort of Heisenbergy. People have always left internal Notes To Self, some verbal and some non-verbal. Before widespread and convenient writing, these internal notes wouldn't have been observed by grammarians. The only externally observable equivalent would have been a bankshot of 2nd person imperatives. "Remind me to lock the doors!" ... followed by the later response ... "Lock the doors!" After writing became easy and cheap, and especially after the invention of the refrigerator magnet, the Note To Self became a purely self-given command with an externally observable and archivable instantiation.

Labels: Language update, Metrology

  ¶ 9:57 AM

  You pays
Previous two items nicely illustrate the distinction between harmless hooey and harmful hooey.

Harmless hooey: The Buddha gaff provides a bit of entertainment and a bit of thought for a very small price. A dime in the '30s = $2 now. Would you pay $2 for a few minutes of wonderment plus something new to think about? I would.

Harmful hooey: The Bergoglio gaff provides genocide and torture and ruined lives and crushed civilizations for an infinitely large price. We are paying trillions to support "global warming" and forced migrant invasions and total destruction of truth and goodness and purpose.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.... except that you're dead after paying for the second choice.
  ¶ 3:08 AM

  The Buddha gaff
Recently I cited one of Aberree's astrologers, who mentioned that he had announced his 1960 election prophecy on Long John Nebel's WOR talk show. I hadn't heard of Nebel. Now a biography of Nebel has appeared in the American Radio History library.

Nebel was one of those universal con men along the lines of JR Brinkley, working remarkably hard and cleverly to put over a scam. He finally settled into a supplement scam, selling a secret combination of herbs that was supposed to cure everything. His radio show was part of the supplement scam, just like most talk shows today. Medicine shows selling magic elixirs.

Before he settled down, he tried every gaff in the book and invented some new ones.

Here's the Buddha gaff:



There weren't a lot** of Buddhists or Muslims in NYC back then.... a Buddha who chants "Praise Allah" wouldn't get very far now.

Where did he get the preprinted invisible ink cards?



Through an established supply chain, of course.

= = = = =

The mental gaff had an amazingly difficult technique:



Plenty of mental gaffers are still around, still making big bucks. The gaff clearly requires tremendous mental skill and agility. I'd think actual telepathy would be easier.

= = = = =

** Second thought: The lack of members of those religions probably wasn't the main difference. Before we started making war against Buddhist and Muslim countries, most Americans simply didn't give a fuck about those parts of the world, which was a sane and normal attitude. In popular magazines and newspapers and trademarks, Oriental stuff and Arabic stuff was all mashed together as "mysterious and arcane". After 1950 we are supposed to "understand" those distinctions so we can "know" which parts of the "arcane" are Current Enemies and which parts are Valued Allies. Deepstate constantly upbraids us for failing to "know" the difference between Sunni and Shia or the difference between Hindu and Buddhist. One side of each pair is Eastasia and the other is Eurasia. One side of each pair is Eurasia and the other is Eastasia. One side of each pair is Eastasia and the other is Eurasia. One side of each pair is Eurasia and the other is Eastasia.

Labels: Aberree, Alternate universe

  ¶ 1:51 AM

  Chief inquisitor warns against cheap knockoff inquisitors
Antichrist Bergoglio continues serving Soros. He warns us against "fake news".

Who is he talking about? As usual Satan is a sneaky snake, making vague insinuations, but this passage leaves no doubt:

Praiseworthy efforts are being made to create educational programmes aimed at helping people to interpret and assess information provided by the media, and teaching them to take an active part in unmasking falsehoods, rather than unwittingly contributing to the spread of disinformation. Praiseworthy too are those institutional and legal initiatives aimed at developing regulations for curbing the phenomenon, to say nothing of the work being done by tech and media companies in coming up with new criteria for verifying the personal identities concealed behind millions of digital profiles.

Developing regulations = EU banning "hate speech" that fails to support EU. Facebook and Twitter banning "hate speech" that fails to praise Hillary.

Millions of digital profiles = RUSSIAN_BOTS.

There are no institutional or legal initiatives, no regulations, on the side of truth.

Here's the sneakiest part:

Nor can we ever stop seeking the truth, because falsehood can always creep in, even when we state things that are true. An impeccable argument can indeed rest on undeniable facts, but if it is used to hurt another and to discredit that person in the eyes of others, however correct it may appear, it is not truthful.

Truth that might discredit someone is NOT TRUTHFUL. Since the professional victims and the people who need to be discredited are all on Soros's side, this means that all criticism of Satan is UNTRUTHFUL by infallible definition.

Accept no substitutes! Look for the Soros™ trademark. It's easy to recognize. If it's not Soros™ it's UNTRUTHFUL!

Labels: infinite evil

  ¶ 12:51 AM

  Neighborhood NOTE!
The vacant apt at 4001 W Crown has been SOLD!

None too soon... the squatters were getting mighty comfy.

This means a major positive change for the neighborhood, with the center of decay gone.

It also frees up my morning walk. When I started the walk 6 years ago, I made a vow to pass by 4001 every time, in one direction or another. I've kept the vow, except for the few days when the streets were so icy that I had to turn back immediately. My purpose was prayerful, hoping to cause a positive change in some mysterious spiritual way. Obviously the 'prayer' didn't work; if 'prayer' worked as advertised, the change would have happened immediately. Nevertheless, a vow is a vow. Now I can loosen up the routine a bit.

Labels: infill, se-lu

  ¶ 2:24 PM

  A whole bunch of nothing special
BBC's non-news features often get things surprisingly right. Not this one! BBC clearly chose a writer who doesn't understand ANYTHING about programming or graphics or simple metrology.

A Facebook engineer has invented a new unit of time called a flick.

The flick has been designed to help developers keep video effects in sync, according to a description on the code-sharing site GitHub.

A flick, derived from "frame-tick", is 1/705,600,000 of a second - the next unit of time after a nanosecond.

It's not "the next unit". You can't describe anything as "the next unit". Anyone can define any base unit for specific purposes.

Flicks are defined in the programming language C++, which is used to generate visual effects for film, television and other media.

Two category errors in one sentence.

(1) A unit isn't defined in or by any programming language. It's just an arbitrary decision to use a particular number for a particular purpose. Apparently these coders were working in C++ when they decided to set up a personal unit. They could have defined it in Cobol or Fortran or Basic or chalk on a blackboard or beads on a very large abacus. (2) C++ is used for all sorts of purposes, and all sorts of languages are used for graphics and visual effects. Ultimately, if you're working for maximum speed you're going to be writing directly in machine code or assembler for the graphics processor system.

Flicks give programmers a way to measure the time between media frames without using fractions. Matt Hammond, lead research engineer at BBC Research and Development, said this can reduce errors such as stutters in graphics. "When the numbers used are not integers, errors can gradually creep into computer calculations. These errors can build up over time, eventually causing inaccuracies that become noticeable," he said.

This is common practice. Again, when you're trying for maximum speed and precision, you want to keep things integral to avoid roundoff errors and time-consuming multiplications and divisions. I've often defined custom ad-hoc base units in a similar way, finding the least common multiple.

In fact the ordinary time system of 60's and 24's was developed by the Babylonians for the same purpose.

Whole bunch of nothing special, treated by BBC as a new special invention.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 8:24 AM

  RT gets there first AGAIN


RT has breaking news of a BIG quake off Alaska, causing tsunami alerts all the way down the coast to Wash, and across to Hawaii.

No sign of the news in Bing and Google aggregators, no sign in any of the local "news" outlets. Some of them don't work at night, but the ones that do update their Twitter feeds are showing things like Ralph Lauren fashion awards and a "comedian" in Seattle who was attacked by his audience. (Bravo!)

The "local" "news" outlets often focus mostly on the Seattle area, and a tsunami reaching the coast of Wash is definitely a Seattle event. It's not fashion or RUSSIAN_HACKING so it doesn't exist.

FWIW (not much): I had one of those definite earthquaky feelings two days ago, but dismissed it because I've got other worries this week, so couldn't isolate the variable.

One hour later, Bing (which is based in Seattle) still hasn't noticed the tsunami, but finally picked up the nearly simultaneous quake in Java. The ring of fire is getting EXTREMELY active in the last two months, with newly awakened volcanoes in Phillipines and Indonesia and Japan. We should be paying more attention to this, but we won't. It disproves the CO2 nonsense, therefore it can't exist.
  ¶ 2:13 AM

  Roads that prohibit cars
I'm puzzled by a peculiar conflict between major pieces of web commerce. Youtube constantly runs JS scripts that Firefox can't handle. FF grinds to a halt, presents you with a choice of Continue, Debug or Stop. Continue just restarts the obstacle; Debug would only be useful if you had written the script; Stop restarts the obstacle. IE also grinds to a halt but without throwing the useless message.

This makes no sense from either side, even after acknowledging that we are the products. Why does Google want to stop viewing by product eyeballs? Why do both Firefox and IE collaborate in the stopping process? Shouldn't they find a way to bill Google for its persistent interference with commerce?

It's like a toll road partly funded by GM that senses the entrance of Ford and Toyota and Chrysler cars, and slams a gate shut to prevent entry. Why stop 2/3 of the cars, when those cars could be helping to pay for the road?
  ¶ 3:29 AM

  Good prophecy
From the incomparable American Radio History library, a 1970 issue of British Practical Electronics has an editorial...



In fact the nightmare arrived quietly in the early '80s. The web, embodied in Compuserve and Prodigy and similar services, was becoming commonplace. At the same time, by a mysterious coincidence, NSA's language processing abilities reached maturity.



Hmm. That's funny. I thought the media NEVER used bugging. Now that Wikileaks and O'Keefe and others are FINALLY using bugging to reveal the media's own massive infinite indescribable feral wickedness, the alien demons are claiming virginal purity and mobilizing legislatures to outlaw such activities....



... Just as the magazine prophesied in 1970. The writer was appropriately cynical about the value of "laws", but unduly sanguine about the monstrous hypercriminal gangs known as "courts", which have been the vanguard of tyranny.
  ¶ 2:08 AM

  Se-lu 21, ablation edition
I've been treating the Federal monster as a giant racket, which implies a conscious purpose or intention.

Try something else. Se-lu. To solve the problem, loosen the concept, loosen the diagnosis. Treat it instead as a giant human.

What's the pathology?

The lower brainstem and spinal reflexes are still running. Breathing and heartbeat and muscles all good. Taxes in, pensions and wages out.

The parietal lobe is working in a basic way, receiving sensory data and moving muscles in response. Weather data and agricultural data in, subsidies and contracts adjusted.

But the frontal lobe is gone. Decision-making is absent, replaced by a fight-or-flight reflex permanently stuck on fight. Since 1946 the fighting makes no sense, serves no purpose, even when judged by cynical Machiavellian standards. It's not defending or preserving anything. It doesn't deter attacks; it EXPLICITLY CREATES ATTACKS. 9/11 happened BECAUSE of our insane aggression in the Arab world. We're losing territory instead of gaining territory. Allies are running away as fast as they can cut loose. But there's no feedback mechanism to examine this totally counterproductive and suicidal result. Just the raw reflex, turned up to 100000000000000. Killing and killing and killing and killing and killing.

Temporal lobe is gone. Speech and hearing are gone. Instead of giving information and guidance, the government screeches and roars incoherently, babbling about delusional THINGS THAT DO NOT EXIST. Instead of offering discipline to maintain internal order, the monster runs around committing and creating crimes, killing and killing and killing and killing and killing.

Which parts should be ablated to halt the permanent seizure?

Leave the brainstem in place. Leave the mechanical agencies that operate without decisions. IRS, SS, VA, Post office, agriculture and commerce departments.

Ablate everything else. The frontal and temporal lobes, the pieces that were originally designed to make decisions, give guidance and maintain order. Legislature, judiciary, executive, "law" "enforcement", military, diplomats.

Labels: se-lu

  ¶ 1:30 AM

  Self-contained answerquestions 2
Reprinting from last month:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

I was grumpily roaring questions like "How come it's OK for Saudi to pay billions to politicians, who then obey Saudi orders, but it's not OK for politicians to TALK to Russia, which DOESN'T give us orders? How come it's OK for the Clinton Mafia to kill witnesses but not OK for the Trump mob to breathe or live?"

Realized the answer is in the question.


It's OK for Saudi to control us and kill 3000 Americans with jetliners BECAUSE Saudi controls us and kills us with jetliners.

It's not OK for politicians to talk with Russia BECAUSE Russia DOESN'T control and meddle and hack and attack us.


It's OK for the Clinton Mafia to kill everyone who threatens it BECAUSE the Clinton Mafia kills everyone who threatens it.

It's not OK for the Trump mob to exist and breathe BECAUSE the Trump mob DOESN'T kill everyone who threatens it.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Adding another self-answering question:

NSA is claiming that it "accidentally deleted" some emails that some pointless investigator wants for some pointless purpose.

Everyone knows that NSA doesn't delete anything. No major organization deletes anything, but NSA is even stricter and more cautious than monsters like Twitter and Facebook. Reading everything and keeping everything is NSA's sole mission, while the other monsters are secondarily required to keep everything in case of audits or lawsuits.

The excuse about deletion belongs in the same category as "The dog peed on my homework." Nobody should accept it.

Yet everybody DOES accept it, nobody even SAYS that big organizations always keep everything.

Why do they accept NSA's dogpee excuse when they wouldn't accept it from anyone else?

Because NSA keeps everything ... and uses it for blackmail.

Labels: Askedanswered

  ¶ 3:45 PM

  1895 bears fruit for the first time
In the 1890s a romantic notion of international governance started to develop. The first outgrowths of this notion were Esperanto, the Nobel Prize, and the (modern) Olympics.

Esperanto was pointless from the start, partly because of poor linguistic design. A better product might have served a real purpose.

The Nobel Prize was meaningful for a few decades (especially for the many years when the committee REFUSED to award a prize!)... then after WW2 it flipped and became a reward for assisting Deepstate's genocide.

The Olympics flipped almost immediately, turning into a warmaking tool for both sides. See how horrible Current Enemy is? We need to kill them!

Now for the FIRST TIME the Olympics are serving the original purpose. North and South Korea are operating in harmony, joining in one hockey team and cooperating on other sports.

The South is using this momentary togetherness as a WEAPON FOR PEACE, trying to pole-vault its momentum into a longer marathon of negotiation:

South Korea's Unification Ministry will seek to hold high-level talks with North Korea on a regular basis and pursue the provision of humanitarian aid to infants and pregnant women in the North. In a 2018 policy briefing to Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon on Friday, the ministry said it would restore inter-Korean relations by regularly holding high-level talks and resuming inter-Korean exchanges and humanitarian programs.

The ministry will seek high-level talks, as well as military and Red Cross talks.

It has decided to lead North Korea to the negotiating table for denuclearization based on inter-Korean talks and international cooperation, while working to establish sustainable inter-Korean relations through the legislation of inter-Korean agreements.

The ministry will also expand civilian cross-border exchanges in diverse areas of religion, sports and health and medical care after the North's participation in the Winter Olympics.

I pray for success. When people get a chance to WORK TOGETHER FOR A COMMON PURPOSE, conflict fades. The SHARED PURPOSE is crucial. Talking without a WORK GOAL makes things worse, emphasizes the differences and conflicts.

Meanwhile back at the genocide ranch, we're continuing to use the Olympics as a weapon against Russia, A COUNTRY THAT HAS NEVER FIRED A SINGLE SHOT OR BOMB AT US IN ALL OF OUR HISTORY. And we're trying to STOP the Koreans from committing peace.

We are absolute crime, absolute evil, absolute wickedness, absolute sin. We need to be removed from the universe.

Labels: Nonzero problems, Zero Problems

  ¶ 3:09 PM

  Fraudulent blackmail
An odd sort of fake blackmail is emerging in recent political nonsense.

= = = = =

First case: The document about Saudi involvement in 9/11. Supposedly several Congressmonsters had read it and seen the 'smoking gun'. Instead of simply TELLING US WHAT'S IN THE DOCUMENT, these Congressmonsters tried to mobilize public pressure on Deepstate to declassify the document. Everyone knows that Deepstate never declassifies anything, so the mobilization was guaranteed to be futile, and the Congressmonsters were then free from real pressure to tell the truth.

= = = = =

Second case: Congressmonsters are telling us that they have seen a memo about the GPS Fusion mess which will expose the Clinton mob's involvement. Another 'smoking gun'. Instead of simply TELLING US WHAT'S IN THE DOCUMENT, they are mobilizing the useful idiots to pressure Deepstate toward releasing the document. Again everyone knows that Deepstate never releases anything, so the Congressmonsters are now free from pressure to tell the truth.

= = = = =

In plain old honest blackmail, A knows something about B that B wants to conceal. A forces B to pay for the service of keeping the secret.

These weird deals look something like blackmail on the surface. Congressmonsters know something about Deepstate that Deepstate wants to conceal.

An honest blackmailer would give Deepstate two choices. Reveal the secret or we'll zero out your budget.

The public would win. If Deepstate revealed the secret to keep its budget, the public would see that "9/11" was a total fraud committed by Deepstate, and the public would see that "Russian interference" is a total fraud committed by Deepstate. If Deepstate decided to keep the secret, it would lose its official budget and would have to fall back on its profitable but unreliable finance-sector rackets.

= = = = =

But that's NOT what happens in these weird little arrangements.

The public pressure looks like punishment applied to Deepstate. IN FUCKING FACT Deepstate isn't bothered at all by public opinion. IN FUCKING FACT Deepstate gains useful information about the mobilized idiots, making the next pogrom more convenient.

Deepstate wins double, and the Congressmonsters gain credit for being whistleblowers while loyally advancing the purposes of Deepstate.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter

  ¶ 2:51 AM

  Vocabulary envy
Latest item at KSHS is not especially old:

This gunflint was recovered during excavations in 2014 of the Adair Cabin site, home of Reverend Samuel and Florella Brown Adair and their family, in Osawatomie, Kansas. Osawatomie and the Adairs were much involved with the abolitionist movement during the "Bleeding Kansas" years. Gunflints were used to generate a spark in a flintlock musket or pistol and as strike-a-lights for lighting a fire. This gunflint was quarried and manufactured in France, as is indicated by it's honey-yellow or blonde color. The square gunflint has one dorsal arriss.

Arriss?

I enjoy reading these archeology items for the terminology. The digital world is starved for jargon; new devices get acronyms, and variations just add more letters to the acronyms. (ROM, PROM, EPROM, EEPROM. RAM, DRAM, SDRAM, DDR1-SDRAM.) Techniques for forming graphic shapes and specialized programming structures are also nameless. No lively metaphors. In earlier times electronic work had a rich vocabulary for types of circuits, ways of building a radio, and variations on parts. All gone in the digital era.

Googling arriss leads to a detailed discussion of gunflint classifications, and sure enough the flint under discussion looks nearly identical to the KSHS specimen. Honey-colored, translucent**, with one dorsal arris, which means it's French.

Yes, it is indeed a gunflint (and, since it’s prismatic, not a gunspall). It’s a typical form for the mid-late 1700’s onwards and it has been used… as evidenced by the semi-circular impact damage on the heel, created by the cap-screw of the gun-hammer. It’s what De Lotbiniere proposed as “Type 4”, characterised by having a single dorsal arris.

Arris seems to be the proper spelling, and the term was formerly common among stone-cutters, as in this passage from an 1828 'Popular and Practical Treatise on Masonry':



Now we're circling back to techniques for forming graphic shapes!


** This stone is so beautiful that I'm surprised it isn't used for jewelry! ... EDIT: It is.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 3:46 AM

  Holland again
After I got thinking about Holland, ZH happened to feature a couple of Dutch items today.

One is a Dutch vegan who moved to Switzerland and started a campaign against the local cattle industry. She's so annoying that the town voted against giving her citizenship. Annoying vegans are unsurprising. Interesting information: Switzerland has genuine DECENTRALIZED DEMOCRACY. Towns have the power to refuse citizenship!

The other is one of those meaningless surveys on 'who trusts news'. Dutch people trust their news more than anyone else.

I decided to check some Dutch news sources, since I hadn't paid ANY attention to them for many years. First try was good old Radio Nederland. Turns out they stopped broadcasting in 2012 and didn't switch to an active podcast website like other shortwave stations. Instead, they turned into a foundation that tries to spread "real news" by Dutch standards to the benighted masses of Darkest Africa.

Here's the website. It's way beyond BBC or DW in the Soros department. Intense hypersatanic propaganda and organizing aimed at Africa, designed to TEAR AFRICA TO SHREDS. Every aspect of morality and religion and family life is SLEDGEHAMMERED and EXPLODED from all flanks.

Unsurprising. Holland is, after all, the country that ARRESTED Geert Wilders for gently and carefully telling the precise truth. "Real news" means Soros times 100.
  ¶ 2:22 AM

  What's missing on a chessboard?
One of the second-string Repooflican yappers was observing: "It's ironic that the lower-class always votes Democrat, and the richest people also vote Democrat."

Not ironic at all. Astute social observers have seen this forever.

In fact it's innate. Natural law. Serfs and owners always align on the same side because serfs can't survive without the owners. Most importantly, serfs fight for their owners when ordered, but artisans and merchants don't fight willingly. Makers are traditionally antiwar because war is breaking. The Insatiable takers, the aristocrats, are warmongers because they always want MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE, and they love to break people and things.

A chessboard illustrates the point. Chess was designed by aristocrats. The pieces include all the allies and employees of aristocrats: Kings, queens, bishops, knights, pawns. But there are no merchants or coppersmiths or millers or carpenters on a chessboard.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Answered better than asked

  ¶ 6:19 PM

  Thanks, weather gods!
This winter seems to be warmer and wetter than usual, with more rain and less snow than average. A quick look at the Weather Bureau's monthly summaries verifies the guess.

For Nov and Dec and Jan to today (18) the liquid precip total is 7.09 inches. If all of that had fallen as snow, we'd have around 80 inches of snow. But in fact we only have 30 so far. Most of the precip fell as rain.

Thanks, weather gods!

(The all-or-nothing comparison isn't precise .... even in a cold winter the first part of Nov would have some liquid rain ... but it's close enough.)
  ¶ 5:11 PM

  Surprisingly drab
Quora.com continues to send me daily digests, which I find useful in two ways. The programming questions are often good info or good puzzles, and the other subjects are often surprising images of the typical feelings and lifestyles of other countries. Positive contribution to international understanding.

Today's new question was simple: What do people eat daily in your country?

Most of the answers are unsurprising and yummy. Lebanon and Pakistan are the yummiest.

Some are unexpected. Argentina is mostly Italian, but Uruguay is just beef, beef, and more beef, washed down with maté instead of coffee or tea.

For some reason the answer from Holland stunned me. Breakfast is a cheese sandwich (or a CHOCOLATE SANDWICH!) and a glass of milk. Lunch is tomato soup. Dinner is meat, potato, and green beans.

Except for the CHOCOLATE SANDWICH, that's standard drab midwestern American eating in the 1950s, before Mexican influence moved in. That's how my mother cooked, and that's why I didn't like to eat until I discovered (through Mexican influence) that food could be edible.

I hadn't specifically thought about Dutch food, but I would have guessed more sharply Germanic, with ham and cucumbers and bratwurst and lots of fish.

More importantly, the abovedescribed Dutch menu violates all the 'Mediterranean diet' rules... and yet modern Dutch folks are the tallest and probably the healthiest in Europe. Was the Quora answer simply wrong? Or is the 'Mediterranean diet' wrong?

Sidenote: Or you could have a truly exciting daily menu!
  ¶ 4:05 PM

  Why I follow RT, yet again
RT shows a headline:



The British and French leaders have reached an agreement that will solve a BRITISH problem which is ACTUALLY KILLING AND HARMING ACTUAL BRITISH PEOPLE.

Does the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation notice this ACTUAL BRITISH EVENT involving the lives of ACTUAL BRITISH PEOPLE?



Of course not. BBC is running its perpetual nonsense about THINGS THAT DO NOT EXIST. It's worrying about "global warming", and it's bashing Trump for failing to say the correct things about what some other idiot failed to say about what some other idiot failed to say about some nonsensical bizarre delusion that DOES NOT EXIST.

The media and politicians in Sorosian lands have reached a height of convoluted delusional psychopathic psychotic insane hallucinations that nobody could EVER have imagined being able to imagine the possibility of imagining at any time in any universe, including the "multiverses" that these monsters also treat as flat facts.

Please, Putin. Please, Kim. Please, Jehovah. Please, Mohammed. If any of you are listening, REMOVE US FROM THE UNIVERSE.

Labels: imprecatory psalm

  ¶ 11:22 AM

  Movable type to moving type
One episode of the best radio program, 'Strange as it Seems', features a murder on an Injun reservation. The script is taken directly from the trial transcript. The mother of the murdered girl is testifying about how she discovered the girl was dead...........

= = = = =

Lawyer: You said that you heard about your daughter Mabel's death from an owl. What did the owl say?

Mother: Owl say: Annie missing. Dead.

Lawyer: Annie missing, dead? I thought your daughter's name was Mabel.

Mother: Owl say: Annie missing. Dead. Her name Annie, too.

(Later...)

Lawyer, terminally exasperated: If the girl's name is Mabel, why did the owl mean your daughter when he said Annie?

Mother, ditto: I tell you! Her name Mabel sometimes! Annie sometimes!

The judge then calls an expert in language who verifies that Injuns have variable names, and that Injuns hear meaning in animal speech.

= = = = =

Variable names aren't a strange idea. Naming by current function or tendency was common everywhere before bureaucracy and printing forced lifetime permanence of ID.

Variable names have returned in the digital world where paper doesn't pin things down. Different avatars in different forums. My name Polistra sometimes! Ockham sometimes!

We could represent the variable parts of the world better if we could formalize this level of variability. Gutenberg brought us movable type, with molded letters capable of taking different positions on the page to spell words and sentences. The next step is movable pixels within the type. Shapeable type.



I've tried this trick a few times:

The O'Brien equation:



Two forms of earthquakes:





A modern variation on O'Brien, typified by the "Silence is violence" ratshit:



= = = = =

If we had better ways of showing a waveform or a pattern as a semantic element, we wouldn't need to smash numbers into a deceptive blob by statistics.

Instead of just listing the median, show the distribution IN the representation:



(This doesn't work as well as the previous examples!)

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Constants and Variables

  ¶ 3:53 AM

  Wonder why
Wonder why the latest Calif secession movement is getting major nationwide coverage? These movements have been running in a dozen states, including Calif, for many decades. What's special about this movement? It doesn't seem to include any celebrities or well-known politicians.
  ¶ 8:04 AM

  Why do they want it this way?
Spam in today's email:

The CIA is watching you. Here's how to stop them.

First thought: As usual the scammer is presenting an obviously false premise. If you're dumb enough to think there's a way to stop CIA, you're also dumb enough to pay big money for the One Weird Trick. Good old sucker filter technique.

Second thought: Well, how do you ACTUALLY stop CIA monitoring? Die.

Third thought: No, wait. That won't work either. The CIA's fronts in the digital world (Facebook, Google, Twitter) have no provision to stop watching you when you die.

Pre-digital businesses take action when a customer or employee dies. They close the account or halt the lease or pay the beneficiaries or whatever is appropriate. When you die in the digital world, your FB page or your storefront keeps on running. This is recognized as a problem, but the CIA fronts are doing nothing to solve it.

Why do they want it this way? There's the question. Ordinary scammers sometimes make use of a dead man's SS number to create fake identities. Is that the purpose here? Doesn't sound right.

= = = = =

Footnote: This spam comes from an outfit called Great American Daily, which was set up as part of faker Trump's scampaign. When faker Trump turned off his scampaign and became Hillary, Great American Daily instantly switched over to standard One Weird Trick scams. No mystery there. Competent scammers know when to trail behind a bigger fraud and when to unhitch.

Labels: Asked and unanswered

  ¶ 1:22 AM

  If
Random thought.

If Trump really wanted to change things, he'd start issuing executive orders that are PRECISELY THE SAME as Obama's executive orders, EXACT PHOTOCOPIES, with only one difference. The signature of Obama is crossed out and replaced by Trump's signature, and the date is crossed out and replaced by the current date.

Black-robed demons will instantly overrule the order because it was issued by Incorrect President. Repeat this process daily. Over and over and over and over. Pretty soon all of Obama's orders will be overturned BY THE DEMONS, not by Trump. Nothing will be left of Obama's decisions. Nobody can question the actions of demons, and the demons will find it difficult to overrule their OWN actions later.

Needless to say, this won't happen. We already know that Trump doesn't intend to change anything. He didn't do anything remotely resembling this; didn't even call attention to the fact that he was mainly restoring orders that had existed during most of Obama's term. The demons weren't bothered by the orders until Incorrect President restored them.

Labels: modest proposal

  ¶ 7:09 AM

  More old drones
I've previously noted that remote-controlled planes are more than a hundred years old.

Here's another old reference that comes closer to the modern version.

'David Harding Counterspy' was a long-running radio series produced by the even more long-running Phillips Lord outfit. Through most of its run, Counterspy was a simplistic cop show seemingly aimed at a young audience, well below the expertise and accuracy of similar shows.

In 1950 Counterspy had at least one seriously science-minded writer. This episode has remote-controlled drones remarkably similar in size and function to the modern version. Dual copter fans, small cargo compartment carrying 5 pounds. They were used by drug smugglers to carry the goodies across the Rio Grande without detection by police.



This episode features a sound spectrograph which accidentally recorded an important conversation in an acoustics lab. The cops find somebody who can electronically decode the spectrograph chart. (Unnecessary level of sci-fi; in 1950 you could find an acoustics expert who could simply read the chart by eye. It was a common skill.)

And this one features a sort of tele-medicine. The main character is shot in the head, and the normal surgeons aren't able to remove the bullet safely. They locate the one surgeon who can do the procedure, and he instructs them by long-distance phone. The anatomy of the brain regions and incisions is accurate.
  ¶ 7:16 AM

  Blaming the wrong user /// EDIT: Nope.
The discussion of Hawaii's false nuke alarm is asking the wrong question. 1% of the commenters are blaming the guy who made the wrong mouse-click, 99% are blaming Trump. We can ignore the blame-Trump part, since Trump is the designated scapegoat for everything EXCEPT the things he should be blamed for.

Hawaii should be blaming and JAILING the software company that designed the system.

The dude who clicked the wrong place on the screen is NOT blameworthy. In fact he should be halfway lauded for performing the TEST that the designers FAILED to perform.

Design starts with understanding the desires and limits of the humans who will be using the system. The Hawaii system failed at the start, because it makes the alert too easy and the cancellation too hard. Even for a simple non-critical action like deleting a fucking file, every system makes you go through an extra Are you sure? step. Why didn't this system have a multi-layer Are you sure? for a drastic action like panicking millions of people, some of whom will die of heart attacks or car accidents or stampedes?

Design ends (temporarily) after thousands of hours of testing with humans of all types. Old, young, dumb, smart, trained, untrained, alert, sleepy, drunk. The unfortunate dude who clicked the wrong item has now STARTED THE TESTING PROCESS, which was clearly omitted before. Give him a reward.

Later thought: Of course the best fucking solution for a SERIOUS CHOICE is a fucking PHYSICAL SWITCH with a fucking PHYSICAL KEY-LOCK. For 180 years SERIOUS CHOICES have been made by PHYSICAL SWITCHES.


= = = = =

EDIT: Update after more info emerged: Well, the software did have an Are you sure? choice, and the agency employee went ahead and sent the alert anyway. Twice. So he is to blame. The software should obviously have better protection as well. The stupidest part of all is that the Hawaiian agency had to check with FEMA in DC to get permission to turn off the alarm.

Major conclusion: As always, USA STRONG's overriding Prime Directive is to kill its own people. We are pure crime, pure evil, pure omnicide, pure wickedness. We need to be removed from the universe.

Labels: defenestration / depontication

  ¶ 2:55 AM

  Aberree and Manweller
In Oct '60, Aberree brought in two astrologers to forecast the '60 election.

One of them put out the usual apocalyptic nonsense**, based on the bizarre wacked-out delusion that elections create "democracy", therefore eliminating elections removes "democracy".



He saw Ike cancelling the '60 election and Gen MacArthur taking over in a military coup. The astrologer treated this as a disaster, but he was wrong. Consider how MacArthur improved Japan. He could have done the same for America. Japan won the industrial battle of the '70s because MacArthur brought the best parts of America (ie Fordism) into Japan, while America lost the battle because we replaced Fordism by Goldmanism. This astrologer was broadly right about the 'breakdown' starting in 73, but wrong about all the details.

= = = = =

The other astrologer called the election correctly, with a couple of wonderfully accurate details. Whether the details came from the stars or from an astute analysis of the two men, they're still excellent.



= = = = =

** Apocalyptoids ALWAYS claim that disaster is preventable by picking the correct party. Apocalyptoids ALWAYS tell us that Current President Of Incorrect Party is going to cancel the election and declare himself President For Life. The above item gives us proof that the same idiocy has been running verbatim for 57 years ... probably a lot longer.

They're wrong about both parts. As always, they're hopelessly gullible and naive, the exact opposite of paranoid. They believe that elections exist, and they believe that presidents have power.

The disaster isn't in the future. It started in 1776 when the colonies broke away from Britain and created a new insane country based on nonsensical counterfactual theories. They could have used their protests and boycotts to negotiate better treatment, but they didn't. The disaster got worse in 1787 when the colonists wrote the insane theories into a system guaranteed to produce tyranny. They could have turned back in 1792 when the theories received an early and bloody proof in France, but they didn't. The disaster was locked in 1803 when the Supreme Screeching Demons tore up the bad constitution and replaced it with raw personal authority of the Supreme Screeching Demons. Congress could have shut down the Demons, but Congress failed. Since then, the disaster has been permanent and unsolvable.

And the current president is NOT going to declare himself President for life because he doesn't have the power to declare much of anything. He is Deepstate's slave. JFK realized this and briefly tried to "fight the devil and all his imps". After that he was "not destined to live a long life."

Labels: Aberree, the broken circle

  ¶ 9:23 AM

  Patient things, patient methods
What's the exact opposite of bitcoin and MMT and QE and Soros?

This feature in the English Russia website shows the Russian equivalent of Fort Knox.

First opposite: The gold is being shown. You can see it's there. USA STRONG never shows any of the gold that it SUPPOSEDLY holds.

Second opposite: This gold is part of a long-term strategy to rebuild a true gold standard in the sane Silk Road part of the world.

Third opposite: Inventory is kept on CLIPBOARDS, not web-connected hackable smartphone thingamajigs.



The first two opposites are clearly an intentional display, consistent with sanity and metrology. The purpose of gold is to provide a VISIBLE AND VERIFIABLE GROUND POINT for exchange of value. Gold is not meant to be the primary exchange material.

The third was probably unintentional, so it's the most impressive.

Russia has a long tradition of sticking with physical and analog methods, and this is typical. When you record on paper, there is NO CHANCE of detection or alteration by foreign action at a distance.

When you record on smartphone thingamajigs, you are GUARANTEEING action at a distance and FORBIDDING modularity. Everything responds instantly to the Will Of Soros. Everything is contained within the Mind Of Soros.

= = = = =

BUT: On the other hand, the Russian government has allowed billionaires to buy small hydroelectric plants for planned bitcoin "mining". One deal involves a 30 megawatt hydro and geothermal plant, sold for only 2 million dollars. Bitcoin is strictly illegal in Russia because Russia is sane... but the legislature is considering a looser approach. In any country, billionaires with vested interests can shape legislation, so these deals may be a vesting and shaping move.

Labels: Metrology, Patient things

  ¶ 1:16 AM

  Rich world problem
HARD winter! Big slushy snow. Had to take the bus BOTH WAYS to the store instead of my normal bus uphill - walk downhill pattern. VERY BAD, as our wonderful idiot leader would say. Shithole snow, makes me use the bus!

= = = = =

Oops. Today is the FIRST TIME I've had to do the bothways routine this winter. Last year was bothways from start to finish. Never a break. Every day was a mountain-climbing nightmare.

This winter is reverting to the mean, or slightly easier than the mean. Snow once a week or so, with dry breaks between to let things melt and recover.

Thanks, weather gods!

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 9:50 AM

  Blood rain? Alien spaceship?


Never seen that color before. Is Portland getting blood rain? Or is that the shape of a giant alien craft?

A look at the Weather Bureau's Portland forecast shows heavy rain, nowhere near freezing, not record-breaking by Portland standards.
  ¶ 3:05 AM

  The best
Babylon Bee has been weak and tepid lately. Today they made up for it with the HARDEST SHARPEST TRUEST PARODY in recent history. Maybe all of history. I don't know how you could do better.
  ¶ 2:51 AM

  Constants and variables 86
O'Keefe has started a series on the inner workings of Twitter. As usual the "freedom" advocates are focusing on the non-shocking constant part and missing the evil variable.

There's nothing unusual about keeping records of all the messages, deleted or not. Any company that runs an email server has to do that. It's been the law for 25 years. Before the web, companies were required to keep copies of internal memos for a certain amount of time. And there's nothing unusual about being ready to submit those records to the government. That's why the records are kept.

These requirements have always been tyrannical and selectively enforced, but it's a very old tyranny. Not Twitter's idea, not Twitter's fault.

If you want to think of Twitter as a publisher instead of a carrier, the practice is less legalistic but even older. Publishers have always kept a 'morgue' of old copies for reference and for use in copyright actions.

The evil part is Twitter's attitude about this record-keeping. They are proudly using the records for purposes well beyond cold storage in case of audit. They are using the records to censor and inquisit heretics.

The second video shows an even scarier attitude. "Like flags and crosses and guns... nobody thinks that way. Must be a bot. Or a redneck." Bot = redneck = unperson. Since BotRedneckThink doesn't exist, we're not committing a crime by liquidating the unperson which unthinks this way. We're simply removing a contradiction.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 2:04 AM

  Metashaving a metayak 2
Even though I'm not in an office and don't punch a clock, I tend to keep a pretty consistent work schedule without trying. I didn't realize just HOW consistent it was until tonight, when I was putting today's work-steps into the latest todo.txt file.

The todo habit was formed long ago, and serves as a highly useful store of knowledge. Did I solve this particular JS or graphics problem before? If so, it's going to be in one of the todos on a USB drive.

Tonight I noticed that the todos on this project were almost all formed at the same time of day. I don't start the files daily or weekly; each new file happens when the old one is about 6kb in length. Thus each file records a variable number of days but a fairly constant number of actual work-steps.

Here's an Excel of the times when each todo was created:



Bad weather didn't affect the schedule, but the recent yak-shaving of transfer between old, newer, and newest computers really screwed it up. The last four files, starting at 39, are exactly the yakshave period.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 5:28 PM

  Heavy drizzle?
Weather Bureau yesterday:



Moderate and Heavy Drizzle? Is that the same thing as light torrents or patchy hurricanes?
  ¶ 6:55 AM

  Sudden stop to warfever
Last week it looked like Persia was the next Inevitable Necessary Noble War to Spread Democracy. All the political demons of both "parties", and all the media demons of both "parties", were pushing harder and harder in screechy unison. BOMB PERSIA! KILL! KILL! KILL!

Then the Persian government speedily and efficiently ended the Sorosian protests. At that point you'd normally expect a massive multiplication of the warfever. How dare they OPPRESS our heroic Sorosian freedom fighters!!!!! We must obliterate the country NOW!!!!!!!!!!

Nope. The warfever simply halted. Vanished. I don't see any items about Persia in the usual Sorosian media like BBC or DW, nor in the news aggregators.

The only fresh item I can find is one piece in reliable neocon National Review, and it's fairly mild by Israeli standards.

War on Persia was pushed in parallel by Saudi and Israel, and US/UK/EU obeyed. Saudi has definitely changed direction as its new king turns more toward the Russia/China side. Bibi hasn't turned, but maybe he's losing credibility. With corruption charges piling up, are his servants deciding that he's not permanent enough to fight and die for?
  ¶ 3:03 AM

  Carver vs Assange
Returning yet again to the biggest point of all:

LIFE IS PURPOSE.

What's the opposite of purpose? THEORY. Or principle, or ideology, or theology. Subspecies of the same class.

I was thinking of Carver as usual. He operated on PURPOSE, not theory. His purpose was to gain more economic power for his people. He worked toward that purpose by improving the crops that grew in the South, and trying to turn those crops into commercially useful products. I think he got sort of phase-locked on peanuts, which are harder to harvest and less efficient than other crops. He might have made more progress if he had LOOSENED his focus, but that's irrelevant to the main point.

Latest news on Assange shows the opposite. Assange operates on PRINCIPLE more than PURPOSE, and his principle often obstructs the purpose of his work. Never reveal a source is not a PURPOSE. The appropriate PURPOSE of an organization like Wikileaks would be Break monopolies of power. By refusing to reveal the source of the Clinton material he lost the chance to break the Clinton mob's power. Now he's endangering his own safety by favoring Catalunya over Spain. Even to an outsider, it was clear shortly after the first referendum that Catalunya is on the Soros side and Spain is on the non-Soros side. Assange is being protected by Ecuador, which is emphatically and proudly anti-Soros.

If Assange could focus on his PURPOSE, he would see that Ecuador is doing MORE to break monopolies of power than he is. He would gladly give up the principle ... or maybe just a feeling in this case .... that leads him to support Sorosian Catalunya.

Later: Aha. Ecuador managed to tame Assange's wild impulses with an appropriate carrot and stick. I'm glad. Assange is a vital part of God's campaign against Soros and other demons, but his fussy principles were interfering with the PURPOSE.

Labels: Carver, se-lu

  ¶ 1:47 AM

  Print file
After I got through with the stupid two-layer transfer between computers, the printer began making an awful noise. Sounded like a busted gear, ratcheting every time the carriage moved back and forth. I don't have much luck with printers, but just for completeness I opened up the back flap that lets you remove stuck paper.

The problem was IMMEDIATELY obvious:



Most graphics programs have a Print-File option on the menu, but this isn't what they mean!

How did it get there? After a bit of thought, this must be it....

I normally keep this box of miscellaneous desktop stuff above the computer.



Papers needed for quick reference, cables, USB drives for backup, two or three fingernail files to occupy my hands during long load times or whatever. Things I need to grab immediately and thoughtlessly.

But how did one of the files get into the printer?

During the transfers, I had two computers stacked on the spot where the box normally fits, and



the box was on top of the printer. I must have tossed the file toward the box and missed, bouncing the file into the printer's tray instead.

Maybe this is the first time I've succeeded in solving a printer problem? Remains to be seen.

And of course, this is yet another yakshave.



A wildly unlikely problem that WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED if I hadn't started down the stupid path of replacing a mostly functional Win 7 computer with a mostly fucked Win 10 computer. At least this stupid problem was easy to solve.

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 10:58 AM

  GAK! YOU FUCKING IDIOT!
Via RT:

State Representative Steve Alford (R-Kansas) has admitted he “was wrong” when he said African-Americans are more susceptible to using marijuana because of their “character makeup” and genetics.”

“I was wrong, I regret my comments and I sincerely apologize to anyone whom I have hurt,” Alford said Monday, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Dammit, fool. First of all, there's no such thing as "character makeup" unless you're talking about this sort of thing. It's an empty phrase with zero semantic content.

Second, if you're going to fuck around with genetic explanations you have to start with ACCURATE FUCKING OBSERVATIONS.

For the 54385834867986058790789058789573456467th TIME:

Every human taste, talent and tendency is partly genetic.

REPEATING FOR THE 54385834867986058790789058789573456468th TIME:


In this case we have an OBSERVED FACTUAL TENDENCY, which is EXACTLY OPPOSITE to your idiotic claim.

In fact Africans are the LEAST SUSCEPTIBLE to chemical addictions.

Northern people are the MOST SUSCEPTIBLE to all chemicals, and Orientals plus their genetic relatives among the original American tribes have special problems with alcohol.

Don't ruin the validity of genetic explanations with FALSE genetic explanations, idiot. GET YOUR FUCKING FACTS RIGHT, IDIOT.

  ¶ 2:21 AM

  Thanks, Ralph 472
The best proverbs and jokes force a doubletake. At first you think Yeah, that's about right and then BLAMO!

ZH reports on Elon's latest overreaching failure, which destroyed a supersecret spy satellite. Nice Emersonian justice. Deepstate always works with the banking class, and Deepstate projects like "global warming" and wars and Bitcoin are designed to reward the banking class for its collaboration. In this case the banking class gets the reward but Deepstate gets nothing. Thanks, Ralph!

One commenter hits a magnificent doubletake in a short sentence:

They shouldn't have used the self-driving option.

At first trite but true.

Then you stop and think: Missiles are ALWAYS self-driving. Autonomous control is not a new and untested optional feature for missiles; it's an intrinsic and necessary part of the entire concept. BLAMO!

Elon has managed to fuck up the self-driving part of a device that can't exist without self-driving.

Labels: Emersonian justice

  ¶ 1:29 AM

  Block verse
Newspaper columnists used to write short verses about current events. Now that "poetry" is the exclusive province of bizarre avant garde civilization smashers, these little cheerful verses are obsolete...

But not in the Weather Bureau. Their anonymous writers (who sometimes use the wonderful name Rex Block) have given us an old-fashioned verse about today's fog:

With H2O vapor condensation
To 100% saturation
Darn sustained dense fog
Makes commutes a slog
Deserving full throated condemnation.

It's not quite Robert Frost, but it's good stuff.

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 3:51 PM

  Taming Win 10, maybe
Been trying all the hints available online to tame the full-time 100% CPU and 100% disk activity of vile foul Windows 10. Two hints made a big difference. After applying BOTH of these, the activity is finally close to normal** computer behavior. One is Superfetch and the other is Diagtrack.

Both of these are OFFICIALLY REQUIRED FORCED MALWARE THAT YOU ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR. Both occupy the computer so fully that the lowly User can only grab an occasional CPU cycle, and both are reporting the lowly User's heretical activities back to Microsoft. That's MALWARE by any definition. With both turned off, the disk and CPU are closer to normal behavior but still noticeably more active than in Win 7.

The turnoff procedures (using services.msc) APPEAR to be holding after 24 hours. Other turnoffs via the task manager didn't last; the malware came roaring back after a few minutes.

Some of the online discussions say that you shouldn't turn off Superfetch on a physical HDD, but the performance is unquestionably BETTER since turning it off.

If these fixes don't hold, I'll trash this computer and return to my old Win 7 unit. Unshave the yak. I figured out that its audio didn't go bad after all; it was just a bad solder joint in one of my speakers. The old unit has one or two other problems that don't matter much by comparison with TOTAL MALWARE that prevents me from USING MY OWN FUCKING COMPUTER.

Maybe I can figure a way to transfer the Win 7 system and license to the newer computer.

** For clarity, 'normal behavior' = busy when running a major task like Firefox or Poser; idle otherwise.
  ¶ 1:06 AM

  Saluting Persia again
Polistra and friends offer a quick salute to Persia, which has successfully defeated our latest evil aggressive monstrous demonic attack.



Soros and USA STRONG will continue to attempt infinite infinite infinite demonic satanic evil beyond evil beyond evil, but God's part of the world is getting stronger and more unified every day. Our attempts are failing more often. God is winning.

Labels: defensible spaces

  ¶ 11:22 AM

  Nice contrast
Excellent paired example of good and bad scientific thinking in a little feature on a new Mars observation.

The rover has spotted some small branching tube-like structures, about a half inch long. To my eyes they suggest earthworm casts, or perhaps semi-structured colonial organisms like algae or coral. I can't think of an inorganic process that makes such shapes.

One of the quoted scientists has a proper Carverian approach:

But on first view of the features, Lee said that as a field geologist, "the immediate thought that came to my mind is bioturbation." This is the process through which organisms living in sediments can disturb the structure of these sediments.

"A common example of bioturbation is the formation of worm burrows. The burrows, once refilled with sediments, fossilized and then exposed by erosion, can end up looking like wiggly sticks," Lee told Inside Outer Space.

See what you see, try to compare it and pattern it. No initial assumptions. Carver.

Another shows classic theorigenic blindness:

"Cool, looks like bioturbation and would likely be as such identified if the image would be from Earth," said Schulze-Makuch. "But concretions can look quite similar, and, in [the] case of Mars, it's … more likely concretions," he added, referring to formations of precipitated minerals.

It's from Mars, therefore it can't be life. Theorigenic blindness, aka prejudice.

See also theories vs patents.

= = = = =

Later: Come to think of it, those shapes DO remind me of something inorganic:



Ceramic and stone pipes made by the Kiowa and Kansa tribes. Maybe the old Martian tribes had their own miniature version of tobacco.



= = = = =

Random semi-related semi-thought: Archeologists have often tried to reproduce ancient beer recipes based on chemical analysis of remnants in jugs and bottles. The above pipes are described as containing remnants of tobacco, but I can't find any similar attempts to reproduce the Kansa blend or the Osage blend. Tobacco is CRIMETHINK because it kills you slowly and improves your thinking. Alcohol is WONDERFUL because it kills you fast and ruins your brain long before it kills you. This is logical by definition.

Labels: Carver

  ¶ 2:14 AM

  We need a Soviet daily devotional
Finally pinned down a point that has been semiconsciously itching me for a while.

RT does what it's supposed to do. RT tries to weaken Russia's enemies. It serves the nation where it lives, which is what an international propaganda source is meant to do. Each nation that can afford such a source does the same.

Nature likes it this way. Each creature minding its own business, trying to weaken and confuse and deter its opponents so it doesn't have to fight them.

But an ethnic Russian news source could actually help Americans. A Russian writer who had lived through the Stalin and Khrushchev times could teach us how to preserve our sanity in a crazy tyranny.

Orlov provided the 'old testament', the basic guidelines, for this approach, but he isn't writing a daily news analysis.

This service would be akin to the daily devotionals provided by churches and ministries. Take today's big idiotic story, look at it from a Soviet fatalist viewpoint, with due regard for the real constants and variables, the real permanent and ephemeral pieces. Show the best path to walk your soul through this toxic dump without too many thorns or stings.
  ¶ 11:20 AM