Constant pattern
Russia's friendships are strictly rational. Russia is LOUDLY maintaining FIRM friendship with Cuba. Maduro gets a much more cautious and tentative embrace.

Why? Competence. The Castro regime is competent. It knows how to serve its people, and has done a remarkable job of breaking Graybill's Law for 60 years now. Maduro wants to be on Russia's side, but does a shitty job of serving his own people.

This reminded me of the calendar. I looked up 7/26** to verify that this month is the actual 60th anniversary of the revolution, and found an astonishing fact.

Castro was originally a CIA asset.

Batista had been loyal for a long time, but after Castro began to make inroads, Batista attempted to answer the people's complaints by nationalizing the oil company. This displeased CIA. We placed sanctions on BATISTA, and CIA sent Frank Sturgis (later famous for other things) to train and organize Castro's ragged band. With improved training and weapons, Castro was able to defeat the disloyal Batista. But soon after victory, Castro started to serve Cuba instead of CIA. He was now just as bad as Batista, so we reimposed sanctions and kept them in place, with a brief break in 2015.

I was listening to shortwave in '59, so I picked up the general sense that Castro had switched from Our SOB to Russia's SOB, but I'd never heard or read the Sturgis connection until right now.

= = = = =

This pattern repeats over and over. We always train the revolutionaries to weaken a government that displeases us, then we smash the revolutionaries after they disappoint us.

The most famous example is Osama, but history is full of hidden examples, from Robespierre in 1789 to Khomeini in 1979.

More subtle question: Clearly we haven't learned anything from this pattern. We keep on supporting revolutionaries, and they keep on disappointing us or even attacking us. Have the revolutionaries learned? Yes, in some cases. Castro and Khomeini have served their own people well enough that they were able to resist our smashing. The initial support may have been worth the later trouble.

= = = = =

** Fussy footnote: I had always thought of 7/26/59 as the finish of the revolution. That's not right. 7/26 was the start of the revolution in 1953. The culmination was less precise.

Labels: defensible times, From rights to duties

  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Tuning the magnet
A couple more items from Shaffner's Telegraph Journal, published in 1854.



Note that the sender "adjusts his magnet carefully." It's not clear what he was adjusting for, or how he could tell when it was adjusted properly. Was he listening to resonances?



Note that OK unquestionably meant All Correct in 1854. It was familiar enough to become part of the protocol. This gives full weight to one of the disputed etymologies. Must admit, I'd been favoring the Choctaw origin until now.

Note 73, which is still in use now, long after the numbers were replaced by Q-signals.

Also the indications of what we'd now call work-life balance. SFD, SFT, SFP. Tea must have been more familiar than coffee. (Cups in signal 35 referred to battery cells, not tea. Early wet cells were glass cups.)

Labels: Language update, Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 3:17 PM

  Bridge without ramps
This is a strong argument, and a good and necessary argument.

Kreeft is concerned that we will give in to the ancient temptation to idolize the work of our hands: symbolic logic and the computers it gave rise to. But if we do so, we will lower ourselves to the level of the beasts, and neglect those powers of the mind recognized by classical logic as what makes the difference between humans on the one hand, and animals and computers on the other hand.

The takeaway from all this is simply to remind us that scientific thinking in the sense of symbolic logic is not the only kind of thinking or knowing that there is. Engineers of all people should recognize that they do their work in the context of human society, which is forever beyond the grasp of symbolic logic to analyze or comprehend. Something more is required. We can call that something classical logic, or wisdom, or even faith. But to limit ourselves to the kind of logic that computers can do is to leave our humanity behind.

Like a well-built bridge without ramps, this argument misses some steps at both the start and finish.



At the start:

Before we can worry about the limitations of logic, we need to worry about simple failures of METROLOGY in our machines. GIGO. Economic calculations can be good math and good logic, but they're based on totally imaginary figures. When you use inflation and unemployment figures that have no connection to reality, your result will have no relation to reality. When you hold a natural variable like interest rate constant, your equations can't even begin to work. Polls may use statistical formulas correctly, but they ask atrociously loaded questions. Everything is based on shared lies.

At the end:

Mechanical engineers and civil engineers do understand the limitations of math and logic. Engineers (except for "software engineers", who are just programmers) have to deal with the real world. They work with the real world in their college classes, and learn HARD lessons on the job. They understand deeply that steel has a breaking point, concrete can be undermined by water and tree roots, wood can be destroyed by termites, etc. The logic of tree roots belongs in the realm of wisdom, not Boole.

Even competent programmers understand that Boole is a poor representation of real-life decisions. We learn quickly that the human versions of IF, AND, OR, XOR are not at all the same as the Boolean versions. A useful program has to adjust for these limitations in order to take advantage of the rigorous and fast logic-math that computers can do.

And finally, "animals and computers" DO NOT BELONG ON THE SAME SIDE of the bridge. Smart animals are much closer to God's wisdom than smart people. Smart people do in fact think like computers, or actually the other way around. Digital computers are Boolean because they were designed by Boolean-brained people.

= = = = =

Later contranote: I wrote that human IF, AND, OR, XOR are not the same as the computer versions. This is only 3/4 true. Computers use Boole for AND, OR, XOR, so they disagree with human actions. The computer version of IF is much closer to the human version than the Boolean.

The Boolean IF in symbolic logic doesn't start with a cause and lead to a result. Implication examines four different T/F combinations of cause and result, and assigns a validity to those four combos. The validity ratings are weird and completely useless for analyzing or making real decisions.

A computer's IF is like a non-subjunctive IF in language, or more simply a WHEN. Check the cause or current situation. WHEN the cause matches expectations, implement one result. WHEN the cause doesn't match expectations, do another result, or do nothing.

Labels: Metrology, Shared Lie

  ¶ 5:14 AM

  Pointless non-thought
Totally random non-thought, "inspired" by mentioning in previous item that I'm getting enough protein from eggs and cheese.

The standard TEDX "evolution" line says that we descended from apes who mainly ate fruits and nuts and bugs, so we should be able to get along on fruits and nuts and bugs.

Why not eggs? When you're hanging in trees, bird nests are everywhere. Eggs are there for the taking just like apricots and acorns. Eggs are seasonal, but so are apricots.
  ¶ 1:22 AM

  Vicarious vegetarians REPRINT
The idiotic BYND fake meat is in the news again. For some idiotic reason I dreamed about this tonight, so it's time for a reprint.

The point here is the same as previous item: DETECTING FAKES BY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.

= = = = = START REPRINT:


It's been clear from the start that Tesla cultists are not truly green. They're rich fuckheads who fly and drive all the time. Owning a Tesla is a plenary indulgence that shortens their time in Gaian purgatory.

The latest Innovative Disrupter shows the same disconnect. BYND is a "new" fake meat made from soy and other stuff. BYND is claiming that its form of fake meat is new, and above all it claims to make the product more available by placing it in the meat department.

Real vegies with real experience know that both claims are false.

How do I know? I've been mostly vegy for most of my adult life. Vegy from 1970 to 1990, then part carny from 1990 to 2010, and now vegy again. The weakly carny period exactly corresponded to my TV-watching period and my neocon period. Not surprising. When you're locked into TV's forcible injection system, you aren't running on natural tendencies.

Though I pretended at first to be following "moral" principles, vegy is just easier for me. My guts don't like meat and don't handle it well. I'm healthier without it. I don't claim or believe that everyone should be healthier without meat. PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT.

During the 1970-1990 period I used fake meat made by Morningstar. It was easily available in regular grocery stores everywhere, including beef-loving Enid and OKC. When I resumed vegy in 2010, I started using the stuff again, then a quick experiment proved that it wasn't adding any nutrition, so I stopped. I'm getting enough protein from eggs and cheese. Fake meat is pretty damn expensive for nothing more than taste and texture.

Morningstar is a big company that has dominated the niche for 50 years because its products are EASILY AVAILABLE and good. Not all of the items taste convincingly like meat, but all of them are easy to cook, tasty, and satisfying to eat.

So the traders and cultists who are boosting BYND clearly don't understand the market. They don't know (1) the niche is already occupied (2) vegies are satisfied with Morningstar (3) serious vegies won't buy fake meat from the meat counter because they don't want to endanger their souls by touching the real thing. This is true of genuinely religious vegies from Muslim to Adventist.

In other words, there's a damn good COMMERCIAL reason why fake meat isn't sold in the same freezer with pig knuckles and T-bones. Stores and distributors haven't simply been missing an opportunity for 50 years. Distributors don't miss opportunities. They know what they're doing.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

  ¶ 12:41 AM

  Constants and Variables 136, Fake fake-detection edition
A classic trick of REAL racketeers and REAL evildoers is the fake cop or fake detective.

Some (not all) of the detectors of fake news are fake cops.

In previous years these bad detectives channeled our attention to fake "on-location" reports. TV reporters often stand in front of a stage set simulating the Capitol or the Courthouse. Supposedly this makes their report fake. No, it's simply irrelevant. Truth is truth no matter what image is visible in the background. Falsehood is falsehood no matter what image is in the background.

When we focus on the staging, we forget to focus on the INFORMATION. Does the verbal output of the newsreader agree with OUR EXPERIENCE at the points where we can check it? If so, the newsreader is likely to be trustworthy on other points.

More recently these fake detectives of fakery are channeling our attention to fake identities, like this example on ZH. Somebody created a "financial expert" using a stock photo and made-up credentials. We're supposed to disbelieve what this expert says because her front is fake.

Again this distracts us from the INFORMATION. Does this expert give rational advice and predictions? Or does she say the same bizarre lethal genocidal turbowacked hypernonsense as all "real" paid economists? The article says that the fake expert is simply advertising a credit-repair company. Well, everyone who writes for a paycheck is advertising some company or another. THAT'S A CONSTANT. The only variable that MATTERS is the INFORMATION. Does her advice agree with reality and common sense? The article doesn't bother to ask the only question that matters.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 10:47 PM

  No, wait
Getting ready for grocery store trip. Thinking it sure would be nice to have a car, so I could pick up a larger load. When I had a car...

No, wait.

When I had a car I rarely used it for grocery trips. I walked or biked. The car was reserved for bad weather or big hardware-store loads, not groceries.

I've never been much of a driver. I've always been a walker.

= = = = =

As long as I'm in random gratitudinous mode, Polistra and friends offer a salute to KEDIT, the ALL-powerful programmer's editor.



Been using Kedit since 1987, through DOS and Win versions. Mansfield Software, the maker of Kedit, keeps trying to abandon updates, but the user base won't let them give up entirely.

Nothing else even APPROACHES the power of Kedit for dealing with program code and other formatted data files. The 'ALL' command is magical, and the block-edit capabilities are supreme. Without Kedit my editing and revision would take three times as long, and would be ten times as frustrating.

A few newer editors (eg Zeus and Hessling) claim to be in the same category. I've tried them. They don't have the 'ALL' command, so they ain't got shit.

Labels: coot-proofing, Patient things

  ¶ 7:11 AM

  Airships
In radio shows and short movie serials from the '30s, flying machines are always called airships or just ships. This is especially noticeable in adventure serials focused on flying, but also shows up in other contexts. For instance, an Ex-Lax ad in a 1940 'Strange as it Seems' episode compares the regularity of Ex-Lax to the scheduling of airships. "You know the Chicago ship will arrive at 3:45." [Pun intended? Probably not. Dirty words weren't at the front of most minds in those days.]

By the '50s, airship was entirely absent, replaced by airplane. Did this happen during WW2? The Google ngram thingie answers the question nicely.



Just after Pearl Harbor, both airplane and aircraft replace airship. Later on, airplane fades out in favor of aircraft.

The change is so sudden that I wonder if media received an official order.

= = = = =

A pretty good marker for the transition point is the 1940 non-interventionist spy serial K-7. All flying machines are airplanes or planes. The transition comes in especially handy in this episode about bombing planes stowed on ships.

Agent Pat shouts:

"Agent Z! Agent Z! There are also planes aboard the other ship!"

This would have been tricky in the previous vocabulary....

Pat: "Agent Z! Agent Z! There are also ships aboard the other ship!"

Z: "I'm sorry, Pat, your message is ambiguous. Could you elucidate?"

Pat: "There are also vehicles which rise from the ground using the Bernoulli Principle aboard the other vehicle which floats on the surface of the ocean using buoyancy!"

Z: "Too late, it already exploded."

Labels: Asked and answered, Language update

  ¶ 1:26 AM

  Simplify, simplify, simplify
Boris and Trump are pretty much the same man with different accents. Why not simplify the situation?

McAfee!

Can a person run for, and be, President of the United States and Prime Minister of Great Britain simultaneously? Yes. Absolutely. Without question. But I believe I am one of the few people stil alive who could qualify for the combined position.

He's the same kind of man as both BoJo and Trump, he's the same age as most candidates (but a lot older than Boris) and he's crazier than both combined. Plus he's in trouble for tax evasion, which makes him the ideal Tory and Repooflican.

Perfect choice.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 3:51 PM

  Thanks, Nature!
I just finished a long and annoying revision of the current courseware project.

The last lesson concluded with a discursive lecture by the author, reminding the students of the utterly unbelievable magnificence of the human brain and speech mechanism.

I'm always in that mood when I illustrate or animate this stuff. Every item requires a certain amount of study, and when I study I learn more about the fantastic and unimaginable PURPOSE and DESIGN.

After the month-long editing task I stood up and stretched, and looked out the door for fresh air and visual perspective. The first thing that moved and caught my attention was a TINY insect, some kind of leafhopper, crawling on the door glass and glowing gold in the sunlight.

This entire creature is smaller than ONE of my spinal neurons, yet it does pretty much everything I do. Walk, see, smell, feel, hear, eat, talk, think. And then it did something I can't do: It flew away.

Thanks, Ma Nature.

Emerson:

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

Labels: Grand Blueprint, infinite GOOD

  ¶ 9:09 AM

  Well, if this is what it takes....
Via Eurekalert, a lunatic way of accomplishing a simple task.

Headline: To prevent another world war, researcher suggests changing how we think

"Adversaries think in such terms, you either get what you want, or you do not," West said. "Can a different way of thinking produce a different outcome? If either/or is the only way of thinking then a person would be either a protagonist or an antagonist, but in reality a person can be both, either, or neither, and often is. Recognizing that opens the door to novel solutions."

The authors suggest that by using both/and thinking a dynamic resolution can be achieved. The Army has initiated this strategy with the introduction of the gray zone, in which an adversary's aggressive acts do not warrant a war response, but neither can they be interpreted as peaceful and benign. Responses to acts in the gray zone, challenge traditional either/or thinking, requiring an appropriate measured and yet unpredictable response. On an individual level, this translates into an understanding that a basically selfish individual can also be a hero, a consequence of the complexity of being human.

In other words,

TO PREVENT A WAR, DON'T START A WAR.

It doesn't require a complex mathematical model. It's EXTREMELY FUCKING SIMPLE.

NEVER ATTACK. ALWAYS DEFEND.

More specifically, DON'T LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO WANT YOU TO ATTACK. Don't listen to Adelson. Don't listen to Soros. Don't listen to Bolton. Don't listen to Israel. Don't listen to Saudi.

There. That's all the math you need.

But if the Army has to reach the simple goal by this lunatic path, then I'm okay with it.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 12:16 AM

  What does it do?
This thing was being discussed on some science websites:



It's being discussed, OF COURSE, because it's supposedly a measure of Trump's CO2 pollution, delivered backwards into the Cretaceous Era by witches riding on Tardis broomsticks.

This thing should be discussed for its FANTASTIC shape. Those things on the outside are described as protective scales, but they don't look like any other scales in nature. Scales are variations on rectangles or diamonds. These things look like differential ring gears. A toothed circle with a bridge spanning the open center of the circle. It can't work as a 'shingle' because it can't overlap and doesn't cover.

The bridge part vaguely resembles a stapes:



but the ring gear part doesn't resemble anything else.

LIFE IS PURPOSE.

This machine can't serve the purpose of a scale or protector. It must be doing something else. Does the bridge part act as a trap for smaller microbes? Bacterium floats into the center, bridge contracts and pulls it in for digestion?

Labels: Asked and unanswered

  ¶ 7:49 AM

  Reverse Coriolis effect
Here in USA STRONG, the black-robed demons ALWAYS enforce satanic globalism. Every time Trump pretends to oppose globalism, the demons conveniently protect him from his fake "intentions".

Brazil is turning the other way. Neocon Bolsonaro was helping Israel to obliterate Persia by enforcing Lord Adelson's sanctions. Some Persian ships had been conducting normal trade with Brazil. Fertilizer to Brazil, corn to Persia. Israeli Agent Bolsonaro ordered the ships to be held in harbor without refueling.

Now Brazil's black-robed ANGELS have ordered Bolsonaro to stop enforcing the laws of OTHER COUNTRIES and start enforcing the laws of BRAZIL. The ships have been refueled and are now sailing back to Persia with the load of corn, which will bring PROFIT to Brazilian farmers.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 7:27 AM

  30-microsecond disproof
Most of these disproofs require a few seconds of lookup. This one doesn't even!

Headline at ZH:

"I'm Very Worried" - Chief Architect Fears Heatwave Will Collapse Notre Dame Roof

"What I fear is that the joints or the masonry, as they dry, lose their cohesion and their structural qualities, and that all of a sudden, the vault gives way..."

1. If the mortar was going to dry out, I'd guess that 800 years have already done the job.

2. Ever hear of chimneys? Blast furnaces? Fireplaces? All of those mysterious new inventions are built with bricks and mortar. The bricks are often special firebrick, but the mortar is just mortar. All of those mysterious new inventions take a thousand degrees over and over and over without failing. And you're worried about a hundred degrees.

3. Ice is harder on mortar than dry heat. Do you ever have snow and ice in Paris?

4. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the temperature in the attic under the LEAD roof has often gone WAY beyond 100 degrees, when the outside is in the 80s.

None of those facts matter in the "mind" of an architect. Architects know that the current heat is UNHOLY HEAT because it's caused by Populists. POPULIST HEAT is witchcraft, not bound by the ordinary rules of physics and thermodynamics.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 5:00 AM

  Not necessarily fun
I wrote a comment at UncommonDescent. Repeating it here and expanding a bit.

A professor wrote several total nonsense papers and submitted them to "social" "science" journals. The nonsense was published without demur, because "social" "science" is a crazed cult that can't begin to distinguish between truth and lies. Anything that ticks the currently fashionable boxes is automatically TRUTH.

The prof has been punished, and UD was sad about the punishment.

Maybe we shouldn't be sad.

It's fun to feed nonsense to a crazed cult and watch the cult eagerly consume the nonsense.

BUT: This particular crazed cult is blindly obeyed by governments and corporations and "protest" movements. Those followers will make laws and destroy careers based on the hoax info, BECAUSE they are crazed cultists who can't distinguish truth from lies.

The hoax info will thus increase the damage done by the cult.

This hoaxer probably didn't intend to increase the damage, but intention is irrelevant. A real criminal would love to feed false info into an automatic killing machine so the machine would grind up his favorite targets. He wouldn't act like a criminal; he'd act like a hoaxer who is having fun.

Mobsters often use the machinery of the police for this exact purpose. Arrange a SWAT raid on your competitor.

Labels: From rights to duties

  ¶ 1:03 AM

  Never believe.
Latest issue of Collectible Auto has an interview with Stuart Chapman. He wasn't a major player in the earlier era of autos, so he doesn't have any major revelations. But he was present at one important event, and his story is still a warning for people who are entangled in similar events.

Chapman took a job as Public Relations director of the Canadian division of Studebaker in late 1963. Since 1956 Studie had been "managed" by Curtiss Wright Aviation, which was using Studie as a tax evasion. Pretty much the same as modern LBOs, and the quintessential USA crime.

When Chapman was hired, the Canadian plant was just a foreign subsidiary. Two months later, Curtiss Wright decided to halt production at South Bend and use the Canadian factory as sole producer. The Canadian executives and workers were happy and proud, and even the government got into the act. Now is our chance to shine! Now we can show those overbearing Yanks what we can really do! Studie is OUR car!

The Canadians didn't learn the truth until 1966. Curtiss Wright was just pulling the usual LBO trick of gradual shutdown, and never intended to continue production in Canada. The resentment and sadness still resonate in Chapman's narrative 53 years later.

Survival in Sorosian lands requires MAXIMUM PARANOIA. Never believe anything a corporation or government tells you. Always assume that the worst imaginable version of reality is just a tiny tiny tiny baby step toward the infinitely evil and infinitely crazy truth.

Labels: meta-experiential education, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:38 PM

  A couple of 1854 items
From Shaffner's Telegraph Journal, which served and defended the Morse company in the same way that Electrek.com now serves and defends Tesla.

First, a distinctly Tesla-like puff piece for the 'Atmospheric Dispatch':

During our recent trip to Boston, we visited the rooms of the Atmospheric Dispatch Company, No. 24 Merchants' Exchange, State Street.

We had but little confidence in the practicability of the enterprise, prior to an examination of the machine and witnessing its operation. The tubes were made of lead, about two inches in diameter, and about twenty feet long. The feasibility of the invention for the uses designed was demonstrated by various experiments. Although the operation seemed to be perfect, yet we entertained doubts as to the ultimate success of a long line; but Mr. I. S. Richardson, the talented inventor, readily presented arguments, based upon fixed laws in philosophy, dispelling all fears.

The Atmospheric Dispatch Company contemplate constructing a line from Boston to Worcester, as the first section of a line to New York. The shares are $100 each, payable in calls of ten per cent, commencing on the 1st of February, 1854. Total capital stock, $500,000.

The tube to be two feet in diameter, for conveying letters and packages to and from the said cities and intermediate places, allowing fifteen minutes to each transit. Although we feel confident of successful results from the art invented, yet we cannot believe in the realization of all the hopes entertained by the worthy and ingenious inventor. If it accomplishes one half, the triumph will be great. The achievement will rival in brilliancy the brightest star of this progressive age. It will be one of the most marvellous and resplendent gems that bedeck tho illustrious escutcheon of American ingenuity.

The non-functional device and the Hallelujah tone and the stock pump are all too familiar.

Of course the device itself ultimately became practical and common for document transfer within one building. It was still used in department stores and office buildings in the 1950s. Elon conveniently forgets this earlier practicality.

... And a quick check of Youtube surprised me. Pneumatic tubes are still a modern and active technology in some situations! The new ones look just like the old ones.

= = = = =

More interesting: The journal includes some of the foreign Morse alphabets as they existed in 1854. The Russian code is introduced thus:

We next append the Russian-Morse Alphabet, arranged for the lesser alphabet in that language, being six less than the full Russian.



The 'lesser alphabet' isn't a familiar concept. In 1918 the Soviets simplified the alphabet by removing Ѣ and Ꙇ and Ѳ which were non-phonemic equivalents for Е and И and ф. This 'lesser alphabet' tosses those three characters, and also omits Ъ and Ё and Э. Russian could get along fine without Ъ and Ё, which aren't really phonemic, but Э is more useful.

So the Soviet simplification must have been a compromise between the 'full' and 'lesser' alphabets. The decision to discard Ꙇ and Ѳ would have been automatic, because those were used mainly in Greek religious words. Tossing Ѣ was sensible, but leaving Ъ and Ё intact seems arbitrary.

Labels: Alternate universe, Language update, Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 5:15 PM

  Walls vs psychopaths
Thinking about Gilded Ages 1 and 2, and then thinking about Bernie Scabders. Those thoughts smooshed together to form a new and dubious correlation.

Not new:

Between the two Gilded Ages we had the Union Age, 1933 to 1979. Predatory corporations existed, but they were CONSTRAINED by hardass Fed regulators AND by hardass unions. They knew exactly how far they could grow, and they didn't try to go beyond the limits. They were forced to operate on PROFIT and DIVIDENDS instead of share value, which means they were forced to have EMPLOYEES and PRODUCTS.

I've covered that territory too often.

New thought:

During a Gilded Age, robber barons have names. Everyone can list several robber barons. During the Union Age, there weren't any named or famed robber barons. In fact the most famous leaders were union leaders.

GA1 = Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Mellon, Stanford.

Union Age = Jimmy Hoffa, James Petrillo, Walter Reuther.

GA2 = Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Musk.

In the Union Age the constrained corporations were no longer led by founding families. The founders were still around in some cases, but they kept a careful distance from the companies. In most cases the founders had either died out or pulled out because constrained capitalism was NO FUN for criminals and psychopaths.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 8:38 AM

  Bernie the strikebreaker
Bernie fires union organizers from his campaign staff.

This is really really really dumb, and not just in terms of standard R vs D talking points.

A lot of "Trump" voters are broadly pro-union, while recognizing that some unions are totally corrupt. We've seen the difference in life quality between union and non-union workplaces, and we've been jealous of union workers. We know that unions have to be part of the solution.

Bernie Scabders talks the union talk but kicks out union organizers.

Really really really dumb.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter

  ¶ 5:16 AM

  Rare agreement with reality
Via Eurekalert, a rare "social" "science" study that gets something right.

The reason for the study is suspicious, but the study amazingly agrees with the reality of human behavior and learning.

The reason:

Learning environments can often complicate the learning process. For example, a student taking a course with both a teacher and a teaching assistant needs to adapt to the ways the different instructors teach the same subject. Even the varying ways teachers talk and behave can complicate learning.

Sounds like they're trying to open the way for more foreign grad assistants, or maybe more "non-binary trans" grxd xssxstxnts.

The finding:

The first method, "object-label learning," is when a student sees an object first and then is provided with the label. This means seeing a color before being told its name. Or hearing a description of a physical force before being hearing its formal title.

The second learning procedure is "label-object learning," the reverse order in which a student sees a label first.

The results of the study indicate that students who see objects first and then hear the name - object-label learners - process inconsistent information better than learners who hear the name first and then see the object.

Verifies what real teachers have known forever, and not just in the peculiar context of "inconsistent information".

Lab first, lecture later.

Interact with reality first, without words or theories. Just enough instructions to get the experiment done without ruining the equipment or burning the building down.

After you've finished SENSING and MAKING, you're ready to process the descriptions and formulas. This works even better if the lab experience is designed to leave you with a puzzle or conflict that can only be resolved with math. At that point the math is especially easy and positive.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 11:24 PM

  Bye Tulsi 2
Tulsi is suing Google for blocking her ads during a crucial few hours after the first debate.

Google's response is blazingly dishonest:

“In this case, our system triggered a suspension and the account was reinstated shortly thereafter,” a spokesperson for the company told The Federalist. “We are proud to offer ad products that help campaigns connect directly with voters, and we do so without bias toward any party or political ideology.”

Every programmer knows that the "automatic unbiased trigger" is a lie. Algorithms obey the people who write the constants.

BUT: I gave up on Tulsi a couple weeks ago after learning that @Jack gave her a maximum contribution. I wrote:

@Jack is deep deep deep deep dark dark dark dark Deepstate. He knows EVERYTHING. If @Jack thinks you're worth supporting, I can be 10000000000000000000% certain that you're a nasty vile warmongering monstrous alien genocidal faker. Just another AP like Trump.

Now we see what @Jack got for his contribution. Tulsi is working for @Jack and suing @Jack's competitors. It's all mobs from top to bottom. Nobody is trying to improve things or make things. Everybody is trying to STOP all improvement. It's mutually assured nothingness, mutually assured chaos and entropy.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Deadthink

  ¶ 10:59 PM

  Well, I guess they are 'originalists'
The Wash state Repooflicans are remarkably brainless. They keep sending me emails even though I haven't sent them any money since 2006. And the emails are ALWAYS the same predictable nonsense.

I thought we had seen it all from Governor Inslee and fellow Democrats in Washington State, apparently I was wrong. Just last week, activist judges opened the door for a state income tax making 2020 even more important than we thought. An income tax would be devastating for our state - plain and simple - that's what we're up against.

ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX

Never any mention of Inslee's mass murder by arson, nor his dam-breaking sabotage. Nope. Starting wildfires is just fine with Repoofs because they belong to the same demonic Gaian church. No mention of crime and prisons, because Repoofs hate cops and love crime even more enthusiastically than Democrats. Grotesque idiots.

If the Dems had wanted a state income tax, they would have done it many years ago. And in fact they DID. We ALREADY have a state income tax for business. The B&O tax applies to all businesses, including part-time freelancers like me. It's not devastating. It's easy if you're a non-NYC who believes in paying for things.

I'll give them credit for one thing. They are 'originalists'. 1776 was solely about tax evasion. Modern Repoofs carry on the same criminal spirit. Pirates and smugglers and NYC murderers from the fucking start.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 10:26 PM

  Feeling the rotation?
In a discussion about the not-so-mysterious 'hum', one of the participants said that she could feel the earth rotating.

Sounds flaky and mystical? Not necessarily.

Polistra tries to demonstrate how it COULD happen.

The earth has its own magnetic field, which rotates inside the Sun's relatively stable field.

We'll let Polistra stand on the equator for simplicity, with the lines of the Sun's field passing through.



When the earth rotates, it carries Polistra through the sun's field at varying angles.



If Polistra has a good magnetic sense, she would be feeling those lines. (Unsurprisingly, those lines look like the aurora.)



Most humans have a poorly developed magnetic sense, but some could be more talented. Birds and bacteria might be more aware of this motion.

= = = = =

Graphic serendipity: Of course those lines are the aurora, but I didn't try to make them look that way. I just made some parallel cylinders and turned them partly transparent. Poser's buggy handling of multi-layered partial transparencies provided the aurora look, which is rather impressive.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:37 PM

  Ambitious and instantly futile
Boris's inaugural speech is certainly ambitious. He names all the problems Britain faces, and says that he's personally going to solve all of them, AND solve "climate change".

NO. Focusing on "solving" "climate change" is EXACTLY why you've been failing to solve all the other fucking problems. This has been going on for 30 fucking years now, in US and UK and EU. EVERYTHING we do is guided by Gaia, which really means guided by Goldman. GaiaGoldman orders us to destroy all real work, all real culture, all real value, all real life, and leave only GaiaGoldman standing.

If you want to make progress on SOME of those other problems, you need to firmly and decisively and uncompromisingly and comprehensively TURN OFF the whole Gaia nonsense FIRST.

Yes, the weather is weird this decade. The cure for weird weather, as FDR understood and IMPLEMENTED, is more dams, better drainage, and more electrical generation enabling us to run more heaters and air conditioners.

We have one advantage over FDR: We have nuclear power, thanks to a project that FDR started.

Instead of building dams, improving drainage, and adding more nuke plants, we are tearing down dams, building swamps, destroying nuke plants, and pouring trillions into NYC banks. We are guaranteeing that real people will suffer and die MORE from the weird weather, so we can "justify" pouring even more trillions into NYC banks to pray for salvation.

We are crazy beyond crazy beyond crazy, evil beyond evil beyond evil.

Labels: Carbon Cult, infinite infinite infinite infinite evil, infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite lunacy

  ¶ 2:29 PM

  Quibbling with Deaton
Polistra's rule of one exception: When a profession or a business is totally corrupt and criminal, Deepstate always allows exactly one exception.

In "economics" the one exception is Angus Deaton. He's the only economist in the world.

All "economists" serve exactly one purpose: RAISE SHARE VALUE. Deaton points out that all "economists" serve exactly one purpose: RAISE SHARE VALUE. That's why he's the only economist.

His latest effort is important, and as always he gets the main points of human behavior right.

Here he expresses all the main problems concisely and correctly:

Unions provided social life and political power for many people who have less of both today. The replacement of stakeholder capitalism by shareholder value maximization is widespread in the US and has been remarked on here, too. Paul Collier has noted that Imperial Chemical Industries, once the crown jewel of British industry, used to boast “we aim to be the finest chemical company in the world,” but that, before it was lost to takeovers and mergers in 2006, it had changed its slogan to “we aim to maximize shareholder valuation.”

ON. THE. FUCKING. DOT.

Because Deaton is British, he misses some cultural or historical factors for US.

Example 1:

America’s first Gilded Age is another case. It also shows that the fundamental rules of the game can be changed. In the Progressive Era, four constitutional amendments were passed, all designed to limit inequality of one form or another. One instituted the income tax, one gave women the vote, one prohibited alcohol—strongly supported by women, who believed that alcohol abuse was an instrument of their oppression—and one an electoral reform that instituted the direct election of senators, as opposed to their previous appointment by state legislatures that were often dominated by business.

Those 1918 changes didn't cure the Gilded Age, they expanded it. Three of them MULTIPLIED the power of banks and corporations, and one was irrelevant. 1. Prohibition created a new form of government corruption. Previously governments obeyed legitimate mobsters like Morgan and Vanderbilt, who were creating real industries with real jobs. After Prohibition, Deepstate switched its allegiance to illegitimate mobsters who created nothing but damage. 2. The change in the Senate removed the power of the states. Previously each senator represented a state government, which gave him considerable leverage in resisting federal centrality. After the 17th, senators represented corporations. 3. The income tax replaced tariffs, which had encouraged real industry and agriculture. The income tax put the burden of taxation on workers and removed the pressure to keep skills local. 4. Voting by women was irrelevant because voting is irrelevant.

Example 2:

Less-educated white men and women in America have had their lives progressively undermined, starting in the 1970s, and showing up, since 1990, in rising numbers of deaths from suicide, alcoholic liver disease, and drug overdoses. African Americans experienced a similar disaster thirty years earlier and the improvements in their lives since then have protected them to an extent.

Right about the main point. Wrong about the timeline for blacks. Black income rose steadily from 1930 to 1970, when it started to drop. That was the same time when those "improvements" came into effect. Those "improvements" took blacks out of the jobs they could do, and pushed them into jobs where they would fail. The INTENDED RESULT was blacks on welfare. Blacks are less prone to suicide because they retained a Natural Law culture, with family supports and functional churches. The churches remained powerful and godly because they remained segregated. White churches were never especially powerful, and after 1970 most of them turned Satanic and lost their members.

What Deaton misses above all is the INTERNAL GOD-ASSIGNED PURPOSE OF MAKING. Working class men are in trouble in bank-driven Sorosia because banks are systematically EXTERMINATING all real labor and all real laborers.

Men are meant to MAKE THINGS. If they can't make things, they will BREAK THINGS.

Labels: Make or break

  ¶ 9:35 AM

  Wanna talk about bias?
Tired subject, but sometimes it's just too screechingly obvious.

Project Veritas has found the rare and valuable CURRENT PAID EMPLOYEE at Google who is willing to discuss how bias works. He makes the hugely important point that algorithms are NOT objective. Algorithms do what the programmer wants. I've made this point often, and all programmers understand it. Many PAID programmers lie about it. Now that a PAID CURRENT EMPLOYEE has said it, maybe it will be noticed. Probably not.

(Unnecessary update: Speaking of mindless automatic algorithms, the engineer has already been fired.)

Google is not the worst offender.

Scrolling through the top stories on news.google.com, it's a rational mix of the real top stories, and most are pretty well balanced. Mueller's fake senility** gets both sides, Epstein's fake suicide actually emphasizes his connections to the Clinton mob.

Bing fails the test totally. Scrolling down through the top items in news.bing.com, 26 of the first 35 are specifically about "climate change". Many of those 26 are utterly irrelevant by any standard. Dust pollution from unpaved roads in New Zealand. Really? Is that the 20th most important story in the world right now? Is it even the 20th most important story in New Zealand?

**Fake craziness is a standard mobster tactic. Vince Gigante used it effectively. No surprise that the Clinton mob knows how to use it.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Deadthink

  ¶ 5:54 AM

  What was that?
Just heard a big THUMP. Sounded deeper than a transformer popping, sounded more like a tree falling. There's no wind now, but there was a major wind yesterday.

This neighborhood didn't get the worst of it; all trees and fences were vertical after the storm. Exactly five years earlier, 7/23/14, this neighborhood got a narrowly focused tornado-like storm.

I checked Avista's outage map to see if a transformer pop has appeared; not yet, but the map is impressive.



This is 27 hours after the storm.
  ¶ 12:16 AM

  All the wrong classes performed
Something randomly reminded me of a song from Sound of Music. ... a flibbertigibbet, a will of the wisp, a CLOWN. Remembered that our high school chorus class had fun with that line.

Why did we have fun? Because the chorus class was constantly getting real-world experience. Whenever the school presented a play, the chorus class was the chorus and the orchestra class was the orchestra and the drama class was the actors.

Those three classes were always PERFORMING, and when they weren't performing they were rehearsing ON STAGE, under the pressure of getting READY to perform. Other classes were just sitting in the classroom watching the blackboard.

Biology class dissected a frog and an earthworm, which is physical, but it's not JOB-LIKE.

Math and English and History classes NEVER PERFORMED, never had to practice and organize and perfect a technique to use in the real world with real people watching.

Math was the worst of all. Math teachers never even talked about how math was used in physics or chemistry or cooking or car repair. The textbooks had a scattering of 'word problems', but we never turned those 'words' into real experiments.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 11:43 PM

  I gave my tooth to ???
From the 1962 'Strange as it Seems' book....



This struck me as locally and personally strange. Manhattan watched KC television, so we heard a lot about St Louis events. I was 8 in 1958, so I was switching out my deciduous teeth at the time. If this project had been widespread, I would have known and participated. I do remember reading a lot about Strontium 90. It was a big deal.

Some 'citizen participation' projects in the '50s turned out to be Deepstate fakes. The Ground Observer Corps, which I idiotically admired during my idiotic neocon phase, was supposed to detect invading Russki planes. In fact GOC was a survey to check the stealthiness of our own experimental planes to invade Russia. The UFO craze was exactly the same. Project Blue Book was a survey to see how people reacted to our experiments.

Was this a similar fake? Apparently not. This Wikipedia article gives a complete account. It was clearly intended to frighten the public, and it was scientifically meaningless. The project faded out in 1970 without publishing any results.

Much later in 2001, a separate team did a 'longitudinal' recheck:

By tracking 3,000 individuals who had participated in the tooth-collection project, the RPHP published results that showed that the 12 children who later died of cancer before the age of 50 had levels of strontium 90 in their stored baby teeth that were twice the levels of those who were still alive at 50.

TERRIBLE use of stats.

First, in a population of 3000, 12 early deaths by cancer is on the low side. A current set of stats shows a cancer death rate of about 900 per 100k for all under 50. That rate would yield 27 deaths in a group of 3000, so the test group would appear to be HEALTHIER than current averages.

Second, it's the wrong direction. The 12 who died had high levels of strontium compared to the MEAN of all others. We don't know how many kids with high strontium DIDN'T die early. You should have sorted the kids by strontium level first, and then looked at cancer among the highest exposures. If most of the high-strontium kids died early, and none of the low-exposures died early, you'd have a point.

Well then, did the study have any consequences? Supposedly it contributed to JFK's efforts to negotiate a test-ban treaty in 1963. The ban on atmospheric testing really made it easier to do more testing overall, which is why both US and Russia agreed to it.

While futilely trying to look up earlier cancer stats, from the era before nukes and cigarettes were major factors, I bumped into this MOTHER OF ALL GRAPHS.



You don't need to read the years or the titles on the curves. If you know anything about history, you know what this is. This is the definition of EPIDEMIC.

Labels: Asked and badly answered, Blinded by Stats, SES

  ¶ 8:37 AM

  AMLO y el AI
Still in Century Clickback mode!

AMLO is showing off a small business that would have looked the same in 1500 AD. Everything in the scene (except the plastic drinking glass) would have been familiar to Montezuma or Don Quixote.




The system is a rolling mill that squeezes juice from sugar cane. It's powered by advanced voice-responsive and gesture-responsive autonomous AI. (Animal Intelligence).

Translating the caption:

Strengthening the economy by supporting artisans, small producers and microentrepreneurs, is the same or more important in job creation and development, than only betting on large automated corporations.

Or putting it my way: If you want to develop your nation's skills, you need to make room for SIMPLE skills.

This job would be unimaginable in UK or US, where regulators act as hitmen for the Bezos mob. We take great pains to prevent small entrepreneurs from competing with Bezos.

AMLO is practicing Natural Law in the economic realm.

NEVER ATTACK. ALWAYS DEFEND.

Don't attack honest work with regulations. Defend the honest workers against corporate bullies.

Semirelevant sidenote: I know nothing about horses, but this horse looks well-nourished, clean, contented, and well-groomed. The wooden machinery is the opposite. This businessman has his priorities straight. Treat your live employees well, and your business will prosper. AMLO does the same with his live citizens.

Labels: 2/3, Natural law = Sharia law, NOT Deadthink, skill-estate

  ¶ 5:50 AM

  Tyson gets it
Cited by one of the Tesla skeptics:

"If a guy's bigger and stronger than you, you drop a television on his head from the roof."

- Mike Tyson, on bullies

= = = = =

Deep wisdom.

FACT: Violence works. Violence solves problems.

Bullies have to be stopped with PHYSICAL FORCE. If you don't have the biceps and deltoids to punch his lights out, you have to find a brainy way to stop him PHYSICALLY.

Stopping him with cleverness is utterly meaningless. No matter how clever your riposte, he can still knock you down.

I wish to hell someone had given me this wisdom when I was young.

When I complained about bullies, parents said "Just punch him back." I knew this was ridiculous, but I couldn't have grasped Tyson's point, because everyone in my world insisted falsely and lethally that "violence never solves problems".

Natural Law. Never attack, always defend.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Shared Lie

  ¶ 2:24 PM

  Backwards Boris
Boris, who is basically Trump with a college degree, has written an article:

Ignore the pessimists - if we can put a man on the moon, we can solve the Irish border problem

The tired Apollo analogy is backwards for Brexit.

Apollo was flying into completely uncharted territory.

Brexit is RETURNING from the moon of the EU back to the earth of Britain.

Britain was an independent nation for about 1000 years. Britain then became a dependency of EU for 25 years. Returning from the unchartered territory to the chartered territory doesn't require a rocket and a "can-do spirit".



It requires an eraser and an "undo spirit". Find all treaties and laws created to satisfy EU. Delete. A week of work for competent clerks who know what they're looking for.

Labels: Asked and answered

  ¶ 6:01 AM

  Should I feel complimented or insulted?
I've noticed an odd website among the few "readers" of this blog. It's called Sane IT Consulting, and it seems to be a cheat service for web coders in India.

Going to the URL, I get their login page, which seems to be recruiting workers for copy-paste work. Here's a textified version:

= = = = =

Important Note:

Accuracy:

We are going to inform you that in copy & paste work having some Terms & Condition Such as a accuracy parameter

As you are working on Copy & paste project uou should know about the terms & condition as we are giving below:-

Paid Websites:-

1.Manufactures
2.Trader
3.Exporter
4.Supplier
5.Industrial Services
6.Distributor
7.Wholesaler


UnPaid Websites:-

1.All Service Provider
2.Payment Gateway
3.Porn
4.Doctorate
5.Arms
6.Alcohol,Medical
7.Not Working Websites
8.With Out E-mail Address
9.All Fields are mendatory
10.With Out Country
11.Those Website which look abuse
12.In case more fault thre will be rework.


Payment will not be count if you'll not fill the column of-

1.Country
2.Email ID


Without Email or Country You will not be able to get the payment of websites.

= = = = =

This may relate to a cluster of similar-looking "reads":



All are using Win 10 and Chrome 75, all are in obscure cities in a variety of countries, all are using obscure ISPs.

Labels: Bemusement

  ¶ 4:55 AM

  Undiscovered and rediscovered forever
While looking for the source of the Nigerian electrotherapy info in previous item, I bumped into another example of the discredit/reinvent pattern.

This is from an 1825 volume of American Mechanics Magazine, p95 of the PDF.



This method has gone in and out of fashion repeatedly. Every time it comes back into fashion, it's heralded as a new discovery.

New or not, it's always right. Rhythmic movement helps not just stuttering but all sorts of neurological 'unsyncings' including Tourettes. As I get older I'm having occasional bouts of vestibular problems, and I notice the same rule. On days when the semicircular canals are frisky, walking settles them down. This even applies to moods. Walking is the simplest cure for depression and anxiety.

We're meant to be steadily moving and making all the time, except when sleeping.

Labels: coot-proofing, defensible times, Grand Blueprint, TMI

  ¶ 12:52 AM

  Who discovered electrotherapy?
Who first discovered electrotherapy, now being discredited (yet again) by Elon?

I've been wrong. It wasn't Americans or Brits or Krauts in the 1880s.

It was NIGERIANS!



Transcribed:

On the river Old Calabar, the electrical properties of the gymnotus are used by the natives to cure their sick children; a small specimen of the fish is put into a dish containing water, and the child is made to play with it, or the child is put into a tub of water and the fish put in beside it.

From History of Electrical Telegraphy, p203 of the PDF.


I'd love to find out how those folks determined the curative effects. They wouldn't have gone through the process of instrumental measurement and theoretical speculation. Why did they try the experiment in the first place? Did adults notice that they felt better after a mild shock?

The author is JJ Fahie, a British engineer who spent much of his career setting up a telegraph system in Persia in the 1860s. He had more experience and respect for non-Euros than the typical British scholar or engineer. I'm trying to trace down the vague source he gave for this info, but so far no luck.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 3:39 PM

  More clickback
Heard some expert on the radio saying: "Apollo is the one event from the 20th century that will be remembered in the 30th century."

Since I'm in Century Clickback mode today, let's click back the thousands place on the odometer. Is there an event from 900-1000 that was still remembered in 1900-2000?

Only one event comes to mind, and it's a remarkably close parallel. In the 900s the Danes settled Greenland, which is really part of North America whether we count it or not. Around 985 a few of the Greenlanders wandered around and hit the solid mainland. They stayed briefly, returned a couple times, and then abandoned the place. Of course it wasn't really a discovery, since lots of non-Danes had been living on the continent for many thousands of years.

A brief visit to a place that didn't need to be "discovered" because it was already familiar. After the brief visit, nothing.

Good parallel.

= = = = =

If we look for SCIENTIFIC parallels, the 900s were highly active. Persia was making major developments in math, but it's hard to single out one specific landmark in the 900s.

= = = = =

Later addition, via the 1962 Hix book:

Uber Eats began in the 900s.

Hix got the details slightly wrong; this is more accurate... Caliph al-Aziz of Egypt had an aristocratic taste for cherries, so he invented a way to get fresh cherries from Baalbek in Syria, where the best cherries were grown. He trained a fleet of homing pigeons to return to his banquet hall, then shipped them out to the best orchard in Baalbek equipped with little cloth pouches tied to their legs. The orchard placed a cherry in each pouch and sent the pigeons back to Cairo. Same-day delivery, powered by autonomous GPS-directed AI! (Avian intelligence)

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 12:10 PM

  Not a wild one
This "conspiracy theory" isn't especially wild. It will never be proved, but it makes sense....

Until last week, UK was cautiously taking Persia's side in Sheldon Adelson's Excellent Adventure. Suddenly UK has flipped to full-service slave.

What happened? Epstein.

Why was Epstein "caught" right now instead of any time in the last few years? He hasn't done anything new or different. If his "capture" was meant to discredit Trump, it would have made more sense in 2016. Right now Trump is loyally serving Lord Sheldon and doesn't need to be pressured. Right now we need leverage to keep our reluctant allies firmly on board as we prepare to bomb Persia down to bedrock so Lord Sheldon can get his rocks off.

Epstein supposedly has the goods on Prince Andrew and (ahem) Third Way Blair and a few hundred other Euro elites. As long as he was free, there was no danger of singing. Now that he's looking for a plea deal, all dossiers are potentially open. We hear meaningless promises of "imminent" revelations. We know from long experience that Deepstate only reveals data to discredit its enemies, not to inform the public. The "imminent" release is designed to get "imminent" cooperation from Europe.
  ¶ 7:29 AM

  Science advances on materials, not ideas.
Toward the end of his 1641 book on codes and ciphers (p 168 in the PDF), Wilkins discusses communication systems that are magical or mythical. He debunks a system described in 1619 by Famiano Strada (p 404 in the PDF). Famiano described an ancient use of magnets to communicate at a distance without interception by enemies. Turn one compass needle and the other moves in sympathy. Wilkins points out correctly (at the time) that this only works for a distance of two or three feet, so he concludes that Famiano was describing a myth instead of a practical method.

Needles to say, we still use this ancient system, and it works over thousands of miles, even to the moon and back.

What changed? We figured out how to wiggle the sending magnet really really fast, using electromagnets to form the field. Fast wiggles transfer more energy. You don't need quantum quackery to feel this concept. Just move your hand up and down slowly, then move it up and down fast. You have to transfer more energy into the muscles to move it fast, even though the distance of each wiggle is the same.

For a more visible example, imagine the car is a magnet vibrating back and forth, switching poles at each corner. Fast and slow are covering the same distance in each lap. Fast uses more energy (gas), and fast transfers more energy (damage) when the car hits something.




= = = = =

Two critical improvements had to precede the development of radio. The first one came just after Wilkins. Around 1680 the manufacture of small-gauge wire became commercially practical. The next one was the storage battery in 1800, which provided a steady source of moving electrons through the wire. After those two developments invention zoomed forward, with commercial telegraphy in 1830 and wireless around 1880.

Wilkins was using rigorous scientific thinking, trusting experiments over theory. He recognized that wireless communication was possible, but had no way to visualize the improvement resulting from thousands or millions of wiggles per second.

Again needles to say, Nature got there first with radio fish, but we didn't recognize what Nature had done until we built sufficiently sensitive receivers.

All inventions are either long-standing dreams or copies of Nature. Inventions happen when materials and manufacturing have advanced to the point where the old or natural dream can be implemented. There is EXACTLY ONE EXCEPTION to this rule, the phonograph. Before Edison got there accidentally, nobody had dreamed of recording sound, nobody had tried to record sound and Nature doesn't record sound. Our brains certainly record long sequences of language and music, but we record symbols and tokens, not sound waves. I can guess that birds function the same way, because they like to jazz up a sequence when replaying.

Searchable sidenote: It's a safe bet that no other text block includes "Famiano Strada" AND "fast wiggles" AND "radio fish" AND "jazz up".

Labels: Carver, Grand Blueprint, storage

  ¶ 2:09 AM

  Rare common sense, but missing the purpose
Via Eurekalert, a group of "social" "scientists" warns that technology to detect facial expressions won't work.

There's nothing new or "scientific" in the warning. You don't need "science" to figure out that facial expressions are a very poor indicator of intention and purpose. Artists and actors and salesmen have known it for centuries. Cultural and national habits shape expression above all. Brazilians smile all the time and Russians rarely smile. Innate tendencies also shape expression. Unwanted people guard their outputs carefully from long experience with rejection. Popular people let it all out because they can. Popular people win every time regardless of expression.

Beyond the generalities, a specific setting of the face can be read in many different ways depending on situation and motion. Ask Mona Lisa.

The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration have trained agents in the past to assess smiling, scowling and other facial movements to identify and stop potential terrorists. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe are now experimenting with technologies designed to automate emotion detection through facial scans. Some companies are experimenting with software to track the facial movements of job applicants during interviews. Such technology might be able to detect facial movements, but they do not detect the psychological meaning of those facial movements, Barrett and co-authors say.

These "scientists" are courageously opposing the tech monsters, but they're misreading Deepstate's PURPOSE in using facial recognition.

FBI isn't trying to "identify and stop" people who are already terrorists. That's a null set. FBI is trying to "identify and START" people who can be shaped into "terrorists" working for FBI. I'd guess that a limited range of expression denotes an alienated rejected male who is ripe for cultivation.

Companies using the tech for job interviews may simply be screwing around with Innovative Disruptive shit because Zuckerberg says it's cool. If they have any real purpose, they're trying to create an "objective" way to reject people they would reject anyway. It's easier to defend a Die-Versity lawsuit when you can say "This is what the MACHINE told us." The suing lawyers won't be able to prove that the MACHINE is following pre-matched correlations of successful vs unsuccessful applicants.
  ¶ 11:23 PM

  My dream job in 1619
A while back I got tickled by a question seen on Twitter: If you were transported back to 1919, what could you do? That was easy. My skills are more suitable for 1919 than 2019.

Well, what about 1619? Here it is.



Scholarly writing in the 1600s and 1700s easily mixed English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and all sorts of other alphabets. I want to be the typesetter! Knowing enough about all of those languages to proofread and find the characters in an existing font. Engraving the matrices and casting a new font if the manuscript required a language that wasn't already in our cases.

Dream job.

This page is from a 1641 book on codes and ciphers by Wilkins, which added cipher tables and symbols to the fun.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 4:16 PM

  Simple solution
Russian cosmonauts have the ultimate simple settlement of the moon landing question.

If we had faked it, Russia would have called us out immediately.

Just as Russia is currently calling out our billions and billions of fake "poisonings" and "attacks" and "hackings" and "meddlings" and "interferences" and "malign behaviors".

The cosmonauts were intensely interested in the landing for obvious skill-guild reasons. They wanted the astronauts to succeed, and they wanted to learn from the success. They had their own receivers and antennas picking up the Apollo transmissions directly. They knew where the antennas were pointed. Moon, not Arizona.

As always, WORKING TOGETHER is the best way to get past ethnic and religious and other "identity" differences. When two people have the same SKILL and work in parallel, those other diffs fade toward zero.

Labels: constants and constants, skill-estate

  ¶ 9:40 AM

  Blood fetish
The medical racket in Sorosian lands is enthusiastically devoted to killing the patients.

How do I know the devotion is ENTHUSIASTIC? Here's proof for UK.

.... Tafida Raqeeb, a comatose five-year-old whose parents want her transferred to Italy for treatment after UK doctors ordered the removal of “life-sustaining treatment.” Doctors at the Royal London Hospital say there is no chance she will recover from her coma, and declared any further medical treatment futile.

Two doctors from the Gaslini Children’s Hospital in Genoa, Italy, however, disagree. They were able to examine Raqeeb via a video link July 12, and they agreed to care for her in Italy. They said they did not believe her to be brain dead.

Tafida's case follows similar campaigns by parents in the cases of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans, who were both terminally ill children in NHS care. In 2017, doctors sought to remove Charlie Gard from his ventilator, despite his parents’ wishes to transfer him to a hospital in New York City. He died in hospice at the age of 11 months, after life support was removed.

Less than a year later, the parents of Alfie Evans also objected to NHS attempts to remove his ventilator, saying they wished to move him to a hospital in Italy. Evans' life support was eventually removed, and he survived for five days breathing on his own before dying just short of his second birthday.

See the pattern? Parents worked with real doctors elsewhere, attempting to take the patients away from NHS. If NHS had been an ordinary secular bureaucracy, it would have been happy to lose the expense and publicity. It would have helped the patients to GTFO. Instead, NHS obstructs the removal. The patients must be kept in captivity so NHS can get its blood-fetish thrills.

Labels: infinite infinite infinite infinite evil

  ¶ 7:37 AM

  Same "theory" works here
Let's extend the "theory" that Elon is a false flag working for Big Oil to discredit EVs.

I hadn't paid attention to his other fakeries. This week he announced that Neuralink is going to cure epilepsy. Again he's trying to disrupt an industry that has been running SUCCESSFULLY for quite a while. Pacemakers and synchronizers have been used for about 40 years, connecting to hearts and spines and various parts of the brain. Lots of people have them, and they work beautifully in most cases. These devices control pain, prevent atrial fibrillation, relieve dystonia and Parkinsons, and stop seizures.

The EV industry was HARMED, not helped, by Elon's poor quality and deadly autopilot.

The DBS industry will be equally HARMED, not helped, by Elon's poor quality, which will be even more massively deadly in this application. Elon's unique superpower that makes him invulnerable to regulators will give him the opportunity to kill without punishment or liability.

At this point the important question is WHO IS PAYING HIM to ruin the DBS/TENS industry? History helps. Electrotherapy was a productive technique from 1880 to 1920, when the Freudians and pill-pushers tinfoiled it and redefined it as quackery. It came back around 1980, and is now a productive and profitable industry again. History is periodic. 1980 to 2020. Cui bono for this phase? Look at the same culprits.

Disrupters are NOT innovators. Disrupters are the exact opposite. Their sole purpose is to stop natural steady EXPERIENCE-BASED innovation, kill millions of people, and obliterate civilization. Instead of joining their cults, we should ask who is paying them to destroy the universe.

Labels: $TSLAQ, 1901

  ¶ 6:27 AM

  Worth more attention 2
Since I'm in 'deserves more attention' mode this week...

Most USA STRONG politicians don't even know who AMLO is. Here are a few politicians who are actually listening to AMLO, actually trying to improve trade relations with Mexico instead of making meaningless noise.

From AMLO's official website, these 8 members of congress are working on a replacement for NAFTA.

George Holding, Ron Kind, Stephanie Murphy, Terri Sewell, Judy Chu, Jimmy Gómez, Rosa DeLauro, Filemon Vela.

I've heard of DeLauro, but the others have never made national news.
  ¶ 12:07 AM

  If you're going to defend.....
I probably shouldn't waste effort on these idiots but can't resist. TAC quotes a passage from someone named Lionel Shriver who is defending the grammarrhoid tendency.

“I’ve thrown in my lot with the pedants. Yes, language is a living tree, eternally sprouting new shoots as other branches wither . . . blah, blah, blah. But a poorly cultivated plant can readily gnarl from lush foliage to unsightly sticks. The internet has turbo­charged lexical fads (such as ‘turbo­charge’) and grammatical decay. Rather than infuse En­glish with a new vitality, this degeneration spreads the blight of sheer ignorance. So this month we address a set of developments in the prevailing conventions of the En­glish language whose only commonality is that they drive me crazy.

“I long ago developed the habit of mentally correcting other people’s grammatical errors, and sometimes these chiding reproofs escape my lips (‘You mean “Ask us Democrats”’). Marking up casual conversation with a red pencil doesn’t make me popular, and I should learn to control myself. Yet fellow philological conservatives will recognize the impulse to immediately re­groove one’s neural pathways, the better to preserve one’s fragile ear for proper En­glish. That ear is constantly under assault by widespread misusage that threatens by repetition to be—­another on-­trend verb—‘normalized.’

If you're against all neologisms, you shouldn't use neologisms. Especially unnecessary ones.

1. Gnarl, which you didn't complain about, shouldn't be used as an intransitive verb. Gnarled is just an adjective.

2. Turbocharged, which you did complain about, isn't a neologism. It's a precise technical term used appropriately as a metaphor.

3. Regroove, which you didn't complain about, is a precise technical term used appropriately as a metaphor. Why is it better than the other two?

4. Misusage, which you didn't complain about, is a misuse. Usage is a word, misuse is a word, misusage is not a word.

5. On-trend, which you didn't complain about, is an unnecessary and unfamiliar neologism. Why not trendy?

6. Normalized, which you did complain about, is a precise technical term used appropriately as a metaphor.

Labels: defensible cases, Language update

  ¶ 4:56 PM

  One exception
Earlier Professor Polistra analyzed the relation between fashionable beliefs and fashionable people.



A similar pattern works for experts vs non-experts. Prof P finds that non-experts, people who know about a subject but are NOT PAID to write about it, have a wide range of accuracy. Non-paid experts are rarely all wrong, mostly close to right, often exactly right.

Paid experts are paid to express fashionable beliefs, so their accuracy is a lot like fashionable people except worse.

The least wicked of paid experts are exactly wrong about everything, with an occasional and accidental right word caused by a typo or editing error. The majority are WORSE THAN WRONG, multi-layeredly and convolutedly and lethally and brain-dissolvingly wrong. There's no way to compare their statements with truth. If you try, you'll lose your mind.

There is precisely one exception to the rule. Ann Widdecombe is a paid expert in the realms of politics and "social" "science". She was the Minister of Prisons for the British government, and now she's a MEP. She is EXACTLY RIGHT about everything I can check and verify.

Labels: infinite evil, infinite GOOD, Pluponents

  ¶ 3:41 PM

  Random thought, probably stupid
Boeing's 737 problem arises from a category error. They're still adding more bells and whistles onto an ESSENTIALLY FAILED MACHINE, in vain hopes of curing its ESSENTIAL FAILURES.

Good engineers and good programmers know that this never works. When a machine is built to crash, no amount of fiddling and training and sensors and coding will get rid of its PURPOSE. The 737's innate genetic PURPOSE is stalling and crashing.

The only solution is to start over with a different PHYSICAL MACHINE. This shouldn't be difficult, since 99% of all the airplanes built since the '30s are innately designed to fly, not crash. Other Boeing planes are designed to fly.

Boeing can't turn its focus toward the correct solution because they've succumbed to the tech monsters. Every company is now a "software company". It's the only way to RAISE SHARE VALUE.

Within the world of pure software, adding bells and whistles is never good practice, but you sometimes have to do it, and you can usually get away with doing it. Old COBOL accounting systems are so deeply meshed in machines and corporate procedures and accessory programs and communication protocols that a complete switchover requires a long shutdown for the transition.

This isn't true of airplanes. All airplanes fit the same hangars, all fit the same runways, all have the radios and transponders and radars for the air traffic control system. There's no extended root system to yank out. Replacing is costly for sure, but it doesn't require changing everything else around the plane.

Boeing is operating in software mode, acting like the defective plane is unyankable. They don't realize it's already been yanked.
  ¶ 8:48 AM

  Worth more attention
Via ScienceDaily, a promising finding. This isn't in my 'department', but it deserves more attention than it's getting so far. Giving it some attention!

A specific cell, a Gata6+ pericardial cavity macrophage, helps heal an injured heart in mice. The cell was discovered in the pericardial fluid (sac around the heart) of a mouse with heart injury. The same cells were also found within the human pericardium of people with injured hearts, confirming that the repair cells offer the promise of a new therapy for patients with heart disease.

Not a stem cell, just an immune-system cell that is generated when the heart is injured. It seems to be designed to work on the outside surface of the heart. Therapies or drugs might be able to boost or focus these cells.
  ¶ 5:42 AM

  Hix hits a homer
Bought a newer Hix book, published in 1962 by Elsie Hix. This has a different flavor than the original John Hix material from the '30s. Elsie's features are longer and more narrative, and Elsie lost John's suspicion of Yankees. In other words, Elsie is more NYC.

Still there's plenty of good stuff. Opening the book I find this on page 1:



In 1960, before the first man went into orbit, NASA was trying to find ways to exchange CO2 for oxygen on long planetary voyages. They found that duckweed, a common fresh-water plant belonging to the lily family, did the job. NASA managed to grow duckweed two-dimensionally on big sheets of absorbent paper, so each 'pond' could be suspended vertically and irrigated from the top. 25 square feet of duckweed, 5 x 5, is enough to exchange the atmosphere for one adult. So a 'greenhouse' the size of a file cabinet would be able to grow enough duckweed for a crew of 10.



The comparison is visually obvious: The volume of plant material is about the same as the volume of the person. Volume = volume.

This was before NASA was LBO'd by the Gaian religion-racket. Now that Gaia runs everything, we aren't allowed to know how little plant material it takes to balance one human.

Nice synchrony as always. I was thinking about astronauts yesterday, and thinking about Gaia's murderous REVERSAL of this exact fact a few days ago.

Labels: Carbon Cult, defensible thymes, defensible times

  ¶ 5:02 PM

  Pretty good analogy after all
MindMatters briefly touches bitcoin...

Mind Matters News spoke with Bill Dembski, who has been studying cryptos for years. As an information theorist, he sees money as a type of information: “For people to claim ownership of information is nothing new. Our society even dedicates an entire industry to preserving and tracking ownership claims to information: intellectual property law.” But information does not require paper or tokens in order to exist. In an information society, systems like cryptocurrency are bound to arise and need only avoid such pitfalls as too much centralization and lack of security, he suggests.

First thought: Money as information? That's meaningless.

Second thought: Well, it's superficial, but it leads to a better thought.

Money is a lot like language. Both need to be stable enough for common usage. Both need to be allowed to vary naturally, not by force. At the other end, both need to be tethered or constrained to prevent hijacking of value.

Government-forced change in language = Orwell.

Hijacking language = PC, changes forced by corporations or organizations.

Government-forced change in money = price control, ZIRP, inflation to monetize debt.

Hijacking money = cornering the market.

= = = = =

Does nature give us a guideline? Yup, in a third form of information. DNA is gold, and the epigenes are the paper currency. Paper can vary its value within a generation or two, but the DNA remains constant. When the epi-inflated generations die off, the unmodulated DNA reverts the epigenes to default.

So we can add:

Government-forced change in DNA = sterilization or genocide.

Hijacking DNA = GMO.

Bitcoin fails because it doesn't have DNA or gold. It's just the paper, designed specifically to be easily hijacked by big bullies.

Do we have a gold for language? Not exactly.

Grammarrhoids are goldbugs, insisting that ONLY the standard meaning as of 200 years ago is valid currency. This doesn't work. Language, like prices and interest, needs to vary naturally in response to present needs.

'Progressives' refuse to recognize any standard because, like bitcoiners and stock traders, they want to corner the market on meaning.

For a while dictionaries were like a paper currency pinned to a gold standard. The American Heritage was ideal, supplying the gold standard meaning along with the present exchange rate for various regions. You could see the differential, the negative feedback, between current rate and gold, and you could pull your meanings back toward standard if you felt things were getting out of control. I don't think dictionaries even try to fulfill this role any more. We're in Semantic Zimbabwe.

Labels: defensible cases, Language update, Metrology

  ¶ 3:20 PM

  When will they ever learn?
The fire in Notre Dame was able to burn for at least one hour before anyone detected it. Why?

The fire warning system at Notre-Dame took dozens of experts six years to put together, and in the end involved thousands of pages of diagrams, maps, spreadsheets and contracts, according to archival documents found in a suburban Paris library by The Times.

The result was a system so arcane that when it was called upon to do the one thing that mattered — warn “fire!” and say where — it produced instead a nearly indecipherable message.

When will we ever learn?

SOFTWARE CAN'T BE TRUSTED FOR IMPORTANT JOBS.

I know. I've been writing the shit for 40 years. I know what it can do and what it can't do. Everyone who actually writes code understands this point, but some are paid to lie about it.

Notre Dame should have hired a few dogs with handlers. Dogs KNOW when something is wrong, and don't give indecipherable coded messages. Border collies are UNSTOPPABLE when something is wrong. They will climb any number of stairs, chew through any number of walls, break through glass, kill themselves if necessary, to get the message across.

LIFE IS PURPOSE.

Border collies are EXTREME PURPOSE.
  ¶ 10:12 AM

  Beautiful article on magnetic senses
A lively article at Aeon gives the full history of research on the human magnetic sense, includes lots of studies I hadn't heard about, and emphasizes the role of declination or dip in animal magnetic senses.

There are only two odd errors, which don't affect the main theme. Both could have been eliminated if the author had called on an engineer type to proofread the article. Hint, hint.

Odd error 1:

Our planet is an enormous magnet, an object whose internal electrical charge causes it to be positive at one end and negative at the other.

Magnetism isn't caused by an internal electrical charge. The earth doesn't have a major planet-scale electric charge. It has an infinite number of constantly changing tiny electric charges, since every single living cell and plant and animal uses electric charges for internal and external communication. The magnetic field happened because the core of the earth is iron spinning inside the sun's magnetic field. We don't know why the sun has a magnetic field. God knows.

Odd error 2:

During the years that Baker ran the Manchester experiments, AM radio broadcasts were common throughout the US, where replication attempts were most frequent, but nearly nonexistent in the UK. If humans, like pigeons, use a mechanism for magnetoreception that can be jammed by AM frequencies, it explains why so much time and effort put into replicating Baker’s finding ended in failure.

Nonsense. British radio stations have used SW more than American stations, but British stations always used the BCB heavily. A quickly found specific reference from the '70s:

23 November 1978 – Radio 1 moves from 247m (1214 kHz) to 275 & 285m (1053 & 1089 kHz) medium wave as part of a plan to improve national AM reception, and to conform with the Geneva Frequency Plan of 1975.

I can't figure out where the author got this "fact". Even if Britain hadn't been using MW, the effects of SW would be identical.

There must be a difference between the two nations, but broadcasting ain't it. How about overhead powerlines vs underground powerlines? Most of the city-scale wiring in Britain is underground, while most in US is on poles. Was this already true in the '70s? I can't find a verbal indication from a quick online search. These pics of Manchester in the '70s show streetlights on poles but no overhead wires at all.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 7:47 AM

  Especially strong full moon

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 1:48 AM

  Can't answer questions, didn't need an answer anyway
Via Eurekalert, one of those computerized "game theory" studies attempts to answer an old question that doesn't really need answering. "Game theory" can't answer any questions, so the effort is bilaterally futile.

This correlation is well established:

A language that covers a wider territory with more people tends to have simpler and more regular grammar.

We don't need research to establish the correlation. We could use some analysis of the mechanism of causation.

One direction of causation is obvious but hard to establish experimentally. A simpler language is easier for newcomers to learn "well enough", so it will spread faster. English spreads faster than Chinese or Russian for this reason.

The other direction is more subtle. Simplification doesn't arise from increased quantity of speakers. Simplification arises when populations speaking different languages mix and merge. The 'invasion' can go either way. It's the intersection that counts.

When Roman soldiers brought Latin to areas speaking Celtic or Teutonic, the Latin lost its noun cases. When French soldiers brought their simplified Latin to England, English lost its noun cases and adopted French plurals.

Labels: defensible cases, Language update

  ¶ 12:57 AM

  Wrong on all counts as usual
The Apollo anniversary is bringing out the usual crap. Via ZH, the usual media demons and "social" "science" demons are applying their usual bizarre delusions and brainless bigotries as usual:

The culture that put men on the moon was intense, fun, family-unfriendly, and mostly white and male.

Vintag.es reposts some Life Mag photos of the astronaut families watching and waiting anxiously.

Those astronauts were ENABLED by their families. Without the "family-friendly" support, they wouldn't have the motive to act as pioneers.

This is ALWAYS true of pioneers.

PIONEERS ARE MALE.

That's a flat biological fact, true from insects to mammals. Nature can afford to waste males, so males have the tendency to venture out and find new hives.

Married male pioneers are motivated by a desire to feed and support their families. Unmarried males are motivated by a false culture-generated lie that pioneering will make them more suitable to females. This is a cruel vicious hoax, but it always works for a while.

= = = = =

The one thing that really stands out in these pictures is TOBACCO. All the adults are handling their anxiety by smoking. No snowflakes here, no Gaian wackos here. Just a single PURPOSE of helping the pioneers find a new hive. Everything else gives way to achieve the PURPOSE.

So "mostly male" is backwards. The culture of NASA was designed to sacrifice males, not to empower males.

"Mostly white" was true but trivial. At that time America was mostly white. In a population that's 88% white, a group of three astronauts is highly likely to be white. At that time there were no barriers to blacks gaining the type of background needed for astronauts. Black men had been in the military since WW1, had been in some universities since 1890 (see Carver) and had been in all universities since 1954. Black families simply saw no reason to sacrifice their males for such an abstract purpose. This wasn't a uniquely black attitude. Lots of non-abstract people (including me) saw no point in the space project.

Labels: Shared Lie

  ¶ 12:41 AM

  Bye, Tulsi
I've been cautiously and tentatively** supporting Tulsi because her WORDS seemed to be on the right side ... while watching carefully for contrary indications. I've been fooled TOO MANY TIMES, and by god I'm not going to be fooled again.

Here's the perfect contrary indication.

News item:

“Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey followed up his earlier 2019 donation to Andrew Yang — by giving several thousand dollars to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign and another thousand to Yang. According to the FEC filings for Tulsi NOW, Dorsey donated $5,600 — the maximum donation — to Gabbard the day after the first Democratic debate.”

Bye, Tulsi.

@Jack is deep deep deep deep dark dark dark dark Deepstate. He knows EVERYTHING. If @Jack thinks you're worth supporting, I can be 10000000000000000000% certain that you're a nasty vile warmongering monstrous alien genocidal faker. Just another AP like Trump.

** Well, maybe not so cautiously on a percentage basis. I gave $50 to Tulsi's campaign, which is 1/3000 of my net worth. @Jack gave $5600, which is one millionth of his net worth.

Labels: Leth

  ¶ 1:04 PM

  Whoops, there goes my favorite example!
I'm fond of pointing out that every part of the 1787 "constitution" is routinely violated, EXCEPT for the obsolete bits that nobody would bother to do nowadays. I always point to this passage:

The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

All three pieces of this sentence are obsolete. We no longer declare war, we just make permanent universal war all the time against every nation that displeases Saudi and Israel. We no longer grant Letters of Marque because the concept went obsolete a long time ago. The same applies to rules about captures. We don't use rules and laws.

Whoopsie! Letters of Marque are back in fashion again!

Via ZH:

Now in a display once again illustrating just who the actual menace is to global peace and stability, the British have openly – even proudly – hijacked a ship carrying Iranian oil allegedly bound for Syria.

As to why the UK believed it was justified to hijack the Iranian tanker – the article would cite “sanctions against the regime of Bashar al-Assad” the UK and EU placed on Syria – which are in themselves illegal and an act of war.

In other words, we issued a Letter of Marque encouraging Britain to hijack Persian ships for our benefit.

We were founded by pirates and smugglers and tax evaders. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's a plain open fact. Every aspect of our "noble and glorious" revolution was explicitly designed to enable piracy and smuggling and tax evasion.

Hix, debunking Yankee myths as always, gave us a lively dramatization of how the Letters of Marque worked. After the revolution we thrived on "official" piracy against Britain. (Start at 7:10 in the clip.)

Labels: Shared Lie

  ¶ 1:48 AM