Is this a change? Maybe.
Deutsche Welle, normally solid Soros, seems to be wavering just a bit, and one Kraut judge is also wavering just a bit.

DW has an article, categorized as News not Opinion, which acknowledges a big part of the problem:

Thousands of migrants in Germany have applied for asylum multiple times and return to the country after having been deported, according to a report by German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag published on Sunday.

There are nearly 5,000 asylum-seekers who have reapplied for asylum after being deported from Germany since 2012, according to the report, which cites official government figures. Some of the asylum-seekers willingly left Germany, knowing deportation was imminent. The then returned to German to make another application for asylum, according to the report.

Asylum seekers who have been deported and have entry bans are jailed for a few months for re-entering the country, according to the report. Arrests and longer sentences are rare.

Catch and release is a HUGE problem in USA STRONG as well, and not just in immigration. It's an even bigger problem with ordinary criminals. The police are trying to do their job, but the "courts" are smashing civilization and overburdening the cops with 5000-time PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS who commit the same crime several times a day, except for occasional hour-long coffee breaks behind bars.

Normal people, not just ULTRA ULTRA ULTRA ULTRA FAR FAR FAR FAR RIGHT KKKTRUMPHITLERHITLER EXTREMISTHITLER WHITEHITLER NATIONALISTHITLER TERRORISTHITLERS, see this in their daily lives and know it's a problem, but the media and dysgovernment NEVER EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE the problem. Anyone who ACCURATELY OBSERVES the problem is jailed solidly and permanently, not for an hour.

Now the premier Soros Satan of EU media has said the same thing that the ULTRA TERRORISTHITLERS have been saying for years.

= = = = =

A Kraut judge has also acknowledged the truth of reality, though in a peculiar and abstract way.

A German judge ruled that an election campaign poster reading "Migration kills!" was a partly accurate description of reality and does not incite racial hatred. The campaign poster was used ahead of the European parliamentary elections earlier in 2019. In full, it reads: "Stop the invasion: Migration kills!"

Judge Andreas Hofer, who made the decision, cited "historical movements of people" from 5,000 years ago to the present day that directly led to "death and ruin," including the expulsion of the Israelites from Egypt and the colonization of the Americas. On that basis, he said that the poster "at least partly reflected reality."

Huh? He's missing the point entirely. It's true that every movement of people involves trouble and conflict and deaths, but each migration has a different PURPOSE. The current migration in Europe is neither ordinary colonialism nor an expulsion. It's an intentional invasion of migrants sponsored and inspired by Soros. The migrants themselves are not the problem. Soros is the problem, and the EU/US/UK dysgovernments who work in tandem with Soros to SLAUGHTER their own Deplorables.

Are we seeing a minor signal of shifting elite opinion? Hard to tell.

Labels: #bluelivesmatter, #DeplorableLivesMatter, Sorosia

  ¶ 11:11 PM

  Ed misses a point, sort of
Ed Niedermeyer, as always, gives a deep and coherent set of thoughts....

We still have a collective memory of a time when cars were created by go-with-your-gut auteurs like Musk, in the form of classic cars that make modern cars and automakers look banal and bureaucratic. What Musk is selling is the fantasy that we can (or should) return to that era.

I think he's missing a subtle but important point.

The 'auteurs' who succeeded were working for big companies that already had many lines of profitable non-fantastic cars. The Corvette and Mustang were irrational cars built from a base of sturdy reliable economy cars. The original Corvette was mostly '53 Chevy, down to the 235 six and Powerglide. The original Mustang was a fancified Falcon. Development was relatively easy because there wasn't much new. Most of the package had been produced and tested in huge quantities for many years.

The auteurs who were more like Elon (in a corporate sense) went the other way, toward too much rationality. The Everyman's Car was the universal auteur fantasy. It always failed because Everyman's Car is a used car. You can't make a real car cheap enough for Everyman to buy new.

Elon is going both ways. His explicit appeal is strictly numerical and precise because his intended audience is autists, not auteurs. His cultists are thrilled by the performance numbers and carbon footprint numbers. Even the CYBERTRK appeals strictly to numberoids. It's not an organic shape like real cars; it's an abstract Euclidean heptagon. It's beautiful to Plato, not to Aristotle.
  ¶ 3:40 PM

  Not too swift
Modular banking mode again....

Via ZH,

On Friday six European countries issued a bombshell joint statement declaring their intent to join INSTEX, or the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, a European special-purpose vehicle serving as a 'SWIFT alternative' to bypass US sanctions on Iran.

Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden released a joint statement asserting it's of "the utmost importance to the preservation and full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) on Iran’s nuclear program by all parties involved."

"In light of the continuous European support for the agreement and the ongoing efforts to implement the economic part of it and to facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran, we are now in the process of becoming shareholders of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) subject to completion of national procedures," the statement reads.

France, Germany and Britain are already part of INSTEX, so it's now most of Europe.

At the moment there are several separate alternatives to the globalist SWIFT, each serving a distinct but somewhat overlapping set of countries. This is a much better counterforce than Bitcoin, because the PURPOSE of these separate alternatives is to BE SEPARATE, not to serve the interests of NSA.

Real business is BILATERAL and MODULAR. Overlapping modularity makes it harder for USA STRONG to play the sanctions game. When everyone was solely linked through SWIFT, we could kill one country's economy with a single flip of the blockade switch. With separate and overlapping small arrangements, nobody is totally vulnerable. We can try to block one of the networks, but each member of that network can now shift its transactions to other networks.



The best part of this particular network is that it breaks the power of the Saudi/Israel mob. Our war on Persia is fought under contract to Saudi and Israel. Our war is growing more futile as our control levers are wilting and melting in our hands.
  ¶ 2:10 PM

  Observations from real experts
Continuing this week's modularity theme....

Some observations on bitcoin from an econ blogger who has contact with real bankers. The bankers are telling him:

1 bearer style assets are user hostile and wont catch on
2 conflating settlement and payments is bad news
3 final settlement not required for payments
4 hard to financialize something which resists regulation

= = = = =

1 and 4 are sort of conditional. It's possible though unlikely that bitcoin will become more user-friendly. Bitcoin resists regulation because bitcoin is NSA, not because bitcoin is "decentralized". NSA wants to avoid the usual written regulations so it can use bitcoin for tyranny and blackmail.

2 and 3 are intrinsic to the whole process of banking and business. These are not usually discussed in the context of bitcoin, and I hadn't thought about them before.

Bitcoin is incurably and intractably GLOBAL. Every transaction requires automatic settlement, and nominal permission, by everyone on the whole chain.

Real banking, like all real business, is always modular and bilateral, a single wire connecting buyer and seller in a trust relationship. The buyer who writes a check trusts that the bank will sooner or later transfer funds to the seller's account, and the seller trusts the bank to give him the money. Neither party needs to know how and when the bank handles the intermediate steps of the transfer.

In earlier centuries, and even now in unconventional banking like scrip and hawala, the settlement happened rarely and bilaterally. Each bank was fully modular. Each bank maintained a pile of real money through its normal savings and loan activities with its own customers. Each bank would keep a ledger page of its credits and debits to each of the other banks. Once a year, Bank 1 and Bank 2 would transfer their net result in gold to null out the differential. Bank 1 and Bank 3 would transfer their pairwise net result, and so on. In an active system those net differences tend to be small because there are lots of checks going both ways between each pair of banks. Each bank's customers didn't know about the transfers and didn't need to know.

Labels: MMT, Patient things, Real World Math, scrip

  ¶ 7:28 AM

  When the 10th Amendment was real
Reviewing Graybill's Law:

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

Graybill works the same way at ALL SCALES, from cells to worlds.

I've previously discussed how modularity in a city helped develop and maintain the skills of black people. When all ethnic groups have to compete in the same global market, only a few skills are favored.

In the realm of radio, I've discussed how distinct local stations developed and maintained the talents of local musicians and actors, who couldn't possibly make it in Hollywood.

Here's an example of modularity helping to develop engineering skills.

Globalism requires each module to know what the others are doing. Modularity frees up each entity to perform its duty with full attention. But Nature sometimes forces globalist knowledge into a localist situation. Do you surrender to globalism and break all the boundaries? Do you let the biggest and nastiest element have a total monopoly?

No, you don't have to surrender. Federal radio regulators in the '30s were devoted to maintaining localism and balancing big vs small, despite the physical limits imposed by the ether. There were only about 100 bandwidth channels in the broadcast band, which meant that many stations had to be assigned to each frequency. Low-power stations could be safely assigned to the same freq without interference, but higher-power stations posed a problem. One solution was time-sharing. There were dozens of sharing arrangements, some of which lasted into the 2000s.

One such arrangement linked KFAB in Lincoln and WBBM in Chicago.

From a modern book about the history of radio in Nebraska.

Having to leave the air during prime network programming in the evening hours was a problem that needed to be solved. A break came at the end of 1931 when KOIL 1260 dropped CBS and snatched the more popular NBC Blue from KFAB. It turned out to be a fortuitous move for KFAB. KFAB engineers and management realized that with CBS, programming during the restricted 7:30 to 10 p.m. hours would match that of WBBM, the Chicago CBS affiliate with which KFAB shares time. KFAB conceivably could remain on the air during the evening hours, but only if the audio and the radio frequencies of the two stations could be perfectly matched. Any slight variations between the two stations on the air at the same time would create annoying interference for listeners in areas where the signals overlap.

WBBM and CBS were on board with the idea. KFAB took over the less popular CBS network on January 8, 1932, and CBS engineers went to work to find a way to get the nighttime signals and audio of the two stations synchronized.

Synchronization was necessary because, in an area where the two station’s coverage overlaps, the two signals beat against each other producing an audible note that’s equal to the difference in the signal frequencies. That note can range from a low growl to a high tone. The greater the frequency difference, the higher the note. If the signal frequencies are within a cycle of each other, the note is too low to be audible.

Also to be synchronized was the program feed. It takes 26 milliseconds for the network audio to travel from Chicago over phone lines to Lincoln. This difference would be heard in the overlap area as an annoying echo.

The frequency problem was solved with a dedicated phone line that carried a tone, its variations being commands that would adjust the two transmitter frequencies together, but the audio delay was a harder problem. With CBS and WBBM footing the bill, engineers worked on a way to create a 26-millisecond delay at the Chicago transmitter in order to match the audio arriving 26 milliseconds later at the Lincoln transmitter.

For several months while the electronic delay system was being perfected and constructed, a relatively primitive non-electrical delay was developed. It used a 23-foot pipe with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. The distance the sound traveled through the pipe created the delay. The audio output of the acoustical delay was a bit narrow but acceptable for the time being and was used successfully for about nine months. The electronic audio delay when completed consisted of a lengthy series of filter circuits, equalizers, and fourteen amplifiers.

Those engineers were having fun. The FEDERAL REQUIREMENT OF LOCALISM gave them a reason to develop a unique solution, transferring KNOWLEDGE between the modules through a singular dedicated channel, without turning all variables into top-down global variables. Note especially that WBBM, the bigger station in the bigger city, paid for the work and compromised its own signal to let KFAB gain profit.

Now KFAB's loyal listeners could leave the dial on 770 during the important prime-time hours, and receive CBS with a strong local signal.

Labels: defensible times, skill-estate

  ¶ 1:22 AM

  Narwhal tusk!
Speaking of weapons and tools... ZH focuses on the HERO who stopped the latest "terrorist" attack by grabbing the nearest effective weapon and using it. The nearest effective weapon was a five-foot narwhal tusk displayed on the wall of a fish market. Another HERO grabbed a fire extinguisher and used it effectively.

Those are the dudes who should be running the police and army. Innate defenders who respond to an emergency with instant rationality and imagination.

Will UK give them knighthoods and hire them to manage the police? No. We know what UK will do. UK will imprison the HEROES for "hate crimes", and will continue to leave "terrorists" free to commit more crimes, as this one was. (He had been "arrested" and released with an electronic monitor, which clearly wasn't being monitored.)

That's the PURPOSE of "terrorism". That's why Sorosian dysgovernments fund and organize "terrorists". Keep the public in maximum fear and chaos, punish and exterminate self-defense in all forms.

REMEMBER: Soros's holocaust has already matched his role model Adolf's record, even without counting the millions of war casualties. And he's not stopping. Insatiable psychopaths never stop.

Labels: defensible spaces, Sorosia

  ¶ 12:12 AM

  Just an exotic and mysterious place
Another reminder of the vital difference between a non-interventionist country and an empire.

In a properly modular mechanism or program or world, each module or gearbox or country doesn't need to know what the other modules are doing. Each module is free to perform its own duty with full attention.

In a globalized mechanism or program or world, each part needs to keep track of the other parts, because the other parts can intrude or invade on this part's variables or shafts or life. The invading part needs to know about the invaded parts so it can slaughter the victims with maximum efficiency.

= = = = =

An ad from a Los Angeles radio mag in 1924, during non-interventionist Harding's term.

I happened to see it at the same moment when I was listening to Tulsi and Joe Rogan discussing our recent fake killing of our fake ISIS leader al-Baghdadi.



Dance to the Thief of Bagdad!

Bagdad wasn't a place we were obliterating, or the locative surname of a fake "terrorist" we were fake killing. It wasn't a place where we had killed a competent secular government that offered tolerance to Christians, and replaced it with chaos and genocide. It wasn't a source of refugees who were weaponized by Soros to destroy America and Europe.

Bagdad was just part of the Mysterious Orient. We could impute glamor and romance to its exotic arts and dances. We were probably wrong, but it DIDN'T FUCKING MATTER IF WE WERE WRONG.

Labels: Alternate universe, From rights to duties

  ¶ 3:25 PM

  Ah. That's better.
A fitting finale for my Objective History Mode week.

Joe Rogan interviews Tulsi, and she finally gets a chance to talk Objective History in full paragraphs without idiotic interruptions and idiotic questions. Rogan asks hard questions, but never asks trite or trivial questions.



Been waiting for this for a long time. Should have happened earlier. Still not convinced of Tulsi's intentions, but her grasp of HARDASS REALITY is unquestionable.
  ¶ 10:37 AM

  Interesting statement from Macron
Still in objective history mode!

Granted that Macron is something like Trump and Boris, capable of saying all sorts of things without meaning them... still, if you take this as a policy statement, it's a big change.

Is our enemy today Russia? Or China? Is it the goal of NATO to designate them as enemies? I don't believe so. Our common enemy today is terrorism, which has hit each of our countries.

First evidence of HARDASS REALISM from an EU leader. Russia hasn't attacked Europe since 1940. China has never attacked Europe. Neither of them WANTS or INTENDS to attack Europe.

Russia is a crucial trade partner and a FRIEND if Europe will let it be a friend. China is a major trade partner but not a friend.

If you apply REALISM to the second part, this goes even farther.

Who is in charge of the "terrorists"? USA and Soros.

Aside from "terrorists", who made the latest conventional military attack on Europe? USA in the '90s.

NATO is never going to fight against Deepstate and Soros and Adelson, so Macron probably doesn't mean to carry the implication all the way. But the first part is good enough.
  ¶ 5:09 AM

  Dubious but scary thought
I think there's something more to Elon's CYBERTRK than a simple Sucker Filter. He's expanding the acceptable range of sadism and murder for his cultists.

I wrote in 2015:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

The old NRA slogan "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" applies correctly to guns, and also to normal autos and most other tools.

A gun or car or hammer or knife or screwdriver or weed-wacker can be a weapon... but only when used with specific deadly intention.

The slogan does NOT apply to autonomous cars. These weapons do kill people on their own, without any human intention.

Hold on. This seems complicated and subtle. Something is missing.

After thinking and walking about it, I formed a chain of reasoning:

What about a mousetrap? When I cock a trap and leave it in a mouseroad, I've created an autonomous weapon. It's programmed to detect a mouse (of below-median intelligence) and kill it.

What about a humantrap? When a store owner gets tired of thefts and sets up a shotgun with a tripwire, he has created an autonomous weapon. It's programmed to detect a thief (ditto) and kill him.

What about a landmine?

Aha. Now the correct dividing line emerges.

Mousetraps and tripwires are SELF-DEFENSE weapons. Landmines are NOT self-defense weapons. Landmines are placed on property that you don't own, and they're not protecting your own body or family.

Self-driving cars are mobile landmines. They are sent out to wander the roads, killing totally innocent pedestrians as a desired side-effect of unnecessary luxury.

Basically a Non-Virtual Reality Entertainment Experience for passive sadists.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

My first thought about the CYBRTRK last week:

WHY is bulletproof a selling point?

Elon's cultists are tech-monsters. Libertarians. Young males. A lot of them are Oriental or Hindu. All of them are well-educated, strong in math, short on life experience. They live precariously in high-rent areas surrounded by slums. They feel physically threatened, and perhaps they also sense that their wealth is on shaky ground, cantilevered by debt and subsidies and share-value Ponziness. Owning a bulletproof vehicle that looks just like the SWAT team's trucks is their substitute for owning a gun. You get to feel like a cop, leaving you free to ignore the gross inequality that you're helping to create, and leaving you free to HATE actual cops who actually put their lives on the line to defend your Libertarian ass.

= = = = =

Add these two concepts. The sum is a private army of literally weaponized autists, willing to let their sword-like autonomous autos do the killing for them, with no moral qualms.

Labels: Deadthink, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 12:39 AM

  Bravo!
Still in objective history mode.....

Via ZH as usual, the Syria war has been totally debunked by a source who can't be easily dismissed. Max Abrahms is a CURRENTLY EMPLOYED ACADEMIC and an insider in policy circles. He's not a random blogger or a safely retired emeritus or a disgruntled ex-employee. Abrahms has calmly and concisely knocked down the entire structure of genocidal lies.

The media and Deepstate will continue to lie, but the truth-tellers are gaining strength.
  ¶ 10:50 PM

  Fake surprise
Trump pulls the usual "surprise" pardon of a turkey, and the usual "surprise" visit to the troops.

I want a president who will REALLY surprise us by shooting the turkey and bringing the troops home.

Humans are omnivores, not cannibals. We're supposed to kill and eat birds. We're not supposed to kill and eat innocent foreigners.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 1:59 PM

  More objective history
Still speaking of a strictly objective approach to history... KSHS has added a big pile of letters related to Charles Curtis.

Curtis was a Topeka politician of native origin, who ended up as Herbert Hoover's VP. He could have been the first and only truly natural-born president if Hoover had ever offended Deepstate enough to get accidented or suicided.

Many of the letters are from Howel Jones, who was Curtis's political godfather at the start of his career in 1895. Jones encouraged Curtis to serve the native people, and also encouraged him to serve the Santa Fe. Curtis did a good job of both.

Modern observers would have a cognitive dissonance attack. On the one hand he was Die-Verse "before his time", and on the other hand he was a Corrupt Corporate Toady.

No CD, no conflict. Curtis was simply a normal non-heroic politician representing his OWN constituents.

He wasn't "before his time". Representing the tribes wasn't unthinkable in the 1920s, wasn't forbidden by pre-modern Nazi Neanderthals. Most of his legislation was passed into law.

Why was his legislation passed? The Santa Fe was based and owned in Topeka, not in NYC. Legislation that helped the Santa Fe brought in more tax money and more jobs for Topeka. Quid pro quo, as we say now.

In modern times quid pro quo is explicitly defined as treason. In modern times normal political trading is obsolete because the tribes now own the casinos that own the states. Everything is a mob now, everything is a monopoly now, nothing requires negotiation or balance between competing forces.

= = = = =

Later thought: Madman Lincoln was also owned and godfathered by the railroads. His career was also a quid pro quo. Lincoln burned down half the country and killed 1/5 of the people. Curtis improved conditions for the tribes. Same quo, different quids.

Labels: From rights to duties, Pluponents

  ¶ 10:35 AM

  Even?
ZH clickbaits the widespread snowpocalypses and snowmageddons this week, which used to be called "winter".

There were even reports of blizzard-like conditions in Spokane, Washington, which on Tuesday, led to a massive pileup involving more than 100 cars.

Clearly the NYC boys who write ZH have never been west of the Hudson. Like all NYC, they think Spokain (rhymes with rain) is a rainy suburb of Seattle.

The pileup happened because a small unpredicted convective cell hit suddenly on an otherwise dry day. Spokane drivers can handle snow pretty well, but no driver can handle snow when it pops up unexpectedly. You're zooming along at 70, and then ICE!

The Weather Bureau here, never very good, is losing competence quickly. As it happens, this cell was right over the Bureau's office, so they should have SEEN it if not predicted it.
  ¶ 10:05 AM

  More from Debo
In previous item I hrefed this as an example of Angie Debo's objective approach to history. I think it deserves to be pulled up as a reprint.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

I've been noticing something lately while re-reading those wonderful WPA Writers Project books.

Example from Oklahoma, p 388:

WYNONA is at the approximate center of the old Osage culture, and for a long time ancient customs and rites could best be studied there. One of these, "Sending away the Spirit", was held the fourth day after the death of a warrior at a selected tree, the bark of which was cut away by the master of ceremonies and the surviving warriors. When the tree trunk stood bare it was stained red, and as a symbol of the spirit of the dead man, was bidden to travel with the God of Day on its endless journey.

Another ceremony for the dead warrior took place on the return of the war party to the town. Within sight and sound of the tepees, they sat down in a circle and began to wail for their lost companion. Then from the town came the master of ceremonies and the people; and in the smoke of fragrant cedar boughs the warriors, their cast-aside clothes, weapons, saddles -- even their horses -- were purified. All their discarded property was then distributed to those of the three clans of the Osages who took part in the rites.

As a final precaution, the returning warriors marched in procession around the encampment in order to establish a line across which the spirit of death could not pass.

The ceremony is moving and thought-provoking, but I'm really focusing here on the descriptive style.

Consistently in those WPA books, local beliefs are reported in the same objective and journalistic tone as local events. The God of Day exists for the Osage, so he's in the story just as the dead warrior is in the story.

Or putting it differently, events recorded in human minds are treated with the same respect as events recorded in court documents. Hillbillies and Osages and Bankers, all tribes deserve the same respect, all deserve the same judgment of good and evil.

Modern "journalists" have lost this unity. The God of Abraham is absent and the God of Day is absent. Only Gaia, the Goddess of the Bankers, is present.

For moderns, human beliefs and human observations do not exist. They are unfacts.

Processed facts exist. Processed facts fall into two categories: (1) The demented gaga ravings of black-robed demons with "law" degrees; (2) The outputs of intentionally defective computer programs using intentionally corrupted data. These products are the only facts.

= = = = =

How do we return to the unity of the past? How do we merge internal human observations, including those commonly regarded as religious, back into the realm of objectivity without losing the purpose of science?

= = = = = END REPRINT.
  ¶ 9:48 AM

  Land of heterodoxy
The JFK assassination specialists have been highlighting the work of Beverly Brunson, a writer and poet who lived in Baxter Springs. In the '60s she did a huge amount of research and developed some theories that later turned out to be valid.

The modern specialists are surprised to find an unorthodox thinker in flyover territory. They shouldn't be surprised. That part of the world was FULL of seriously original thinkers and writers. I've been highlighting Alphia Hart in Enid.

An earlier parallel to Brunson was Angie Debo, who lived in the tiny town of Marshall. Like Brunson, she did the NYC bohemian thing for a while then returned home. Like Brunson, she retained bohemian habits while doing strictly objective and empathetic historical work. She was the main writer of the WPA Guide to Okla, taking over the whole project after the original team got tangled up in typical leftist ideological squabbles.

I met Debo in 1970, when a history prof at Phillips invited her to give a lecture on Okla history. The prof was a firm Republican and Debo was a firm Socialist, but they were friends on the neutral ground of objective history. Debo was about 80 at the time, a small intense passionate woman who knew the facts and knew how to tell them clearly and sharply.


(My little graphic salute to Baxter Springs.)

Are there still any unorthodox thinkers around there? Not much evidence on the web.
  ¶ 5:41 AM

  Done.


This year's courseware is DONE.

Now I can relax for a while and play with graphics and electronics until I get restless for a real PURPOSE again.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 3:10 PM

  Always good drama
The Dresden jewel heist is an irresistible story, especially because jewel heists are extremely rare nowadays. In earlier decades, real crime and stories about crime focused on diamonds and jewels as a portable compact store of value. International jewel thieves were supposedly the most prestigious criminals.

Why is jewel theft rare now? No obvious reason. Insurance companies have ALWAYS done a good job of recording and tracking major private and public collections. The advent of Big Data has made their tracking even more efficient. A recent article (in Atlantic?) showed that reselling diamonds is no longer worth the trouble even within legal channels. Diamonds are only 'liquid' for the original cartel retailer, not for the buyer.

Why were these hugely valuable Crown Jewels so easy to steal using century-old methods?

ZH has the answer.

The pressure is on for the police to find the stolen jewels, since the Saxon state government neglected to insure the collection (very un-German of them), leaving the state on the hook for the loss unless the gems are recovered unharmed.

It's not just the loss. Insurers force clients to adopt good security. Even ordinary home insurance requires fire extinguishers and deadbolts. Insurance for major value gets seriously strict.

If the museum had been German, or just SENSIBLE, they would have paid for insurance and received the added benefit of enforced and well-advised security.

= = = = =

Speaking of crime vs crime drama, this dude could probably make more money playing a criminal on TV than being a real criminal. Compare him with this '50s actor. Same face.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 5:41 AM

  Fake good idea
Article in EdWeek on applying math to "civics".

Not as bad as it might be, but still a lot of sneaky advocacy.

= = = = =

Example:

As a concluding assignment, students must use the data they’ve analyzed to write a paper as if they were campaign strategists for the Republican or Democratic party: Which constituency would they target to win a particular contest?

It’s not always an easy activity to teach—most students haven’t quite grasped the concept of the electoral college before the lesson begins—but by now it’s so highly anticipated that every fall, students ask Strole when they get to do “the political party thing.”

Apparently they're assigned to take one side or the other, like traditional debate class, so it's not strictly partisan.

BUT 1: Adolescents always prefer the currently fashionable version of "left", so this is really serving the D party.

BUT 2: If you're doing strictly objective analysis, you have to start with Manweller aka plain old reality. Partisan rhetoric is fake. Actions are identical. Campaigns have no effect on attitudes.

= = = = =

Worse example:

Recently, for example, her school had just installed some solar panels. So Strole adapted a Mathalicious lesson that teaches algebra expressions within the topic of solar power. She asked students to do a cost analysis on the costs and benefits of sticking with electric versus purchasing or leasing solar panels—and even whether the school’s solar energy production was on track to help the city meet the United Nations’ goals for renewable energy by 2030. Then they had to write a memo for the district’s energy manager and the mayor on what other steps Fishers would need to take to reach that goal.

Here the class is OPENLY partisan, taking the currently fashionable "left" position, which is STRICTLY CONTRARY TO MATH. If you're really doing math on this subject, you have to start with the FACTS of power grids. Solar is only beneficial for small installations in remote places. When power grids are forced to include solar and wind, the net result is ALWAYS more coal or natural gas. This isn't politics, it's plain PHYSICS. The class is advocating a CONTRAMATH position simply because it's fashionable.

Labels: Experiential education, Real World Math

  ¶ 5:04 AM

  Manweller corollary
ZH highlights a small academic study of the "Russian" "trolls".

Unsurprisingly, the study finds that nonexistent things had no effect on attitudes.

Hidden in the middle of the discussion is a MUCH BIGGER finding.

Indeed, a recent study indicates the net effect of most political campaigns is probably zero. If the most sophisticated American campaigns can’t really influence voters, why should we expect the Russians to be anymore successful?

Campaigns have no effect on attitudes.

That's a BIG statement.

When you know how things work, you aren't surprised. Good old Manweller. Elections have no effect, so campaigns have no effect.

The population is divided into two distinct groups.

1. Partisan bots who obey MY SIDE and MY PARTY mechanically, and insult and mock OTHER SIDE and OTHER PARTY mechanically. Campaigns don't change the attitudes of this group because their attitudes can't be changed; but campaigns DO bring in money from this group, which is the real purpose of campaigns.

2. Normal humans who have learned from experience that elections have no effect. We may have started as partisans, but at some point we NOTICED that the candidates on MY SIDE and the candidates on OTHER SIDE are precisely identical. Campaigns have no effect at all on this group.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 3:56 PM

  Unique design... did it sell?
A unique radio design from a 1925 trade journal at American Radio History.

I've never seen this before on paper or in person. A one-tube receiver packaged something like a telephone. The tube seems to be horizontal, held in place by the screwed-on bezel, so you can see when it's lit and replace it fairly easily. The batteries are external, connected to the binding posts on the right, which defeats the purpose of a self-contained sealed package.



Did they sell any? The ad claims to have sold 2500 of the crystal version.

I looked at some pages featuring collections of similarly obscure radios, and didn't see any of these.
  ¶ 10:05 AM

  Backwards
McAfee is HARDASS realist about some things, but his Libertarian ideology gets in the way of realism.

This morning he says:

A free society is one in which those who are different or unpopular are as safe as those who are not.

Exactly backwards. If you want odd and unpopular people to be safe, you need either a STRICT culture or STRICT law enforcement.

The Libertarian utopia is 'Lord of the Flies'. That was the whole point of the story.
  ¶ 4:31 AM

  Man Wei La Hao?
It will be interesting to see how China implements Manweller's Rule. The Hong Kong election was allowed to happen, and the results haven't been instantly annulled. The results are STRONGLY against Beijing, with 90% of the HK parliament now held by "pro-democracy" candidates.

Manweller, of course, says that elections are never allowed to change things. An election that would yield actual change is always deleted or ignored.

The US application of Manweller takes three forms:

1. Preplan the election. Insure that no REAL pro-change candidates get anywhere near the ballot.

2. If a pro-changer accidentally gets elected, through an oversight or typo in the forms, blackmail him into submission or Unperson him with scandal. In extreme cases, accident him or suicide him.

3A. For referenda, use "courts" to overturn incorrect results.

The British version of 3 is more subtle.

3B. Instead of acting on the referendum, fuck around for years doing exactly nothing.

So far China has already missed step 1, at least on the surface. China's social credit system should make 2 easy, literally automatic.

Will be interesting to watch. The simplest hypothesis is that the "pro-democracy" candidates are all fakers, Pied Pipers like Trump. After they're in office they will show their true colors.

  ¶ 10:58 PM

  Annual annoyance
Every time the book + courseware is published, the publisher sends out a pile of free samples of the book to all authors. Most academic authors are professors, and they're supposed to distribute the samples to their colleagues. I doubt if this really happens.

It certainly doesn't happen here, since I'm not a prof and don't have colleagues. Normally I open one of the boxes and keep one book for a souvenir, then toss the rest. Since I never use the souvenirs, this time I just hauled the boxes directly from the front porch to the trash bin.

Wasteful, and even worse than wasteful. At my age hauling a heavy box is a bit risky. If the ground had been snowy, it would have been risky for any age.

I think the wholesale price of the samples is deducted from royalties. (This was true for previous publisher; don't know if it's true for current publisher.) Aside from the waste and risk, I'd rather not pay for samples that I can't use.

No point in asking for an exception. The previous publisher was a giant rigid NYC bureaucracy that couldn't make exceptions, and my current publisher is a small struggling company that would be unnecessarily burdened by setting up the exception. I'm just hoping that someone who works for some publisher will read this, and rethink the practice for ALL authors. Make it voluntary instead of automatic.

Labels: modest and stupid proposal

  ¶ 1:20 PM

  Pecking out of the shell
Strategic Culture, the only reliable source of real history, has an unusually self-reflective article.

Patrick Armstrong asks why he bothers to write the truth.

On the other side of the divide are the writers and readers of the WaPo/NYT/Economist/Guardian established media. They also generally agree with what they read, approve of each other’s writing and nod their heads in agreement. They are in their comfort zone.

Two solitudes – two bubbles. An agreeable agreement bubble for each: different bubbles to be sure but the same warm comfortable feeling of reassurance that they’re well-informed.

So what’s the point of writing? I already agree with you, you already agree with me. Our readers are here because they also agree. Writing becomes a mechanical operation, moving along a pre-determined course. No minds are changed, no minds are even engaged.

The well-informed person will be less often surprised than the poorly informed person.

Yup. I like to put it a different way, focusing on HOW-knowledge and skills:

When you know how things work, you don't need details.

Armstrong then asks how people discover alternate bubbles, how they peck their way out of the shell.

Which brings me to my final point and the answer to the question of why do we in the Strategic Culture Foundation stable and the many other new media sources do it. Why do we spend hours obsessing, researching and writing if all we’re doing is painting the inside of our bubble? It is very unlikely – we’ve all tried it and we’ve all failed – to reason the consumers of the establishment media out of their assumptions. They weren’t reasoned into their complacency and they won’t be reasoned out of it. There is little chance that some conventional believer will stumble across some piece in any alternative source and change his mind.

But people do change and our audience is growing. How can that be happening if we change no minds?

Because the individual makes the first step on his own.

How did I take that first step beyond the two fake "sides"?

I was always out of the bubble in science, thanks to a lifetime of real experience and real experiments. When your hands and eyes know how the world works (including the world of academia and grants!) you can instantly dismiss theories that disagree with the world. The "global warming" fraud was easy to debunk, and other frauds and fashions like quantum quackery follow the same pattern.

Without real experience, I was firmly locked into the bubble in politics, and I'm still not all the way out. I'm still idiotically SURPRISED when those Soros "revolutions" turn out to be Soros.

First I unplugged the TV in 2011. No knowledge can penetrate when you're tied to the Fox injector or the CNN injector.

Then I started noticing patterns in the old radio programs I'd been consuming for many years, and in the old technical books and magazines I peruse to gain material for graphics projects. Because those publications aren't explicitly political, they don't get Rectified.

Maybe the biggest shock was finding our 1918 invasion of Russia, working WITH the Axis before Armistice, in an old Signal Corps publication. Our "history" texts and media never mention this invasion. Soon other patterns emerged, such as the clampdown in 1946. Just after VJ Day we were treating the atom bomb as open-source, helping other countries to acquire it for defense. A year later the topic was forbidden. We had decided (again) to treat Russia as the enemy.

The '46 turning point was also audible in radio news and entertainment. Before '46 most news was fairly objective, openly acknowledging that all sides are propaganda. Most entertainment was empathetic, respecting the differences between classes and types of people. After '46 news was one-sided; after '54 entertainment consisted of rich NYC types squashing Deplorables.

Strategic Culture writers like Ehret had already reached these conclusions, and they have the history skills to fill in more of the reasoning and details. So I read them. They don't always hit the mark; Ehret seems to think that Trump is not just a Pied Piper; but they hit it and expand it often enough to be worth steady reading.

Labels: Alternate universe, Shared Lie, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:49 PM

  FAKE then, FAKE now.
The indispensable American Radio History library has posted a peculiar brochure issued by KFRC in Frisco in 1950.

Title: How to survive the atom bomb.

Extremely detailed descriptions of how an A-bomb happens, and what to do at every second before and after the Russkis kill you. Far more gruesome and grisly than what we heard in school or the media in the '50s.



Detailed map showing how the Russkis can reach everywhere. The map realistically uses Arctic paths, not horizontal paths.



List of Enemies Within, compiled by Rep Harold Velde, "formerly with FBI".



= = = = =

Okay. Now the reality. Chart from Wikipedia, which is not known for anti-Establishment tendencies:



I've clipped out some of the middle, but the point here is 1950. We had 299 usable weapons and Russia had 5.

RUSSIA HAD FIVE BOMBS.

RUSSIA HAD FIVE BOMBS.

RUSSIA HAD FIVE BOMBS.

Russia couldn't even do the eight arrows on the map, let alone the dozens of cities shown as targets.

Why in the HOLY FUCK would Russia send even one of its weapons, when it could only destroy parts of a few cities, and we were GUARANTEED to reduce all of Russia to rubble?

The whole thing was

then, and it's still

70 years later.

We're still assuming that Russia is the sole aggressor, even after we invaded and occupied Russia TWICE in 1918 and 1990. Russia has NEVER attacked us, NEVER fired one bullet or bomb at us.

We're still making long lists of Enemies Within, and we're still letting FBI make the lists and determine what we think. And the Frisco types like Maddow and Lemon are still handling the media end of the fakery.

We DESERVE to be wiped out, but Russia won't do it.

Labels: malign misattribution

  ¶ 7:19 AM

  Seedscrapers
An interesting observation from ZH:

For years, we've cited some fascinating alternative forms of data, such as the Skyscraper Index, which was first elaborated by Andrew Lawrence in January 1999. The index is simple; the world's tallest buildings are often constructed or completed at economic turning points, right before or just as the downturn gets underway.

I've noticed a similar pattern in other realms.

The best expression of a technology or a cultural form tends to happen just after the tech or form has been replaced by another.

Houses are often remodeled just before a divorce, as the foolish husband's last futile effort to please the Insatiable wife.

Plants send out flowers and seeds when they sense trouble approaching.

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 12:54 AM

  Nothing 'dark' about these dudes
UncommonDescent pointed to a set of brief conversations among the 'Intellectual Dark Web', a group of thinkers who are allegedly anti-Establishment.

After listening to a few of them, my earlier vague suspicion is solidly verified. There's nothing remotely countercultural about this group. They're standard neocons, proudly labeled as such. Their view of God is purely modern.

Bret Weinstein, famously fired for alleged heterodoxy, is perfectly orthodox.

"We need to take evolution out of the driver's seat and replace it with our own ethical framework."

"The deity is a hack, a hack that functions" for the benefit of society.

Sheer hippie nonsense. Good behavior, behavior that helps the entire hive function, is written into our genes. Call it evolution or call it design, it's IN THE GENES. The authorities have often channeled and distorted this set of standards for their own evil purposes (such as bombing every country that displeases Israel) but the standards themselves are NOT a myth.

Darwin said it clearly. Selection prefers behaviors that keep the WHOLE POPULATION alive and strong, not NYC behaviors that enrich ONE INDIVIDUAL while destroying the population. Keeping the WHOLE POPULATION alive requires altruism and empathy, which is why we HAVE those capacities. If only humans had those capacities, maybe you could hypothesize that we made them up, but they appear in every social animal and plant, and they're a lot stronger in most non-human social animals.

As I repeat tiresomely, we have the logbook of God's experiments in the form of old wisdom and old testaments. The people who survived wrote down their recipe for survival. They told us what to eat and how to behave.

Every attempt to create our own ethical framework has led to GENOCIDE AND DISASTER.

Weinstein is such a perfect snowflake that I wonder if the usual story is right. Did the college really fire him for disagreeing with their views? Back in the '60s unpopular or insubordinate profs were often fired for "communism", which was easier to define than unpopularity.

Labels: Ethics, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 12:26 AM

  Semaphores done


Finally decided to button up and release the Semaphores set, made for Poser. Here's the item at ShareCG. The set includes six types of semaphore, with inside and outside scenes; and python apps to animate each system from text files. I'm hoping someone can use it for interesting animations.... or even better, catch the idea and build new real semaphore systems for interesting purposes.



= = = = =

List of blog posts about the set:

Russian 1850s

Chappe clock system and wing system [This is the main discussion.]

Dupillon (French) [I snuck this into an older item without properly describing it]

Six shutter (English)

More discussion of Chappe [Some alt-history]

Chatley (English)

Redo of Russian

Redo of DuPillon

Done. [This item]

Labels: defensible cases, Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 10:14 AM

  Sucker beyond suckers
Well, I thought this was the ultimate zenith of wacked-out cultist fandom for Lord Elon.

Nope. Unsurprisingly BBC takes it to the next stage.

The writer accepts EVERY WORD AND TRICK OF ELON'S OBVIOUS FAKERY as gospel truth, and asks why any truck buyer should stick with those neanderthal far-right KKKHITLERTRUMP primitive horse-drawn ordinary trucks when you could get an angelic universe-saving Tesla CYBRTRK instead.

But then this was written by Top Gear, a program that specializes in fakery and gimmickry. Takes a scamster to admire a scamster.

I wonder how many blackmail files Elon can mobilize against BBC? Considering the Andrew connection, probably a lot.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 6:06 AM

  Why bulletproof?
Bulletproof is the big selling point for Elon's CYBRTRK.

Everyone (including me) has been mocking the fakeness of the bulletproof, but there's a deeper question.

WHY is bulletproof a selling point?

Elon's cultists are tech-monsters. Libertarians. Young males. A lot of them are Oriental or Hindu. All of them are well-educated, strong in math, short on life experience. They live precariously in high-rent areas surrounded by slums. They feel physically threatened, and perhaps they also sense that their wealth is on shaky ground, cantilevered by debt and subsidies and share-value Ponziness.

Bulletproof makes sense in that situation, because buying a gun is

for a tech-monster. Owning a bulletproof vehicle that looks just like the SWAT team's trucks is their substitute for owning a gun. You get to feel like a cop, leaving you free to ignore the gross inequality that you're helping to create, and leaving you free to HATE actual cops who actually put their lives on the line to defend your Libertarian ass.

Moving to a less precarious job in a safer city with less inequality is thinkable, but such a move would put a cap on their imaginary exponential curve of income.

Labels: #bluelivesmatter, Shared Lie, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 1:13 AM

  Dreamy
Got curious to see how long it would take to model the new dreamy CYBRTRK.



15 minutes without looking at the dreamy original. Formed a heptagon, pulled its points in various directions, extruded, made wheel openings. Formed four more heptagons for wheels.

By comparison, a real car like Polistra's R8 takes several weeks to model. (And the R8 is among the simpler car shapes. I wouldn't dare try a swoopy shape like a '59 Chevy.)



Why is CYBRTRK dreamy? Here's why. I figured this would happen, and sure enough it was much worse than I imagined. Sucker Number One.

I've discussed this father-son comparison before. The son, also predictably, has a rational and well-informed discussion of the subject.

Recently the father retired from running his website. Since he retired the website has been a bit less active but a lot less biased. Perhaps we're seeing why he needed to retire.

Couple days later: He's doubling down.

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 2:16 PM

  Another giant Sucker Filter
Looking at Tesla's CYBRTRK.

My first thought, after a good solid MUCH-NEEDED belly laugh, was that it reminded me of a Science Fair project I did in 12th grade. I designed a circuit and ordered parts, then waited till 2AM on the morning of the display day to build it. Ended up with a PC board that had some parts in it, no possibility of functioning. I still blush with deep shame every time I remember it.

Someone else had exactly the same thought:

"Looks like somebody waited until the last day to start their science project!"

This is yet another fine Sucker Filter from Elon. Total incompetence, jabbed in your face. A design that can't possibly drive, can't possibly pass any safety test, can't carry anything, displayed with a loose wheel and a broken window.

If you're a big enough sucker to appreciate this, you're the sucker we want! And needless to say there are plenty of big suckers singing hymns of praise.

Later thought: Where's the GUILD? This ruins all American products. In the same week, Elon's rocket blows up while Flatearth Mike Hughes makes a good test flight. Elon's dream truck turns out to be a cardboard fake that couldn't possibly work even if it was real. We now look exactly like our old MYTHS about Soviet products. Or even better, our earlier MYTHS about Jap cars made from beer cans.

The REAL auto industry, along with the REAL tech industry, should work together to buy out Elon and force him to disappear completely from public view. GUILD.


= = = = =

And later again, a more precise analogy to Mike Hughes.


The Leata was designed and built by Don Stinebaugh and his four sons in Post Falls. Stinebaugh owned a machine shop and wanted a big project to train his sons properly. He built and sold a hundred or so Leatas before he ran out of money. The Leata wasn't beautiful, but it was a REAL CAR. It passed EPA pollution tests and NHTSA safety tests, and drove like a real car as seen in this video.

= = = = =

Still later.... Those knife edges would never pass NHTSA testing if NHTSA bothered to test. We know in advance that NHTSA will NOT test this because Elon owns all the regulators. That's the overwhelming advantage of Elon's Epstein and Mossad connections. No regulations, no laws.

Imagine leaning over the bed to load sacks of fertilizer. Of course you can't do that anyway because of the stupid fastback design, but if you tried it you'd bleed. Aside from chopping drivers and pedestrians to bits, there's a plain old mechanical reason why cars have relatively rounded edges. Metal fatigue. If those edges are bent sheetmetal, they'll tear and break in a week of real driving. If they're on a giant diecast block, they'll chip and crumble. If the block is bulletproof as Elon claims, the whole thing will be absurdly heavy. If they're separate panels, they'll let in water and air.

Labels: skill-estate, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 2:37 AM

  Never fails to disappoint
Every now and then I check FrontPorchRepublic to see how badly they can disappoint me. They never fail.

This time they're pushing the "third" party candidacy of Brian Carroll, who is a strictly orthodox Democrat.

Few quotes from Carroll:

The pursuit of short-term goals also tends to depend on fear as a motivator. That often results in racist tropes, and xenophobia.

Standard D line.

The battles against Climate Change and to provide Racial Justice are not going to provide the immediate and measurable results that a President can brag about for re-election purposes.

Standard D line.

Ross Perot championed a balanced budget, and both President Bush and Challenger Bill Clinton had to shift in that direction. Perot’s influence lasted through several administrations.

That wasn't Perot's main point, and nobody even tried to balance the budget.

The UN has no business forcing abortion on its member nations, but it does have a role overseeing the rules of ocean-fishing.

The UN doesn't enforce fishing rules. Ad-hoc groups of nations do. If you accept UN's authority on any subject, you have to take the whole package. You can't pick and choose.

Parents and a local school board should have the first say about curriculum decisions.

Standard R point, but misses the real threat. Lawsuits are the real problem, not Federal standards.

The Federal government grew when no state government was big enough to control the railroads.

No, it grew because no state government was big enough to SUBSIDIZE the railroads or kill half the country to increase the share value of railroads. But Genocidal Madman Lincoln didn't permanently grow the government. Wilson created the modern Deepstate, invading every aspect of thought and culture.

I heard a speaker who worked in the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives under Bush 2. He said they were simply expanding work begun under President Clinton, and which was continued under President Obama. The office is still there under President Trump, but it suffers from staff vacancies and a poor understanding of what its job should be. This office should be a priority, under any Administration.

This is just silly. Bush's "faith-based" shit was a placebo, intended to satisfy demands while doing nothing. It's succeeding.

I think one reason I was nominated by the American Solidarity Party is that during some fairly intense disagreements within the Party, I demonstrated the ability to discuss important topics with civility.

Standard D line.

= = = = =

So he's mostly a standard Democrat, sounding more like Biden than anyone else. Why do we need another Biden?
  ¶ 1:26 AM

  How many purposes?
Headline: Music is universal.

Not a surprising fact, but surprisingly not systematically proved. This BIG study is trying to prove it, and more specifically to categorize the main types and PURPOSES of music.

They looked at every society for which there was ethnographic information in a large online database, 315 in all, and found mention of music in all of them. For their own ethnographic portion, they collected around 5,000 descriptions of song from a subset of 60 cultures spanning 30 distinct geographic regions. For the discography, they collected 118 songs from a total of 86 cultures, again covering 30 geographic regions.

They found that, across societies, music is associated with behaviors such as infant care, healing, dance, and love (among many others, like mourning, warfare, processions and ritual), and that these behaviors are not terribly different from society to society. Examining lullabies, healing songs, dance songs, and love songs in particular, they discovered that songs that share behavioral functions tend to have similar musical features.

"In music theory, tonality is often assumed to be an invention of Western music, but our data raise the controversial possibility that this could be a universal feature of music," he said. "That raises pressing questions about structure that underlies music everywhere -- and whether and how our minds are designed to make music."

The last question, whether and HOW OUR MINDS ARE DESIGNED to make music, is sliding into problematic territory for academics. I'd add that our minds are designed to make and use and consume music. Music is necessary food for the wave patterns that form our mind.

We no longer do lullabies or healing songs. We have plenty of war songs and procession and ritual songs, and we have plenty of futile mating songs.

Wouldn't be surprised if we have genes for each of the universal purposes, and wouldn't be surprised if the same genes are expressed in birds and bees for the same purposes.

= = = = =

Related thought: While reading about semaphores I bumped into an unexpected type and purpose of song. It's not clear to Modern Me what these songs were doing, but their purpose was definitely clear to the writers.

Les Merveilles de la Science was written in 1868 by Louis Figuier. He wrote several compendiums of various subjects. Especially in the section on balloons (aerostats), he frequently breaks into song. Each song is set to a popular melody so the reader can sing it. I googled these popular melodies and found only one of them. The others are totally unmentioned and unrepresented online.


Two examples with only the first verse:

LE VOYAGE AÉROSTATIQUE.
AIR : Le curé de Dôle.
Écoute, ma mie:
Dans les Tuileries,
On a vu Charles et Robert,
S'allant promener en l'air.
Ça faisait envie!


AIR : Premier jour de janvier.
L'autre jour, quittant mon manoir,
Je fis rencontre sur le soir
D'un globiste de haut parage;
ll s'en allait tout bonnement
Chercher un lit au firmament,
Et moi, je lui dis bon voyage.

What category do these fit? Songs of science? Songs of wonder and discovery?

Tom Lehrer's semi-modern science songs have the same flavor. I can't think of more recent examples. The "climate" genocidists sing, but their songs are ferocious all-consuming war screeches, devoted to obliterating science along with the rest of life and civilization.

= = = = =

Random speculation: We're finding that 40 Hz is a crucial brain syncing frequency, and auditory inputs of that freq seem to make a difference in aging and Alzheimers. The ears just barely pick up 40 Hz as a sine tone, but we can hear it easily as a trill or a beat frequency superimposed on a higher note. Did any of those healing songs require the singer to trill? Did they involve two singers 40 Hz apart, or more complex harmonies that evoked a 40 Hz beat freq?

Labels: Carbon Cult, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:04 PM

  Carver in Iowa
Latest item at KSHS is a real rarity. An 1895 group photo of GW Carver as a student at Iowa Agricultural College, with several of his friends.

Labels: Carver

  ¶ 10:05 AM

  One of these dudes is not like the other
Mike Hughes, the flat-earth dude, built a rocket by himself with one or two helpers, and launched successfully for a half-mile trip.

Elon Musk, the Gaia dude, used billions of dollars and thousands of employees to build a rocket. It blew up without launching, creating a giant cloud of toxic pollution.

Both dudes are pursuing idiotic theories. Only one dude knows how to GET SHIT DONE.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 2:56 AM

  Hard to make metaphors for infinite lunacy
Stupidly watched a few minutes of replays from the latest "debate". This is crazy beyond crazy beyond crazy.

As always in a "debate", the participants are not arguing two sides, they're bidding up the strength of one side. "Debates" are auctions. In this auction, each bidder takes a turn at bidding up the need to impeach Trump. Why do they want to impeach Trump? Because he was pretending to "investigate" an ordinary bit of corruption. Who caused this unremarkable bit of standard DC corruption? Biden.

Hmm. I guess this Biden fellow must be out of politics, safely insulated from the discussion of his corruption.

No! Wait! Biden is right there on stage along with the bidders! He's joining in the bidding!

Best analogy for this craziness: A jury trial with the defendant serving in the jury. The defendant turns the trial around to convict the cops for arresting him.

Labels: infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE lunacy

  ¶ 2:24 AM

  Aberree vs Disnee again
Continuing from yesterday's discussion of good management vs tech-monster management of a digital storefront...

The item I ordered brings up a separate topic. For clarity, this item was made long before the current GOOD management of the storefront, so it has ZERO connection to them.

The item is a scene of an old saloon. It includes several OBJs and several textures that are unquestionably derived from my free work posted at ShareCG. I knew about the derivation a long time ago, so this is old news.

Did I buy the item in order to start litigation? No, the exact opposite. I bought the item to use for my own enjoyment, because the artist ADDED VALUE. He added some of his own pieces, creating a scene that pleases my tastes by definition because it reflects my tastes. I could have built this scene, but I never got around to it, so it's worth paying a few bucks to let the other artist build it.

This attitude clashes with the modern Disney notion of copyright, but it harmonizes with Alphia Hart's idea of copyright.

= = = = = START PARTIAL REPRINT:

Hart's view of copyright was unique in 1954:

Copyrighting everything you write is a confession that you have little faith in your ability to continue producing salable stuff -- and that there may come a time when you'll have to fall back on your own, protected material to make a living. When we can't produce new copy for The ABERREE, The ABERREE ceases to exist, because we're certain no one wants to read tomorrow what we said yesterday and today.

I reached a similar conclusion a long time ago in making courseware. The restrictions of 'digital rights' get stricter and more tangled every year, but they don't bother me because I have CONFIDENCE in my own ability to produce new images and animations.

Framing it as "rights" to duties: The newer Disney versions of copyright law show the insanity of "inherent rights" more perfectly than other applications. In this dyslogical delusion, every "creative" product has the "inherent right" to be held and sold. When everything is automatically "protected" without any form of registration or payment for title, raw force is the only determinant of title. In plain reality, the Disney law gives total freedom to the mafia with the largest army of consiglieri, which mysteriously and astonishingly turns out to be Disney.

When you start with the GOD-ASSIGNED DUTY to create order and value, the selling is secondary. You can try to sell your created products for money, and customers can buy them. You can't transfer the DUTY OF CREATION to a publisher because the publisher didn't create the item. You can pay the publisher to disseminate your product, or you can persuade the publisher to bet on your product, splitting the profit by negotiation. The publisher is not the owner, it's just providing a service for you.

This is parallel to the sharia paradigm of capitalism, which STRONGLY encourages you to USE your capital instead of hoarding it. Land should be USED for growing crops. Money should be USED to make products for people to USE. Skill should be USED to invent and develop more products and services for others to USE.

= = = = = END PARTIAL REPRINT.

Now I know that this is also parallel to the Soviet notion of copyright as embodied in the inventor certificate. The IP belongs to the state, which will use it for the benefit of the people; but the inventor gets public and permanent recognition plus some of the profits, and doesn't have to bankrupt himself fighting a Disney-style mafia corporation which is guaranteed to win in the end.

Labels: Aberree, Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 12:57 AM

  Feature, not bug.
Via ZH:

The poll found that only 35 percent of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29 felt comfortable sharing their political opinions with their college professors, highlighting a severe disparity when compared to Democrats and independents, who polled at 54 percent and 51 percent, respectively, on sharing views with educators.

Everyone thinks this is a problem for the Repooflicans. No, it's an advantage. The conservatives and Repoofs are learning a valuable life lesson early.

Politics doesn't belong in most situations. If you're learning something REAL, you won't even be thinking about politics. Your entire mind and body will be involved in PRACTICING a new skill, whether it's welding or audiology or haircutting or gene-splicing.

The Dems are acquiring a false impression that you can share your beliefs with everyone, regardless of context. They are also learning that politics is the only thing that matters. Both of these experiences will be shockingly reversed when the young Dems enter the real world of work. (Unless they go to work for Deepstate or its subsidiaries like Google.)

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 3:44 PM

  Need more non-weaponized humans
One of the old storefronts in the CG graphics world has been resurrected under new management. The old version failed because it was run by a Weaponized Autist who applied precise standards to everything, measured and calibrated down to the 461.34.8876th decimal place. (Decimals have decimals have decimals in Autist World.) If you didn't calibrate precisely with his requirements and opinions, he didn't need you as a customer.

The new management is getting off to a much better start. I tried to order something. The ordering system didn't work. I emailed the management, telling them that they were probably losing some sales because the system isn't working. They sent me a gift card thanking me for "letting us know that the barn door was open."

It's wonderful to deal with REAL HUMANS WHO WANT TO DO BUSINESS AND MAKE A PROFIT, not computers or share-value bots or humans who function like computers.
  ¶ 8:53 AM

  What would OCD do?
Random and stupid thought.

OCD types have undoubtedly been around forever. It's a distinct genotype that comes through clearly regardless of circumstances.

Here's a funny 1949 episode of 'This is your FBI'. A 'germsy' kidnapper who compulsively cleans everything spoils the perfect crime by scrubbing down the abandoned tourist cabin where the gang was holding the victim. Before his cleanup, hundreds of random fingerprints were scattered in and under the dust and leftover magazines and clothing. After his scrubbing, he carefully touched every surface to check for the last particle of dust, and left perfect prints.

What would 'Germsy' have done in Elizabethan England where soap was unknown and everything rotted under layers of perfume and lead-based makeup?

Later thought: We do have evidence that the 'germsy' type existed, and it's hardly obscure! Out, out, damned spot!
  ¶ 6:59 AM

  Brilliant!
A beautiful piece of science, cutting across all the lines of orthodoxy and contributing directly to both education and medicine.

Does traditional medicine work? Yes, and sometimes it works better than modern.

London schoolchildren have found that some of their families' soup recipes have antimalarial properties, with the help of Imperial scientists. Researchers from Imperial College London helped the schoolchildren test their family soup broths for activity against the malaria parasite.

Several of the soup broths, collected from traditional family recipes that originated around the world, showed activity against the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, either by curbing its growth or preventing it from maturing. The soup recipes had been passed down through the generations for the treatment of fever.

Especially interesting that the recipes were ALREADY KNOWN to be medicinal.

Five of the broths were able to curb growth of the parasite in its disease-causing stage by more than 50 percent. In two of these, the inhibitory activity was comparable with that of a leading antimalarial drug, dihydroartemisinin.

Four other broths were more than 50 percent effective at blocking the ability of the parasites to mature to a form that infects mosquitoes, potentially blocking the process of transmission.

The recipes for each of the broths varied. They were vegetarian, chicken, or beef based, with no particular ingredient common to those with the strongest antimalarial activity.

Unfortunately the press release doesn't give the recipes of the effective soups, and the original article isn't properly linked through the DOI system yet.

Later the link was fixed: Here's the original article, but still no recipes.

Labels: Experiential education, infinite GOOD

  ¶ 5:25 AM

  More puzzling behavior
Liz Warren, who formerly tried to sound like an independent, has suddenly joined Trump. She fully and violently supports our coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

If nothing else, her support of the purely ethnic coup in Bolivia will dispel those rumors of Cherokee ancestry. It also dispels any rumors of support for poor people or ordinary people or "socialism".

There must be a calculated reason for this change, probably related to those 700 people in Florida who are the only actual voters. She now loses all other potential supporters.... which really doesn't matter because only those 700 Floridians matter.
  ¶ 3:58 PM

  Flipping the other way
Earlier today I talked about the duty of beauty, and a magnificent flip.

I understand people who take ugliness ... or even prosaic dullness ... as a reason to create beauty, no matter how big or small. Write a symphony, plant a flower. That's the exact definition of life. Ingest chaos, create order and complexity and beauty.

I don't understand people who intentionally create ugliness.

For many years I've been following the decline and momentary fake rise of an abandoned building in this neighborhood. During a decade of vacancy Nature wasn't doing much harm. The basically pretty building was holding its own against snow and wind. Two years ago meth-addled squatters moved in, and decline accelerated dramatically. Windows broken, fires started. Finally the city bought out the original owner and forced a sale.



Supposedly the buyer was required to tear down the building and put up new housing on the large lot. The buyer didn't demolish; instead, they started to renovate. They fenced off the lot, reshingled the roof...



... pulled out the windows and doors and drywall ....



... and that's all. Now the building has been wide open for six months, and all signs of construction have stopped.

Why? What's the gain? The squatters were breaking the windows, now the windows are all wide open to rain and snow and squirrels and rats. The roof is new, but it's not sheltering anything. The fence may be keeping squatters out, but nobody is supervising, so I doubt it will last much longer.

I don't understand the long holding by the original owners, and I don't understand the behavior of the new owners. Neither makes sense by ordinary business purposes. Supposedly the purpose of owning an apartment building is to rent out the apartments and gain profit. Spokane is seriously short of rentals now, so the apts would rent quickly.

The original owners were paying property taxes and risking lawsuits for 10 years, with no gain. The new owners spent a considerable amount for construction crews, with no gain. No tenants, no rent coming in, property tax and potential lawsuits still going out.

There must be a profit-based reason for this "Creative Destruction" and profitless expense. Tax dodge? Using the LLC as a shell for illegal activities?

I don't understand.

Labels: Asked and unanswerable

  ¶ 1:54 PM

  Who are they?
Pew poll shows that only 8% of Americans want to keep pot fully illegal. 92% want various degrees of legalization.

Who are those 8%? Gangsters, especially the DC-based drug gang DEA. Only gangsters benefit from illegal pot.
  ¶ 10:29 AM

  Good description
This documentary by DW is a wonderfully clear account of how the financial world works, and the massive damage it does. Special attention to the murder of savers, since Krauts are savers. Toward the end it covers some possible solutions, again with solid clarity. The program is about two years old, but nothing has changed. Surprising from DW, which normally serves Satan.


  ¶ 12:36 AM

  Flipping
Our duty is to make beauty.

Best example:

By all reliable accounts, Elizabeth 1 was an ugly stinky mass-murdering filthy psychopathic stupid faghag. It spent its life destroying countries and minds. Courtiers and intellectuals and soldiers and artists had to constantly fawn over it and please its picosecond-changing Github whims; despite their best efforts, it would decide randomly to torture and execute them.

What did they do? The artists and musicians created the largest store of pure beauty in history as a "tribute" to the "beauty" of it.... or more precisely as a counterpoint and counterforce to the ugliness of it.

The madrigals collected as 'Triumphs of Oriana' stand as a lasting monument to the infinite power of beauty. A nasty filthy monster was flipped into the best music in the universe.

Labels: From rights to duties

  ¶ 11:37 PM

  Good point but backwards
Robert Shiller is arguing that economics pays too much attention to theories and numbers. Perfectly correct. He's also arguing that real economies run mainly on narratives, feelings and gossip. Half correct and possibly deceptive.

We need to separate economics from Dow. The people who call themselves economists have ZERO connection with actual business. The people who call themselves economists are SOLELY stock shills. Their SOLE PURPOSE is to raise share value for their employers.

If Shiller is talking about Dow, then his judgment is accurate. Dow is a number which depends on nothing but fake stories, frauds, cheating and mass murder. Mostly mass murder. The Dow curve surfs on a growing tsunami of Deplorable carcasses.

Many of the cheaters and fraudsters use math jargon to cloak and cover their bad logic. This type of cheating is especially dense in the Bitcoin world. A new example:

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee believes Bitcoin (BTC) will accrue price value following a similar logic to the Silicon Valley tech titans. During an interview for CNBC’s Street Signs Asia on show on Nov. 15, Lee argued that cryptocurrencies “are network value assets” — and share this with the world’s most successful tech stocks.

“Cryptocurrencies are network value assets, meaning the more people hold the asset, the greater the value. In fact, it’s a log function — so if you double the users hold it, you get a quadrupling of value. To go to $25,000 you essentially need a little less than 4x rise, which means you need to double the number of people who hold Bitcoin.”

In the first place he's got log and exp backwards. Log describes REAL business, rising to an asymptote and settling there. Exp describes frauds like Bitcoin. In the second place, network value asset is a meaningless phrase. (Wolfstreet has a solid takedown of the nonsense!) Tech stocks and Bitcoin are mass hallucinations, depending solely on the fraudster's ability to puff up a giant indescribably stupid fantasy.

= = = = =

Shiller's complaint is ON THE FUCKING DOT for this situation.

But he's clearly talking about more than Dow. He claims to be discussing the entire realm of business.

A real-value economy DOES function more by math than narratives, but NOT the math used by the people who call themselves economists. The math of business is simple, and entirely handled by bookkeepers using ledgers.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

The blockchain fad is a bizarre symptom of Deepstate-induced craziness. First let's ignore the simple and obvious facts that (1) Bitcoin's founder openly proclaimed his CIA connections (2) Bitcoin is perfectly centralized, running all transactions through NSA. Even without those blazingly obvious links, the idea is still crazy and harmful.

As an old pen-and-ink bookkeeper, I have a feel for how ledgers are supposed to work. Ledgers aren't supposed to be accessible and changeable by everyone in the world. Ledgers are supposed to be an accurate and unchanging record of the Debits and Credits, the outputs and inputs, of ONE business or organization or individual.

Modularity is IMPERATIVE and BASIC to the functioning of an organism, and thus to the ledger that records the functioning.

Without modularity, without borders and layers and hierarchy, you can't even define inputs and outputs so you can't have a ledger. You can't have any sort of schematic or equation or model unless you have a boundary.

= = = = =

This article in a 'new econ' website invokes the double-entry ledger to explain fractional reserve fake currency creation.

The commons is a conscious implementation of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruists, whether human or ape, reward those who cooperate with others and punish those who defect. A commons works the same way. A resource such as a lake or a field, or a monetary system, is understood as a shared asset.

If one’s business activities hurt any other market participant, they undermine the integrity of the marketplace itself. For those entranced by the myth of capitalism, this can be hard to grasp. They’re still stuck thinking of the economy as a two-column ledger, where every credit is someone’s else’s debit. This zero-sum mentality is an artifact of monopoly central currency. If money has to be borrowed into existence from a single, private treasury and paid back with interest, then this sad, competitive, scarcity model makes sense. I need to pay back more than I borrowed, so I need to get that extra money from someone else. That’s the very premise of zero-sum. But that’s not how an economy has to work.

Zero-sum misses the point entirely. The crucial question is where the CRedit comes from.

Value is an increase in order. Value is an increase in life and beauty.

In the most basic agricultural forms of commerce, the CRedit is CReated by plants, who turn sunlight and water into infinitely ordered life, and secondarily by animals who eat the plants and transform the order into a more condensed order.

CR represents an increase in order.

Within the boundaries of the ledger, CR is measuring the number of currency units paid to the farmer or miner or oil driller or supplier, but it directly represents an increase in order, an increase in life.

DR is also an increase in order.

The business processes the raw input, using human labor and machinery, and turns it into a more complexly ordered object, or makes it more convenient to use, or more attractive to buy, or more STORABLE. Storage is probably the most important increase in order.

DR in the ledger measures currency units coming into the business from the customer who gains convenience or storability.

= = = = =

I've often cited Steinbeck's analogy: Real value business brings in salmon, puts it in cans with human and machine labor, and sells it. Capitalists HATE human and machine labor. They would rather can salmon with ledgers, and now they've finally managed to do it.

= = = = =

Using salmon, Polistra shows how the REAL-VALUE ledger measures the increase in order on both sides of a REAL-VALUE business.

On the CR side, Nature increases order by growing a salmon. The fisherman brings in a salmon, adding a unit of life-order to the business. The ledger represents this CRedit as money going back to the fisherman.



On the DR side, the business increases order by filleting the salmon and placing it in cans, then selling it to customers. Canning makes the salmon more convenient for ordinary people without butchering skills, and it makes the salmon STORABLE. The ledger represents this increase in order by showing the money flowing from customers to the business.



A business wants to have input money exceeding output money. Profit means that the business is creating more order than it consumes from its suppliers. In other words, the business is alive. And this accumulation of increased value is where the money supply really increases. The Soviet system recognized this basic fact by using VAT to determine when the national money supply would increase.

= = = = =

From this viewpoint we can see how debt is actually a LOSS of real value. When a business rents money from a bank, the incoming money was NOT generated by nature or labor. It was counterfeited by the bank. The business gets nothing but an obligation to repay the money, which limits the freedom of the business. The interest paid to the bank must be sucked out of the real value accumulated by the business.

Modern economics turns the whole picture upside down by treating the sucked-out interest as the "creation" "of" "value".

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: Real World Math, storage

  ¶ 1:06 AM

  Poor service, but why do they want ads?
Yesterday I was ungratefully bitching about Lambdatest, an excellent emulator service that won't let you pay for the service you need. You can get it free, or you can pay way too much for more than you need.

Free is supposedly wonderful, but in fact it's terrible. Product, not customer.

Now I'm bitching about the opposite kind of mispricing, which is more serious.

Part of the current courseware project is a set of videos showing anatomical dissections. I dissected the videos into short pieces, with questions and quizzes interspersed in the usual courseware pattern. At first I had tried to do it the cheap way since I'm getting very little money from this work. I used FFMPEG to cut the pieces manually. FFMPEG is a crude tool, cutting only on keyframes, and the copy-editor didn't like the results. I respect this editor's judgment tremendously, so I looked for a non-cheap way to dissect the dissections. I remembered using Ulead (now Corel) on a much earlier courseware project, and purchased the latest.

(I wasn't listening to good old Emerson. Cheap is always more expensive in the end!)

Corel VideoStudio is a HUGE NEOCON MONSTER that invades and occupies the computer. It has all sorts of features that I'll never need or use. The installation was crude and coarse, failing with no error message. I tried using Corel's India help center, but they were slow to respond. Finally figured out the problem by reading error logs. Corel was sulking because it didn't like my display resolution setting. I set the resolution to max, Corel installed and ran. I finished the work, with a much cleaner result than FFMPEG.

Now that Corel is occupying a large part of my computer, you'd think it would at least be QUIET. That's supposedly why you PAY for software, to stop the annoying advertisements.

Nope. Being paid is not enough for Insatiable Neocon Corel. Several times a day it pops up HUGE ADS on my regular desktop, where they have the feel of serious warnings from the operating system.



I'll be glad when this project is done so I can uninstall this parasite.


= = = = =

Update 11/27: Project is done. Uninstalled the parasite immediately, ran CCleaner to rip out its roots, rebooted. Unshaving the yak was just as hard as shaving. The UNINSTALL required me to switch screen resolution. and during the reboot Windows had to run CHKDSK to clean up the file system that Ulead had messed with. Good riddance to a BAD program.

Next day: Computer still seemed to be running slow, so I looked at tasks and startup. Corel had turned ON Windows Update without asking permission. I'd shut off Update a long time ago because it's essentially malware. Removed Update from startup and rebooted. At least no DISKCHK this time.

Labels: From rights to duties

  ¶ 12:21 AM