BBC askedanswered
BBC website has a pretty good article on malingering. Point: Amateur malingering is easy to spot. Expert malingering can be damned hard to objectively detect. Hardest of all, genuinely crazy people often make their craziness seem worse to gain more benefits or leniency.

One sentence caught my attention:

Another red flag for fakery is the suspect who endorses improbable symptoms, such as agreeing with the question, “Have you ever believed that automobiles are members of an organised religion?”

Whoopsie! Another paranoid theory turned to fact. Now that automobiles are "intelligent", they are automatically priests of the Tesloid Cult. The unintelligent human servants of the cult abandon all control and rationality to the four-wheeled Angels of Elon.

Then I read an item about Elon hiring a former museum press agent as his new Twitter manager. The candidate sucked up to Elon with a clever bit of avatar-switching, turning the icon of his museum employer into the Holy Face of Lord Elon.

The combination leads to a serious question which the $TSLAQ skeptics have already been asking. Is Elon playing crazy to get out of penalties for his obvious and transparent crimes? Or is he just crazy? Or both?

Labels: $TSLAQ, Answered and unnecessarily asked, Deadthink

  ¶ 12:07 AM

  Y no Screwdriver Talk?
More classy Spokane:



Swords and machetes and screwdrivers are becoming the weapons of choice for idiots. I haven't done the numbers, but I'm pretty sure incidents with this class of weapon are MORE common than gun incidents now.

Both sides of the weapon debate are falling behind this trend.

On the Soros side, there isn't any agitation for knife control or screwdriver control. (At least not in USA; seems to be happening in England.)

On the non-Soros side, there's a huge community of gun fanciers who support all sorts of radio and TV shows and web forums dealing with a wide variety of numerical details. The typical call on such shows is a complex set of numbers. Model number and year of gun, caliber and weight and powder characteristics of cartridge and slug, magnification of scope, antler count of buck.... All of the numbers are both precise and familiar to the discussers.

Why don't we have Screwdriver Talk shows, with callers passionately debating the static and dynamic puncture properties of a Torx T30, or the quick-draw velocity and momentum of a 1915 Stanley Model 20 6-7/16" slotted, rebeveled to accept Whitworth standard?

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked

  ¶ 1:33 AM

  Where are the librarians when you need them?
Convective thought, spawned by mixing the mummy wrap papyrus with the oddness of the Tower of Babel.

The old and new testaments are unusable because the documents weren't handled by a proper archiver or librarian.

Both of the books were gathered many centuries after the manuscripts were written. If there was any coherence in the original stories, it was long gone by then. Nobody bothered to link them, nobody tried to disentangle thousands of inversions like the Tower. (God busted up the Tower for proper Natural Law reasons, but the writer takes Satan's side so we blindly go with Satan instead of God.)

In later centuries librarians developed complex skills and systems of association, aided by the human talents of the librarian. A good library was like a well-synced brain, packed with billions of memories that can be accessed quickly and accurately when needed.

After the Deepstate Coup in 1946, librarians gradually lost their memory-storage mission and became nothing more than enforcers of orthodoxy. They refused to stock heretical books and emitted nothing but Fashionable Doctrine when asked.

The skills gap exploded when the web was developed. We suddenly had trillions instead of billions, but still no librarian.

Google was able to conquer the world by filling the gap. Google copied and metaphorized all the traditional skills of a human librarian, and shaped the results to commercial and governmental purposes.

We still don't have OBJECTIVE librarians. The city library has abandoned its mission, and Google feeds us a carefully crafted set of distortions.

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked

  ¶ 1:23 AM

  What would Morris do with a Tardis?
Pointless convective thought.

Not sure why this item updrafted to the top of consciousness, but I'll go ahead and write it. This thought grew from the Paine vs Morris essay.

A recurring topic in various forums and sci-fi stories is what you'd do with a time machine, given a limited amount of power. Three Tardis wishes.

The standard answer, of course, is abort Hitler.

Nope, wouldn't work. If Adolf hadn't been born, the backwash from Versailles would still have produced a similar leader. Given the basic nature of Krauts, another leader would have been more effective. Adolf was sloppy and unfocused. The typical Kraut is relentlessly persistent and infinitely thorough. Krautistic.

In general killing any bad leader is useless because the leaders are responding to existing pressure, filling a niche.

Revolutions kill leaders along with a lot of innocent bystanders, in the hope of eliminating the niche. It never works, always achieves the opposite result. Worse people** fill the niche.

A Morris-style counterrevolution would ruin the bad leaders while they are fully representing the niche, so that the leaders AND their goals are tainted by uniform distaste.

= = = = =

So what would I do with my three Tardis wishes? I'd go back to 1946 and ruin the reputation of Roy Cohn, James Byrnes and Bernard Baruch. If those three men had become untouchable after they started to gain power, Deepstate would have been seriously delayed. The tripod of bankers, leftist activists and intel agencies would need to reset and start from scratch. Unlike Hitler, those three were ideally suited to their roles. Other players were less effective.

And if I had any power left after that, I'd stay in 1946 and jump to Detroit. I'd sway the minds of Studebaker's leaders toward an immediate merger with Nash, and I'd persuade Packard's CEO to switch from cars to corporate jets. With those two changes, the car industry would have remained competitive a lot longer, and the monopolistic idiocy of the big three might not have reached terminal coma in the '70s.

= = = = =

** Footnote 1: Why are the new leaders inevitably worse? Because they WANT POWER more than the existing leader, who typically inherited his position. The revolutionaries WANT POWER enough to kill thousands of people for it.

Footnote 2: I'm not retrofitting my ideas onto Morris. His real behavior in the Paine incident gave me the idea. Briefly: Tom Paine was a violent criminal asshole who spread the genocidal plague of "rights" wherever he placed his bloody hands. After ruining this side of the Atlantic he moved to Paris where he used the brain-eating "rights" virus to create an even crazier tyranny. The Frogs, even though fully infected, got tired of Paine and put him in prison to await the chop. Morris was in Paris to negotiate our debts with the new government, and Paine begged him for rescue. Morris wrote an extremely pro-forma letter, basically implying "You asked for him, you got him. He's your problem." Since Paine had thousands of idiot Twitter followers in many countries, the Frogs were stuck with keeping him alive. Thus Morris undermined both Paine and France without killing anyone.

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked, From rights to duties

  ¶ 11:54 PM

  Shouldn't need to ask
Headline: Preachers who are in love with Christ

That encounter is with the risen Lord. “Look at my hands and my feet”, Jesus told the frightened disciples, “Touch me and see…” There is the encounter: Look at Christ. Touch Christ. See Christ. Not just with physical sight, but also with spiritual vision. Then love is born—and it is never boring!

And you still wonder why heterosexual males aren't in church on Sunday?

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked

  ¶ 6:47 AM

  Stupid random thoughts about split-levels
For some reason I was noticing split-level houses lately, and noticed that split-levels rarely get expanded.

Plain flat houses like the Default 50s house...



... nearly always get fancified ...



... and often get expanded on the back.



But the Default 70s House...



which is a bilevel, almost never gets expanded or added. There are at least 10K houses like this in Spokane, with the usual tract-house variations, but I've only seen one or two with side additions. None with back additions.

The floor height can't be the problem; flat houses have various heights, some with basement and some with slab. Renovators can always match the height closely enough, sometimes needing a bit of a ramp or slanty sill.

It must be the cantilevers. All of these Default 70s Houses have fairly large cantilevers on front and back, again with variations. There's no easy way to stuff a new foundation under the cantilevered part, and very few lots have enough space for a side addition.

As I was "pondering" this deeply serious topic, I realized: I've made digital models of many different flat and two-story houses, and one '60s trilevel, but never a bilevel. Is it worth trying to make a model?

But wait! I already made several bilevels! A bungalow with grade entry IS a bilevel. The only difference is that the modern bilevel has the grade entry on the front and the front stoop on the back. (Now called a deck.)



Here's one of my bungalows forward and reversed. The reversed version on the right is a bilevel.

In other words, a bilevel is a Wolagnub.

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked, Zero Problems

  ¶ 3:46 PM

  Why the question?
Odd article in RCS by Halligan and Oakley.

Headline: What If Consciousness Doesn't Drive the Mind?

The article runs through a clear and valid description of awareness as currently understood. Internal narrative checked against sensory inputs. I wouldn't argue with any of it.

Who would? Who EVER thought that consciousness was in the driver's seat? Most religions give the dominant role to dreams or spiritual connections under various names. The 1st Commandment prohibits treating your own awareness as supreme. Freud certainly didn't think the conscious mind was the boss. Behaviorists like Skinner and Watson refused to acknowledge any sort of consciousness or will. The brain was just gears and levers.

Who are the authors arguing against? They don't say.

= = = = =

Later: A nice parallel in a BBC "science" feature.

Headline: Flies more germ-laden than previously thought

HUH? Who ever thought that flies were basically clean, or even less dirty than anything you can name?????

Everyone knows that houseflies are first-class disease vectors. This has been a firm and valid belief for at least 150 years. If the article was claiming less germ-laden than thought, it might be worth a headline.

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked

  ¶ 10:23 AM