Nothing happened
After watching some fictional instant justice on old TV detective shows last night, a question popped up. Have I ever exposed a fraud? Done any "investigative reporting"?

Not in the conventional way, but I did properly and scientifically expose one fairly well-known racket a few years ago, and NOTHING HAPPENED.

I built an electronic replica of Hubbard's original E-meter as designed by Mathison.

The results were definite and scary. The E-meter wasn't a meter, it was an active nerve stimulator, with instant effects on the autonomous system controlling heartbeat and panic.

I hesitated before writing up the result, since Hubbard's cult has a long-standing reputation for suing detractors. But I went ahead anyway. REAL SCIENCE is a mission that can't be softpedaled. A real experiment must be written up. The show must go on.

Nothing happened. The blog item, like pretty much all of my blog items, was read by the two or three regulars, but it didn't even garner attention from the identifiable Deepstate connections like Amazon Ashburn. No lawsuits, no social media campaigns.

Conclusion: The Hubbard cult is vestigial. Its reputation for ferocity is based on past actions, not present strength.

Question: Where did those people go? Did they move into more fashionable cults like the "virus" cult, which exhibits the same types of ferocity?

Labels: Carver, meta-entertainment

  ¶ 1:23 AM

  Sportwave reprint
I linked this 2014 piece in previous item. After reading it, I think it deserves a reprint. Partly for the obvious relevance to communication methods, more importantly for the entertainment aspect. The content of shortwave was passively entertaining, and the work needed to send and receive SW was actively entertaining.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Shortwave is unique among all means of communication. It has a certain sporting aspect. When you send out a signal in the range of 3 to 30 mc, the atmosphere may decide to bounce it around the world, allowing you to reach great distances with fairly low power. With higher power, a serious antenna, and lots of experiment and calculation, you can be reasonably sure of reaching a desired destination most of the time. But you're never entirely sure. Sunspots and thunderstorms and temperature inversions and all sorts of other crap may block you. Ham operators enjoy this sporting aspect. Like fishermen they collect wall trophies (QSLs) and run contests and expeditions for bragging rights. Professional broadcasters may not enjoy it but have learned how to exploit it.

Doing a review of a 1983 Soviet shortwave radio got me thinking (again) about the meaning of SW. This radio, clearly for domestic use, proves that the Soviet system was confident about its success in those years. Not so in Stalin's time, when owning a SW was a criminal act, and radio was basically a closed-circuit intercom system.

Within the US, popularity and availability of SW radios inscribed a different curve. SW broadcasting came of age around 1935, basically enabled by the superhet receiver. Earlier receivers weren't able to maintain a consistent sharpness of tuning across a wide range of freqs.



American radios for home entertainment began to feature SW bands as soon as broadcasters began to provide content. SW reached a peak in WW2, when listening to the propaganda of both sides was considered part of an Informed Citizen's duties. Even some car radios had a SW band. Along the same lines, American newscasters frequently mentioned "our propaganda says .... and their propaganda says ....", trusting the American listener with the fact that both sides were stretching things.

After WW2, home radios dropped SW abruptly and picked up FM instead. This coincided with the government's sharp crackdown on 'disloyalty'. Suddenly the duty of an Informed Citizen was limited to line-of-sight propagation. Then TV finished the job, making the viewing experience line-of-sight as well. Propagandists finally fulfilled their perpetual dream: a closed pipe injecting one stream of messages from source directly to brain, with no leakage or tributary streams allowed. No skip, no bounce, no imagination. Best part: the injectees didn't even realize it was a pipe. They only knew that they couldn't stand to be disconnected from the pipe.

This state of affairs continued, with constantly tightening media monopolies and narrowing of permissible viewpoints, until the Internet came along in the mid-80s and broke the monopolies but didn't stop the censorship. The Web is, after all, a closed-circuit intercom system. Everything we see and hear passes through NSA's ears and eyes before it reaches ours.

SW isn't illegal; you can still buy SW radios designed for ham use, but they aren't meant for home entertainment. They don't look good in the living room. This limits their use to a small number of Oddballs who can be watched easily.

Why did US government and culture encourage SW in the '30s and discourage it from the '50s until the present? I think it was a question of confidence. FDR was confident that his efforts to improve America would stand comparison against the alternatives in Russia and Germany. Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, et al were not nearly so confident.

It's especially noteworthy that Russia was building and selling SW radios domestically in the '80s and we were not. Reagan crashed the Soviet Empire at a moment when our own empire truly would not stand comparison. As Gorby was loosening and reforming, we were eliminating industrial jobs, freezing out all possible reforms, and continually narrowing the range of permissible discourse.

Our trend has continued, with disastrous results. We don't know how the Soviet trend would have developed because it was interrupted.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Everything in the item is still valid except the date of 1935. In fact SW was intensely used by all sorts of operators in 1930, as clearly shown in this 1930 official list. Commercial broadcasters, dispatchers for police and airlines and shipping, simulcasts of US local stations, TV and fax experiments, and above all the commercial wire services.

Labels: Entertainment, meta-entertainment, Natural law = Soviet law, Patient things

  ¶ 12:10 PM

  Fractal banana
ZH correctly mocks the latest idiocy in the world of "art" where name and provenance are EXACTLY EVERYTHING. An "artist" who apparently has a "name" has sold a plain old banana ductaped to a wall for $120,000.

ZH missed a parallel, which may not be a national phenomenon. In local grocery stores, buying one banana is the standard way for food-stamp customers to get cash for drugs. They slap down the banana, insert the EBT card in the scanner, and ask for $50 extra. Apparently it's illegal to just use the EBT card as an ATM; you have to buy something that counts as food. Real food is unnecessary for a methie, so the transaction is shaped for minimum nutrition and maximum cashback.



So the banana as physical icon for totally wasted money is fractally valid at all scales.

= = = = =

Later: A commenter at ZH probably got closest to the truth. "Conceptual art" is a money-laundering scheme, and the evidence disappears on its own.

Labels: Entertainment, meta-entertainment

  ¶ 1:09 PM

  Still grumpy
Speaking of monsters who get paid and recognized:

"Expert" Krugman is paid millions and gets Nobel Prizes....

OK, this is extremely weird. I received an email saying that a payment has been received into my blockchain wallet. But I don't have a blockchain wallet. Presumably there's some kind of fraud going on, but what?

... and he can't recognize an ECONOMIC fraud.

Some of the commenters are blaming Krugman's age (OK Boomer and all that) but they're wrong.

This is the oldest setup in the world. And this instance actually reverts BY NAME to the oldest version of the oldest setup, the wallet drop.

TV and radio used to warn us about scams and frauds. Even among the scattered remnants of old TV and radio shows, I can immediately cite two examples of the wallet drop: This is your FBI, 1945 and Racket Squad, 1951.

Modern versions are better known as the Nigerian Prince. The rig is always the same. You stumble onto a potential "windfall", then you pay to get access to the "windfall", then the "windfall" disappears after you pay.

Krugman doesn't recognize any of this. Why the fuck should we recognize him?

What's the fucking purpose of an economics expert who KNOWS LESS THAN WE DO ABOUT ECONOMICS?

= = = = =

As long as I'm citing old radio, It Pays to be Ignorant was an explicit parody of "experts" who know less than we do. It was modeled on Info Please, which had a panel of arrogant condescending NYC "experts" like Krugman. Ignorant had three intentional idiots who found an infinite number of ways to miss the point.

Example questions:

How many lakes are in the five Great Lakes?

Which wild animal is on the buffalo nickel?

Can you name a President who started life as a baby?

What liquid is contained in a fountain pen?

When is a June Bride married?

And the best of all:

Can you name the people who star in the radio program It Pays to be Ignorant?

The "experts" were expert comedians. Their obtuse struggles with self-evident facts were genuinely funny. It's not so funny when an obtuse idiot advises governments and corporations.

Labels: Entertainment, meta-entertainment

  ¶ 5:32 AM