Perpetual economics
In econblog circles there's a productive dialog on the basic question: Is economics a science? Krugman has a surprisingly sensible answer. He says econ is a science, but many economists are priests, not scientists.

Mote and beam, of course. Krugman himself is The High Priest of Infinite Stimulus. More more more more more more more more more more spending is The Holy Answer To All Questions. (I suspect he knows this about himself at some level; he has more insight than most Experts.)

I've hit this question many times, with a solidly negative answer. Let's look at it again from the Grand Blueprint perspective, from the distinction between living purpose and non-living predictability.

Economics is an attempt to measure and describe a uniquely live activity: Creating value.

Non-living things move back and forth and exchange places under the influence of wind and gravity. That's not economic activity.

All living things know what value is. Bacteria move toward good 'smells' and away from bad 'smells'. They place high value on edible material and low value on inedible material. I'd call that a prerequisite for economic activity.

Real economic activity begins with bugs and birds selecting pretty or tasty objects as courtship tokens. That's the first instance of exchanging things based on value, with a living purpose or goal in mind.

Humans take this to the next level in trading and barter. A trader selects and presents things to maximize their attractiveness, in order to exchange them for things that he considers superior. In selecting and presenting, he is increasing extrinsic (perceived) value but not intrinsic value.

Real intrinsic value gets created when the farmer applies labor and care to seeds and soil and eggs. Living purpose takes care of the rest, giving us edible fruits and leaves and meat.

Finally, the most advanced form of human purpose starts with raw stuff and carves it or bakes it or melts it or ties it together to make new intrinsic value, objects that didn't exist in Nature and weren't created by natural growth.

Value can be recalibrated via feedback loops, increasing and decreasing with perceived supply and perceived demand; but value can only be created by selection, natural growth, or manufacture.

Up to here we're looking at concrete and observable processes. Living purpose is not part of most scientific discussions because most "scientists" don't know what life is. Still, it's perfectly observable. An economist who stayed within these bounds could be doing something like science. Problem is, modern economists don't stop there.

Modern economists talk about Efficient Markets and recommend things like stimulus and options and derivatives and QE. Those activities do not belong to the realm of concrete and observable processes. They are pure numerical manipulation.

QE doesn't add value through any of those stages of human or animal purpose. It just moves numbers around in order to STOP normal economic activity that would be expressed in varying interest rates. It breaks the loop. It's not only fake, it PREVENTS the creation and exchange of real value.

Quite simply, QE is perpetual motion. Real science showed long ago that perpetual motion is just a waste of time and activity.



Economists can't see this, which means they are quacks.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:15 AM

  Not a horse.
Idiot news item:

The Obama administration is scrambling on multiple fronts to salvage the Obamacare web site and change the negative narrative for the president’s signature health care law.... On Wednesday the CEOs of several health insurance companies will head to the White House to meet with adviser....

Okay, let's change the narrative. Everyone with a brain could see from the start that Romneycare was bound to fail, if you define failure to mean "making things worse". It's the worst of both worlds. It hugely expands all the broken and evil parts of American health care, and does nothing at all to solve the well-known problems. You didn't need to know ANY FUCKING DETAILS. The basic scheme was designed to guarantee perfect monopoly to the insurers who already had a partial monopoly. From this one fact, you could be sure that everything would get worse. Basic economics.

By governmental standards this is success, not failure. Starving the poor and enriching the rich is success, not failure.

The idiot partisan votebots on "both" "sides" guaranteed that Romneycare would happen. "Both" "sides" worked with a shared lie as always. The shared lie, that Romneycare is socialized medicine, served "both" purposes. R-label votebots could rail against its "Marxist" tendencies, and D-label votebots could sing hymns to its "fairness".

Failure of the website was not predictable from basic principles. The government has lots of similarly purposed websites, and most of them work pretty well. You could assume that the same people who designed those good-enough websites would design this one. Clearly that didn't happen!

Now the R-label votebots are saying that Romneycare was a trojan horse, meant to fail so that "Marxist" Obama can implant real socialized medicine.

Nope, that doesn't work.

(1) First, though Obama grew up in a Marxist household, his performance as President has been perfectly consistent from the 2008 campaign through the present. He works for Wall Street, just like Bush, McCain and Romney. Every single move he makes is obviously aimed to starve the masses and enrich the rich. Everything he does, including Romneycare, is successful for Goldman's purposes.

(2) Second, Obama had no conventional political reason to implement something as horrible as Romneycare. In 2009 he had a real mandate to FIX the medical system, and the way to FIX it is single-payer plus lawsuit reform. Medicare for all. This is not a matter of opinion or theory, it's an experimentally determined fact. We have 120 years of experimentation by various countries, and the conclusion is clear by now. Single-payer systems work. Insurance-based monopolies like US (whether partial before Romneycare or total after Romneycare) do not work. Fully socialized systems like UK do not work.

(3) Third, the R-label votebots called Romneycare "socialized medicine." If it is "socialized medicine", it's not a "gambit to reach socialized medicine." Can't have it both ways.

(4) Fourth, nobody uses a trojan horse in modern American politics. All systems are intended to starve the poor and enrich the rich, and no system is ever repealed or removed. If some rich people are displeased by some aspect of a system, the government will add new epicycle bureaucracies to please those factions, thus making the system even more expensive and unwieldy. (I emphasize modern because it wasn't always this way. Repealing or simplifying systems was possible until about 40 years ago.)

Labels: Shared Lie

  ¶ 3:19 AM

  Paging Dr Percy..... Paging Dr Percy..... Stat!
NPR discusses a truly obnoxious and satanic feature of Romneycare which hasn't been advertised much yet. President Romney wants all medical practices to 'get together' in big clinics so you can see your doctor, your soul-stealing Stalinist shrink, your dentist, your optician, etc all together in a nice togetherly TEAM.

This is EXACTLY what Walker Percy was predicting in 'Love in the Ruins', specifically in the climactic Grand Rounds on Mr Ives scene. Everything all mushed together in one place so you can't possibly escape from evil. You can't select. You have two choices: Participate in Satan's togetherly niceness or die.

Chickenshit.
  ¶ 6:01 PM

  From the mouths
Broadcast journalists sometimes show unexpected wisdom when they're just filling time. They tend to be stupid when discussing Heavy Topics.

This morning a local drive-time show was picking up the taped forecast from weather guy Mark Peterson. Weather guy is cheerful this week because he's the messenger of beautiful weather. "Today we'll reach 68. Tomorrow just a scosh cooler at 64."

One of the drive-timers then said:

"A scosh is different, of course, if you're talking about Fahrenheit or Centigrade."

Unexpected wisdom. Comparing official and natural measurements is wise, and it's something you don't hear from Official Commentators.

In more detail: A scosh, or a smidgen, or an oodle, or a shitload, is constant regardless of official system; so the Fahrenheit equivalent of a scosh is different from the Centigrade equivalent of a scosh.


Sidenote 1: I'll bet today will be Aphid Day. Earlier I wasn't sure we'd get an Aphid Day this fall, because I didn't think we would get close to 70. Will update later, but wanted to place the bet now. [Later: Nope. A few of the aphids showed around sunset, but not a proper swarm yet.]

Sidenote 2: Peterson often shows a solid understanding of Reality vs Official Systems, and expresses it in a wonderfully terse way. Recently he said "Rain yesterday: a tenth of an inch at the airport. More at your place." Exactly. Spokane's Official Weather is measured at the airport where NOBODY lives. The airport's readings are always significantly different from the inhabited parts of Spokane. No matter where 'your place' is, it's going to have a higher temperature and less wind and more rain than the airport. Peterson said it all in four words.


Sidenote 3: In this Fibber episode Fibber formalizes and tabulates the system of natural units. He's talking with the little girl next door Teeny:

Teeny: Mister, what's a scad? Willie Toops says his uncle has scads of money and I can't argue with him because I don't know how much a scad is.

Fibber: You know what an oodle is, sis?

Teeny: No, but everybody says my dog has oodles of fleas.

Fibber: Exactly. There are several scads in an oodle; plenty of oodles to a gob; lots of gobs to a heap; batches of heaps to a load; and multifarious loads to a galore. Understand?

Teeny: Well, no.

Fibber: Well, let's put it this way. Suppose you had several oodles of peanuts. Somebody gives you a heap more. How many scads would you have?

Teeny: Loads, I betcha.

Fibber: Loads of scads, or lots of gobs, or a batch of heaps.
  ¶ 6:09 AM

  Canine cases, Danbo Declension
Languages vary hugely, but there are some fairly distinct asymptotes or pivot points. In syntax and noun forms, the asymptote is NGDA. Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. Many languages have inflections to denote other relationships between an object and the world, but as a language develops it tends to simplify down to NGDA and stay there. Even after the case endings dissolve or merge, NGDA still remains firmly marked in word order.

Why is NGDA optimal? It describes the basic relationships in any social structure, whether we're talking about dogs or humans or bees. When you have NGDA you have a society and vice versa.

Labels: Danbo, Language update

  ¶ 6:01 AM

  No need to model.
Science 2.0 describes an analog way of modeling complex processes. Much as I appreciate analog and concrete ways of doing things, this one probably won't help. The originator suggests that it could serve to model stock market crashes.

No. Stock market crashes are not 'non-linear' or 'chaotic' processes, they are CRIMINAL processes, ordered and commanded by a criminal syndicate. When Goldman needs a crash, Goldman makes a crash. That is all.

The solution is simple. How do you reach ZERO PROBLEMS? Eliminate the object that creates problems. When I perceived the risk of trees falling on my house, I didn't try to predict the probability of falling; I didn't buy Pine Default Swaps; I had the trees cut down. When my own elderly memory was starting to create problems with a cabinet door, I didn't try to monitor or predict the door; I didn't buy Door Headbump Futures; I removed the door.

Same with markets. The stock market, with its associated speculators, is a constant and deadly danger to society, with absolutely no conceivable benefits under any imaginable circumstances.

REMOVE IT. ZERO MARKET = ZERO PROBLEMS.

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 2:42 AM

  Normal Politicians Party
Mentioning Nethercutt in connection with Foley's death led to a thought.

Nethercutt is a good example of a Normal American Politician. Extrovert with great social skills, likes to manipulate and maneuver, likes to have power derived from pleasing real people. This type probably doesn't fit any traditional category of 'ideal human' or 'saint', but it's a type that has served pretty well in Parliamentary systems over many centuries.

The DC government has grown so destructive and suicidal in the last 30 years that many Normal American Politicians can't stand it. They move up through levels of power in the states, decide to move into Congress, and then quit in disgust after a couple terms.

Some politicians thrive in DC. These politicians are comfortable with suicidal insanity by definition.

By now we have a pretty good collection of Normal Politicians Who Can't Stand DC.

Maybe this collection should form a party and run together against the wackos who love suicidal insanity. They would recruit enough decent state politicians to fill out a complete national ticket for one election: 435 Lower Nuthouse and 33 Upper Nuthouse candidates. They would offer: "Elect all of us at once. We'll bring back regular functional politics, with all its ordinary corruption and silliness. We'll take bribes from companies in our own districts, but we won't take bribes from any foreigner or financier."
  ¶ 6:13 AM

  Variables and constants 5
Brief thought on "austerity", after reading some Krugmanite shit like this:

We live in extraordinary times where our country’s economic stability and global competitiveness is under perpetual threat by those we have placed in office. Families and students are feeling the sharp edge of broken policy and austerity economics.

Constants and variables, fuckhead.

What's constant? Insane federal regs based on the suicidal leftist idea that all humans are identical.

What's variable? Federal payments intended to compensate for the insane federal regs. Even at the max, these payments don't come anywhere near the cost of the insane regs. Now that Congress has finally and SANELY started to cut the payments, local schools are feeling the pinch.

In engineering terms, the load is constant and the power source is discharging.

Both political "sides" are focusing only on the battery. The Krugmanite "progressives" insist on more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more batteries, and the Randian "conservatives" want to remove all the batteries. Both wrong. Focus on the load. Part of it is needed for normal public education, but 1/3 of it is suicidal, planted by black-robed Soviet saboteurs in a deliberate and calculated attempt to SMASH civilization.

Correct solution: Remove the unnecessary part of the load. Disobey federal regulations unless the feds pay 100% of the cost.
  ¶ 5:21 AM

  Something happened. What?
Last night I was awakened after 3 hrs of sleep by a strange dream about a huge gathering of cop cars in front of the house. After awakening fully I looked around; didn't hear anything, didn't see anything. Assumed the dream was just a story, and dropped back into slumberland.

After daylight I noticed a vague tireprint just above the curb in the front yard. Not a big divot as you'd expect from an out-of-control car, just an impression in the frost. It was gone after the sun warmed up.

Later I checked the police log and found a cluster of Malicious Mischief and Disorderly Person reports in this neighborhood, which is highly unusual. One of them was on this street at exactly the same time I woke up; but it didn't specify the address or even W or E. This street on the East side is a common crime location.

So something was going on around here, maybe a sirenless police stop in front of my house. No definite indications of damage or vandalism. Puzzling and frustrating to see so many indirect signs without a definite picture of what happened!

Full moon at work. This one is especially strong.
  ¶ 5:29 PM

  Why do I use the word 'genocidal' so much? 2
A "study" by a monster named Aaron Lotz has reached the "conclusion" that human longevity is the main variable controlling "loss of biodiversity". The countries where humans live longest are also the countries that record the most endangered species and the most invasive species.

If this is a valid correlation, which it probably isn't, the source is instantly obvious. Countries with good medical care and low human infant mortality are also countries with lots of paid scientists and paid researchers. It takes lots of paid satans to worry about "endangered species."

Naturally, or I should say unnaturally, the monster called "Lotz" is incapable of seeing this obvious connection. Instead, the monster assumes ... are you ready for a shock shock shock? EVIL KKKARBON! Wowie zowie! I couldn't have guessed in a trillion thousand hundred papillion dozen years! This is the surprisingest surprisingest surprise in the history of the universe!

Plain fucking fact: Nearly all REAL extinctions of big animals were caused by humans, but not through any weird religious theology about EVIL KKKARBON. They were caused directly and simply by uncontrolled hunting and fishing. If there are any REAL extinctions going on now, they are more likely to be happening in poor countries where hunting is a desperate need, and where the rulers are too busy getting rich off foreign NGOs to worry about feeding their people or restricting hunting.

Think elephants.

Of course this basic obvious thought is unthinkable for a monster called Lotz. Savile Broadcasting interviewed the monster called Lotz this morning. At the end of the interview, the monster called Lotz said:

"Certainly some people live off the grid and don't have very much impact on the planet."

Lesus save us. Lohammed save us. Luddha save us.

Has this monster ever NOTICED how people live off the grid? They live OUT IN THE WILDERNESS, directly impacting wild animals, HUNTING and FISHING and FORAGING on wild plants. They don't worry about game rangers.

Off-the-grid people are THE SAME FUCKING PEOPLE who caused most extinctions before.
  ¶ 5:22 AM

  Why do I use the word 'genocidal' so much? 1
Following on this rant on Commie hatred of GMO crops. Point was: Commies hate the idea of breeding and altering plants with modern technology, but love the idea of breeding and altering humans with modern technology.

A similar conflict shows in this Savile Broadcasting piece on problems with invasive pests in trees. Commies are deeply concerned with "alien Asian invaders" that "native varieties haven't coevolved with."

Good concern. Can't argue with this concern, though I suspect a good dose of DDT would take care of the insect pests quickly if Commies hadn't prohibited DDT. It's good to keep native varieties thriving, and it's good to repel alien invaders.

Well then, the same idea should apply to human varieties, right? WRONG! If that isn't obvious, examine the comments in this Guardian article on a Brit government attempt to make migrants feel unwelcome.

Any attempt to protect native human varieties against invaders that we "haven't coevolved with" is MAXIMUM SIN! EVIL! WE MUST BE COMPLETELY VULNERABLE! WE MUST SACRIFICE OURSELVES FOR THE SACRED IDEA OF DIE-VERSITY! KILL US ALL NOW! LET THE INVADER HAVE THE LAND!
  ¶ 5:02 AM

  RIP Foley
Tom Foley died. Most of the commentary is in terms of ideology, but ideology really isn't the point. Foley lost the '94 election because he had moved too far into the role of Speaker, and had lost touch with his district.

I saw him fairly often in those years because his local office happened to be in the same building where I worked. When he was in town, he was always rushing around, never shaking hands with businessmen or kissing babies.

Nethercutt replaced Foley and took special care to stay local. He avoided moving up the leadership ladder and always made time for local radio, always shook hands and kissed babies. He left politics after three terms, clearly disgusted with the direction DC politics was taking.

I'm sure Boehner's constituents must feel the same way that we felt about Foley, whether they agree with his ideology or not.

Representatives were not meant to become Speaker. The Speaker was supposed to be a purely national figure, something like a low-grade Prime Minister, appointed by the Lower Nuthouse from leading citizens.

I might draw an analogy at the international level. The US was not meant to be an empire. It was supposed to be just another nation, and the peculiar demands of empire have caused the whole national government to turn into an imperial monstrosity. It needs to be removed and replaced with a more 'local' government that shakes hands and kisses babies. But that ain't gonna happen.


Further thought here.

Semi-relevant sidenote: Ever notice that Foley and Bing Crosby looked alike and had similar manners and voices? (In speaking anyway; I don't know if Foley was a good singer.) There are several other specimens of the same type in Spokane, especially around Gonzaga. Seems to be a particular Irish type that clustered here.
  ¶ 1:20 PM

  Truth in labeling
Wash state has a referendum on the ballot this year to require labeling of GMO food. The state Atty General is bringing a complaint against one of the organizations on the anti-labeling side, charging it with failing to label its membership correctly.

This is indeed a problem. Ad hoc 'organizations' always form temporarily on both sides of these referenda, and these 'organizations' always have vague misty names like Americans for Niceness or Seattle for a Good World or We Love Puppies and Angels or Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Especially the last one. Grocery Manufacturers Association.... Wow! How could anyone tell what it's for, or which side of this dispute it's on, or who belongs to it? Purely abstract name, made up of focus-grouped phonemes.

Yes, that's the one the Atty Genl is complaining about. The Grocery Manufacturers Association is failing to describe its purposes and members.

Lesus Q. Christ.

= = = = =

There's a broader irony here. Though everyone has gotten into the fake-name act by now, the trick was invented by Commies, and Commies are still the specialists in fake labels. They never require honesty in labeling by their own side. It's perfectly OK for hard-line mass-murdering genocidal Pol-Pot-worshiping Maoist Cadres to describe themselves as "Episcopal Church" or "American Civil Liberties Union" or "Scientists." But it's not OK for recently hybridized crops to go without labels. All food crops and livestock have been carefully bred and hybridized for at least 5000 years, but we urgently need to know which food items have been hybridized using modern methods. Modern hybrids, with genes transported by mechanisms under human command, are EVIL and must have WARNING LABELS. Older hybrids, with genes transported by viruses or mice or crows, are ORGANIC and WONDERFUL and need no labels.

And we can get even broader. Which ideology has always favored 'mechanisms under human command' for selecting and altering humans? Yes, boys and girls. Lenin's ideology. And which ideology CANNOT TOLERATE 'mechanisms under human command' for selecting and altering corn and cattle? Yes, boys and girls. Lenin's ideology. So: Modern breeding methods for humans are REQUIRED, but modern breeding methods for everything else are PROHIBITED.
  ¶ 8:30 AM

  Proficiency vs efficiency
Been reading some old books on banking, trying to trace the trends of abstraction and speculation vs healthy deposit-and-loan. The wavelength of these cycles is shorter than I had imagined, with frequent bubbles and frequent returns to sanity. Nothing new about TBTF banks or gov't bailouts of TBTF banks, either.

The current bubble is vastly larger than earlier bubbles in geographical terms, but fairly ordinary in temporal terms; 10 years between bubble and re-regulation is fairly typical. We haven't reached the 10-year point yet, so we can't say for sure that this bubble will go unfixed forever.

One book goes deeply into error-checking methods, reminding me of some tricks I had used in my long-forgotten bookkeeping days....



Humans and machines are both good at making errors, but humans are still unbeatable at catching errors. This detective work was the fun part of bookkeeping, especially when the error was made by someone else. Not so much fun when it was my own error! Note the author's tone of regret at the loss of "the accounting genius" and the replacement of proficiency by efficiency.
  ¶ 5:00 AM

  Non-living 2
Sort of related to my earlier ramblings on living purpose vs non-living non-purpose. We like to imagine that we are actively deciding what to do at every moment. We like to pretend that our 'decisions' have wide variations that wouldn't have existed if we had picked other courses.

Lately I've noticed the precise predictability of my daily routine. Since I stopped working regular hours a long time ago, I don't watch the clock, but two pieces of technology mark time for me. One technology is the AM radio, which is usually turned on for tinnitus-masking background and fake 'companionship'; the other tech is the computer's screen saver.

Three examples:

Breakfast is a bowl of ramen, which feels partly variable. Sometimes I gobble fast, sometimes I stop for a while to think and read. Despite that, the computer's screen saver is always fading out just as I sit back down after eating. The time between leaving the computer and returning to the computer is 15 minutes on the dot, no matter how 'variable' the process feels.

My walks to Safeway also feel partly variable. I use the bus to carry me up a steep hill, then walk the whole way on the downhill return trip. The bus is fairly consistent, so arrival at Safeway always happens at the same time. After that, shopping and paying feel variable. Depends on what I'm buying and depends on delays in the checkout line. The homeward walk also feels variable; sometimes I have to stop for heavy traffic, sometimes I'm more energetic. Despite all of that, about 80% of the time I enter the front door on the same word in the talk show's standard intro.

Evening shower seems fully variable. I go into the bathroom when I feel like it; sometimes stop to think for a while; do things in various sequences. Despite the apparent 'variability', about 80% of the time I return to the living room just as the local talk show host is finishing her musical intro.

Am I really in control of what I do? External markers shout NO!

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 4:15 AM

  Goldman crack corn, I don't care
Noted a news item about the ongoing bankruptcy of my publisher. Latest development is that their creditors, represented by JPMorgan, have seized all their copyrights, and the publisher is suing to get the copyrights back.

A few of those copyrights are mine. Or were mine until JPMorgan snatched them. More significantly, JPMorgan has also snatched part of my annual income.

Do I get perturbed? No. Welllllllll, not hugely perturbed.

Why? Because unlike the publisher, and unlike this miserable fucked beyond-insane beyond-Satan former so-called alleged quote "country", I've learned to function on the savings side of the ledger. I no longer need their income, so it doesn't matter .... well, it doesn't matter quite as much ... that JPMorgan owns the products of my brain and labor. Also, I understand that JPMorgan is Chosen and thus deserves to own more than everything. JPMorgan's Chosen birthright entitles it to own everything that exists, plus an infinite amount of "value" counterfeited by its Chosen servants who control the knobs on the Chosen government counterfeit machine.

Supposedly I've reached the level of fuck-you-money:



Trying to convince myself, but it doesn't work. No matter how hard you try, you can't escape the bloody talons of Goldman. You stay out of debt, live cautiously, save ferociously, avoid the stock market.... Nope, Goldman still snatches your property and steals your income. It's the only law of nature, the law of the Chosen.
  ¶ 9:50 AM

  Coy questions
Probably a misobservation again, but here goes....

What happened to the basic skill of asking questions? In the last decade or so, I've noticed a lot of completely useless questions. Poor questions can get especially dramatic in the context of a graphics forum, but it's the same basic problem in verbal situations like callers on Money-Talk radio shows, or people asking the bus driver where the bus goes.

Often the trouble is what might be called 'coyness', where the questioner is trying to keep his actual purposes hidden while finding how to do something or how to get somewhere. When you hear a sentence starting with "Let's say" or "For example", it's probably going to get coy.

The problem with coyness is that your example or metaphor often includes a bad assumption, a bad connection between what you want and what you say. You don't know how to do X, therefore you especially don't know how to form good metaphors or examples about doing X.

In the bus context, you're trying to reach the DSHS (Welfare) office at Ash and Boone, so you ask the driver if this bus goes to Cannon Park which is nearby. Well, the bus that gets close to Cannon Park might not** go anywhere near DSHS. You've only assumed that it has to go that way.

I didn't observe this 'coyness' problem in earlier decades. When I was teaching electronics, I often answered incomplete questions that showed several stages of ignorance, but the question never included a poorly constructed example that had to be disassembled first. I could always start from the question itself and build the student's knowledge up to the necessary point.

Is this semi-competent self-protective attitude a consequence of the web's deep intrusiveness? Habits acquired from watching lawyer shows on TV? I don't know.

You could state a rule of thumb: Examples belong in answers, not in questions.


= = = = =

**Footnote: I didn't look it up on the route maps first. Actually the bus that goes to Cannon Park does pass right by DSHS, which means I unwittingly created a bad example of a bad example, thus proving the main point neatly. If you don't know the fact, you aren't going to create good examples about the fact.
  ¶ 10:02 AM

  Variables and constants 4
Washington Post has been carrying and even extending Snowden's info, treating it with all the severity it deserves, not pulling any punches. This is a strong indication that something big has changed in the world of journalism.

Variables and constants:

Before this, WP had a consistent 'transfer function' that could be mapped in a simple table.



No matter what R does, Impeach! No matter what D does, Wonderful!

The function was established in the Watergate story, where Nixon precisely copied the behavior of Kennedy and Johnson. WP ignored dirty tricks when done by JFK and LBJ, and blasted the exact same dirty tricks across the world when done by Nixon. Until now, the function continued without exception. Party was the sole input. Behavior was disconnected.

Now we have a partial change, making a somewhat more complex truth table.



When party is R, behavior is still disconnected. For all behavior, output = Impeach! But when party is D, behavior matters. Bad behavior by D is now relevant.
  ¶ 5:42 AM

  Economics closed, mofo.
Economics is supposed to be a science. The job of a science is to gather and analyze facts and construct theories. We justify paying people to do science because good theories (like Newton's laws or Ohm's law) can help us make things and prepare for the future.

Robert Shiller is an economist. We know this because he just received a Nobel Prize for economics. NPR Marketplace just now played a quote from Robert Shiller about the probability of federal default.

"It'll probably be OK, but I can't predict the future."

Today is Monday. He's talking about Thursday. He can't predict Thursday from Monday.

Therefore: Economics is NOT a science and all of its practitioners should be disbarred and ignored, just as we ignore astrologers. Closed, mofo.

QED. Of course we already knew this, but it's ever so nice to have a perfect disproof directly from the horse's ass.

Compare: How would real sciences handle a three-day prediction?

Meteorology: Thursday will be dry and cool. Low 35, high 60.

Botany: By Thursday, the deciduous trees will have dropped 40% of their leaves.

Both of those scientists are dealing with VASTLY more complex systems than the federal default. Each system has an exactly infinite number of variables, while federal default depends on exactly three bizarre Satanic pseudo-human thingamajigs (Reid, Boehner, Obama) whose behavior in nearly identical circumstances is known from previous years.
  ¶ 4:16 PM

  What time is it? Tsunami o'clock!
The western part of Wash will be holding a tsunami practice drill at 10:17 AM on 10/17 (Thursday). Local radio news mentioned this, even though it's not strictly relevant to us, and included a clip of the tsunami siren.

The siren is a Westminster chime! It's the most familiar two segments of the chime, technically speaking parts 4 and 5 of the pattern.

If you weren't aware of this, what would you think? "Oh, there's the half-hour. Must be 10:30. No, wait, my clock says 10:17. Better set it to 10:30 since the church clock is usuaTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP! CRASH! SPLASH! GLUB GLUB GLUB"

A long video on the Shakeout.org site gives clear instructions for handling a quake, with good explanations of the reasons.... but the recommendation is only valid for people working in a downtown area with skyscraper-type buildings that can drop cornices or windows. It urges you to stay inside a building and find cover. In a residential area, correct advice is the exact opposite, but the clip doesn't say this. Houses can fall. Sky can't fall. Get outside.

Later: Aha. The Westminster is one of the patterns available on the standard 'EOWS' sirens, and it's specifically meant to be used for benign testing, as in "Just making some noise, folks. Don't get excited." Having a distinct testing sound is an excellent idea, but the news piece didn't mention this.
  ¶ 6:58 AM

  Fish in a barrel


A huge discovery:

Scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Utrecht Medical Center in the Netherlands report in the new study that a class of specialized cells in the stomach reverts to stem cells more often than they thought.

“We already knew that these cells, which are called chief cells, can change back into stem cells to make temporary repairs in significant stomach injuries, such as a cut or damage from infection,” said Jason Mills.

If a significant injury is introduced in cell cultures or in animal models, more chief cells become stem cells, making it possible to fix the damage. “Chief cells normally are big factories with elaborate networks of tubing and secretory mechanisms for making and secreting digestive juices,” said Mills. “That all has to be dismantled and recycled so the chief cell can become a stem cell. It’s a remarkable change.”

Hugely newsworthy for three separate reasons:

(1) The discovery happened partly in America, which means the death-loving Embryonic Stem Cell forces are losing their iron grip on American science. Research on the real solution is now both fundable and publishable. Good sign of positive change.

(2) Basic implication is obvious: Everyone has their own highly productive and easily convertible stem cells that can be gathered directly with endoscopic tools.

(3) Another destroyer for evolution theories. Let's imagine how these chief cells "evolved". A cosmic ray penetrates the stomach of some early animal, and happens to hit just the right combination of genes to turn the cell into a "big factory with an elaborate network of tubing". Entirely possible. Oops! How did the stomach function without a complete set of those cells? Well, let that slide. Now we just need to have cosmic rays happen to hit the exact same combination of genes in millions of other cells, to create a stomach that can generate its own acids and enzymes. Now that the animal can eat and digest food, which it couldn't before... Oops, we'll let that slide. Now we need to have more cosmic rays cleverly finding just the right combination of genes in those factory cells, so that the factory cells know how to turn themselves back into generic cells. Now that we've got that, we need to have more cosmic rays happen to hit just the right combination of genes in most of those millions of chief cells, so the chief cells will know when to return to generic form in response to chemical signals from other cells when those other cells were injured by sharp stuff coming into the stomach. Now that we've got that, we need to have more cosmic rays hitting just the right combination of genes in those other cells so they will emit chemical signals when they're injured, and the signals must be the same ones that the chief cells understand. Oops! We just said they already knew how to emit signals, even though the signals were useless until the chief cells learned how to read the signals. Well, let that slide............

See how easy it is? It's all happenstance. No other possibility.

[Sidenote: Yes, I know the cosmic rays really need to be hitting the nuclei of egg cells or sperm cells so that the next generation will exhibit the changes. That doesn't affect the overall unlikeliness of the process, nor does it remove the X-before-Y AND Y-before-X contradictions.]

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 4:33 AM

  First thought, second thought
The sales end of Romneycare seems to be having serious tech problems, beyond the usual startup strain. It's taking info from users and giving the info to insurers in faulty form, with bad addresses and all sorts of missing data.

First thought: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. EAT IT, MONOPOLY INSURERS. YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE GETTING MILLIONS OF NEW FORCED CUSTOMERS WITH NO SALES EXPENSE. HA HA HA HA HA. JOKE'S ON YOU, ASSHOLES.

Second thought: The Post Office has been using computerized addresses since the '70s, and they have a complex but well-formed set of systems for handling variations in addresses.

For many years Repooflicans have been saying "You don't want health care to work as badly as the Post Office, do you?" I always thought that was a PHENOMENALLY STUPID comparison because even before Romneycare American health care was INFINITELY LESS competent, INFINITELY LESS customer-oriented and INFINITELY LESS friendly than the Post Office. Hospitals and doctors kill 200,000 Americans each year through mistakes. Somewhere around 5% of patients are harmed by medication errors. USPS never kills anyone, and has a much lower error rate in general. The comparison only tells me that the Repooflican yappers who make the comparison are superrich fuckheads who live in a privately owned bubble with private armies of doctors and private armies of illegal immigrant slaves. They have never experienced the horrible service of a proletarian hospital or the competent service of a postman or PO clerk.

Now the stupidity becomes perfectly literal. The Romneycare tax-funded salesman system is failing to use the Post Office's OWN address-determining system!
  ¶ 12:54 PM

  Rattle rattle rattle
First hard frost today. Seems earlier than the past few years, and the pattern is sharper than usual. Generally Oct is in the 60s with a few 70s. This year had a step-function from summer into fall; 90s steadily through August then down to 50s.

This morning all the trees are talking about the hard frost. As I walked, cones and leaves dropped around me every few seconds. Clunk, click, clunk, rattle....



Plants are not passive. They have their own slow-moving intelligence.

The seasonal step-pattern leaves the aphids with no clear swarm signal. Normally they mark the end of the 60s and 70s, informing us that winter is ready. No 60s and 70s this year, so you can't find the end of the 60s and 70s! I saw a few aphids last night. Maybe they'll mount a weak and slow swarm without a proper signal.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 8:45 AM

  Revolt of the non-living
Successful systems of ALL kinds require two qualities:

(1) Decoupling.

(2) Negative feedback.

Life invented these qualities. Or the Creator of Life invented them, if you prefer to think in those terms. In either case, they don't exist in the pre-life parts of the universe.

Life works because it's decoupled and loopy. Every module at every level, from mitochondria to cells to organs to individuals to hives, has its own loops, and each module has a strictly limited influence on other modules.

Half-formed thought: Human history has led to a wide variety of overlaid systems, each of which succeeded when it reached maximum Life, maximum decoupling and loopiness. Recently we've been running in reverse, turning many of those systems back toward a non-life condition with tight coupling and no feedback. In most cases we still have 'living' examples of each system, and the 'living' systems are usually growing and succeeding. But in some areas the 'living' examples are in danger from the power connections of the 'non-living' examples.

Yes, that's vague and sort of private-language-ish. See if some examples will clarify.

= = = = =

Religion. Decentralized churches are growing, centralized are shrinking. Who's growing? Islam and Baptist and Pentecostal. What do those belief systems LACK? They lack a Pope or an Archbishop of Canterbury or a Grand Pooh-bah. They are highly fragmented, with local and ethnic branches growing independently on the same belief base. A local church or ethnic branch may go bad (too loose or too tight), but it doesn't infect the other branches.

When you have a Pope or an A of C, you have O'Sullivan's Law writ large. A bad Pope like Miss Francine has total control, and all of her followers must remain loyal, must find a way to defend her apostasy. Everyone is required to catch the Popette's moral disease.

[Sidenote: The fact that decentralized and growing religions are also strict religions is a positive indication that most humans are morally healthy and resilient. Most of us understand why we need religion, and choose a religion that gives us what we need.]

= = = = =

Banking. TBTF says it all. Centralize, securitize, commoditize. Independent banks, tied together by clearing-houses and limited in their scope by strict laws, work well. One bank may become unprofitable, and may even fail, but its failure can be absorbed by the rest of the system. When the restrictions disappear and one Goldman controls everything, governments have to let Goldman do whatever it wants.

= = = = =

Computing. The personal computer has always been a threat to the old centralizers. Genuinely personal computer power reached a peak around 2000. Each desktop unit had its own CPU and its own storage for both programs and data. The punch-card boys never enjoyed losing their power, and now the 'Cloud' has finally brought them back into total control. Programs and data are now central, and each desktop or handheld unit is just a TTY. Punch-card boys are happy, and their friends in NSA and GCHQ are delirious.
  ¶ 5:53 AM

  More revolutionary revisions!
Miss Francine, who was briefly known as Pope Francis, isn't content to destroy the church by eliminating those old obsolete laws and scriptures. Now she/he/it has changed the main character who stands at the base of the former Christian religion.



We eagerly await the rest of her/his/its revisions. Will the Sacred Blood now become the Sacred Transmission Fluid? Stigmata become Holy Flat Tires? Crown of Thorns become Sacred Bird Poop On Windshield? Resurrection become Concours-Grade Restoration?

Oh well. After you destroy the basics, details don't matter.
  ¶ 3:42 AM

  Didn't play then either
This morning The Economist has an article on how the DC shutdown 'plays in Peoria'. Good coverage of ordinary people, and especially good understanding of gerrymandering. (Brit journalists often fail to pick up the dirty realities of American politics.)

Fibber and Molly were the main source of the 'plays in Peoria' theme. They grew up in Peoria, played in vaudeville, then on radio. Fibber (Jim Jordan) made a strict rule for the writers of his radio series: If it couldn't happen in Peoria, it won't happen on the show. He especially wanted to avoid inside jokes that would only be meaningful to Hollywood fatcats or NY intellectuals**. This restriction makes Fibber episodes a good reference for common culture: if you hear a word or idiom or topic, you can be sure most Americans understood it.

I always have some Fibber episodes on my bedtime playlist. I've recently bought a set of episodes from the late '50s that hadn't been in the usual circulation before. Nice to get 'new' stuff from a reliable source of entertainment.

Last night I was listening to a 'new' episode from 1955 in which Fibber writes an outraged letter to his Congressman. The show's writers rarely dipped into partisan politics, but this time they were pissed enough to sternly denounce a bill that would shut down all education funding until the budget was balanced.

Sounds familiar. A shutdown didn't play in Peoria in 1955, doesn't play now!



**Footnote: Chief writer Don Quinn left in '48 to do Halls Of Ivy. In this grotesquely condescending and unctuously smarmy 1951 interview he makes it painfully clear that he chafed under Fibber's restriction, that he felt Infinitely Intellectually Superior to those horrid midwestern Amerikkkans, and that he HATED HATED HATED having to obey Bourgeois Capitalist Imperialist Running Dog Slobs.

Labels: Danbo

  ¶ 6:54 AM

  Why no Service Cats?
Why don't you ever hear about a Service Cat for the Disabled? Here's why.

Dog: Oh! You need help! How can I help? Please let me help!

Cat: You're defective. I'm outta here.
  ¶ 5:25 AM

  Frustrating reformer
I've previously expressed frustration with Gove, the British ed minister. His goals are admirable and his focus on discipline is wonderfully correct, but his focus on rote learning is wrong.

Now we have an even more frustrating 'manifesto' by one of Gove's associates, Dominic Cummings. His diagnosis of the terminal illness of education is spot on. It's a very old illness, and every attempt to cure it has been swallowed and co-opted by the Satanic black hole of educrats. I heard my father cussing educrats in the '50s, I ran up against them in my own teaching in the '80s, and now Cummings takes his turn.

Of course the problem was around long before my father. Here is an extended quote from an 1899 book on Manual Training by William Hailmann. I transcribed instead of pasting a screencap as usual, because I want this to be searchable. Hailmann gives the same old diagnosis, followed by the CORRECT prescription.

The traditional school... puts an end to 'full life' in the development of the child. It seals hermetically the sources of the vitalizing stream that was meant to feed the child's soul with sparkling waters of personal experience and personal purpose. And then it dribbles into the captive soul in measured drops the stale waters of a spiritless conventionalism, of a distant past and far-away environments.

What wonder if the children learn little, and this little so slowly and painfully. What wonder if what they do learn lacks the warmth of life and is of little value to them in the concerns of practical life.

This is the situation which the so-called new education would change. It would keep the sources of fresh inflowing experience open and bring in new tributaries.

The business of life is adaptation to environment, to nature, to the universe. This implies knowledge and control of self and surroundings. The business of education is to lead the child to these things with the greatest possible economy of effort. The child should learn to rely implicitly on his power to see, say and do. He should acquire in these matters the habit of success, a calm sense of power, a firm conviction of mastership.

This is possible only if head and hand have been trained simultaneously and in unison; and for this manual training is indispensable. Manual training leads the student to use skill and knowledge in his geographical, historical, literary and scientific studies, in such a way that facts and relations, principles and formulas, become his living possession through rational doing, through their eager application in interesting creative work, rather than as a residue of tedious verbal repetition.

Why is Cummings so wildly frustrating? Because his diagnosis is so painstakingly complete and accurate, and some of his prescription is appropriate. (Get rid of teacher unions, get rid of educrats, open the system to charter and private.) But his purpose is fatally wrong.

Cummings says that social mobility is almost entirely dependent on genetics, so there's really no point in expecting education to help most kids. Education should be aimed primarily at the elites, the Mensa types who will Save The World By Pure Thought And Computer Modeling.

JESUS H. FUCKING CHRIST. DEAD WRONG ON ALL COUNTS.

CONSTANTS AND VARIABLES, FUCKHEAD.

First: Social mobility has drastically decreased in recent years, while human genes haven't changed. This should tell you that something external has changed. And the something external is no fucking mystery. We have ALREADY placed 100% of social value on the Mensa elites. We have OBLITERATED all value-adding jobs that non-elites can do. We have either shipped those jobs to China or robotized them. In short, we've eliminated HANDS from the economy.

Second: Public education wouldn't affect Cummings and his Mensa tribe because they are NOT IN THE FUCKING PUBLIC SCHOOLS. They are in Yeshivas or Country Day Schools, or they are home-schooled by armies of private tutors. They have an ideal constant, and won't be touched by this variable. If you build it they won't come.

Third: Pure Thought And Computer Modeling are PRECISELY why we've gotten into the current mess. We've relied on models for criminal Climate "Science", for nutrition, for business decisions, for government decisions, and ABOVE ALL for derivatives, options, lightspeed trading and QE counterfeiting. We don't need MORE modeling, we need PRECISELY ZERO modeling. Using models should be a shoot-on-sight capital offense.

If universal education had focused on hands instead of heads, we'd have the economic and intellectual force needed to reject formulas and models. Our factories would still be running because we wouldn't have allowed the modelers to take over business and government. Our ordinary non-Mensans would still have jobs that paid enough to buy what they made.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Experiential education

  ¶ 2:50 AM

  Man in a box
Pomeroy at RealClearScience discusses a new and fairly obvious 'study' that invalidates most modern research on diet and nutrition. Apparently most modern research relies on self-reporting of caloric intake, and most people underestimate their caloric intake.

No duh, as they say.

A century ago, diet research was more properly scientific because University Ethics Committees hadn't yet been invented. Dietetics was a branch of Home Ec, which was a hard science, relying on carefully measured experiments. Now dietetics is a social "science", running on poorly monitored surveys. Example of the old way from Food and Dietetics, written in 1907 by Alice Peloubet Norton, prof of Home Ec at Chicago:

Wait! What? A female college professor in 1907? No! No! Impossible! Everyone knows that wyymmmyyyns were barefoot and pregnant in 1907!

In fact most profs in Home Ec and related fields, and many profs in biology and geography, were female. When Home Ec was killed by feminists a major employment opportunity for female academics was also killed. Of course that's the sole purpose of feminism: to guarantee that woemooooons can only be placed in situations where they will fail, thus "justifying" the need for government subsidies and Die-Versity Laws.

Here's how calorie requirements were determined in 1907: Atwater's full-body calorimeter. Put a man in a sealed box, leave him there for a few days, have him do exercises on command, and record all inputs and outputs. Food, poop, oxygen, CO2, temperature, physical work, everything.


The Box seen from outside, with part of the extensive lab around it:



And the inside:

And here are some recommended intakes resulting from Atwater's Man In A Box and similar experiments in Britain and Germany. Maybe we should use these recommendations instead of modern ones, since they were derived by real science, and also because 1907 people were lean and trim.



Incidentally, dietaries meant prescribed or recommended diets, and proteid isn't a misprint. The word changed from proteid to protein later, just as hominid more recently changed to hominin. No particular reasod for either change; just keeping the hoi polloi confusen.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Blinded by Stats, Ethics, Metrology

  ¶ 4:26 AM

  Alfred would understand
The Nobel wackos have done something bizarre this year. Normally the Peace Prize is awarded to the most loyal servant of Stalin, the most effective mass murderer, the most unimaginably crazy psychopathic alien. This time the committee has accidentally followed the will of Alfred Nobel explicitly and literally. Nobel regretted inventing dynamite and wanted to insure that people wouldn't use weapons to make war. Nerve gas was a weapon Nobel would have understood.

Of course even Nobel's original purpose was backwards. The plain and simple fact is that big weapons do prevent some kinds of war. When a government has a weapon that its internal and external enemies can't match, and when the gov't has shown a willingness to use the weapon, its enemies won't attack. This mainly prevents internal rebellions, but nevertheless it prevents some death and destruction that would occur otherwise.
  ¶ 3:21 AM

  Which is better?
Local schools and media have been running nonstop memorial activity for two weeks after a couple of high-school kids died in a car accident.

It wasn't that way in the '60s. I'm thinking about an inconspicuous girl named Lana. She was absent for a couple weeks, then the teacher announced a new seating arrangement that filled in the chair Lana had occupied. Someone asked why. "Because she died." Oh.

And that was it. No ceremonies, no Grief Counselors, no teddy-bears on fences, no media coverage. Just revise the seating chart.

Which is better? I suspect the optimum is somewhere between.


Sidenote: We were tacitly led to believe that Lana had died from some unspecified illness, but I wasn't convinced. She hadn't seemed ill, she had seemed blank, like her soul had died long before her body. Lots of fathers in those days were drunken brutes. I don't know if that was the case with Lana, but the picture was unfortunately familiar.

That's another big difference between the two eras: today's parents and kids seem to get along in an amazingly positive way. Might be totally unprecedented in human history. I hope this generation gets a chance to take over before we fuck everything up.
  ¶ 6:41 AM

  Spearing Satan
Continuing yesterday's theme. African media are emphasizing this story today. An obscure NGO has done a detailed report on UN failures in Africa:

Transparency International said in a report Wednesday that the United Nations has failed to make tackling corruption in U.N. peacekeeping operations a priority, leading to cases of bribery, fraud, theft and exploitation of natural resources and resulting in the loss of tens of millions of dollars.

The report cites examples dating back to 2000 when peacekeepers in Sierra Leone were alleged to be smuggling diamonds...

There is external corruption in the host nation which is "likely to be endemic" and where greater efforts are needed to keep it from becoming embedded, he said, and there is corruption within the peacekeeping force which needs stronger oversight than the U.N. has today.

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Management Yukio Takasu said before the report's release that the U.N. monitors abuse of power, illegalities and corruption, and it has very tight financial controls and inspectors in peacekeeping operations.

Right, Yukio. The report is Not Receivable. Just let Satan monitor Satan, like the banks monitor the banks. Self-regulation is always perfect.

Nothing new in the report. The Alger Hiss Organization has been operating the same way since 1946. Fact-loving Americans have been trying to call attention to it since 1946. Satan's media has been coating us with tinfoil since 1946.

Now it's heartening to watch the Southern nations calling attention to the same old facts. Satan's media hasn't yet tinfoiled those countries, so their message can reach the public for a few moments. Through the Cold War era most African countries adhered to the Russian side, which meant they also obeyed the UN. Now that the South is feeling more independent, with Brazil as a leader and China as a sponsor, the UN is losing much of its reliable voting bloc.



Graphical note: I was trying to make iconic African spears, but they look more like X-Acto Knives in this context!
  ¶ 4:20 AM

  Suing Satan
Bravo to Haiti for trying to sue Satan!

Victims of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti are suing the United Nations for billions of dollars in damages over claims it was triggered when sewage from infected peacekeepers was discharged into the water system.

The Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which has filed the suit, said in a statement: 'The plaintiffs include Haitians and Haitian Americans who contracted cholera themselves as well as family members of those who died of the disease.'

[Satan's] spokesman Martin Nesirky said in February of this year that the United Nations advised the representatives of the cholera victims that 'the claims are not receivable pursuant to Section 29 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities.'

"Not receivable?" Receive THAT, Satan!
  ¶ 4:14 AM

  Reynolds Wrap
Was reading some comment on the NSA/Snowden thing, and was suddenly struck by the sheer oddness of the situation.

I've talked about this before, but didn't spot the oddness. I've understood since the '70s that CIA operates domestically, and I've understood since the '80s that NSA monitors absolutely everything. I can't be alone in this; lots of Americans were in similar situations at various times, so lots of Americans have reached the same understanding in varying degrees of certainty and detail.

Snowden's news shouldn't have been news.

Why was it?

The power of the pooh-pooh, that's why. Media and commentators on all "sides" roared and thundered whenever a mere human tried to speak a tiny piece of truth. Media and commentators on all "sides" constantly conflated dumb conspiracy theories (some of which were clearly manufactured by AP's working for the secret police) with real suspicions based on real observations. Any attempt to note a problem was instantly coated with tinfoil.

Snowden has momentarily broken through the tinfoil curtain. Because he had documents, and because he had friends in non-extraditable places, he was able to escape and speak a very large piece of the truth.

It will be interesting to watch the repair process. Snowden can't be easily suicided, so the Reynolds Wrap will have to be patched elsewhere.
  ¶ 2:45 AM

  Paradoxical reversal
Purely personal...

A series of dreams this week gave me an insight into my 'stages' of life. Back in the 1970s, in my 20s, I was a scrawny gawky pimply adolescent. Yet I moved confidently in adult circles. In Enid and Norman, I knew people with some degree of power, people who later became congressmen or mayors. They seemed to respect me.

Now I look more like an adult, more like people with power; in fact I look something like Mohammed Morsi. Not necessarily a good omen!... but still, he did have power for a while. Yet I don't move comfortably in any circles, let alone powerful circles. I feel more like a scrawny gawky pimply adolescent, and I shout here in these lines of text with no illusion that anyone is listening.

Why the paradoxical reversal? Dunno. Not sure that I need or want to do anything about it, because the current situation is far more comfortable. I've arranged a narrow little introvert life, and it works just fine for a narrow little introvert.

These dreams are saying that the previous 'high-places' situation was a tightrope that wasn't much fun when it was real. I had to drink to maintain it. Not a new insight, but the dream generator apparently decided that a sharp reminder was needed.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 4:22 PM

  I like this "shutdown"
Was paying zero attention to the idiot antics in DC until I heard some specifics about agencies affected by the slowdown. The EPA Terrorist Army is 95% down, and the same for NASA.

YAY!

This is the only way the chickenshit fagass bitchass sissyass Repooflicans could manage to defund the EPA Terrorist Army. They didn't have the motherfucking guts to do it the proper fucking way. Nevertheless, it's ACTUALLY DEFUNDED for a while, and NASA, former operating base for Satan Hansen, is also ACTUALLY DEFUNDED for a while.

Keep it up forever! I don't give a fuck what else has to be shut off, if this leads to keeping the EPA Terrorist Army out of action.

Ideally it should be 'negatively funded'. Its employees should be placed in hard labor camps and farmed out as permanent personal slaves to people whose lives were smashed by EPA Terrorist Activity. Its budget should be tripled and devoted solely to UNDOING 40 years of EPA torture. Rebuild the demolished dams, recapitalize and rebuild the resource industries (logging, steel, coal, nuclear, etc) that were obliterated by the EPA monsters.

Aside from my pet hates, the overall picture is pretty decent. The parts that represent appropriate government activities are still running, and the parts that are pure evil are shut down. This is approaching an optimal federal government! More, please!

Later: Economist Ritholtz, who sometimes makes sense, guesses that a one-month "shutdown" will cause a 30% loss in the false "value" of the Wall Street Crime. Good! Excellent! Beautiful! Let's have a 12-month "shutdown" to guarantee that the Wall Street Crime is completely and decisively collapsed. Again, shooting would be better than shutting, but I won't quibble about verb tenses if we can zero out all the criminal false "value".
  ¶ 7:16 AM

  Hexed headline
Clearly the spirit of Halloween put a Hex on this headline in a local TV station's website:



I wonder if something new is going on in the hacking department. I've never seen this type of computer glitch before, and it's hard to imagine how it happened. When text goes wrong at the HTML level, it's usually a Unicode or codepage problem, showing characters from the wrong part of the ASCII list. You'll see something like ¡Û Á¤È¸¿øÀº ¼ÒÁ¤ÀÇ È¸ºñ ³³ºÎ¿Í³³ºÎ´Â 2014³â ¿ù 1¸¸¿ø ÀÌ»ó.

This looks more like a direct memory dump expressed in hex.

Similarly, the recent bank error that placed $4,040,404,040,404.04 in several accounts. This is not a data entry problem, or a bad binary arithmetic operation translated to decimal, even if you assume that banks are using BCD instead of strict binary. This looks more like a flag register that got treated as a BCD numeric value. (Apparently there's a way to make this happen in COBOL.)
  ¶ 5:43 AM

  Reverse causation as usual
Some discussion about awarding the Nobel Satan Prize to Malalalalalalala or whatever. If it's solely about courage, she deserves it. No doubt there. Malalalalala or whatever was courageous on her own before the Commies picked up her cause. Most of our "courageous crusaders for rights" are actually lifelong Commie activists from privileged backgrounds, who faked their life stories with conspiratorial assistance from the Soviet media.

But what about the specific subject? Does increased female literacy lead to peace? No.

Look at the ranking of countries by female literacy. It's pretty much what you'd expect. The top 70, all richer and better-organized temperate zone countries, are all at 100% literacy, give or take a few points for varying statistical methods. [A reported number like 96% is actually more trustworthy than 100%, because 100% is impossible.] As you descend the list, you get closer to the Equator, and you get into poorer and less organized countries.

How does that ranking correlate with warlike tendencies? Well, it depends on which kind of war you're talking about. The top 70 countries, the more Kraut-like countries, have been responsible for all of the Giant Wars that killed multiple millions. The bottom 70 countries, the less Kraut-like countries, include many that are in a state of permanent unrest, along with many that are peaceful. They do NOT include any countries that make Giant Wars.

In other words, female literacy is just one of the side effects of overall discipline and organization. It doesn't cause anything.
  ¶ 4:36 AM

  Non-random observation on random
When "scientists" call a process Random, they mean it's indeterminate or incalculable; when "scientists" call a process Ordered, they mean it's determinate or calculable. This is pure nonsense.

Let's arbitrarily focus on one simple calculable measurement, the side-to-side rotation of a car.

In the initial state, which we'll call S-sub-0, the frame is horizontal.


Here's one altered state S-sub-1, with the left side of the frame down.


And now we have a second altered state S-sub-2, with the left side of the frame up.


We would typically treat S1 as the result of random processes, and we would treat S2 as the result of non-random ordering processes.

Let's take a different path.

S1 happened because the left front tire went flat, which resulted from an unsupervised set of natural processes. Molecules of rubber moved into a condition that no longer separated high-pressure interior air from lower-pressure exterior air, and the 'random' Brownian motion of the air caused the two pressures to equalize.

S2 results from a supervised set of natural processes. Polistra noticed that the car wasn't level, diagnosed the problem, gathered appropriate tools, and began to correct the condition.

If you look at either process from a sufficiently microscopic viewpoint, you'd be unable to tell the difference. No matter where you looked, you'd see molecules moving around. Are these movements EVER indeterminate or unpredictable? No. Never. At any single instant, each molecule is pushed by its neighbors using electrostatic forces, and at any instant these (relatively few) neighborly pushes can be calculated nicely by plain old Newtonian laws. We can't possibly calculate the full set of movements over any non-zero time interval, but this is true in both situations. This is a practical limitation, not a distinction between the two types of situation. In theory we could run back and calculate all the influences on one molecule since the creation of the universe, which means its motion is always determinate and predictable. Practically, the task is impossible because it would require a practically infinite number of arithmetic operations.

So there's no such thing as indeterminate. The "scientific" definition of random vs order is simply and obviously nonsensical.

What then is the real difference? The molecules inside Polistra's cells are part of a living organism. Their movements are channeled at every level to achieve the purposes of this living organism. Some of those molecules are helping to power muscles in her arm, some are picking up light waves and passing them on to other molecules that are helping to process the light waves into signals, then on to others that compare the signals with templates resulting from internal memory references... and so on literally ad infinitum.

Is purpose always part of a living organism? Microscopically it's always the same. All organisms from bacteria to vertebrates have similar purposive loops and control mechanisms inside their cells. Microscopically the purpose is always to maintain extreme differentials of temperature, pressure and chemistry between inside and outside, so conditions inside the cell remain conducive to running the purposive loops. At larger scales the purpose is expressed in all sorts of ways. A bacterium sends and receives chemical and electromagnetic signals, and moves toward food; vertebrates send and receive acoustic, visual, chemical, and electromagnetic signals, and move toward all sorts of goals.

Is an extreme differential always 'orderly'? No. A nice example popped up just as I started to write this paragraph. I'm running laundry this morning in my stupid fucking front-loader machine. I heard it start to spin. I trotted to the laundry room so I could be prepared to shut it off early, because the load is usually distributed with an extreme differential, causing the machine to shake itself and the floor to disordered pieces. This morning, unusually, the load happened to be nearly 'random' so I could allow the spin to finish with minimum destruction. [Sidenote: I'll never buy another stupid fucking front-loader. A top-loader can also be unbalanced, but the top-loader allows you to flip the lid and rearrange the contents at any time. It lets you apply human purpose to the load based on human intelligence that remembers the result of an extreme differential.]

Conclusion: When we talk about random vs ordered, we're not talking about any mechanically measurable difference. We're only talking about living purpose. Soul, if you like that word.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 4:14 AM

  Round the bend
Every day's load of news-shit contains billions of grotesque indications of insanity beyond insanity beyond insanity beyond insanity beyond insanity, but this one has a certain finality about it. The authorities in Britain have raised insanity to an infinite exponent, and there's absolutely no return. Only total revolution and total obliteration can cure this Aleph-sub-10 insanity.

Lord Sugar has been investigated by police after he was accused a posting a racist message on Twitter. The tycoon posted a photograph of a crying Chinese child and joked: "The kid in the middle is upset because he was told off for leaving the production line of the iPhone 5."

How in the motherfucking motherfuck can this be described as racist and called a "hate incident"? It's a strong ANTI-SLAVERY sentiment, and it criticizes both Apple and the Chinese government for running slave labor in China. It's the PRECISE DIAMETRICAL OPPOSITE of a criticism of Chinese people; it's exactly a stout DEFENSE of Chinese people.

I can't hope to understand the "thought" "process" that defines an ANTI-SLAVERY PRO-CHINESE comment as "racist". Absolutely alien. These ... things ... have removed themselves from the human species, and only vaporization can restore humanity. 100 megatons on DC, 100 megatons on NY, 100 megatons on London, 1000 gigatons on Brussels. Please, Lord. Save us.
  ¶ 5:33 AM

  Perfect example
Spokane newspaper's website celebrates the "work" of someone who has been officially named as the city's Poet Laureate. His "poetry" is a typical Facebook profile update. Just a few lines about what's happening today. It's not poetic in any sense of the word, and it's indistinguishable from most of the unpaid writing you can find in most comboxes on the Web.

Apparently this ordinary shopping-list stuff magically turns to poetry when you insert linebreaks in unexpected places.

Well then, let's see if I can make poetry. Start with some non-poetry:

Got up this morning. Short sleep because of gas pains. Peed, washed face, took BP pill, made coffee. Sat down at computer, decided to start a new little graphics project because mind has been insufficiently occupied. Started setting up a model of a coin-operated scale. Read that Northern Lights had put on a show last night. Opened back door, stepped out on porch, looked. Nope, nothing here as always. Disappointed.

The above is not poetry because it's not spaced funny. It's just a dumb list of what I did so far today, expressed in the terse checklist-like form I use when 'thinking out loud' or talking to myself. It's not even interesting to me, so I wouldn't presume that it could be interesting to anyone else.

Let's magically transform it:

Got up this
morning. Short sleep because of gas
pains. Peed, washed
face, took
BP
pill, made coffee. Sat down at computer, decided
to start a new little
graphics project because mind
has been insufficiently occupied. Started setting
up
a model of a coin-operated scale. Read
that Northern Lights had put
on a show last
night. Opened
back door, stepped
out on porch,
looked. Nope,
nothing here as always.
Disappointed.

The above is poetry because it's spaced funny and italicized.

Well, actually it still isn't poetry, because I'm not titled Poet Laureate. You can't do Art unless you have a title. When you have a title, everything you do is Art.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 4:28 AM

  3 = 8 ?
There's generally a motive behind most actions of Satanic illegitimate "governments", and it's generally easy enough to spot. Most of the time, the motive is maximal profit for banksters; sometimes it's maximal power for the Fashionable Ones.

This new action is a puzzle. Maybe writing these thoughts will help me to parse the motive, but I doubt it.

Three-parent embryos. In the first place, why does anyone WANT to do this? No possible reason.

And the response of the usual Satans is equally inconsistent and puzzling. EU, normally predictable in its absolute unconditional mandatory support of evil, is opposing this practice. Why? EU considers two male parents or two female parents to be Perfect. One male and one female is Morally Dubious, but practically hard to Exterminate, so EU hasn't tried very hard ... YET ... to exterminate mixed-gender parents.

Three parents are even more unnatural and even more firmly against 50,000 years of experimental data than same-sex parents. Since the EU's prime directive is to violate all facts and disobey all scientific results in all possible areas, it should gloriously celebrate this new method which violates science and common sense EVEN MORE FEROCIOUSLY than two-male and two-female combinations.

Well, is it just numerology? Superstitious fear of 3? I can see some consistency there. The Fashionable Ones are wildly opposed to older forms of polygamy. They literally made war against Mormons for practicing polygamy, and they've acted with equal violence against modern polygamist cults.

Possible parallel: Entomologists who work comfortably with 6-legged insects find 8-legged spiders to be scary and icky. So maybe these powerhungry bloodthirsty lunatics who work comfortably with various types of 2-partner marriages simply find 3 to be so scary and icky that they can't make their usual genocidal rules. It doesn't matter if the 3 parents are all the same sex ... which logically should be EVEN BETTER than 2 of the same sex. It's 3, so we can't think about it.
  ¶ 5:23 AM

  Okay, so it's a "right"
Obama likes to say that health care is a "right". I don't go along with the whole concept of "rights", because it's a monstrous and dangerous piece of illogic; but almost everyone uses the concept, and "courts" certainly use it.

Okay. Let's do it their way. Let's use the concept for the sake of argument. Health care is a "right", which means the 14th Amendment applies. Health care must be provided in the same way for all types of people, and in all states and localities.

Now let's look at the fairness of this "right". To make it real, here's the rate table for a Bronze plan given by my insurance provider:



Note that the rates differ by a factor of 6, depending on location, age, and smoking. This is perfectly normal and proper for private insurance. This is exactly how insurance is meant to work, and it tends to be 'fair enough' for each type of person. If your characteristics make it likely that you'll cost the insurer more, you should pay more.

But it's blatantly improper for a "right". An absolute "right" cannot differ by location, cannot differ by age, and cannot differ by personal habits. Traditionally there have been some practical differences between child and adult, and some exceptions for illegal personal habits; but modern "courts" are trying to erase those differences. Since we know Obama loves these modern "courts", we'll go in their direction for the sake of argument.

Well then, where's the nationwide class-action suit? Why haven't the 9th Circuit Satans gone ahead and issued an Instant Imperial Diktat, without the need for a suit? They do it for other "violations" of "rights", why not this one?

Won't happen. Lawyers and "judges" wear the Goldman D-label shirt, which means they are never going to sue Their Lord And Saviour, His Holiness Barack Obama. Even though His Holiness is doing 100.00000000% of the same shit that Their Evil Nemesis Mitt Romney would have done while wearing the Goldman R-label shirt. It's all about shirts and letters. If you have the correct letter on your jersey, everything you do is Angelic.
  ¶ 3:02 AM

  Memory hole at work
Super-weird example of media idiocy.

SPOKANE, Wash. -- City leaders confirmed Friday that they are starting a pilot project to better clear driveways snow berms. Snow removal teams will test equipment to remove berms created by plows. Leaders said they ordered one boot which will be attached to a grader. The grader pushes snow to the sides of streets, similar to a plow. The boot would be used to clear plowed snow from the end of driveways. Spokane Mayor David Condon said he hopes to test the process and find out how long jobs will take, or whether or not it will be financially beneficial to the City. Leaders also said that only one boot will be enough to provide data to see if it will make a difference.

Sounds like an interesting new pilot project unless you have a memory. THE GRADER BOOT WAS INVENTED HERE IN SPOKANE by the city's own drivers and mechanics, sometime in the 1960s. Spokane was unique for a while, until the invention spread to other cities. Spokane was still using the grader boots when I moved here in 1991; they stopped a few years later, maybe 1995. So it's been less than 20 years since the gadget was STANDARD PROCEDURE here.

The news article doesn't mention any of this, and the writer is even ignorant of the way the boot works. It doesn't "clear plowed snow from the end of driveways". It's a hydraulically controlled gate on the right end of the grader blade. The driver drops the boot while he's passing a driveway, and the boot temporarily prevents the snow from flowing to the side.

Now the idea is treated as an import from other cities, and even the city gov't seems to be treating it as a completely fresh idea that nobody has ever encountered before!!!!

Later: Well, I take it back somewhat. The TV version of the story doesn't ignore the history. "For the first time in decades, Spokane residents may be able to use their driveways...."

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 4:00 PM

  I love it.
Those barriers around the White House, and similar barriers around most Fed courthouses and office buildings, were built in the '90s to guard against alleged White Supremacists. Since then the barriers have been reinforced every time some white dude got uppity and dared to open his white mouth.

And now the barriers have finally served their purpose! Yes, one of those evil white southern Christian Klansmen finally tried to get at the African-American Living Saint President, Our Most Holy And Angelic Lord And Saviour Amen! And the barriers stopped him!

Oops? You say it wasn't a Klansman after all? Not even a white dude? Nooooooooooooooooo! I can't believe it! I won't believe it! You say it was a crazy black woman who thought Obama was stalking her with microwaves? Nooooooooo! That's impossible. Unthinkable. Unfathomable. Does not exist. Rectify! Rectify! Rectify! Memory Hole!

Oh well. Doesn't matter. We'll still go on spending billions to rebuild and reinforce the barriers every time some uppity white dude opens his mouth.

= = = = =

DEAD SERIOUS NOW: Have we figured it out yet? Have we figured it out yet? Have we figured it out yet? Or do we need a few thousand more incidents?

We should stop worrying about "terrorists" of all colors and varieties. They are not the big problem. Most likely they are all failed stings anyway. We should stop worrying about guns. They are not the big problem. The big problem is schizophrenics. Before the 1970s we handled them properly. We had involuntary commitment, we didn't toss them in ordinary jails, and we didn't toss them on the streets. We had asylums that focused on useful work instead of drugs and TV. Sun, soil, hands, completion, competence. During the 1970s both political "sides" conspired (as always) to move schizies out of those generally benign and curative conditions. Now everyone is vulnerable. The schizies are vulnerable to poverty, starvation and ordinary crime, and normal people are vulnerable to the huge crimes that a smart schizy can commit. Both political "sides" prefer it this way, because maximum vulnerability maximizes their power and profit.
  ¶ 5:51 AM

  Electric Girls
Happened on this while looking through 1839 texts on electricity. Just seemed cute. Even at that early stage of electric learning, the author understood the process well enough to spot a likely fraud.



Tongue firmly in cheek at "Saving this singular circumstance..."
  ¶ 5:33 PM

  Primates throw poop
Interesting and important bit of psych research.

People believe that negative outcomes are especially likely after a jinx. If someone says, "No one I know will ever get into a car accident," for example, it often feels that a car accident is likely to occur. But people's elevated concerns after tempting fate can be eliminated if they engage in a ritual to undo that bad luck.

Noting that many of the most common rituals for undoing bad luck – knocking on wood, spitting, and throwing salt – all seem to involve movements that exert force away from a person, researchers set out to test whether the avoidant nature of the action is key for reducing the negative expectations and heightened concern generated by tempting fate.

"Our findings suggest that not all actions to undo a jinx are equally effective. Instead, we find that avoidant actions that exert force away from one's representation of self are especially effective for reducing the anticipated negative consequences following a jinx" says Jane Risen, associate professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth. "Engaging in an avoidant action seems to create the sense that the bad luck is being pushed away."

Basically an emotional equivalent to basic physiological actions. Eliminate the poop from the body and flush it or bury it. Or compare with the phage action of immune cells consuming bad microbes and carrying them out via the kidney.

More complex rituals accomplish the same purpose without the direct throwing action. Burnt sacrifices transfer the bad luck into the sacrificed object, then simultaneously eliminate the object and purify with smoke.

For serious Christians who know history, knocking on wood is a double play: it adduces the sacrifice on the cross, and it moves the hand away.

Aside from subject, the study itself is notable because it was done with real physical actions, not the usual computer-based "games". Much more likely to be valid.
  ¶ 4:36 AM

  Musical echo
Super-random thought. Heard a familiar '90s pop tune on the radio yesterday. Remembered liking the song when it was common. Why did I like it? There was something attractively relentless about the tune.... Reminded me of something much older ..... Yes, that's it.

The '90s pop tune: Gangstas Paradise.



The much older tune: the Mockingbird lullaby.



Same tune, transposed into minor. Similar sequential pattern in the words. Obviously not the same theme!
  ¶ 4:02 AM

  Threat? No.
Typical quotes from news articles considering the effects of a default:

It's unfathomable... it would send shock waves through the financial community ... A default could create a chaotic situation on the international market for debt .... Investors would not want to accept bonds that were no longer paying interest. ... But the market is not set up to deal with rejected bonds, so there could be a period of confusion for traders.

Unfathomable! Clang, clang, clang, clang....


Polistra's Law of the Unthinkable: Any time the elites call X unthinkable, you can be 100% sure that X is the best of all possible actions.

Polistra has repeatedly examined this point. Might be unfathomable, but it would be GOOD and NECESSARY.

Is default a threat to the economy? NO. It is a beautiful chance to FIX the economy, a chance for REBIRTH of an actual economy.

Default is a threat to the BANCONOMY, the parasites who have total control in Western countries. The BANCONOMY is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the ECONOMY, and has nearly killed the ECONOMY wherever it has taken control.

Interest rates SHOULD go up drastically. Borrowing SHOULD become nearly impossible, and saving SHOULD become attractive. THIS IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING PURPOSE OF INTEREST RATES.

The nations that depend totally on the BANCONOMY, namely US and UK, will go through a period of trouble, but other sane countries will take over and may be able to reconstruct the ECONOMY in these two countries on sane foundations. Like receivership after bankruptcy. UK could become a protectorate under India, US a protectorate under China.

Not pleasant to be sure, but the only pleasant solution is 100 megatons on NY, 100 megatons on DC, 100 megatons on London. With the receivership route, China and India would try to salvage real production if possible. They've already demonstrated this process in Africa.

Labels: the broken circle

  ¶ 3:27 AM

  Constants and variables 3
News coverage on the rollout of Romneycare is focusing on glitches in the system of websites and "navigators".

Wrong focus. There will always be glitches in a startup. That's an inevitable CONSTANT. No amount of testing substitutes for an assault by actual users.

The VARIABLE here, the NEW thing about this system, is the use of state and federal tax money to PAY insurance salesmen. That's exactly what these Exchanges and Navigators are. Everyone pays the salaries of these salesmen, and only the insurance companies benefit from their work.

Well then, the insurance companies are getting a break, so they must be passing the break along to customers? Nope, all premiums are going up.

Supposedly bringing in all those new "young and healthy" customers will pay for the increased services to "old and sick"? Nope, it's the other way around.

In those terms I'm something like "old and moderately healthy". My premium will go up by 50% to pay for MATERNITY AND CHILD VISION AND DENTAL SERVICES, which I will never need in any conceivable universe, and which obviously serve a "young and healthy" population.

Nice compromise, President Romney. Nice balance of inputs and outputs. You charge me extra for services to the "young and healthy", and in return I get .... what? The comforting knowledge that young people can pay $90 a year to avoid making their own contribution to MATERNITY AND CHILD VISION AND DENTAL SERVICES? The comforting knowledge that insurance companies are getting a government-enforced total monopoly plus vastly increased premiums plus government paid salesmen?

I'm not comforted, President Romney.
  ¶ 5:29 AM

  Good analogy after all
Listening to "news" about the government "shutdown", I tried to make an analogy. What if I closed down my own household and stopped paying bills because of an ... internal dispute???

Huh? How could that happen? Well, I could pretend that Polistra and Happystar disagree about the electric bill because Happystar provides his own illumination. Or I could pretend that Lady Danbo doesn't want to pay the property tax because she sleeps outside in her own little house.

But of course these "people" are purely imaginary cartoon characters, in total contrast to the Repooflicans and Democrats who are ....

Aha! No, it's not different at all. It's an excellent analogy.

What are those DC Comics characters arguing about? Well, BatRepooflican refuses to approve the health care system designed by BatRepooflican, while DemoRobin insists on enforcing the health care system designed by BatRepooflican. That's the dispute.



See what I mean? Purely imaginary cartoon characters. Actual humans couldn't possibly behave so bizarrely.
  ¶ 2:45 AM