Yet again
UncommonDescent cites a new piece of SJW toxic sludge:

It has been argued many times over the course of decades and across diverse paradigms that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education practices-as-usual (re)produce systems of dominance: be it patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, (neo-)colonialism, able-ism, classism, labor inequity, anthropocentrism, and/or others. Thankfully, there are many who are doing the critical and creative work of (re)opening STEM education to the possibility of eco-social justice to-come through a plurality of productive approaches, orientations, and stances: anti-oppressive, anti-racist and critical race-based, decolonizing and de/colonizing, queer, Indigenous, gender-equitable, post-colonial, community-based and participatory, critical place-based, inter-species, and many more.

The good part: This shit is unreadable. The above paragraph contains two sentences. Each sentence is nothing more than a LIST of fashionable jargon, tangled in hopelessly bad syntax. It doesn't say anything, so it can't influence real teachers DIRECTLY.

The bad part: If someone manages to find the point of this shit and translate it into English, it will do MASSIVE LETHAL HARM to EXACTLY THE PEOPLE IT CLAIMS TO HELP.

= = = = =

We do have a real problem in USA education, a problem that has gone on for 100 years with no improvement. As I tiresomely fucking repeat every fucking day, our math and science teaching is solely designed to select and motivate maximally autistic and maximally abstract PhDs in maximally autistic and utterly useless and bizarrely delusional "math" and "science".

The solution is clear and perfectly well-known. Does this shit article get anywhere near the known solution?

= = = = =

Later in the shit article, one section appears to be getting close....

Nikki Rotas’ contribution “puts to work” (Lather 2007) Baradian notions of diffraction in her work with children (ages 10–12) in an afterschool robotics club. Rotas’ goal is to engender an understanding of design that can resist or escape rigid disciplinary pathways of both experience and design through cyborg embodiments of vision with wearable technologies. Can learning lead to and from alternate ontological and epistemologies that emerge from engagement with multiple assemblages and apparatuses?

Well, I'll bet those kids appreciated Baradian notions of diffraction and alternate ontological and epistemologies. If nothing else, they UNlearned(pre) how of writ(noth)ing Englishes the sentenced and.

Looking through the references and links, I found a vast universe of the same brain-dissolving toxin, wasting vast piles of university money.

Every penny of school budget, and every second of teacher attention, wasted on this SHIT is money and time that COULD have gone to real teaching that would really serve black and poor kids.

Yet again USA education is RUINING its own kids by taking the MOST DESTRUCTIVE PATH IMAGINABLE, when the CORRECT path has always been available.

And that's the WORST part. Schools should be focusing STRICTLY on experience-based and job-like training for the vast majority of students who are NOT going to be autistic PhDs.

The small silver lining: Many good teachers are TRYING to focus on job-like training. They are visible and HELPABLE through DonorsChoose.org.

= = = = =

Slightly calmer afterthought: I suppose this is just the latest and greatest Edufad. Ed administrators and planners have always been pushed and pulled by immeasurably stupid Edufads, always expressed in incomprehensible jargon. Edufads ALWAYS pretend to "solve" a problem by making it worse, so the admins can demand more budget next year to "solve" the worse problem, ad infinitum. Parkinson.

Labels: Experiential education, Pluponents

  ¶ 1:04 AM

  Not a paradox
A political theorist who has obviously never met any ordinary people comes up with a truly ignorant "paradox" about "authoritarians" like Bolsonaro and Orban.

I use the World Values Survey and European Values Survey to examine the relationship between democratic discontent and the left-right political spectrum. I find that, contrary to much contemporary commentary, hostility to democracy is strongest not at the political extremes, but in the center. Respondents at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, least committed to its institutions, and most supportive of authoritarianism. I refer to this surprising finding as the ‘centrist paradox.’

No, it's not a paradox.

Ordinary non-extreme people want to LIVE AND WORK.

When a "democratic" government brings in cheap foreign labor to disemploy you, and brings in criminal gangs of migrants to kill you, and neuters the police so criminals can rob you, you are NOT LIVING and NOT WORKING.

Ordinary people get unhappy when they are not allowed to LIVE AND WORK. They understand ACCURATELY that it takes a FORCEFUL leader to fight against the corporations and NGOs and bankers who are KILLING us.

The "extremes" aren't nearly as interested in living and working, because (at least in Sorosian lands) the "extremes" are organized and funded by Deepstate.

This isn't new. In the 1850s NYC industrialists funded and organized the abolitionists. In the 1960s CIA was running both the hippies and the Birchers. In modern times CIA is running both the alt-right and the Antifa.

Those "extremes" don't want a new system of government because they're EMPLOYEES of the existing Deepstate.


There. No paradox at all.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Sorosia

  ¶ 5:06 PM

  More dumb "whistleblowers"
The biggest and SMARTEST scam of modern times is the idea that NSA's web is decentralized, uncontrollable, free, etc, etc.

Previous tyrants, both factual and fictional, never thought of this trick. In Stalin's Russia or Orwell's Airstrip One, everyone understood that the communication systems were fully bugged. Dissidents developed ways of communicating without connected technology.

When everyone is self-deluded, there's no pressure to develop alternatives. Everyone continues using NSA for all of their communication, which is wonderful for NSA but not so wonderful for dissidents.

The same trick works on a smaller scale with Deepstate outlets like The _Intercept. At first it looked like an independent publisher. By early 2016 it was obviously part of Deepstate, a fully owned division of the Clinton Mob. Despite the obvious connection, "whistleblowers" continued to use it. The entity named Reality Winner, who was working for NSA, was too stupid to figure it out. Now another "whistleblower" working for FBI has fallen into the same trap.

What's wrong with these people? Outsiders can be forgiven for innocence. When you're INSIDE THE SYSTEM you're supposed to understand the system.

Labels: Patient things

  ¶ 3:52 PM

  I call him Doesn't Have Sword
More classy Spokane:



This one didn't get any clever comments, but it struck me as an ideal Self-Explanatory Sentence. A short description that captures all SALIENT parts of the subject. Clearly the police know this dude. For him, going without clothes is normal, but going without swords is salient.

Labels: SES

  ¶ 2:55 PM

  Realism wins
ZH notes a brief attempt to move Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy and into Moscow, which failed for reasons that aren't clear in the article.

Easy explanation. Russia didn't want Assange.

Russians are REALISTIC. Assange is not. He's romantic and notional, devoted to vague useless false abstractions like "rights". He doesn't understand that fighting must have a PURPOSE. His unyielding support for Catalunyan "independence", which was clearly a Soros project, showed his lack of common sense.

He knew that his Ecuadorian hosts disapproved. At that time Ecuador was anti-Soros. Because he has access to lots of inside info, he SHOULD have known that Catalunya was Soros. I have no access to info, and I could smell it almost immediately.

A week later: Assange has SUED Ecuador, and Ecuador QUITE PROPERLY AND MATURELY decided to stop helping him entirely. Good. Assange is acting like a spoiled Elon, and it's time for a spanking.

Labels: From rights to duties, Sorosia

  ¶ 11:32 PM

  Aphid Day 2018
Last week I wasn't sure if we'd get Aphid Day this year, but they grabbed their chance today, 10/17.

So, here's the annual reprint with additions...........

= = = = =

[This is the ninth time I've noted it here. Aphid Day in 2010 was the first of Oct; in 2011 it was the end of Oct; in 2012 the first of Oct; in 2013 the last part of Oct; in 2014 the end of Sept; in 2015 end of Sept again; in 2016 end of Sept again; in 2017 near end of Oct, now in 2018 around mid Oct.]

= = = = = BELOW HERE IS REPRINT of the original.

Every year in Spokane the end of summer is marked by the swarming of tiny white-winged flies.

Insects don't waste much time in adulthood; lots of bugs live several years as larvae and only a few days as adults.

These flies take it to an extreme. Adults are minimally equipped to get in the air and reproduce. They don't have as much brain power as other flies, nor do they have hard shells. Instead of flying purposefully, they drift with the wind like seeds, and die as soon as they bump into anything even at near-zero drifting speed. Result: for a couple of days, your face and clothes are covered with semi-liquid insects.

Despite their lack of navigation, they must have some kind of superior instinct or 'community intelligence', because picking the last warm day is much harder than picking the first warm day of spring. Termites and ants don't need to calculate their swarming day; they only need a simple neuron to detect when temperature rises past a certain threshold, plus an emitted pheromone to trigger the avalanche.

But how do these flies determine that today is not just warm, but the last warmth for their generation? They must be sensing something besides temperature.

At any rate, they serve as a reliable sign for us, even if our supercomputers can't match their calculations.



Polistra has put it into folk-wisdom format:

White flies swarming, no more warming.

= = = = =

[Artistic note: the swarm in the animation turned out nicely, but Polistra's head looks steroid-swollen and South-Park-ish for unknown reasons. Maybe she's allergic to the bugs.]

[Technical note: According to some sources, these bugs are smoky-winged ash aphids, Prociphilus americanus.]

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 4:55 PM

  PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE 4
Macron is rearranging les chaises du deque dans le Titanique, and doesn't even realize it. He says that he's NOT changing any policies. Perfectly wrong message. He's losing popularity and losing sub-leaders because people want to see CHANGE, not because people want to see EVEN MORE OF THE SAME.

Via Politico:

When Emmanuel Macron swept to power, French media marveled at the organizational skills of a man they dubbed the country’s first “managerial president.”

There were wide-eyed articles about Macron’s color-coded schedules, his 2 a.m. text messages to members of parliament and his interventions into minor matters of executive power. Most of all, Paris was fascinated by how tightly Macron controlled presidential messaging, handling important communication personally and never, ever letting his subordinates speak out of turn.

Those are signs of an INEFFECTIVE leader, not "organizational skills".

An effective leader, like an effective organism or an effective organization, is MODULAR.

The 2 AM calls and microscopic interventions kill MODULARITY. If the top leader is doing all thinking about all issues, the subleaders stop functioning. You can call it laziness or despair, but the result is the same. After you learn that top leader is going to override all of your decisions, you stop deciding.

Then the top leader is FORCED to make all of the decisions, which is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

Life is infinitely modular. All tasks are delegated and TRUSTED to lower levels, from the hive all the way down to the mitochondria. Effective leaders follow Nature's way. In earlier decades this principle was understood and celebrated; the whole point of becoming a leader was to WORK LESS, not to work 25/8.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 1:53 AM

  It's the epigenes, stupid.
The Randians and Repooflicans are slamming down hard on the DNA aspect of Elizabeth Warren's story.

Their focus on the numerical is not mysterious. They understand that the HUMAN aspect of her story appeals to humans in the middle part of the country, people who would normally be Repoof voters. The Repoofs can't possibly counter the human side because they no longer have any humans in their leadership stable.

To the NYC Tribe, leaders are meaningless. Only numbers exist. Specifically, only two numbers count in the mind of an Insatiable. Finite numbers do not exist. Only zero and infinity exist for an Insatiable.

ZERO TAX.

ZERO INTEREST.

INFINITE DOW.

INFINITE WAR.

Trump has turned out to be an excellent number for NYC, even though they can't possibly praise him or thank him publicly. The NYC Tribe demands INFINITE loyalty and gives ZERO reward to non-Tribals. Unless your genes are 100.000000000000000++ pure++, you get zero pay, zero recognition, zero gratitude. You are a disposable machine. Nixon found this out when he ruined the entire economy to help Israel. Instead of gratitude he got impeached. That's how the Tribe works.

For humans, leaders are more than numbers. Leaders are personalities. Some of them seem alien and incomprehensible, some are understandable. NYC numberdemons are incomprehensible to humans. Until now, Elizabeth has been tightly associated with NYC, so she was presumed to be alien.

Now she has shown her real connection to real Okies. She moves into the understandable category.

= = = = =

There's a number vs human aspect to the immediate question of ancestry as well. All Okies are part Injun by culture whether we're 1/1024 Cherokee or not. The Cherokee shaped the state's government and business from the start, because the Cherokee were smarter than the late-coming hillbillies. They shaped the black population as well, because the Cherokee were better slaveowners than the hillbillies.

Whether we like it or not, Okies know that Cherokee influence is inescapable, like the red dust of the red land. It may not be part of our genes, but it's a huge part of our epigenes.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Real World Math

  ¶ 5:04 PM

  What am I complaining about?
Momentary convective thought:

Maybe I should be glad Deepstate is starting to focus on Saudi and China as enemies. Unlike Russia, they are REAL enemies. China has been running a trade war and massive spying for 30 years, and Saudi bombed NYC in 2001. Until now we've been COLLABORATING with both of those enemies while we build up toward our third invasion of Russia, which has NEVER ATTACKED US EVEN ONCE.

Unfortunately, the diffused focus doesn't mean the war against Russia is slowing down. We're still adding more blockades and more NATO forces ready to attack.

The attack on Persia is also dropping out of the headlines, but our blockades and threats continue to build up.

So that's what I'm STILL bitching about.

= = = = =

The above thought was pointless, but writing third invasion led to a more productive conclusion.

First invasion, 1918. Full military occupation, with troops and supply lines, aimed at turning Russia into a colony. Didn't work. Failed quickly.

Second invasion, 1990. Not military. We controlled Yeltsin and sent masses of economic "troops" to turn Russia into an economic appendage of Goldman. This invasion worked for a few years until Putin came along and restored Russia's independence.

The first two invasions had a common factor. Both happened after Russia's government had been toppled by internal revolutions. We tried to turn the chaos to our advantage.

Our attempted third invasion doesn't share the common factor. Russia is economically and culturally united now, and its economy gets stronger with each of our blockades because Putin is serving the Russian people in a Russian way.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 11:08 AM

  Meta-githubbery
Normally Elon steals century-old inventions that failed the first time around. He Innovatively Disrupts them into even bigger failures because he fails to adopt the century-old METHODS that make any sort of manufacturing possible.

Now he's managed to take a BRAND-NEW bad invention and turn it into an even worse invention.

Github is a disease infecting all of technology. When you own a modern device or program, you are FORCED to accept constant "updating" of the software, which constantly ruins existing programs, introduces new bugs and security flaws, and prevents you from getting your own work done. The only "good" part of Github Syndrome is that you don't have to pay for the forced injections of bugs and flaws and spyware.

Tesla cars are fully and terminally infected with Github Disease. Now Elon has figured out how to make Github even worse. You pay FIRST for a feature that isn't actually present. The update DOESN'T come automatically; you have to take the car into the dealer to get the new bugs and flaws injected. The dealer will keep the car for an indefinite period.
  ¶ 10:31 AM

  Constants and variables 109, motor gaff edition
The REAL reporters who cover Tesla are hitting hard on an "endurance test" but they're missing the more serious deception.

Elon is boasting about running the motor and gearbox from a Model 3 for a simulated million miles at steady RPM.... but he makes it sound like the car itself ran a million miles. Well, that's sneaky but it's an answerable charge. Elon could say that the motor was actually tested and actually endured. It still indicates quality and reliability.

Here's the more important deception: THE MOTOR ISN'T THE PROBLEM.

All electric motors run steadily for LONG periods of time. Many refrigerators run 50 years without needing repair of the motor or gearbox. This is harder than the Tesla run because a fridge is starting and stopping every hour. Huge motors in industrial systems run for many decades under heavy loads.

ANY electric car will need less motor service than ANY gas car. Simple physics. An electric motor has one moving part that turns smoothly. A gas motor has dozens of moving parts that are slamming back and forth, enduring 3000 EXPLOSIONS per minute.

Reliability problems specific to an electric car have always been in the batteries** and switching systems. Aside from that, every vehicle has a body and chassis and suspension and tires. Teslas have big problems in these areas because Elon always favors theory over experience. Carmakers have learned how to forge and mold and assemble those parts by 100 years of experimentation, which Elon threw out the window because he knows everything better than everyone.

EXPERIENCE SURVIVES. THEORY KILLS.

= = = = =

**Batteries: In fact the battery problem was ALREADY SOLVED a hundred years ago with nickel-iron batteries, which have an unlimited lifetime. Another old solution that Elon tossed aside in order to fuck things up with theories.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 3:43 PM

  That's fine....
Glad to see Elizabeth Warren emphasizing her Okie heritage. I was hoping she'd hit that point. It's good politics. Normal Americans have a WELL-FOUNDED SUSPICION of Boston and NYC types, because Boston and NYC have been EXTERMINATING normal Americans for 400 fucking years. Elizabeth's agenda is at least nominally anti-NYC, but it's hard for normal Americans to trust this agenda from a Yankee.

ZH features a campaignish video where Elizabeth talks with her relatives in Norman. These are familiar people in a familiar place, proper Okies with a proper part-Injun genotype and culture.

Needless to say, the ZH Randians don't think much of Okies. That's fine, we don't think much of you either.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 6:13 AM

  No room for order
UD cites an article by Jonathan Bartlett proposing that software developers need to pay more attention to the 'spiritual' side of users... or at least to our sense of beauty and order in the universe.

When I try to read the article at MindMatters, here's what I see:



Hmm.

Beams and motes, practice what you preach, etc.

I agree with the basic premise as briefly extracted by UD. I've been making the same point often.

This specific failure is a perfect example of Github syndrome. The designers at MindMatters are moving with the latest picosecond, not bothering to make their website readable by ancient primitive Neanderthal Deplorable browsers more than a few months old.

The broader problem is not computers but cellphones.

Full-size personal computers, almost from the start, had enough space and color available to set up an atmosphere via the interface. The atmosphere could invoke spirituality or beauty if designed properly. More importantly, it could improve your workflow and concentration by proper placement of various controls and spaces. Orderly productive work is the best way of answering God's gift of life. Make more beauty, more life, more order, more value.

Since the switch to iPhone/Android and Responsive Web Design, everything is gray rectangles on a gray background, stacked vertically. There's no room for design, no room for ergonomics. Just keep thumbing down and reading the text, if you can see it.

Labels: From rights to duties, Make or break, skill-estate

  ¶ 12:59 AM

  Purpose questions
Still whining about lack of adult leaders ....

One way to develop or find adult leaders is to ask PURPOSE questions. Nobody EVER asks these questions.

"Journalists" never ask ANY questions at all. They just SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHH.

Political "opponents" never ask purpose questions.

The questions are easy and normal. In small business settings or project teams these questions are asked all the time.

= = = = =

Why are you doing this?

What do you hope to accomplish by these actions?

Why do you think this goal is worthwhile or necessary?

Why do you think this goal CAN be achieved at all?

How do you plan to accomplish this goal?

Why do you think your plan will accomplish the goal?

= = = = =

Question #4, CAN it be achieved, is the dead end for Sorosian politicians. Sorosian goals are all completely utterly PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. But you'll never reach #4 in a series of verbal questions because no politician can answer the FIRST question coherently.
  ¶ 4:50 PM

  Se-lu 29, containment edition
RT is interviewing an Expert who is arguing that before the Switchover USA was mainly containing Russia. Since the Switchover Russia is trying to contain USA.

Makes sense.

Looking at it from a different angle:

In 1945 both USA and Russia were working together to contain Germany. The purpose of occupation was to prevent Krauts from reuniting, because united Krauts always try to take over the world.

When our Deepstate was restarted in '46, our political propaganda turned against Russia, but the military reality in Europe remained the same. USA and Russia were still working toward the same goal, if not exactly together. We were still keeping Germany weak.

In 1961 the Berlin Wall changed things.

Conventional wisdom says that the Wall "taught us Russia couldn't be trusted".

SE-LU. Loosen the ropes, open the mind. As seen from the containing-Germany angle, the Wall made the division permanent, allowing us to relax our attention on Krauts and focus totally on exterminating Russia. We started the task immediately and succeeded in 1989. The ascension of Putin in 2000 broke our first attack. Like any psychopathic bully, we paused when we encountered real resistance. Now we're trying again, but it's too late. The rest of the world has figured out that we're Satan. Nobody is voluntarily helping us ruin the universe.

Labels: se-lu, switchover

  ¶ 11:41 AM

  Odd overestimation
The election in Bavaria looks rather undramatic by the numbers. CSU, which is basically the Bavarian brand of Merkel's party, lost some seats but still holds 35%. AfD, which had no seats before this election, now has 11% of the seats. The Greens gained most.

Dividing the parties in the ONLY meaningful way, pro-global vs anti-global, this is a small gain for the anti-global side. Nothing to get excited about.

BUT: Sorosian media are uniformly describing this as an 'earthquake' or 'massive losses' or 'conservatives battered'.

They would normally UNDERestimate or IGNORE a small loss by Satan.

I suppose they're thinking of the effect on Merkel's coalition, which is on the edge of falling apart. Last straw.

Sweden's election a few weeks ago had a similar pattern. Unimpressive shift in the numbers, ruling coalition collapsed.

Labels: Sorosia

  ¶ 9:52 AM

  Bet those "Russkies" are scared shitless
ZH reports on new hi-tech helicopters by Boeing, allegedly meant to protect our missile silos from "Russians". What they really mean, of course, is Americans.

One pic:



This is a fucking mess. Engineering students and radio hams do a far better job of rigging an EXPERIMENTAL setup. This is not experimental. This is supposed to hold up in battle conditions.

EMP? Hacking? Impossible. Everything is perfectly shielded except for the tangle of white wires on the left and the open rotary switch at upper center. No chance for signal leakage at all.

Note especially the circled mess of adapters and readapters and rerereadapters.

Reminds me of my crude Tinkertoy phonograph which isn't meant to hold up in any conditions at all. It's just a bit of fun for me.


  ¶ 2:40 AM

  AI morality problem
Speaking of autonomous systems .... The latest from Classy Spokane.



This isn't new. Criminals often use taxis to deliver crime, and taxi drivers generally get the fuck out and call the cops when they see what's happening. Uber drivers have the same problem and the same response.

After Uber goes fully autonomous, the decision will be made by the perfectly intelligent all-knowing all-good computer, programmed to solve Complex Moral Conundra in picoseconds. How will the computer know that the riders got out and conducted a fight or a murder or a bank robbery before resuming their trip? In this case the action wasn't hidden; the two other suspects were clearly waiting for a pre-planned fight, which started immediately.

The answer is obvious. The computer won't know. Autonomous vehicles, if they actually worked, would be the perfect crime delivery system.

= = = = =

Later: One of the commenters hit the golden bell: Uber Beats!

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 1:52 AM

  Dreaming of Elon's world
Tonight's dream was remarkable.

I was working for a school that was entirely run by an AI system. Everyone pretended / assumed that the AI was perfectly efficient. Nobody thought about disobeying or just turning it off.

In fact everyone was working 24 hours a day to get the ordinary school stuff done, while simultaneously compensating for the AI system's bizarre nonsense.

Students came to school in a pneumatic tube system which deposited them at random locations several miles from school. After they were "automatically" taken "to the doorstep", they had to climb mountains and cross rivers via primitive swinging rope bridges to ACTUALLY reach the school.

Incoming mail and shipments were delivered to a less difficult location a few blocks from the school, and the principal had to carry everything manually from there to the school, no matter how heavy the item.

The AI system issued daily "schedules" that were long strings of meaningless multilingual puns, often repeating one syllable over and over, like James Joyce with Tourettes. The principal had to "interpret" the schedule into usable orders without disobeying it.

= = = = =

Congrats to the dream scripter for an astonishingly precise and creative dystopia. (Sometimes I wonder if dream scripter keeps up with current events .... no need to wonder now!)

Pretty clearly a vision of Elon's world, though Elon wasn't in the dream or mentioned by name.

  ¶ 12:28 AM

  One adult politician?
I've been whining about the lack of adult leaders in Sorosian lands. Here's at least a potential adult: Richard Ojeda, running for Congress in WVa. He's running as a genuine Populist, anti-crime and anti-corporations. Remains to be seen what he'll do, but he's talking about actual problems and actual solutions instead of mechanical partisan quotes.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Sorosia

  ¶ 3:31 PM

  What's behind the latest "hiker"?
I don't understand why we've suddenly turned against Saudi.

In 2001 Saudi bombed NYC and killed 3000 people. We didn't respond to this OBVIOUS act of war. Instead we just continued selling them more weapons and welcoming their MEDDLING in our academic and political process. Saudi has been Our Most Valued Ally.

Recently Saudi has been running a hugely destructive war in Yemen, with our active military assistance.

Now Saudi kills one of their own citizens who was a part-time writer for Bezos. We consider this an act of war and start cutting all connections and imposing sanctions.

Everyone is focusing on this one "journalist" as the FIRST CAUSE of the switch, the UNPRECEDENTED SHOCKING SURPRISE that SUDDENLY CHANGES EVERYTHING.

Pearl Harbor? No problemo. Mess with Bezos? El Grande Problemo!

= = = = =

I don't really think Bezos is the important variable.

Better guess: This looks a lot like the way FBI handles its cultivated "terrorists" and "criminals". As long as the cultivar follows the orders of his handler, he gets plenty of money and logistical support, and is encouraged to kill and plunder and bomb without punishment. But when he disobeys the handler or starts snitching on the wrong people, he's instantly fed into the meat grinder.

9/11 was obviously a cultivated action. Every Saudi action since then was obedient UNTIL the new prince MBS took over. Now Saudi is moving away from obedience, doing more business with Russia, buying nuclear reactors and weapons.

This "columnist" is obviously CIA, but he's not the real cause of the change. He's just the usual CIA "hiker" or "tourist" or "pastor" who becomes "news" in order to give us a "reason" for bombing a country.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 2:05 AM

  WW1918D?
Interesting question posed in Twitter:

You wake up in 1918. What job are you qualified to do?

That's easy.

1. Hot-lead and Ludlow typesetter.

2. Double-entry bookkeeping.

3. Teach electronics, vacuum tube style.

I have a lot more 1918 skills than 2018 skills.

= = = = =

Most of the answers in the thread are from idiot womxns who don't know the slightest thing about 1918. The usual brainless assumptions and vile bigotries.

The most hardass REALISTIC answer from a male:

Recently shell shocked soldier freaking out in a trench in northern France.
  ¶ 5:02 PM

  Not a mystery
A nice example of REAL SCIENCE, with REAL EXPERIENCE for students, and a nicely written article.

In an unprecedented study of a solar eclipse's influence on bee behavior, researchers at the University of Missouri organized a cadre of citizen scientists and elementary school classrooms in setting up acoustic monitoring stations to listen in on bees' buzzing -- or lack thereof -- as the 2017 eclipse passed over. The results... were clear and consistent at locations across the country: Bees stopped flying during the period of total solar eclipse.

"We anticipated, based on the smattering of reports in the literature, that bee activity would drop as light dimmed during the eclipse and would reach a minimum at totality," says Candace Galen, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri and lead researcher on the study. "But, we had not expected that the change would be so abrupt, that bees would continue flying up until totality and only then stop, completely."

Shouldn't be unexpected. Perception is logarithmic. As the intensity dropped linearly, the bee's sense of light stayed nearly constant for a while, then dropped off abruptly.

Labels: bee, Carver, Experiential education

  ¶ 1:57 AM

  GetReligion blows it
GetReligion normally steers a fairly objective course, observing reality and avoiding stupid preconceptions.

This article breaks the usual pattern.

Rifkin is drawing a comparison between Soros, Franklin Graham, and the Kochs. He's trying to say that all are equivalent scapegoats for opposite sides.

What do the following political players have in common; Franklin Graham, George Soros and the Koch brothers?

Did I hear you mumble “nothing,” other than gender and the aforementioned political-player designations?

Not a bad guess. But not the answer I’m looking for at the moment.

The commonality I have in mind is that they all serve as public boogeyman — names to be tossed around to convey a suitcase of despised qualities that need not be unpacked for opponents skilled in the art of in-group rhetoric.

First, the difference between a scapegoat and an actual troublemaker is simple. If the group or person has enough power to MAKE trouble, it's an actual troublemaker. If the group or person DOESN'T have any power, it's a scapegoat.

When we find ourselves blaming a group, or when we hear others blaming a group, we need to ask this basic question first. Is the group influential in government or corporations? If so, we can validly blame it for problems caused by its influence.

Franklin Graham has ZERO influence, or more precisely NEGATIVE influence. Governments and corporations are explicitly and murderously anti-Christian. Therefore he doesn't belong in the same thought with Soros and Koch. If you blame him for any real problems you're scapegoating him BY DEFINITION.

The Kochs support Randian capitalism, and they do have some influence in some areas, so you can blame them (along with other influencers) for the excesses of share-value debtism. They haven't killed anyone directly, but Bezos and Zuckerberg and Buffett, following the Koch line, are ruining lots of lives.

Soros destroys entire countries DIRECTLY and kills millions of people. His death count already matches Hitler's famous six million.

How can you even TRY to compare these three? Is Rifkin abysmally stupid, or is he working for Soros?

Labels: infinite infinite infinite infinite evil

  ¶ 12:57 AM

  Another piece of the Switchover.
RT is focusing HEAVILY today on the failed (but recovered) Soyuz launch. Seems a bit odd for a propaganda outlet, but maybe it's not so odd.

In Cold War 1, the western side made a point of showing both the successes and failures of our side. The shortwave outlets aimed at Russia were actually more objective than our internal media. When I wanted to know what was REALLY going on, I tuned to VOA or BBC instead of NBC or ABC.

And in Cold War 1, Pravda and Radio Moscow were famous for ignoring failures of their side, especially in space.

SWITCHOVER.

Now the western media, both internal and external, are utterly devoid of facts and logic, and Russia's external media make a point of showing both the good and the bad, especially in space.

When you have CONFIDENCE in your side, you don't need to lie.

Labels: switchover

  ¶ 11:48 PM

  Opposite of censorship
Earlier I noticed that Salvini's inspiring words were autotranslated by FB, losing the inspiring part.

Censorship? Maybe not.

Today the autotranslate went the other way!

Original:

Lavoro, tasse, pensioni, sicurezza: burocrati e professoroni contro il governo ma noi tiriamo dritto!

Translated by FB:

Work, taxes, pensions, security: bureaucrats and creeps against the government but we pull straight!

I see what happened... professoroni is not the same as professori. The -on suffix is derogatory, so professoroni means 'bad professors' or perhaps 'creepy professors'. The translator decided to generalize.

(Now I've got a song stuck in my head. Professoroni, the San Francisco Treat!)

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 3:38 PM

  I've got words
The media demons are screeching as usual about the latest hurricane.

UNIMAGINABLE! UNPRECEDENTED! NO WORDS! GAIA! TRUMP!

I've got words.

1. Live by the beach, die by the beach. If everyone moves to the beach, everyone is going to be killed by hurricanes and floods. When you're AT SEA LEVEL you're going to be flooded OFTEN. This isn't a question of long-term RISING sea-level because of changes in the earth's magma flow; this is just a simple subtraction of house height and CURRENT sea level. A wind-pushed tide rises above CURRENT sea level. When your house is AT CURRENT SEA LEVEL, a tide will enter your house.

2. Some buildings stood up to the flood and wind just fine. If you have a weird fetish that forces you to live near a completely uninteresting flat landscape, you should LEARN from the buildings that survive.

This is directly parallel to wildfires, which are also becoming more damaging because GAIA TRUMP.

NO, YOU FUCKING IDIOTS. Wildfires are more damaging because

(1) GAIA REFUSES TO CUT DOWN ANY TREES.

(2) Gaia-worshipping rich fuckheads have a weird fetish that requires them to live in the middle of uncut ready-to-fall ready-to-burn trees.

(3) Gaia-worshipping rich fuckheads insist on wood roofs and wood siding on their 99999999 billion square foot idiot mansions in the middle of ready-to-fall ready-to-burn trees.

Labels: Answered and answered and answered, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 3:14 PM

  Orlov misses one of his best points
Orlov is a prophet, but even a prophet sometimes forgets his own vision. He missed a major point in his latest offering.

I’ve traveled around and have lived in a few different places in the US and in Europe, and it’s absolutely shocking how backward and substandard and really run down the US has become, how many things there are really outdated, sometimes in a dangerous way—like the way the bridges and the highways are, and other infrastructure, such as water and sewer mains, the electric grid, the railways, etc. It is also stunning how absolutely ridiculously stupidly everything is organized, from the tax code to the permitting and licensing systems. The banking system in the US is the most retarded banking system I have ever seen. Who has ever heard of paper checks? That’s just not done any more.

Paper checks are the PARAGON of old durable mechanisms, ready to serve when modern crap collapses. This is Orlov's main point in his original US/Russia comparison. Russia stuck with old tech like streetcars and vacuum tubes and families and useful work and Natural Law economics. Things that are just not done any more. America surged ahead into "self-driving" cars and cell phones and variable gender and offshoring and Goldman debtism.

Old stuff works because it's been tested for a long time. Old stuff remains ready for duty when the new shit updates itself into oblivion.

Time for a double reprint, mashing parts of two items together. I've covered scrip many times; these two items were the closest to Orlovian.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

How do you cure economic abstraction? I was making the point that MMT claims to cure abstraction by even worse abstraction, like curing crack addiction with flakka. Bitcoin is another reverse "cure", pulling economics even farther into the world of pure software. You need to cure abstraction by REDUCING abstraction, but you don't have to go all the way back to gold.

You just need to keep the abstraction MINIMAL and LOCAL.

America discovered the cure ALL BY ITSELF, without government help, in 1933 when FDR closed the banks. As I've noted before, a system of SCRIP self-organized almost instantly.



Scrip was not exactly currency; it was more like pre-printed and pre-denominated checks. It was issued by city governments or major businesses or the Chamber of Commerce. All local businesses agreed to use it for paying workers and selling stuff. And it worked.

Populists missed the chance to grab onto Scrip and maintain it. They were still trapped in the pluponent idiocy of bimetallism.

Another decentralizer was Mutual Benefit Societies, universally active from 1870 to 1920 and still existing marginally. (See Christian Medishare.) These were nonprofit businesses that handled all insurance services from medical to property to burial, and often specialized in care for the elderly.

Still another was Fordist corporations. When you worked for NCR or Ford or Conoco, you had the same all-around service as an MBS.

Populists did help to create and spread MBS, and Fordism was the last big push of Populism.

Both of these trends were displaced and scattered by the financialist boom of the 20s. When the boom crashed, some Fordism remained but the MBS were gone. The government picked up the elderly side with SS, then the profit-making insurers picked up the medical side after WW2.

= =

Hawala or scrip is the economic implementation of a principle that's painfully familiar and even trivial in other areas.

Decentralizing works ONLY when the modules or units share a common ground.

A trust network (like MBS) holds up ONLY when the units are built with a shared purpose. Ideally each unit should be physically incapable of harming the network.

When you can count on the units to follow the same rule in the same situation, you don't need a heavy controller sending commands to the units, and you don't need a lot of communication between the units.

When the modules have different grounds or different limits or different operating systems, you need a strong central controller, and even then the overall system will be inefficient. Most energy will be chewed up in the contradictory and redundant operations of the bureaucratic control system.

In electronics the common ground is literal, and the modules may also need to agree on limits of output voltage and input impedance, or may need to be sync'd to a common phase. It's easy to design modules that are physically incapable of violating the limits.

In law and morality, the common ground is a shared immersion in the same system of commandments and taboos. Natural Law works best because Natural Law was scientifically settled by 50k years of experimentation. Other systems and charters and constitutions are generally designed to violate Natural Law, so they don't hold up. (Our insane constitution held up for only 16 years, 1787 to 1803.)

The Chaotizers of Deepstate understand this principle better than anyone. After you eliminate the common operating system, the common understanding of reality, the units will DEMAND a strong controller.

With hawala or scrip, the separate bankers share a common PURPOSE of helping the ethnic group or township. A banker isn't quite physically incapable of breaking trust, but he knows that the group or township will physically break his legs if he goes wrong, so he remains trustworthy.

Hawala has both sticks and carrots. The banker earns a small fee on each transaction. The American scrip system didn't last long enough to grow carrots, but a fee structure would undoubtedly evolve given more time and experience.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Paper checks were the Patient Things that saved us when the banks dissolved. Paper is OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF NSA. That's exactly why Deepstate hates it and tries to make total control COOOOOOOOOL with the Agents Provocateurs of Bitcoin and MMT.

Labels: MMT, Natural law = Soviet law, Patient things, Pluponents

  ¶ 1:07 AM

  Poll without questions? What's going on?
I've got the phone bell turned on this week, running phone tag with a contractor.

Since the phone bell is only on for about a week each year, I'm not accustomed to dealing with incoming calls. I grab each one, wanting to get the contractor stuff over with so I can turn off again.

About 4:10 a junk call came in, but it didn't start with the standard 5 seconds of silence so I didn't hang up instantly. It was a Chinese-sounding female doing a poll on voter choices. Since she sounded pleasant, I went ahead and responded. After verifying my name and address, she said the standard thing about call being monitored, then said "We have no questions at this time. Thank you for responding."

Huh?

Shortly thereafter this email came in:

Washington Opinion Research is conducting a survey about issues concerning registered voters in your area and would like to invite you to share your opinions.

If you'd like to participate, please click the link below. Again, this is a survey about issues in your area and there will be no attempt to sell you anything or request any personal information. Your opinion does matter!

Link: CLICK HERE

Thank you in advance for helping us with our research efforts.

Many thanks,
Washington Opinion Research
1232 Q Street Suite 100
Sacramento, CA 95811
916-443-4722

Sounds like the same text. I clicked the link and found:

"This survey is closed at this time. Thank you for responding."

Clearly the same thing in two forms, nearly simultaneous.

Google shows the outfit in Sacramento is an actual polling company, not a made-up address. I probably shouldn't have clicked the link, but AVG takes care of such things reliably.

Why would they waste money on the caller and email if they're not asking any questions? If they're just looking for people who WILL respond, this isn't the way to do it. Now I'm suspicious and WON'T respond the next time. If they had asked some real questions, I'd be more willing to do it again. (Basic human nature, understood by salesmen forever. People enjoy answering questions about their own opinions.)

= = = = =

Next day: SE-LU! Loosen yourself to SOLVE the problem!

In fact this is the first HONEST political poll. There are no questions because there are no QUESTIONS. "Both" "parties" agree 10000000000000000000000000000000% on everything AND MORE, but speak in slightly different accents.

Labels: se-lu, Unasked and unanswered

  ¶ 4:56 PM

  Where did that come from?
This afternoon's dream was about Bach adding an extra chapter to the gospel of Luke. Huh?

I didn't have any sound in the house, no radio or MP3, so it wasn't the usual repurposing of verbal input. At the end of the dream I said "I'll have to Google this when I wake up."

So I did. It's not true. Bach did, of course, write a Passion based on Luke, but there's no mention of adding to the text.

One of the references emphasized the Magnificat, which is a concise and complete statement of Natural Law Economics. Maybe that's where the dream scripter was aiming.

Labels: Asked and unanswered, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 2:06 PM

  Updating isn't always bad....
I'm constantly smashing the modern Github mode that forces constant continuous updates, leaving no room for thinking and processing and plain old life.

I need to remind myself that machines and ideas do OCCASIONALLY deserve updates. When new facts are observed, some ideas can benefit by incorporating the new facts. When new manufacturing methods or materials are developed, the devices that use those materials and methods can benefit by bringing in the new. These changes need to be SLOW AND CAREFUL. Both ideas and devices need a few years to test and phase in a major new development.

Some things never need updating. Natural Law, dealing with morality and economics, was determined by thousands of years of do-or-die experimentation. There is no new genetic material since Natural Law was settled, so Natural Law doesn't need revision.

Convective thought:

It's unfortunate that astrology didn't get updated in the 1840s when magnetism was systematically understood. Astrology is based on a limited set of observations about gravitational fields, expanded and rigidified into a system that has one or two good functions and a lot of crap.

If astrology had been updated to include magnetic and electrostatic fields, we'd have a much better tool for understanding natural changes like climate, and behavioral changes in humans. It's clear that the changing geomagnetic field, linked solidly with the changing solar magnetic field, is solely responsible for climate.



Madame Polisztra illustrates a Magnetic Zodiac.

Astro-scale magnetic fields also affect the functioning of our brains, in ways that are not yet understood. Neurologists in the 1840s were starting to explore magnetic effects, but their discipline was derailed around 1900 when Freud and pharma kicked out all other modes of treatment. This branch of science returned around 1980 and is making fast progress, but it could have been 100 years farther up the timeline if the pill-pushers hadn't tinfoiled it.

= = = = =

Types of magnets and inductors (not all shown in Madame Polisztra's diagram) immediately suggest personality types. Air-core, iron-core, variac, tapped, bar, resonant, permanent, superconductive, three-phase, transformer, relay, load coil ....

Labels: 1901, Aberree, Carbon Cult, Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 3:45 AM

  Aphid note
I think we might miss Aphid Day this year. I saw a few of them on Oct 1, but nowhere near enough to count as the Swarm Day. Summer switched to fall stepwise on Sept 9, which is before the Aphid Bracket, and we haven't had one properly warm day since then.

Weather Bureau predicts somewhat warmer and drier in next couple weeks, so maybe the aphids still have a chance.

Sure enough, they took their chance on 10/17.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 3:28 PM

  Speaking of adult leaders....
THINGS WORTH DOING AND HOW TO DO THEM.

BBC tells about an American astronaut who fired up the Deepstaters by quoting Churchill. Since every wise-sounding sentence has been attributed to Churchill and Einstein and Franklin simultaneously, it's impossible to avoid "quoting" Churchill.

His quote was uncontroversial and meaningless: In victory, magnanimity.

When Deepstate returned fire, the astronaut instantly clipped his OWN balls, fervently apologizing for a meaningless and uncontroversial quote.

ADULT Salvini has quietly provided the CORRECT response. If you haven't done anything wrong, don't apologize. Don't clip your own balls by answering the charge. "I'm not a racist" acknowledges that the charge is relevant and valid. Don't defeat your own cause, don't betray your own followers. Simply continue doing the right thing.

This item shows how to do it.

“Il successo non è definitivo, il fallimento non è fatale: ciò che conta è il coraggio di andare avanti”. W. Churchill

Notte serena Amici, io ci sono, sempre.

.... accompanied by an astronomical-looking picture of a sunset.

Labels: defensible spaces, things worth doing

  ¶ 12:36 AM

  EXCELLENT!
Via ZH:

Marine Le Pen distanced herself Monday from former White House strategist Steve Bannon, saying only Europeans will save the continent from getting orders from the EU, not Americans.

Le Pen said Monday, at a meeting in Rome, that she wanted to clarify “lots of conjecture” about Bannon’s plans to set up a foundation, called The Movement, to boost far-right[sic] parties in Europe.

Speaking with right-wing[sic] Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini by her side, Le Pen said Bannon is not European, but rather an American who wants to create a think tank to offer research to nationalist parties in Europe.

LePen and Salvini are being diplomatic. The truth, visible IMMEDIATELY, is that Bannon is an Agent Provocateur working for the globalists. Like Alex Jones, his job is to make non-Sorosians look horrible.

I'm glad LePen and Salvini can see through the facade. (But not surprised!)

Localism means BY DEFINITION that each nation determines its own boundaries and its own way of life, WITHOUT following orders from foreigners. Soros is a foreigner, Juncker is a foreigner, Bannon is a foreigner. His attempt to be a leader for Europeans is GLOBALIST, just like Soros and Juncker.

Later and larger thought: When do we get ADULT leaders? Italy now has ADULT leaders actually ruling the country, along with Hungary and Russia and Austria and Malaysia. France has an ADULT leader (LePen) within the party system, though their Deepstate is doing everything possible to kick her out.

ADULTS speak sanely. They answer questions with facts and judgments, and when they don't know the facts they say so. They observe reality and judge accordingly.

Our leaders in "both" "parties" just grunt the same mechanical primitive shit over and over and over.

My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.
My party good. Other party bad.

Labels: Sorosia, Zero Problems

  ¶ 9:40 AM

  Tariffs work
Via ZH: Foreign automakers have signaled that they will shift more of their manufacturing to the United States, Canada and Mexico thanks to the recent US trade deal with Canada and Mexico, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Nuff said.

Labels: Answered and answered

  ¶ 5:52 AM

  Past Orwell
Bolsonaro basically wins Brazil. Looks like 48%, so there will be a runoff which he will win.

BRAVO to the ORDINARY PEOPLE of Brazil.



Needless to say, the Sorosians are not happy. A Sorosian named "Lady Gaga" is devastated, which has become a meme already.

Lady Gaga has a massive private security army. She/he doesn't have to worry about crime. She/he is DEVASTATED at the thought that ORDINARY BRAZILIANS might gain more protection from crime. They still won't have the guaranteed protection of a massive private security army, but they might die less often. This is a DEVASTATING thought for "progressives". The SINGLE SOLE SOLITARY GOAL of "progressives" is to EXTERMINATE ALL DEPLORABLES. Lady Gaga said it.

Another meme from the "human" "rights" "civically engaged" "enlightened" pogromssives WHO ALREADY TRIED TO KILL BOLSONARO:

So sad that Bolsonaro wasn't killed.

And the best:

Can't we just stop letting people vote for things?

We've gone past parody, past Orwell.

The plain and simple definition of DEMOCRACY is NO VOTING.

The plain and simple definition of AUTOCRACY is VOTING.

= = = = =

Sidenote: This is a classic illustration of Manweller's Law. Elections are tolerated as long as they always agree with Deepstate. When an election manages to produce real change, elections are finished.

Labels: From rights to duties, Sorosia

  ¶ 4:44 PM

  The new anti-racket squad
Returning to an old point... Media no longer trains us to detect rackets and scams because everything is a racket. Training would ruin the effectiveness of everything Deepstate does.

The Tesla 'shorts' have taken up the role of anti-racket training. One of them quotes a cartoon about engineers:

Engineer's Syllogism.

1. I am good at understanding numbers.
2. The stock market is made of numbers.
3. Therefore, ... WOW! Where did all my money just go?

The old-fashioned Racket Squad and Hello, Sucker emphasized that conmen LOVE to find a sucker who is focused on numbers. Even the simplest gaffs involve lots of money sloshing back and forth. If you're focused solely on adding and subtracting the dollars and cents, you aren't asking the basic question. WHY is all this money sloshing around? WHY isn't this a plain and simple transaction, trading a specific product or service for a specific amount of money?

If you're focused on REAL VALUE, direct exchange of labor for money, you're harder to fool. The entrepreneurial gaff and MLM gaff are clear violations of REAL VALUE. You put in years of hard and creative work, betting that you might get a big payoff. The payoff comes for a few but not for most. The few who get rich are the cheaters and conmen, not the honest workers.

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

  ¶ 11:55 PM

  Tomato template found!
A few years ago I wondered if food choices were explicitly built in.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Think especially about tomatoes. There's plenty of evidence that humans live longer and better with tomatoes. I've experienced this in my own life. It's a safe bet that we were designed to want and need tomatoes. Did we really get along for a million years without them?

Or did we lose them through bad cultivation or bad weather in the Eastern Hemisphere, while the Western Hemisphere continued growing and eating them?

Bear in mind that the Western Hemisphere people came from the Eastern Hemisphere to begin with.

It may seem strange that we would have specialized connections with certain plants, but why should it be strange? Nearly all animals have specialized connections with certain food sources. We've been smart enough to find and cultivate a huge variety of foods that we like, but that doesn't exempt us from having innate needs and wants before we started farming and cooking.

Putting it another way: Nature doesn't assume that a bee or a crow or a koala will learn which foods to eat through spoken or written transmission of culture. Nature gives those animals a specific sensory template to recognize their proper and necessary foods by sight and/or smell. Since we didn't have spoken or written transmission of culture until rather late in our existence as a species, how did we know what to eat before we had words for things? Only one possible answer. We were given a specific sensory template, just like every other animal. If we didn't have innate standards, WE WOULDN'T HAVE SURVIVED to the point where we used culture.

= = = = = END REPRINT:

Now the template has been found. It's in the amygdala,



Pyramidal cells in the amygdala "form cliques that help us enjoy the total food experience, from recognizing a banana to anticipating its taste and texture, placing it correctly in the category of food and maybe even the subcategory of a breakfast food."

The amygdala is generally responsible for fear vs empathy, with right and left amygdalae playing opposite roles. Food recognition clearly relates to fear and avoidance.

I strongly doubt that breakfast is an innate category; choosing certain foods at certain times of day is an EXTREMELY recent development in a few parts of the world. But the rest makes sense.
  ¶ 12:28 AM

  Important admission 2
A couple weeks ago Bloomberg News admitted the OBVIOUS FACT that fully autonomous cars are impossible.

Now Bloomberg News admits the OBVIOUS FACT that windmills are not just useless but damaging as a "power" source.

In both cases SANE ADULTS, especially adults who UNDERSTAND HOW THINGS WORK, have been TRYING TO SPEAK THE TRUTH for MANY years, but nobody in power was listening.



In both cases the satanic media have been PERFECTLY UNANIMOUS in opposing and squashing and killing the truth. Until now.

Is this a trend? Maybe not, but it's two changes of tone in two distinct subjects.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 11:49 PM

  More from Classy Spokane
Another perfect comment!

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 4:18 AM

  Was the prediction right?
From a 1968 article in an RCA journal devoted to industry trends:

The need for human skills for the computer will increase markedly in the future before leveling off, with the biggest demand continuing to be for people to design programs and feed the data into the hardware. However, the programmer or systems analyst of tomorrow will probably have to be a specialist - an expert on the problems of one specific industry, such as petrochemicals. In fact, many computer people expect that many specialized software service companies will be established in the 1970s. These firms will provide expert programming and systems analysis help to the customer in fields too complex for the ordinary programmer. By the year 2000, many economists expect the computer industry to be the single largest employer in the United States, outranking even the auto industry.

Hmm. How well did that turn out?

Total employment is 133 million.

Major sectors, with auto and computer sloppily separated out:

Government 21 m
(Most of govt is local, most of local is teachers.)

Health care 17 m

Retail trade 14 m
Within retail trade,
Car dealers 1 m

Leisure and hospitality 13 m

All manufacturing 12 m
Within mfg,
Auto manufacturing 1.5 m
Mfg of computers and parts 1 m

Wholesale trade 5 m

Transportation 4 m

Data processing 260 k

Construction 5 m

Financial 7 m

Computer systems design 1.6 m



From these categories, looks like auto total is 2.5 million and computer total is 2.8 million. By these hopelessly sloppy figures, computers did barely beat autos... but both are WAY down the list. Government and health care and casinos HUGELY dominate the numbers.

Of course these numbers miss the big picture just as badly as the 1968 article. Within each sector there are plenty of specialized programmers, as the article correctly predicted. I can't find a census page with those internal job classifications nicely parsed out.

Real point: The prediction was right in terms of consumption and usage. Sales of computers and cell phones exceed autos. Usage of cell phones exceeds every other sector, including breathing and eating and thinking and pooping. We** use cell phones more than we use life. The prediction was wrong in terms of AMERICAN JOBS because both of those industries INTENTIONALLY AND TREASONOUSLY STOPPED HIRING AMERICANS and moved their factories and employees overseas.

= = = = =

** Pronoun disclaimer: We ain't me. I've never owned or handled or touched a cell phone.
  ¶ 3:43 AM

  Y no discrimination lawsuits?
In watching the Tesla anti-cult reporters I've noticed something. The truest of Tesla true believers .... the buyers who continue to LOVE the car and the company even when the company delivers nothing or delivers a useless undrivable brick .... are from China and Vietnam and India.

I can't think of an innate reason for this tendency. Those three groups are hugely varied culturally and genetically. The only thing they have in common as immigrants is prosperity. People who come here from that corner of the world are self-selected entrepreneur types, driven by a desire for wealth. Recent immigrants from Mexico or the Soviet zone are less wealth-driven and less wealthy.

If Elon wasn't the anointed prophet of Gaia, leftists would be noticing this pattern and suing him for race-based advertising. The suits would be false, like all "discrimination" suits; but the pattern would be obvious enough to win the case.

Labels: Asked and answered, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 2:36 AM

  Real value econ lesson
A good lesson in REAL-WORLD economics.

Rybolovlev, who sold two Russian fertilizer producers for almost $7.5 billion in 2010 and 2011, has been pursuing Yves Bouvier around the globe for several years, claiming the art dealer owes him more than $1 billion. Rybolovlev accused Bouvier of overcharging him on 38 artworks that he purchased for $2 billion over more than a decade.

This is what both Marx and Mohammed were talking about.

No real value at all. Hifalutin "art" serves exactly one purpose. It's the same as potlatch and palaces. The PRICE ITSELF displays the EXCESSIVE wealth of this fuckhead.

How can you even define overcharged in this situation? Without the price display, the real value of hifalutin art is negative. When you buy an artwork like "3.61 square meters of air", you are buying an obligation to maintain the non-space in the correct condition with proper visibility of the nothing.

If Bouvier charged more than some arbitrary amount, the EXCESS means that the art is MORE valuable in this sense, not LESS. The overcharge DISPLAYS to the Deplorables that the buyer can spend ANY amount of money for ANY amount of nothing.

All perception is ratios and baselines.

Normal humans determine the ratio of price to value by simple utility, with a simple linear formula. If I buy one tomato I can make one omelet, which gives me one unit of wonderful taste and one unit of vitamin C. If the store charges me twice the original price, I'll have to skip a day between vitamin C inputs, which will not be good for me. I'd have real physical grounds for complaint if not suing.

Rich fuckhead value is measured by status comparison, not utility. The numerator of the ratio is the publicly known price, and the denominator is real value of the object by Deplorable standards. If fuckhead pays 1 billion dollars for a piece of paper that would be worth 0.1 cents if it wasn't covered with meaningless random paint spots, the ratio of 1 billion to 0.1 cents is 1 trillion. If Bouvier charges him 2 billion, the ratio is now 2 trillion. He is now "worth" 2 trillion times as much as a Deplorable, so he should be THANKING Bouvier, not SUING him.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law, Real World Math

  ¶ 12:13 PM

  Full-spectrum censorship
Ashenden has been banned from Twitter.

You couldn't ask for a more precise opposite to Alex Jones.

Jones is all bluff and blow, slander and sleaze, threats and throwing things.

Ashenden is THE PERFECT ENGLISHMAN. Cautious, delicate, restrained, euphemistic. He would describe a tornadoearthquakevolcanoshipwrecknuclearbomb as "a bit of bother". Under the delicacy he's rock-hard in his convictions, some of which are ACTUALLY CHRISTIAN.

And that's the problem. FIRM SOLID RELIGIOUS BELIEF is the most serious and burnable heresy in the age of Github and Comrade O'Brien. Exactly as it was in the age of Borgia.  ¶ 10:54 AM

  Old skills never die
Sort of halfway following on previous item. I was curious to see if the acoustic properties of beadboard had been noticed by blind people, possibly used for directional guidance. No luck there, but bumped into a more definite connection.

Yesterday UncommonDescent mentioned an article about an entirely different way of writing embodied in the old Inca khipus. These are complex structures of strings and knots which have been understood for a long time as number records directly parallel to an abacus. Recently researchers have realized that the khipus could also record language as well as math.

I read the New Scientist article and pointlessly wrote a comment at UD. Repeating it:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

It’s a fantastic story, with math, linguistics, cryptography, and plain old adventure. The turning point happened when a local lady heard about the research and revealed that her village had been guarding a secret set of khipus for hundreds of years. They were secret because they were believed to chronicle a rebellion against the Spaniards. The villagers knew the story but had lost the skill of reading the threads.

Sabine Hyland had already laid out a sequence of combinations based on choice of fiber, color of fiber, and knot patterns, which seemed to yield 95 code groups. Just right for a syllabary. She got access to the sacred khipus for only 48 hours, desperately photographed and noted everything she could, and then started doing classic cryptography to find repeated patterns that agreed with the known names of the people involved in the story.

At this point only a few of the code groups are firmly identified, but the mapping is convincing enough that the work is moving forward, looking for more known stories.

The code appears to be somewhat parallel to Chinese ideograms, where one set of symbols carries metaphorical meaning and another set carries phonetic suggestions. In this case the paired sets aren’t expressed as ink on paper; instead they’re colors and fiber types and knot types.

= = = = = END REPRINT

The article also mentioned that interpreting the code required both touch and sight, to catch the type and color of thread and the shape of knots.

While looking for an old reference to wall surfaces as they affect blind folks, I came across a nice connection to khipus.

From a history of the Tennessee blind school:

The first maps used by the blind were embroidered cloth or canvas. Eighty or one hundred years ago it was the fashion for ladies to work a great deal in worsted and silk. The " sampler" then employed leisure moments, as crocheting does at present; hence the most natural way of making maps was by embroidery, the needle-work representing the land, and the plain cloth the water. Boundaries were marked by coarse, corded stitches, and towns and cities by points made with the same work. The next contrivance consisted in pasting the ordinary map upon a board prepared for the purpose. Small pin tacks were driven in the board along the boundary lines, coarse thread was glued upon the river courses, and the broad-headed tacks showed the positions of towns and cities. Sand was glued upon the paper where lakes and seas occurred.

Skill lost, skill recovered!

Labels: Leth, skill-estate

  ¶ 7:26 AM

  Why was beadboard so popular?
In making my graphic tributes to lost places I use a lot of beadboard surfaces.



From 1880 to 1920, beadboard was nearly universal on inner walls of commercial buildings and schools, and often on the utility parts of residences. The 'nice' rooms had plaster walls, and the laundry or back porch had beadboard.

Beadboard would have been hard to clean and hard to paint. Wood is more resilient than plaster, so it could take bumping by furniture without chipping or cracking. But wider slats forming a flat surface would have served better. Tongue-and-groove wood flooring would have been easier to paint and clean, and would re-use existing materials and installation skills.

Possible advantages: Especially on ceilings, beadboard would diffuse light better than smooth wood. On walls and ceilings, beadboard would be acoustically interesting and perhaps superior to plaster or smooth wood. Beadboard would be an Acoustic Diffraction Grating, redistributing echoes by frequency.

Acoustic Diffraction Gratings are common but unfamiliar. Any building with a vertically ridged surface, concrete or metal, is an ADG. I first noticed the phenomenon on the KU computer center:



I was walking along the sidewalk in winter and my shoes were making scrunchy sounds in the snow. I heard a Doppler echo, almost like a ricocheting bullet, after each scrunch. Later I tried it with other transient sounds like claps and tongue-clicks, and it worked consistently. As the sound passes along the ridged concrete, each ridge preferentially echoes a longer and longer wavelength. It's just like an optical diffraction grating except that the spectrum spans time instead of distance.

Labels: Asked and badly answered, Leth

  ¶ 2:18 AM

  Trojan Tesla?
The real reporters in the Tesla anti-cult brigade are noticing Model 3s stored in random parking lots and vacant lots EVERYWHERE. Not just near the "factory" but all across the country.

Cranking the paranoid dial up to 11: What if the cars really are autonomous? What if the scare headlines about Killer Robots and Intelligent Drones are correct? Placing groups of cars EVERYWHERE would be good strategy for a multifront attack. Classic guerrilla tactic. Pre-stage your troops stealthily, posing as trees and bushes; or in this case posing as defective inventory.

Later and more important thought: NYTimes is picking up the work of these real reporters, which is highly unusual... but of course NYTimes is NOT paying them, which is highly usual. Another example of the 'gig economy', the new version of debt slavery or homesteader slavery. Persuade suckers that they are climbing the billionaire ladder, when the reality is total failure. The work gets done to benefit NYC, and NYC never pays for anything. As always NYC is the black hole of economics. Infinite input, zero output.
  ¶ 3:32 PM

  This is called "democracy" or something
Spokane-News mentions:

Vice President Mike Pence is in town today. Many have asked about the Law Enforcement presence along I90 and in town. Extra security in place for the motorcade and also reported protesters downtown.

I was curious to see how fast the motorcade was going, so I checked SRTMC, the hub for traffic webcams, and found this:

The SRTMC will be undergoing a planned outage with our camera services on 10/02/2018 between the hours of 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM. All camera images and video playback will be unavailable during this time. Traffic events, message signs, and flow segments services will continue to operate as usual. Thank you for your understanding and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Note that the reason for the outage is classified. Peons are not allowed to know why we aren't allowed to know about why our traffic is blocked. More bad epistemology.

I presume Pence is speaking at some idiotic Party event, supporting some demon R candidate who is identical to the demon D candidate.

This is called "demoncracy". We get the privilege of total traffic blockage so idiots of one party can see their preferred idiot up close, which is somehow better than seeing him on TV. We get to "choose" between equally demonic alien monsterblobs who EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE us with equal efficiency. But we aren't allowed to know ANYTHING AT ALL.

Labels: epistemology, infinite infinite infinite infinite lunacy

  ¶ 3:15 PM

  Fuqing stupid
Unnecessary and mostly wrong research:

The results, reported in Monthly Weather Review published by the American Meteorological Society, suggest that we can greatly enhance our ability to predict thunderstorms capable of producing tornadoes.

"It's not just the data that's important," Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology and director of ADAPT said. "It's how we design very sophisticated numerical mathematical algorithms to ingest that satellite data into the model. This is really our expertise and our pride. Our team is the first to be able to effectively take in this high resolution satellite data and prove it can be useful in real-case scenarios."

In the past 40 years, tornado warning lead-time -- meaning the time interval between when a warning is issued and the tornado occurs -- has increased on average from 3 to 14 minutes. Zhang said this method could extend that lead time even further.

Unnecessary. Radar and HUMAN SENSES are already doing the job.

Lead time increased from 3 to 14 minutes? Nonsense. That might apply to the official NOAA definition of a tornado, which requires search warrants, due process, preliminary hearings, trial by jury, and appeals.

"In the past 40 years????" Back in the '70s, which was 40 years ago, the "real-case" tornado warnings via TV were always at least 30 minutes, sometimes a couple of hours. Add the human sense that develops when you live in tornado territory, and you often have 3 or 4 hours of warning. Not 3 minutes.

There are a few outliers, small tornados that pop up in ordinary storms, and dust devils that get strong enough to do a little damage. But the serious twisters always give an hour or two if you're on the ball and in tune with Nature.

And as always, IMMENSE THANKS to LIFE-SAVING HERO Gary England, who perfected the TV warning system and trained people in awareness and readiness.
  ¶ 3:26 AM

  Verruguin works!
I don't do product notes here, but this is too good to skip.

I got tired of a large mole or wart on my cheek that had been sitting there for several years. Ordered a product called Verruguin via Ebay. It's basically isopropyl alcohol mixed with collodion to keep the alcohol from evaporating. Applied it twice a day for 7 days. This morning the wart seemed ready to break off, so I peeled gently and it flipped right off, leaving fresh pale skin underneath. No bleeding, no swelling, no drama. Just new skin. A lesser wart on my neck had already come off after just one day.

I'm still ugly, but now I'm less dramatically ugly than I'd been recently. Feels good. Confidence counts.

Verruguin WORKS!

Labels: Zero Problems

  ¶ 12:53 AM

  More red dirt
After the last 'showoff' of my current graphics fun......



I noticed an overly predictable feel in my landscapes. As explained before, hills and bluffs in the background are (1) accurate for Eastern Kansas and (2) practical for Poser scenes because the hills close off the horizon without lots of added backdrops.

Can't do without the hills, but do I really need bluffs? And everything is always green, except when it's snowy.



Real Kansas, and especially real Okla, aren't always green. Okla is brown and gray for much of the year.

So I'm trying to capture a more Okie feel, in the area that Alphia Hart calls 'the shortgrass country' and Steinbeck calls 'the red country and the gray country'.





In the scene below I've got a good red dirt / black dirt boundary, and I'm having a little fun with streets and plats. Often small towns had a grand plat with names for every latitude and longitude, even when most of the streets never existed or scarcely existed.



Literary footnote: I'd always remembered Steinbeck's phrase as 'the red dirt lands and the black dirt lands'. Looked it up and corrected it to 'the red country and the gray country', but my version is better.

Labels: Heimatkunde, Make or break, Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 12:01 PM

  Honest evil vs dishonest evil
A nice little burst of honesty from Satan dba TechCrunch:

We cared about Cambridge Analytica because it could have helped elect Trump.

Note the automatic WE that includes all humans. Only one thought exists, only one brain exists. Any entities which do not share the SOLE THOUGHT of all humans are obviously not things that exist. Things that do not exist are contradictions which must be resolved. Crank up the ovens.

= = = = =

The hyphenated hypermonster BERNERS-LEE isn't quite so candid. Hyphenated Hypermonster, who "created the web" by applying a horribly buggy pseudolanguage to a system that was already working pretty well, is now planning an even newer and more horrible setup to SOLVE THE BIGGEST CRIME IN ALL OF HISTORY, which was the Cambridge Analytica breach.

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.

In a sane place and time, a NON-JOKING promise to dominate the world would be seen as scary. H-H is not scary because he is solving THE BIGGEST CRIME IN HISTORY, guaranteeing that NOT ONE BYTE OF DATA shall ever again be used for non-orthodox non-globalist purposes.

The Holy-Hyphen continued:

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

Oops, that was somebody else MEDDLING and HACKING the Holy-Hyphen. EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE.

Let's try again.

What does H-H actually propose?

The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.

We already have a pod. It's called a computer, or more precisely the hard drive and other storage parts of the computer. We can already protect our data from misuse by NOT PUTTING IT ON THE FUCKING WEB.

THIS IS NEITHER MYSTERIOUS NOR NEW. All through the history of civilization, objects and thoughts contained within your own house or farm are yours. Objects and thoughts that you place in the public realm are public.

In the H-H system your data resides in the Cloud, physically located in facilities owned by Amazon or Microsoft. H-H wants you to BELIEVE that you own the data, because his software gives you "security" or something. In reality these nice little "pods" will be vastly easier to mine than widely scattered data in FB profiles and iPhone GPS location memory. All gathered up and organized for convenient use ONLY BY IMPERIAL AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

When asked about this, Berners-Lee says flatly: “We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are not asking their permission.”

Because you don't NEED their permission, you sneaky nasty faker. When all data is contained in servers owned by Amazon, Amazon automatically has permission to use the data. It's their property.

= = = = =

Semi-related: Before the Hyphen got into this, some tech businesses were already proposing ways to "possess" your own data and sell it. This is just another hoax like Bitcoin. As above, it will NOT increase privacy. It will also WIDEN inequality, not level the playing field.

Simple question: Who is the more desirable customer, me or Elon? Whose data is more valuable, mine or Elon's?

This is actually a VERY OLD product. Prestigious people do prestigious things and go to prestigious places. Their movements and actions and thoughts have ALWAYS been valuable to advertisers and newspapers for endorsements and headlines. Publicity agents or 'flacks' have ALWAYS monetized the actions and thoughts of popular people.
  ¶ 5:00 AM

  Germany continues to break from USA STRONG
Via RT:

Russia and Germany have agreed to connect Germany’s capital Berlin with St. Petersburg. The train will go from Germany to the Russian exclave city of Kaliningrad and then onwards to St. Petersburg.

There is currently no direct railway between St. Petersburg and Berlin. Passengers have to make a two-hour connection in Moscow and spend 32 hours on road. It is also difficult to get from Berlin to Kaliningrad by train - you have to change trains twice. The new route will also slash the travel time between St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad by almost a half.

Excellent.

Pipelines and railroads are PERMANENT connections that create commercial and cultural links between their destinations. With people and products flowing steadily, it's much harder for Germany to start yet another war against Russia, or join USA STRONG's current war against Russia.

The Kaliningrad connection undoubtedly sweetened the deal for Germany. Kaliningrad aka Königsberg is historically German, or more precisely Prussian. It was the center of earlier Kraut empires, and was handed to Russia after WW2.

Could this provide a pretext for future Kraut leaders to recapture Kaliningrad? Possibly, but for now the easy connection is likely to relieve such pressures.

Labels: Patient things

  ¶ 1:41 AM

  Dreystadt vs Elon
Smart industries and smart marketers figured out a long time ago that you can't expect high volume sales if you restrict your customer base. Modern Sorosian corporations have abandoned this principle because they no longer want customers or sales. They want holiness as defined by the Dow.

As I wrote earlier...

After the '29 crash debtism no longer functioned. Companies couldn't make money by stock manipulation. Customers were no longer living on margin and speculation. Companies had to figure out FAST how to make a profit by selling things to people who were living on real incomes.

At GM, Cadillac sales dropped by more than half. Cadillac didn't know what to do until Nicholas Dreystadt came up with a peculiar solution. Dreystadt had started his career at a Caddy dealer in Chicago, moved up to regional sales manager, then moved up to the national offices.

He had seen something interesting in Chicago. The black upper class loved Caddies, then as now. Cadillac dealers were more interested in eliminating The Wrong Sort Of Customer than making a profit. Rich blacks had to hire white "proxy buyers" if they wanted a Caddy.

Dreystadt proposed a strange new idea to GM management: Instead of trying to run an exclusive social club, RUN A FUCKING BUSINESS. Sell Caddies to anyone who could pay for them. Product out, money in.

Management was skeptical but let him try it. It worked. Caddy sales jumped back up and stayed up.

This is another LESSON FROM EXPERIENCE that Elon dismisses along with experience in manufacturing. His cars are aimed SOLELY AND SPECIFICALLY at hard-line members of the Gaian Church. Non-members need not apply.

This members-only approach would sustain the original low-production high-luxury roadster. It wasn't meant to be a daily driver or even a driver. It was solely designed to display your faith openly and aggressively, like the old Hindu Juggernaut or the Popemobile. When you saw a Tesla Roadster, you KNEW that you were humbly privileged to bask in the lavish radiance of a Holy Gaian Bishop.

Members-only doesn't work with a slapdash hastily assembled car with sloppy paint. Rich fuckheads expect VISIBLE high quality. Visibility is the whole point.

Cadillac was able to expand its audience because it provided the luxury and beauty that rich people, WHITE OR BLACK, expected. Tesla can't do the same. Rich fuckheads who aren't first and foremost Gaian zealots have no reason to buy a piece of crap that looks like crap.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Sorosia

  ¶ 1:08 AM