Can't argue with experience, can quibble with a theory.
Mattingly writes a Texas insider view of Perot vs Bush.

I can't argue with an account from experience, but I wonder if Mattingly's hypothesis is the most likely.

He points out that both Perot and Bush Senior were elite Texans who looked down on ordinary Texans. Perot was known as a 'Highland Park Presbyterian' in Dallas. His wife was a leader in Planned Parenthood. Mattingly guesses that Perot resented Bush for courting pro-life votes.

I recognize the type in Okie terms. The West Side of Enid was the same. Presbies and Piskies, bankers and oilmen. The Mungers spoke only to Champlins, and the Champlins spoke only to God.

And when those Presbies and Piskies spoke to God through their ministers, they were speaking to abortion salesmen. The ministers ran an underground referral service for the nearest quasi-legal abortion mill in KCK.

So the connection makes sense, but doesn't seem powerful enough to account for the hostility between the families. Everyone knew that Bush didn't mean what he said, and 'Highland Park' types simply don't focus on religion. It's not part of life or thought. You have to make religious noises to keep the plebeians at bay, and that's as far as it goes. Trump is the same type transposed to NYC. He emits religious phrases written by staff, but he clearly has no idea what the phrases mean.

I'd look instead for a more earthly connection through Perot's main business. EDS was an ancestor of Amazon AWS, providing Big Data storage and processing to corporations and government. EDS was thus part of Deepstate. If CIA chief Bush had tried to favor a competitor over EDS, that would account for a grudge in the meaningful part of life.

(Sidenote: I hadn't thought of this before. Those abortion-selling reverends were serving the interests of the elite by culling the herds of hippies and blacks. They knew what they were doing.)

Labels: storage

  ¶ 3:57 PM

  The other part of the "vacation"
For some reason I was thinking about the 1962 family "vacation" to visit dying Grandpa. I've already written about Grandpa's noble attempt to teach me about life. Grandpa was trying to immunize me against the delusions of the "liberal" parents by illustrating ACCURATE OBSERVATION. The vaccine didn't really activate until 1969 in jail, when those delusions collided head-on with serious reality. Then I saw what Grandpa was trying to say.

Other things were happening on that same "vacation". My ball-clipping mother was seemingly trying to visit all of her old boyfriends, showing my father how inadequate he was by comparison with the men she could have clipped.

This part of the "vacation" failed.

One of her old boyfriends owned a gas station and had a nice house, but he didn't have a happy life. He suffered from what we'd now call PTSD from WW2, and made life hell for everyone around him, including visitors.

The other old boyfriend was an undertaker. He decided to entertain the visitors by embalming a body while we watched. He explained how the big needle injected the embalming fluid, showed the color changing, explained what happened after burial.

DID THAT REALLY HAPPEN, or did I make up the memory? It must have happened. It's too fucking weird to make up.

Labels: Asked and unanswerable, Emersonian justice, Entertainment

  ¶ 9:57 AM

  The mob never forgives
This Epstein dude is a sleazy international fixer and blackmailer. The type was featured prominently in the Mueller soap opera. All of the characters in that series were evil fixers and blackmailers who worked for all sides at the same time and betrayed all sides at the same time. Mueller carefully and meticulously "saw" only the crimes that helped Trump or Trump-related organizations. Standard FBI procedure, standard media procedure.

The same thing is happening with Epstein. As long as his crimes were mostly associated with the Clinton mob, prosecutors and media gave him a free pass. Now that a connection to the Trump mob is possible, prosecution is possible and stories are possible.

In this case the link point has a classic Deepstate twist.

The Trump connection is Acosta, the former prosecutor who GAVE EPSTEIN THE FREE PASS. Acosta was heroically serving Deepstate by freeing the fixer who could have snitched on the Clinton mob if prosecuted.

And how does Deepstate REWARD Acosta for his service to the Clinton mob? By tossing him to the wolves because he is now connected to the Trump mob.

Exactly the same trick that Deepstate pulled on Nixon. After 20 years of loyal service, he was destroyed anyway. The mob never forgives. No matter how loyally you serve the mob, one wrong step and you're dead.

= = = = =

More serious sidenote: The connection between intel services and sexual deviance is old, well-known, and almost tautological. Spies are often recruited by blackmail, so spies often have a currently unfashionable lifestyle. In the '50s, homosexuality was unfashionable, so many spies were homosexual. Now that homosexuality is the official norm, other lifestyles are still unfashionable and recruitable.

Labels: Bemusement, Entertainment

  ¶ 5:23 AM

  The godmother
Once in a while a bit of political soap opera makes it through my filters. This is just too good to ignore.

Pelosi showing her Italian heritage:

All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.

You got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.

Too bad Brando is dead. I can see him playing the part to perfection. No makeup needed.

Come to think of it, it's not unfortunate. Diversity is everything in Hollywood! Now that Brando is a Person Of Rigor, he could play Pelosi magnificently. Pull him out of the coffin, prop him up, put a speaker inside the skull.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 12:50 AM

  This is the whole fucking purpose of Gaia.
Via ZH, more details on PGE's failure.

The important point is that the long powerlines failed ON THEIR OWN from lack of maintenance. There wasn't a windstorm or a lightning bolt. The insulators were just OLD.

PGE continually avoided NORMAL MAINTENANCE on long lines that were up to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. The HV wire kept dropping into trees BECAUSE THE EQUIPMENT WAS OLD.

This is the ENTIRE FUCKING PURPOSE of the Gaian fraud. It was originally set up in 1974 to help CIA replace civilization with a single global government, but most of its current practitioners are SHARE VALUE CORPORATIONS who use Gaia to lay off their own FAILURES onto other companies like Exxon.

By normal sane standards it's a bizarre form of fraud. It wouldn't have worked before the propaganda branches of CIA had softened and melted our brains with 50 years of constant universal all-pervading brain toxin. No corporation in 1960 would have considered using religion to shake down other companies. GM wouldn't have used the doctrine of Consubstantiation to charge Lever Brothers for the Corvair's safety failures. Ford wouldn't have manipulated Premillenial Tribulation to bill Disney for the Pinto fires.

This time the trick isn't working for PGE. They finally bumped into an honest JUDGE who (so far) isn't buying the normal shit.

= = = = =

Footnote for clarity: In sane times, corporations and religions often manipulated the same aspects of human nature for their own purposes. (1) Unpopular people want to be popular and wealthy. Corporations used this desire to sell deodorant and clothing. Religions used it as the Prosperity Gospel. (2) Most folks don't want to die. Corporations used this to sell drugs and medical procedures. Religions used it to sell tithing and indulgences. These are parallel forms of dishonesty. Now businesses use religion as a tool for fraud.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 11:59 PM

  Constants and variables 135, traffic flow edition
Like other semi-creative work, courseware has creative phases and organizing phases. Like other semi-creative workers, I'd rather do the creative stuff. I try to "justify" more new animations, but sooner or later the "justifications" bump into time constraints. Last week I ran out of "justifications" and had to start the dull work of editing and matching and setting up pointers and proofreading.

Also last week, the idiot Spokane dysgovernment pulled one of its typical stunts. Suddenly moved a pile of heavy equipment into this neighborhood and started CRASHING and HAMMERING and THROWING HUGE PIPES AROUND. As always they didn't give any warning or notice. I checked online and found out that this is a "traffic calming project". The online info doesn't include any maps or diagrams. I know that other "traffic calming projects" led to more speeders and more accidents, so we can expect the same here. It looks like they are narrowing down the intersection with an island of some sort, which will make the corner even more fun for school buses.



The conjunction of my phase change with the seismic distraction allowed me to test a long-held belief about 'flow' and concentration.

It's generally believed that creative work needs uninterrupted concentration, while proofreading and editing can be done 'in the background'. You can let it stand while you answer a phone or go to the store.

This rule is valid for physical creation like painting and pottery and cooking, where chemistry forces your hand. You can't start cooking a stew and then turn it off and leave it around for a few days until traffic-calming stops calming.

The old rule turns out to be backwards for my specific work. I could do the graphics and animation without any problem while the bulldozers and jackhammers were BANGING AND CRASHING. But the editing side requires me to keep two pictures and a dozen text files open and active at the same time, and I need to remember which items are 'source' and which are 'destination'. This takes serious concentration, and I can't just halt without dropping the spinning plates.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 9:51 AM

  More fake concern about fake news about fake robots
Brendan Dixon reports on a convincing bit of CG that fooled a lot of people, INCLUDING ME.

Motion graphics artist @TomCoben published a video last week showing an industrial robot bowl a perfect strike. Strictly speaking, the robot did not actually bowl a strike: It rocketed the bowling ball the full length of the alley, striking the pins dead-center, sending them all flying.

As The Daily Dot points out—and as Tom tried to make clear well-before his video went viral—the video is fake. As a motion graphics professional, Tom wanted to demonstrate what he can do, not what robots can do.

But his video did not enjoy 16 million views because his motion graphics skills are impressive. It went viral because viewers believed that’s what robots can do.

Even though I make CG all the time for work and play, I was fooled.

I read that it was CG, understood that it was CG, quickly imagined the steps needed to set up the animation, and then BELIEVED IT WAS REAL.

This is a tangled mess. Fortunately the solution is already available, and already mandated in the context of advertising. When an endorsement is simulated by an actor, the ad clearly and constantly shows a warning notice. When a fast car is shown doing idiotic risky shit that nobody in their right mind should ever do, the ad clearly and constantly shows "Professional driver on closed course."

Just apply the same regulation to CG simulations.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 5:48 AM

  Why did the videophone take so long?
I've asked the Y-long question about sound recording. Edison's first phonograph was equally usable as recorder and player. The office version (Dictaphone) remained record-play, but the home version instantly became play only. Why did home recording take so long to return? The answer is that home recording never returned. We have the tech built into cell phones and computers, but we still don't feel the need to record our own voices.

Similar question about the videophone.

Here's a 1930 experimental setup by Bell, found in the 1933 Arnold book that also prophesied a horrible TV utopia.



It was fully operational with two-way sound and two-way video, not needing a transmit/receive switch, as described in Arnold's incomprehensible grammarrhoid "English":

In one of these television-telephone booths a person seats himself before a frame in which he will see the face of the person with whom he is talking. His own face is rapidly scanned by a mild beam of blue light which reflects from his face to the photoelectric cells and gives rise to the current which transmits his image to the distant booth. There is no fierce glare to the scanning beam; and one is not annoyed by its presence and may even gaze directly at it without inconvenience.

The first thing which strikes the observer when he steps into the booth, which is lighted with a dim orange light to which the photoelectric cells are insensitive, is the absence of the usual telephone. Special telephone transmitters and receivers are concealed in the booths. One talks face to face to the distant person, and a hidden receiver speaks the words which seem to issue from his mouth.

And here's the more familiar 1960's videophone, proudly exhibited by Bell in several World's Fairs:

Hmm. The 1960's version looks a lot like a desktop computer. Why didn't the desktop computer evolve from the videophone? Why didn't the videophone become popular until 2000?

Same answer. Most people STILL don't use their cellphones as videophones. They use cellphones in two distinct ways. Most of the time it's an interactive TV or videogame system, communicating via text like a telegraph or a desktop computer. When people use it as a phone, they hold it to their head like an old-fashioned phone.

(I've never owned or handled a cellphone, so I'm just observing what others do.)

People don't like to record their own voice, and people don't like to show their face when talking on the phone. Both technologies have been available and rarely used since 1930, because human preferences haven't changed.

Labels: Asked and partly answered

  ¶ 4:57 AM

  We only need one diagnosis.
Ever since the founding of Freudian therapy, all of its theories and methods have been useless. Ever since the founding, outsiders and insiders have objectively proved OVER AND OVER AND OVER that it is useless.

Here's yet another disproof, via Eurekalert.

The main findings of the research were:

1. Psychiatric diagnoses all use different decision-making rules

2. There is a huge amount of overlap in symptoms between diagnoses

3. Almost all diagnoses mask the role of trauma and adverse events

4. Diagnoses tell us little about the individual patient and what treatment they need.

The authors conclude that diagnostic labelling represents 'a disingenuous categorical system'.

A good replacement:

Professor John Read, University of East London, said: "Perhaps it is time we stopped pretending that medical-sounding labels contribute anything to our understanding of the complex causes of human distress or of what kind of help we need when distressed."

The causes of human distress, and the kind of help we need when distressed. Concise and accurate.

This article doesn't mention the change from useless to MONSTROUS in the last 20 years. Now the DSM primarily serves as a tool for detecting and drugging and destroying dissidents. Unfashionable beliefs are OFFICIAL DISEASES. This is lethally important because Freudian psychiatry has OFFICIAL STANDING. When courts want to determine the "sanity" of a criminal or a dissident, Freudians make the OFFICIAL decision.

There is only one validly diagnosable psychiatric disorder: Psychiatry.

Labels: metametrology, Metrology

  ¶ 3:46 PM

  The champion
Speaking of truth-tellers, Ann Widdecombe is the champion truth-teller right now. She never allows a flat assertion to sail through unquestioned, never bites the poisoned apple.

This interview is classic.



At one point the "male" journalist unit fires a standard idiotic talking point at Ann. She disassembles the talking point and hands it back. The "male" unit says "I don't understand."



Ann doesn't bother to explain AGAIN, just says "I'm sorry that you don't understand."



Beautiful contrast in body language. The "male" unit feels cold and humiliated. He doesn't even understand why he doesn't understand. Ann is cozily ensconced in truth.

I trust her truth by EXPERIENCE, which is the only way of judging truth. She is the ONLY politician in the world who speaks the truth about prison and crime. All others, regardless of good or bad intentions, are totally removed from reality.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 2:47 PM

  Perot RIP
Ross Perot, out of public life for many years, has died of natural causes.

As a sort of funeral cortege, let's see if we can place him in the lineup of Deepstate's victims.

1. Harding broke up Wilson's bureaucracies, imposed tariffs, and supported non-intervention. Deepstate unquestionably ethicuted him, and possibly killed him.

2. Ike pulled out of Deepstate's Korean war and supported non-intervention elsewhere. Deepstate heartattacked him, and Nixon took over.

3. JFK and RFK tried to expose Deepstate. Both got killed.

4. George Romney had been telling the truth about offshoring LONG before anyone else saw the problem. He told the truth about Vietnam, so Deepstate unpersoned him, made him unfit for public consumption.

5. George Wallace told the truth about pretty much everything. He was assassinated but barely survived, permanently disabled.

6. Reagan offended Deepstate in ways** that we still don't know about. Bush Senior assassinated him. Unfortunately for Bush, his family-owned assassin wasn't as competent as Oswald, so Reagan was weakened instead of killed. Bush Senior took over the government de facto, and later by "election".

7. Perot told the truth about offshoring and globalism. Bush Senior unpersoned him, made him unfit for public consumption.

Does Trump belong in this list? No, he's the opposite. He's working FOR Deepstate.

Nixon remains the only mystery, the only confused picture. He offended Deepstate in '48 by exposing FBI "soviet" agents. Deepstate never forgave him and ultimately unpersoned him. But in the interim he served Deepstate in '56 by taking the reins from Ike, and then gave Deepstate ALL OF ITS WISHES AND DREAMS in the '70s. Despite his heroic service, the old Hiss grudge was the only thing that counted in the end.

= = = = =

** Best guess for Reagan's offense would be the same 1948 hearings where JFK and RFK and Nixon were exposing FBI "soviets". Reagan wasn't in professional politics yet, but he was helping HUAC to expose the agents in Hollywood.
  ¶ 8:10 AM

  Good prediction after all
The early stages of any communication technology inspire grandiose elite fuckheads to dream of a world where everyone is reduced to elite fuckhead idiocy.

A new item at American Radio History contains a beautifully horrible example. Arnold's 1933 handbook of advertising includes a chapter on the glorious promise of television. The author imagines the TV Utopia that awaits us in 1940:

I can easily anticipate special music of the operatic type written exclusively for broadcasting. No longer will it be necessary to compress a three-hour presentation of some famous opera into the period of an hour. Much of this will apply to our commercial programs of the future.

Instead of being a miscellaneous collection of disassociated items brought together for the sake of holding the attention of an audience for a limited time, there will be presented musical, dramatic and educational programs written for presentation where both eye and ear reception will be taken into account.

Jesus. What a grotesque monster. NOBODY really likes LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG operas. Fashionable fuckheads watch LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG operas because it's the fashionable thing to do. Radio could ALREADY present LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG operas in 1933. Short pieces weren't compelled by technical limitations; short pieces were compelled by HUMAN NATURE.

Normal people have other things to do. They listen to radio while washing dishes or changing diapers or fixing the car. They want ENTERTAINMENT, which means DISTRACTION from the dull hard stinky necessities of life. Radio in 1933 was already doing a damn good job of providing sane and clean entertainment, including a lot more classical music and serious discussion than any mass media provides now.

When the 1940 that I have described shall have arrived, we are likely to be in the midst of a new social and economic order.

Shall have is an excellent globaleth, a symptom of satanic neocon grammarrhoids.

New social and economic order is awfully familiar. In 1933 one new social and economic order was well underway in Stalin's Russia, and another new social and economic order was starting in Hitler's Germany.

Nations will no longer be disassociated units, but may be convened on a few hours' notice at a conference where views may be exchanged and visible indications of approval witnessed.

The perpetual idiotic dream of participatory democracy. Modern "libertarians" have finally achieved it. A conference where views may be exchanged and visible indications of approval witnessed is PRECISELY Facebook's stated mission. Exchange verbatim repetitions of Correct views, hit the Like button. Try to exchange an Incorrect view, and the conference disassociates your unit.

So this fuckhead was a good predictor after all, but his prediction wasn't the utopia that he idiotically imagined.

= = = = =

Later: No, I'm wrong. No paradox, no irony, no failure. The new social and economic order IS utopia for fuckheads like Norman Corwin and this author. They are in charge of the utopia. That's the whole fucking point. Exterminating billions of Deplorables IS utopia for demonic psychopaths.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Entertainment, Leth

  ¶ 12:06 AM

  Social Darwinism at its best
A writer at the Sounding Line, a less famous competitor of ZeroHedge, has assembled a video showing all the rulers of France from 500 AD to today. The earlier ones are paintings, later are photographs.

One sharp line stands out. The hereditary monarchs are either delicate and sickly or soft and effeminate. In 1300 years, only two of them look like they could throw a punch or tolerate a bit of bad weather: Pepin le Bref and Louis XIV.

The list doesn't depict the Revolutionary leaders, treating them as 'the Directorate'. The pictures resume with Napoleon. In 1873 the first non-hereditary president is Adolphe Thiers. The phenotype instantly changes. Thiers looks like a man who could handle himself, and nearly all of the non-hereditary presidents are equally solid. Macron is the first revert to the delicate monarchical type.

Later constants and variables thought: It's possible that the painting vs photograph line is mainly responsible for the difference. Perhaps royal painters were ordered to show the monarch as holy, which was manifested as delicacy. But if that was true, then the painters of Pepin and Louis violated the order.
  ¶ 7:02 AM

  tl;dr Natural Law
All of Natural Law in one GIF.

Tulsi gets it.

Labels: defensible cases, defensible spaces, defensible times

  ¶ 5:26 AM

  Full recapture
Greece has firmly elected a new PM. Mitsotakis isn't familiar to me, but a BBC article clarifies. The Mitsotakis dynasty has been part of the ruling class for a long time, though not as famous as the Papandreou and Karamanlis dynasties.

All you need to know:

This was a venture capitalist, ex-McKinsey consultant educated at Harvard and Stanford in the US, who appeared very much part of the old guard.

A copy of Macron. Total recapture by EU and the bankers. Victory for Soros, who first occupied Macedonia, then leveraged a peculiar 2300-year-old trademark dispute to break the weak Tsipras government in Greece.

Labels: SES, Sorosia

  ¶ 1:31 AM

  Why so upset?
I don't understand why everyone is so upset over the girl who licked the ice cream. She was just following instructions. The label said FRENCH VANILLA, so she Frenched the Vanilla.

Seriously, it's no different from any produce in a store. Hands are covered with bacteria. Every tomato and apple gets "tampered" by lots of bacteria-covered hands before your bacteria-covered hands pick it up and put it in your basket. Tongues and fingers don't carry the same bacteria, but that isn't a meaningful distinction.

"Product tampering" is a remarkably long-lasting moral panic, creating a whole bunch of laws and a whole bunch of expense and inconvenience, all from ONE crime committed by ONE criminal about 30 years ago. Because ONE criminal put poison in Tylenol containers, ALL containers are hard to open and sometimes impossible to open. Though nobody measures it, a whole lot of injuries have resulted from using knives and scissors and pliers to open those "tamper-proof" containers.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 11:09 AM

  Storage is the heart of civilization
Noticed a badly done graph on corporate bankruptcies at ZH. The graph doesn't adjust the assets for inflation, so it's useless.

There's an even stupider description on a currently relevant item. One of PGE's bankruptcies happened in 2001, as a result of "drought that decreased hydroelectric output."

No. Southern California is ALWAYS in a drought, some years worse than others. When your CONSTANT CONDITION is low rainfall, you need to add ENOUGH reservoir capacity to keep your generators going.

PGE failed to do that. They chose** Gaian craziness over civilization. Instead of building more dams, they REMOVED some of the existing dams, pretending to replace the input with wind and solar.

Wind and solar CANNOT power civilization because they aren't steady. Wind is actually COUNTER-steady. Wind is weakest exactly when you NEED extra electricity.

Civilization requires steady and reliable power sources.



I've made this point before. Storage is the heart of civilization.

When you have a steady supply of power and material and labor, you can start building a SURPLUS of value. A good season can be stored to get you through a bad season. Grain elevators, oil storage tanks, dams, savings accounts.

In basic economic terms, civilization happens when you have a reliable SURPLUS of value. The SURPLUS can be used to build new farms and factories, and to build better and more beautiful cities and parks and schools. Without the SURPLUS, civilization collapses.

When you're constantly behind the curve, living hand to mouth or deep in debt, every slight perturbation kills you.

Western debtism guarantees that the whole system is constantly on the negative side of the ledger, constantly relying on bankers to supply loans or the central bank to print money. Just-in-time inventory, wind and solar "power", zero interest on savings, arbitrage instead of grain storage. Civilization is impossible, and independent decisions are impossible. NYC controls everything.

Sharia and Soviet systems are firmly planted on the SURPLUS side, with government taking part of the surplus to fund its operations. Monopolizing the surplus is prohibited. In Sharia the prohibition is cultural and legal; in Soviet the stock traders simply don't exist so they can't slaughter the world.

= = = = =

** Footnote on chose Gaian craziness. PGE can't claim that it was meekly obeying EPA genocide. PGE is big enough to buy regulators and break rules with impunity. It breaks all other rules all the time. When it follows Gaia instead of rationality, the choice is voluntary and intentional.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law, storage

  ¶ 5:43 AM

  No, people didn't think that way.
Article in Aeon reports that "scientists" are sloooooooooooooowly catching up with knowledge that humans have possessed for thousands of years.

Now, having come up with some sneaky new ways to investigate animal memory, scientists are closer than ever to answering that question once and for all. In the past decade, researchers studying animals from the far corners of the animal kingdom – western scrub-jays, dolphins, elephants, even dogs – have come to the same conclusion: at least some animals are capable of these human-like memories of past experience. ‘For a long time, people thought that nonhuman animals were not capable of forming episodic memories,’ Jonathon Crystal, a neuroscientist at the Indiana University, told me. ‘That default view is not correct.’

No, people didn't think that. Only "scientists" and Catholics believe that non-human animals are inanimate mechanisms.

People who WORK with animals have always understood and USED the episodic memory of animals. A milkman's horse or a seeing-eye dog remembers and implements a LONG sequence of actions and places.

A more interesting question is the genetically implanted sequence in some fish, who know how to reach their designated spawning location through thousands of miles and hundreds of tributary branchings. (When going downstream you merge automatically. Upstream you have to pick the correct branch.)

Later: Note how the milk horse in the cited video negotiates a sharp turn in a narrow space flawlessly. Like a semi driver, he knows where each point of the vehicle is without looking.

Labels: Asked and unanswered, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 10:45 PM

  It's all derivatives now
Cited by the Tesla skeptics...

Deloitte, an accounting firm, estimates that the outstanding value of loans against art in America reached $17bn-20bn in 2017, up 13% from the previous year. Industry insiders say such lending has continued to grow at double-digit rates since then.

“Ten or 20 years ago it never crossed your mind to leverage your art collection. But the word is out now,” says Evan Beard of Bank of America Private Bank, the institution with the highest outstanding value of art-secured loans. As interest rates have fallen, borrowing has become more attractive. Open public registers make it easy to check if art is encumbered. Price estimates and auction results available online since the early 2000s have made underwriting easier. In America collectors can even keep encumbered art on their wall.

Pawned paintings used to be a mark of faded genteel aristocracy, not a mark of satanic fuckheads.

As I wrote earlier in a similar context:

EW Marland, who sacrificed part of his own wealth to cultivate Ponca, had a huge collection of paintings in his mansion. After JP Morgan bought him out, he lost gumption and frittered away his investments. He died nearly broke. His younger wife Lydie was loyal to the manor and the name. For a while after EW died, she wandered the country living on the kindness of strangers, frequently pawning and redeeming the one painting she had kept. Late in life she returned home, and the Roman convent that owned the mansion allowed her to live out her last years in the gatehouse.

In Poncan myth, Lydie's pawned painting was the distilled soul of the noble lord.

Now a rich idiot casually buys one random painting for the same price as all the houses in Ponca.

Paintings used to be esteemed as real value, the result of trained and practiced talent. Now paintings, like everything else, are just tools for arbitrary arbitrage.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 3:31 PM

  Seismology is worthless.
Some branches of science have taken off their theory goggles and started observing reality. Seismologists haven't. Their prediction ability has NEVER IMPROVED. It's still zero. They can't even POSTDICT properly.

After the 6.4 yesterday, seismologists said there was a 9% chance of a larger quake following. A larger quake followed. Now they're saying there's a 5% chance of a larger quake following this one.

When your 9% turns out to be 100%, you should AT LEAST adjust the next prediction upward. Seismologists do not observe reality.

Another seismologist said that these quakes are not on the San Andreas, so there's ZERO chance of a big quake along the San Andreas. This is an ancient and unshakeable bigotry among seismologists. No quake can ever cause another quake. Each quake exists in its own universe. Every quake is strictly an independent Poisson data point.

Sheer nonsense. Or rather shear nonsense. We've had many examples of large quakes triggering distant quakes in areas that had been 'waiting' for a quake. Simple physics requires it. When the waves are strong enough to do damage 100 miles away, they're also strong enough to break the static friction of ANY fault that's stressed and ready to slip.

USA STRONG seismologists have studiously ignored work by Chinese and Russian seismologists who have managed to predict quakes days in advance by observing animal behavior. USA STRONG seismologists do not believe in life. Animals are independent Poisson data points without senses and brains.

When a branch of science has been active for 300 years without ONE SINGLE SUCCESS, it's time to stop funding it.

Labels: Blinded by Stats

  ¶ 9:15 AM