And a third mystery unraveled!
Another long-lasting question answered!

What did tornados sound like before freight trains and jet planes were invented?

The answer comes from the 1816 Encyclopedia Perthensis, under the long section on Electricity.



Tranfcribed to make the text fearchable, and to fubftitute ftandard f's for thofe ftrange f's that feem to be f's:

"August 2, 1763, about six in the evening, there arose at Anderlight [Anderlecht], about a league from Brussels, a conflict of several winds born upon a thick fog. This conflict lasted 4 or 5 minutes, and was attended with a frightful hissing noise, which could be compared to nothing but the yellings of an infinite number of wild beasts. The clouds then opening, discovered a kind of very bright lightning, and in an instant the roofs of one side of the houses were carried off and dispersed at a distance; above 1000 large trees were broke off, some near the ground, others near the top, some torn up by the roots; and many of the branches and tops carried to the distance of 60, 100 or 120 paces. Whole coppices were laid down, as corn is by ordinary winds; and the glass of the windows, situated near the spot, was shivered to atoms."

It is not unusual for thunder-storms to produce most violent whirlwinds, such as are by some philosophers attributed to electricity; nay, even to occasion an agitation in the waters of the ocean itself; and all this too after the thunder and lightning has ceased. Of this the following instance happened at Great Malvern, October 16, 1761:

"At a quarter past 4 in the afternoon, the people were surprised with a most shocking and dismal noise; 100 forges, all at work at once, could scarce equal it. Upon the side of the hill about 100 yards to the SW, there appeared a prodigious smoke, attended with the same violent noise, as if a volcano had burst out of the hill; it soon descended, and passed on within about 100 yards of the south end of the house; it seemed to rise again in the meadow just below it, and continued its progress to the east, rising in the same manner for four different times, attended with the same dismal noise as at first; the air being filled with a nauseous and sulphurous smell. It gradually decreased till it was quite extinguished in a turnip field, about a quarter of a mile below the house; the turnip leaves, with leaves of trees, dirt, sticks, &c. filled the air, and flew higher than any of the hills. The thunder ceased before this happened, and the air soon afterwards became calm and serene."

The first incident could be a tornado, but seems more like a derecho or even a Chelyabinsk-size meteor. The second is unquestionably a tornado.
  ¶ 10:30 AM

  Another mystery cleared up!
This is a good day for explained mysteries!

Polistra has always been puzzled about the purpose of the Tesla electric car. In South Park terms, the Tesla business model appeared to be:

(1) Make a hugely expensive and completely unusable car that turns into a brick when you drive it.

(2) ???????

(3) Profit!

Now this article fills in the missing ?????? part.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk must be getting tired of fighting bad reviews of his cars. In 2011 Tesla sued the BBC’s ‘Top Gear’ over a segment where two of their roadsters allegedly broke down on the show’s test track. Musk defended his company once again this month on Bloomberg television. He claims a misleading New York Times review of the Tesla Model S cost Tesla $100 million.

So, the true and complete business model is:

(1) Make a hugely expensive and completely unusable car that turns into a brick when you drive it.

(2) Sue everyone who figures out that the car is unusable.

(3) Profit from court settlement!

And as long as I'm being silly, let's repeat the Tesla Owner's Song:

Oh give me a place where the wind turbines race,
where the birds and the bats die and scream;
where subsidies pay for my Latté Grandé,
and the bursting dams kill human dreams.

Home, home is my range, where the volts charge my batteries quick,
I can quietly roam, thirty miles from my home,
then my Tesla turns into a brick.
  ¶ 7:41 AM

  Finally explained!
Well, the word finally isn't accurate, except on a personal level.

I've been looking since Sept 2008 for a plausible explanation of what happened then. It was clearly a coup, and it smelled like blackmail. Our Goldman-slave government and Goldman-slave media refused to even ask the question.

Oddly enough, the answer was published in a mainstream essay in May 2009, but I didn't see it until now. Thanks to the Econned blog for pointing to it.

The explanation, along with plenty of good background info, was in The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson, former head of IMF. His experience in dealing with third-world countries enabled him to understand this third-world country in a way that other observers couldn't or wouldn't:

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

Well, that's it then. Not explicit old-fashioned blackmail as I suspected, but extortion nonetheless. The foreign lenders who had been propping up our fake "economy" saw the game starting to collapse, and began pulling out the props. Goldman dba "US Government" had to satisfy them to keep the Ponzi rolling.
  ¶ 3:28 AM

  Did money come from Betelgeuse?
This morning one of the Money Talk shows, maybe Ray Lucia, was making a point about evolution and money. It's a familiar and plausible point, rehashed often: Money came along quite late in the course of evolution, thus we aren't equipped to handle it. We constantly make big mistakes in evaluating prices and risks because money is basically beyond us.

This morning, for some reason, I applied the Grand Blueprint mindset instead of the random evolution mindset. The Grand Blueprint, gaining more support every day from new examinations of epigenetics and actual critters, holds that all the functions and purposes of plants and animals were present from the start. Each major and minor type of living creature, each phylum and species, carries a significant part of the whole blueprint, maybe even the whole thing; but the hard-wired heritable genome of each type includes only a very small subset. Putting it simply, evolution is a process of subtraction, not a process of addition.

Okay then. If all human talents and tendencies have been available since we walked upright, then these particular deficiencies in sensing risk or value are not universal. Money, with all its various virtues and sins, didn't drop in from some other planet 5000 years ago. All aspects of money were invented by humans with better talents in this area; thus all aspects are understandable by higher-ability humans. It's not a question of universal deficiency, it's just a question of different types of intelligence. Some humans understand the risks and values well enough to fool other humans. If that weren't true, money wouldn't exist at all.

Why is this important? Because the 'money came from ET' mindset makes it easier for the cheaters to get away with their games. Securitization is 'too complicated' to regulate. Mere humans can't understand it; we just have to trust Goldman to do it honestly.

Nonsense. It's all as old as humanity, and governments have been regulating commercial cheaters ever since we had governments. When securitization popped up in Swift's time, the British government wasn't afraid to punish it. When it popped up again in Coolidge's time, FDR wasn't afraid to punish it. The only reason we won't punish it now is because the thieves are fully in control of everything. That's all. It's not evolution, it's just absolute and total crime. The problem is complicity, not complexity.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 5:50 PM

  Good stereotypes make good neighbors
Nice straightforward article on the value of stereotypes by Ross Pomeroy. Nothing new or surprising. Most stereotypes are accurate. Forbidding all stereotypes prevents us from protecting ourselves, and prevents us from distinguishing the few inaccurate generalizations from the many true ones.

Pomeroy's discussion of bad neighborhoods led me to a new thought via circuitous paths. Spokane's leftist establishment sees most of the city as a bad neighborhood,



which has always struck me as unjust. Look at any combox under any local news item, and you'll find scathing hatred for the 'North Side', comprising about 2/3 of the city's area and population. If you've never been here, you'd think everything north of the river was Compton. In fact the bad parts are small isolated islands, and they're mainly on the East Side, both north and south. Trouble is, 'the East Side' isn't a named stereotype in Spokane. The southern part of the East Side counts as part of the supposedly nice 'South Hill', and the northern part of the East Side counts as part of the supposedly awful 'North Side'.

Recently I decided to stop fighting the anti-NorthSide bias. If it keeps rich assholes from moving into this part of town, then it's a protective fence. Rich assholes bring dishonesty, deviance, inequality and snobbery wherever they move.

Here's the new thought: I'm a social imbecile, with zero understanding of human strategies. If I can reach this conclusion about stereotypes after 63 years of slow dull thinking, it must be trivially and instantly obvious to people who know how to manipulate power. Thus it's highly likely that many inaccurate stereotypes are maintained because they protect someone who lives inside the stereotype.
  ¶ 4:38 AM

  Long-nosed cricket / EDIT: I TAKE IT BACK.


Beppe Grillo is certainly an interesting character, but I hope young Italians will treat him with caution and suspicion. He was trained in commercial economics, and his vaguely defined agenda seems awfully similar to Occupy's vaguely defined agenda or Tea Party's vaguely defined agenda.

Smells like Agent Provocateur to me. A clever and flashy distraction, a lightning rod to discharge youthful energy into a cause that will ultimately serve the Establishment. Watch out.

= = = = =

Couple days later: NO. I TAKE IT ALL BACK after reading Evans-Pritchard's analysis of the election. The net result of Grillo's voters is a victory for parties that favor pulling Italy out of the EU. That's an ABSOLUTELY GOOD THING, and it's exactly what the banksters hate most. Remains to be seen whether the banksters will allow independence. But if AEP is right, Italy will give it a good solid try. Bravo!
  ¶ 2:39 AM

  Good day for the world


No reason to hold this one, waiting for the usual triple pattern! This death needs to be celebrated on its own.

One of the most toxic arrogant high-fashion commiefags in all of history has finally moved to Hell. Roy Cohn, current ruler of Hell after a hostile takeover in 1986, will try to spend a few subinfinities in bed with Koop, thinking him a kindred evil spirit. Ultimately Cohn will realize that Koop is too evil for Hell, and will banish him to the newly created Koop's Super-Exclusive Inferno Health Spa, where nobody but Koop can ever be admitted.


Trouble in Hell, happiness on earth!

= = = = =

Addendum a couple weeks later: Damn. I knew Koop was evil, but I didn't even realize the full extent of his hyperultrasuperevil.

From an adulatory pile of lethal vomit in the Soviet-front """"""""Christian"""""""" Century:

Koop, a distinguished pediatric surgeon, had long opposed abortion, but in 1978 he teamed up with Francis A. Schaeffer, a goateed, knicker-wearing evangelical philosopher, to produce a film series called Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Schaeffer had long excoriated what he called “secular humanism” and warned that the legalization of abortion would soon lead to infanticide and euthanasia. Koop’s sterling reputation as a physician added credibility to the argument. As the film series toured American cities in 1979, the term “secular humanism” entered the political lexicon—and Falwell, Weyrich and other leaders of the religious right harvested popular anger over abortion. They adroitly mobilized politically conservative evangelicals into a potent voting bloc in time for the 1980 election.

The rest, as they say, is history. The religious right settled on Ronald Reagan as their champion and standard-bearer, despite the fact that as governor of California Reagan had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in the nation. They supported him instead of his evangelical opponent with a longer record of opposing abortion, incumbent Jimmy Carter.

The religious right’s reward was the appointment of Koop as surgeon general of the United States. But Koop proved to be his own man:

He called attention to the burgeoning AIDS crisis, even though others in the Reagan administration preferred to ignore it.

He advocated for sex education and the use of condoms, which pitted him against other leaders of the religious right, especially Phyllis Schlafly.

He quashed a specious [sic], politically motivated [sic] report that asserted that women who had abortions suffered adverse psychological effects.

For "own man" read "Soviet mole". Koop's career was remarkably parallel to Roy Cohn. Associate with pro-American politicians; lead them into unpopular positions; take power; use power to implant the Soviet ideology with maximum force.

With this info, I'm more inclined to think that Ev and Roy are enjoying their eternal mutual ass-ramming sessions. No need for Roy to get rid of such a kindred superstar of sodomy and sovietism.
  ¶ 5:20 PM

  Tired of this stupid analogy
From Politico:

A scientist nibbled away at Sen. Rand Paul on Friday after the Kentucky Republican blasted his research on schools of fish as wasteful federal spending. “He got the funding wrong and the species wrong, and he misrepresents the work we’ve done,” Princeton science professor Iain Couzin told POLITICO. “He’s done some serious cherry-picking here. That’s one study, we’ve had a series of studies that have taken many years.”

On Fox News on Thursday night, Paul said the military has spent $5.2 million studying goldfish and advocated yanking funding for such programs to cut the budget. “In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish — studying goldfish to see how democratic they were and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish,” Paul said on Fox. “I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies.”

But Couzin charged Paul “misrepresented” the research that scientists have been doing for about four years. First of all, Couzin said, they studied golden shiner fish — not goldfish. He also said the research, among other things, can help lead to advances in technology for robots that work on deep sea oil spills and radioactive leaks. He said the research has “direct applications to human security and collective control of robots.”

Wrong fish? So fucking what? Jesus. Spare us.

Commenters on the story pulled out the usual tired shit: You can't always predict where research will go. Fleming found penicillin by accident, Thomson's discovery of the electron seemed useless until electronics came along.

I hate to defend Rand Paul, a man who was named after a Soviet agent, but he happens to be right (by accident!) on this one point, and the usual defenders of infinite research funding are wrong.

= = = = =

(1) Fleming and Thomson were NOT working on blue-sky speculative crap.

Fleming had been successfully developing antibiotics for 10 fucking years. He had the good sense, the experience and the equipment to spot a new antibiotic when it popped up amid the work he'd already been doing for 10 fucking years.

Thomson wasn't playing around with Gedankenexperiments. He coined the concept of the electron in 1899, when electric circuitry was already well developed and commercialized. Inventors and experimenters already understood the behavior of the 'electric substance' in a solid and quantitative way. Everything that happened after Thomson could have happened just as well with the existing models. The electron did not lead to electronics; electronics led to the electron.

= = = = =

(2) Federally-funded researchers are not allowed to have accidents. They are required to know the result before applying for the grant. Serendipity will be ruthlessly cut down by the peer reviewers.

This is basically a good thing, provided that the subject is appropriate for Federal work. When an already known discovery is likely to be beneficial to THE FUCKING PEOPLE OF THIS FUCKING COUNTRY, and when commercial interests are unlikely to fund the research, then government funding to test and develop the discovery is worthwhile.

Excellent example in today's news: A wheat researcher at WSU, working patiently for 10 years (Hmm, sounds familiar) and using old-fashioned breeding instead of GM methods, has developed a wheat variety that combines the best qualities of durum and red. It has the drought tolerance of durum along with the softness needed for bread. This will expand bread-quality wheat farming into areas that are too dry, or it could decrease the need for irrigation in places like SW Kansas where the Ogallala Aquifer is being overused.

The main problem with most Fed research is not the lack of serendipity, it's the subject matter. We simply don't need research in collective control of robots or social "sciences" or global warming or economics or cosmology or quantum "physics". Those areas are fraudulent religions that serve no purpose but tyranny, murder and greed.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age

  ¶ 5:30 AM

  Another triple play


Polistra notes another triple-play obituary. Founders or leaders of three iconic bottle-shaped things died this week.

(1) Paul McIlhenny, the last named McIlhenny in the Tabasco clan. The company remains privately held by the family, which means it should remain successful.

(2) Wojciech Inglot, founder of Inglot Cosmetics. The company recently released an accidental success in the form of O2M nail polish. It was intended to be all greeny and Gaian, allowing the nail to breathe. Instead, it turned out to be massively popular in the stricter parts of the Muslim world. Muslim women enjoy decoration as much as any other woman, but halal law requires all parts of the body to be 'aired'. Before O2M, nail polish was an impervious varnish, thus prohibited.

(3) Ray Cusick, designer of the Daleks, EXTERMINATED at 84.

Okay, okay, mixing those three into one theme is a long stretch. Mainly I needed to pull Polistra and Happystar out of the predicament I put them in yesterday.
  ¶ 5:30 AM

  1938: Sulking banks?
Polistra, always trying to defend FDR against his modern critics AND his modern fans who misunderstand him, is suspicious of the usual explanation of the 1938 're-depression'.

The usual leftist explanation, according to Krugman: FDR was pouring borrowed "stimulus" into the economy; he stopped in '38, and the economy crashed again. We must learn from this, and we must increase our current "stimulus" to a level sufficient to "prime the pump". This crucially necessary level of borrowing is somewhere between Infinity and (Infinity * Infinity).

First of all, the analogy fails entirely. FDR's "stimulus" was fairly small by modern standards and NONE of it went to banks. FDR had started his first term by closing bad banks, not propping them up; and he gradually added more regulation and enforcement against banks and speculators. The harshest regulations came into force in 1936.

Unlike Krugman/Bush/Obama's giant "stimulus" to the Wall Street Mafia, FDR's small "stimulus" went into building infrastructure, largely through WPA and CCC; and into supports for farm prices.

Second, leaving the idiot analogy aside: If slowed "stimulus" was the problem in 1938, we should see poor people and farmers most strongly affected by 1938, because they lost some of their "stimulus".

I'm familiar with automotive history, and this is where my suspicion started. In the auto industry, 1938 doesn't fit the 'poor hardest hit' template. The worst loss was in the middle range, not the bottom. Chevy's 1938 year was down 42% from '37; Caddy's 1938 was down 35%; but Pontiac was down 60%. Other middle makes like Hudson and Nash were dramatically down.

What was happening on the farm? A couple snippets from the nice little USDA 'Farm Outlook' booklet in 1939:



Nothing special happening directly to farmers, but more indications that major industries were the focus of the problem.

Let's look at some manufacturing sectors, taken from this Census bureau document.

Three industries that fired lots of workers in 1938: [Larger picture here.]


Three industries that weren't affected by 1938: [Larger picture here.]


See it? The industries that were hurt most were related to autos, or fairly expensive stuff. Clothing and shoes were NOT bothered by 1938.

Poor people kept buying shoes and clothes, but middle and upper-class people slowed down their buying of cars and other expensive items.

Typically you need a LOAN to buy a car, and you don't need a loan to buy shoes. (Though you may be running a tab at the clothing store.)

Well, let's pursue that line of thinking .... and it didn't take long to find a hint. Though internal bank documents from 1938 are probably not available online, here's the first page of a 1939 Mass Bank Commission report:

Bringing the text out of the image: "During the past year much has been written and spoken on the subject of banks refusing to loan money. This statement as applied to Mass appears definitely as a myth."

There's the smoke. Bankers were pissed at strict regulations, and decided to take revenge.


But where's the fire? Haven't found it yet, though the SEC's enforcement of PUHCA may have been the match. Decided to post this as an open question for now, in case someone who has better access to documents happens to read it and pursue the point.
  ¶ 4:28 AM

  Shepardson again
This morning's science news about bees and ions adds another piece to the old Shepardson puzzle. Polistra has been following an old idea, written up by George Shepardson in 1901, that (some) plants live more by trading electrons than by absorbing sunlight.

Today's item indicates that (some) plants use negative charge intentionally to attract bees. When a flower is ready for bee service, the plant charges it negatively. Bees, who are always charged positively from the friction of flapping around in the air, sense the negative field and head for it. The contact of bee to flower discharges both sides, so the bee can tell which flowers are used up.



Shepardson's special theme was that pointy things act as centers for charge transfer. Pine needles have very little sunlight-absorbing area and excellent charge-absorbing qualities, so it's reasonable to assume that their main function is to gather electrons, not to gather sunlight. Similarly, bumblebees are hairy so they can sense the static signals from flowers.

= = = = =

Ancient sidenote, from 1816 'Encyclopedia Perthensis'.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, bee, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 8:07 AM

  Why is that surprising?
Somewhat interesting science item.

The complexity [of speech] comes from the fact that spoken words require the coordinated efforts of numerous "articulators" in the vocal tract -- the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx -- but scientists have not understood how the movements of these distinct articulators are precisely coordinated in the brain.

To understand how speech articulation works, Chang and his colleagues recorded electrical activity directly from the brains of three people undergoing brain surgery at UCSF, and used this information to determine the spatial organization of the "speech sensorimotor cortex," which controls the lips, tongue, jaw, larynx as a person speaks. This gave them a map of which parts of the brain control which parts of the vocal tract. They then applied a sophisticated new method called "state-space" analysis to observe the complex spatial and temporal patterns of neural activity in the speech sensorimotor cortex that play out as someone speaks. This revealed a surprising sophistication in how the brain's speech sensorimotor cortex works.

They found that this cortical area has a hierarchical and cyclical structure that exerts a split-second, symphony-like control over the tongue, jaw, larynx and lips.

Okay, so getting a real-time map of what happens in the sensori-motor area is an advance in scanning.

But really: why are you surprised at the sophistication? It's been known for 200 years that speech is a monstrously complex process involving split-second coordination of a dozen major sections of the body and a hundred different muscles. So the control center, wherever it might be, has to provide split-second coordination of a monstrously complex process.

Considering the brain's even more amazing ability to rewire itself on the fly, I doubt that these particular mappings are permanent or general.
  ¶ 8:34 AM

  A prayer, repeated again
Today's stock news is encouraging, but nowhere near enough. Apparently the Federal Counterfeit Bank has vaguely indicated that its Mafia-Feeding Mechanism may drop from (infinity*infinity) to merely (infinity) at some unstated future time which may even be within the lifetime of our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. This was enough to throw the Jew Mafia into a frenzy.

Time to repeat the prayer for complete reform:

= = = = =

Polistra and Happystar are saying a prayer in the form of a cheer. Since nobody in the Gaian Occupation Government understands the truth, maybe Allah will have mercy on this unfortunate land and force the truth to be visible in the only way that the idiots will understand.

It would have to be Allah, since his economic system is exactly the right medicine for our terminal illness.




Closed caption for cartoon-impaired:

Gimme a Z! Z!
Gimme a E! E!
Gimme a R! R!
Gimme a O! O!

Whatsat spell? Zero!

Where do we wannit? DOW!

When do we wannit? NOW!

= = = = =

And why is this necessary? Another repeat:

For the last 5 years we've been operating in strict defiance of the oldest law of economics, pretending that we can hold the price of borrowing at zero (for the Correct People only!) without creating problems. Real economists have known since 300 AD that price control always creates shortages, hoarding and black markets. And predictably, we have shortages, hoarding and black markets in capital. These bad things bring great profit to a few evil people, and those evil people pay all the 'economists' to be goddamn liars. If interest rates can rise to meet genuine risk, the whole banking system will return to a true free-market setup. When governments realize they have to pay actual interest on their bonds, they will be much slower to borrow. (I suppose Capo Bugsy Bernanke will invent some new criminal trick to get around it, but China's own economy is slowing down now, so China can't be the ultimate sugar daddy from now on.)

Same with stock prices. This is a longer-lasting problem, running back to 1980 or so. Companies that use profit as their pivot point are motivated to satisfy their customers and their employees. Companies that use share price as their goal don't care about quality of product or service; share price can be manipulated easily by insider tricks (acquisitions, buying back own stock) without any actual product or service at all.

Clearly the 2008 crash wasn't enough. Suckers are still going into the market, giving the evil players lots of material to play with. A great big resounding crash will drive the suckers out once and for all, and the share-dependent companies and traders will be unable to function. Only 'privately held' companies that operate without trading will survive. Profit will dominate again.

LOW INTEREST AND HIGH STOCKS ARE THE PROBLEM.
HIGH INTEREST AND LOW STOCKS ARE THE SOLUTION.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, the broken circle

  ¶ 4:58 AM

  Dogs and automobiles.
Why do dogs love vehicles? There aren't any vehicles in nature. Insects ride everything (sometimes in multiple levels!), but mammals don't have any experience of riding.



I suppose we'll never know why, but this wonderfully Dickensian picture answers when: as soon as humans invented the first self-propelled machines, dogs were proudly riding shotgun.

[Couldn't get more perfectly Dickensian! From left: J. Marley, B. Cratchit, E. Scrooge, T.T. Cratchit.]
  ¶ 10:35 AM

  Missed the best name!
Weather.com apparently gave up on finding a Q name for today's winter storm. They're just calling it "Storm Q". Come on, folks! You've missed the most perfect winter god of all, an Eskimo weather-god!

Qailertetang.

The short Wiki piece on Qailertetang feels suspiciously modern and suspiciously fictional. I'll stick with Franz Boas who says Qailertetang was a servant of Sedna, the crippled one-eyed fingerless mistress of the underworld. [See p 168 in this PDF.]



Let's all run around shouting "Hoo, hoo, hoo" to propitiate Qailertetang! Can't hurt, and it's a whole fucking lot nicer than the modern ceremony where we run around stealing trillions and trillions and trillions from poor people, who then freeze to death; and we hand the trillions and trillions and trillions to super-rich stock speculators, who then eat the poor people. (Menu: Medallion of peasant au pauvre in a balsamic libor reduction. Kosher, of course.)

The part about wishing for calm weather and a calm soul is just unspeakably beautiful. I can't say anything snarky about it.



As I was looking through the Boas text, ran into another interesting bit:

Hmm. Seems like the Eskimos survived a previous warm period. This means their food (seals, bears, etc) also survived a previous warm period. I thought all "scientists" told us that was impossible. "Before there was any rise and fall of the tide..." is especially tantalizing. Do the Eskimos remember a time when the moon was farther away?

= = = = =

Artistic note: Apologies to real Eskimos and their gods. I do NOT intend to disrespect or profane their ceremony. Exactly the opposite. I only wanted to mash the complex sequence into a simple animation that Polistra and friends could perform.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 7:01 AM

  Capacitive dynamo
An extremely old idea becomes practical, thanks to some Korean researchers. As reported here, they have plugged a hole in the most basic foundations of electricity.

Magnetic dynamos were invented early and brought to perfection by 1900. But capacitive dynamos were never developed. Why?

On paper you should be able to turn mechanical motion to electric motion equally well by both methods. And in practice you can do it both ways ... but until now, nobody had found a practical way to generate useful amounts of power by capacitive effects, while the magnetic methods produced megawatts easily.

Capacitor microphones, found in every audio device now, are capacitive dynamos. They create tiny charge motions, insufficient to drive any useful load. Their tiny currents can only modulate a larger current in a FET amplifier placed immediately next to the mic.

These Koreans produced useful amounts of power with an unexpected and rather sneaky trick. Sandwich a drop of water between two horizontal metal plates coated with Teflon. Apply mechanical force to vibrate the bottom plate up and down slightly. Well, seems a lot like a capacitor mic, so what's the trick? The trick is that the surface area of the water changes as the drop is squashed and unsquashed; and the changing area of contact turns out to be remarkably effective at driving electrons in and out of the plates. See the movies at the above link.

Another triumph for small experimental science. Fetishist wackos describing themselves as "physicists" continue to spend billions and billions and billions and billions and billions on their Large Hardon. Their only goal is to add new terms to their bizarre nonsensical jackoff equations, and they haven't even achieved that. Pure destruction, pure waste, pure consumption. Meanwhile, this elegant little hundred-dollar experiment opens a huge new field of endeavor.

= = = = =

Back in 1844, Faraday came ever so close to this effect during his unbelievably exhaustive experimentation. He was working with fine drops of steam passing through a small pipe made of various materials:



For more of Faraday, see page 130 of this PDF.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age

  ¶ 5:57 AM

  Disingenuous-fest
Oh no! This cannot be! We are hopelessly surprised!



"Oscar Pistorius, the South African Paralympic athlete will reportedly be tested for steroids after the banned drug was found at the home where he is accused of murdering his model girlfriend."

Absolutely inconceivable!!!! Nobody could have possibly suspected it!!! A world-class athlete cheating with chemicals? Nay, nay!!!! It has never happened in history!!!!

Tell you what. Wake me up when you find a clean athlete or a non-fag actor or a banker who missed one opportunity to steal a trillion.

= = = = =

Later thought: Pistorius is actually cheating two ways. One is juicing, which is apparently normal and unavoidable in pro sports nowadays. The other is his prosthetics. Olympic authorities let him get away with this because they couldn't bring themselves to deny a 'heroic cripple', but when you take away the emotion it's just plain cheating. In essence he brings a bicycle to a footrace, knowing he'll get away with riding the bicycle.
  ¶ 4:32 AM

  Who's adaptable?
We think of the Vatican as a ssssssssllllllllllooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww-moving government. We think of a western 'democracy' as being fairly adaptable, capable of responding to emergencies.

Two headlines today.

Washington shrugs as March 1 sequester nears

Vatican raises possibility of early March conclave

Debt problem obvious for 10 years ===> Fake solution delayed for one year ===> Fake solution delayed again.

Pope replacement problem obvious immediately ===> Real solution scheduled immediately, finished in 2 weeks.

So which government is capable of quick action?
  ¶ 8:26 AM

  Jesus, do you really have to be so fucking stupid?
In the wake of the Chelyabinsk meteor, more meteor sightings are hitting the news, leading to speculation that we're in some kind of new bad era.

I'd say it's possible that we're passing through a strong belt of space crap. Either the crap in this belt is bigger than the usual meteor belt, or it's faster. Two weeks ago there was a meteor over Spokane that emitted a sonic boom. I've never heard a meteor boom before. (Sounded metallic to me, like a car crash nearby: Bonk-bonk!)

And it's unquestionably possible that the news will bring us more meteor flashes, making it seem like something unusual is happening.

But here's one thing that ISN'T possible:

Expert quoted on NPR:
"We're likely to see more of this, because more of the earth's surface is covered with cities."

It's true that megacities are sprawling in the last 20 years, especially in China and India. But the overwhelming trend of the last CENTURY is that LESS OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE is covered with HUMANS. People have been concentrating more and more in a few urban areas, leaving huge swathes of prairie land and small towns uninhabited.

Motherfucking city-ass fuckheads. Always assuming that only city-ass fuckheads are human. Rural people are incapable of seeing flashes of light and hearing big booms.
  ¶ 12:19 PM

  Misplaced argument
Discussion of self-defense in US has been exclusively focused on guns for a long time. This was NOT the intention of the 2nd Amendment, and it's a carefully planned distraction from the real meaning of self-defense. NRA still repeats the nonsense about dictators taking your guns. Hitler might have done it, but plenty of other dictators didn't. Russia was very well-armed during Stalin's time. Iraq was bristling with AK-47s during Saddam's time, as our soldiers tragically discovered. Those guns were not used against the dictators because the dictators ruled with the consent of a majority of their people.

In 1787 the word arms meant 'self-defense tools'. Those tools included swords, knives, clubs and guns. In 2013 the concept 'self-defense tools' still includes those older items, and also includes computer software, printers, telephones and cameras.

Stalin understood the point. He didn't confiscate guns, but he did refuse Bell's offer to set up a telephone network in Russia, and he fiercely wiped out unauthorized printing presses and mimeographs.

Modern Russians also understand the point, which is why they all have dashcams.

Modern German anarchists understand the point. Camover. Using cameras to document an underground campaign to decamerate the authorities.
  ¶ 5:24 AM