A little team spirit
Kaiser Permanente in Seattle is testing one of the new vaccine candidates for the Branded Swine Flu. For clarity, they aren't making the vaccine; they were able to assemble a set of suitable volunteers from the epicenter of the breakout.

I don't go in for Team Spirit, but must admit this makes me feel a little proud that the money I've been paying them for 12 years is helping to accomplish an important task.

KP is highly competent. When they took over this outfit from Group Health two years ago, the quality of service went UP dramatically. Surprised me.... normally a merger causes both the big fish and the little fish to decline.

  ¶ 3:31 PM

  Is that true?
Strether at NakedCapitalism cites this:

“Copper kills coronavirus. Why aren’t our surfaces covered in it?” [Fast Company]. “When influenzas, bacteria like E. coli, superbugs like MRSA, or even coronaviruses land on most hard surfaces, they can live for up to four to five days. But when they land on copper, and copper alloys like brass, they die within minutes. “We’ve seen viruses just blow apart,” says Bill Keevil, professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton. ‘They land on copper and it just degrades them.’ No wonder that in India, people have been drinking out of copper cups for millennia. Even here in the United States, a copper line brings in your drinking water. Copper is a natural, passive, antimicrobial material. It can self-sterilize its surface without the need for electricity or bleach… In the face of an unavoidable future full of global pandemics, we should be using copper in healthcare, public transit, and even our homes. And while it’s too late to stop COVID-19, it’s not too early to think about our next pandemic.”

Sounds good. I don't know if it's true or not. Is it true?

I always go back to old science when it's available. From a 1905 Public Health Journal, p 184 of the PDF, a long set of experiments on copper vs bacteria.

During the active period of this investigation, samples of the water passing to the filter and the effluent of the filter were taken daily for bacterial examination. The bacterial results obtained from the filter during this experiment, when compared with those obtained during the year previous to the application of copper sulphate to the raw water, show no gain in acterial removal on account of the use of the copper sulphate—rather the reverse. During the year previous to the use of copper sulphate, the raw water contained 8,300 bacteria per c.c. and he effluent, 73 bacteria per c.c.—or a bacterial efficiency of 99.12 per cent. During the year of copper sulphate treatment, the raw water contained 7.400 bacteria per c.c., and the effluent of the filter, 114 per c.c.—a bacterial efficiency of 98.5 per cent, o.62 of I per cent less than during the previous year. During both years practically every cubic centimeter sample of the raw water that was tested contained B. coli. The effluent of the filter during the year before the copper treatment contained B. coli in 13.5 per cent of the cubic centimeter samples examined, and during the year of copper treatment it was found in 26 per cent of the cubic centimeter samples examined.

And a second set of experiments with copper sheets inserted in the glass beakers:

In the experiments in which the waters have been exposed to metallic copper, about 15 liters of water were used in every case, except in the experiments in which a number of metals were under comparison, in which case the volume of water used was about 1,000 c.c." -The containers in the metal experiments have in some cases been of copper, with the control in enameled ware or in glazed stoneware, and in others the waters have been placed in glass and the metals inserted as thin sheets.

The removal of bacteria, B. coli and B. typhosus, by allowing a water to stand in copper vessels for short periods, while occasionally effective, is not sure, and the time necessary to accomplish complete sterilization is so long that the method would be of no practical value to the ordinary user. Furthermore, metallic copper seems to have little more germicidal power than iron, tin, zinc, or aluminum.

Answer: All metals have some antimicrobial properties but copper is no better than others, worse than some, and certainly not a magic germ-killer.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 2:29 PM

  Better response
Earlier I posted a ferocious HARDASS response to dysgovernmental genocide. Deleting doesn't make any real difference; NSA has undoubtedly cached the original. But I didn't like seeing it here and didn't need to be reminded yet again of the monsters.

I need to obey Kadyrov's advice and focus elsewhere. Focus on duty, not anger.

Later, more reassurance about the sanity of normal people. So far 2000 comments on Monster Inslee, the vast majority just as HARDASS as my earlier comment here. Unfortunately sanity doesn't make any difference. All of the ruling class is genocidal.

Well, not all. Actually we have a balanced experiment. Part of the Spokane metro area is in Idaho. The governor of Idaho is NOT crazy. He has NOT shut down everything that makes life possible. The Post Falls schools will close down for a couple days to disinfect, then resume normal operation, while the Spokane schools will close down entirely for six weeks. Same people, same geography, lots of commuting between the two areas. Which side will end up with more deaths? The side where people can't carry on normal life, can't work, have to make special arrangements to stay alive.

Labels: Constfucts and variables, From rights to duties

  ¶ 10:03 PM

  Ma Nature DIDN'T invent the Hammond.. or did she?
Following up on the astonishing Hammond....

Most of our inventions are imitations of Nature's inventions. In many cases we didn't even know about Nature's version until quite recently, so we weren't infringing on Nature's patents.

Here's a device that recurs over and over in technology but doesn't seem to have a physical equivalent in Nature. There are several software equivalents in Nature.

A rotor that turns until it hits a selected item.

It was common in inventions of the 1800s.

Alarm clock, Breguet telegraph, Hammond typewriter, Brett printer, Strowger dial.

The start and end of the rotor's motion are defined variously.

On the most familiar Strowger/Bell rotary dial, the human user picks the starting point and the end is constant.

An analog alarm clock has a cam that you turn to set the alarm time. When the hour hand drops off the 'cliff' on the cam, a lever releases the bell or buzzer mechanism.

Hotel wakeup clocks, and clocks to control other devices, had a full circle of settable pins.

The Hammond typewriter and Brett printer closely resemble the hotel wakeup. The rotor is turning freely until it encounters a pin raised by the chosen key.

On Breguet, the start and stop are both arbitrary.

= = = = =

Nature has lots of free-turning or limited rotors. Leg joints on arthropods and vertebrates are limited rotors, the flagellum motor on bacteria is free-turning. I can't think of any that are used as selectors with physical pins to stop the motion.

I can think of two virtual or software implementations.

Leg joints are halted by feedback via the alpha and gamma sensors. The brain decides on the target position and gives the sensors a target stretch. When the sensors reach the assigned stretch, they issue a Stop command to the muscle.

In the location mapping section of the hippocampus, a "radar" beam rotates around the hippocampus until it encounters a matching resonance.

Our physical AND virtual inventions have abandoned the pin-stopped rotor. The mechanical devices I've listed above are all firmly obsolete. Servomechanisms are a literal implementation of the stretch sensor, but servos are rare now. We use stepping motors instead, which don't involve any direct feedback.

Our computer keyboards have never used the Hammond/Brett trick, though it would have been easy in software. They have always issued an immediate parallel or sequential code for each key.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 2:53 PM

  The astonishing Hammond
The Sholes & Glidden typewriter, perfected by Remington, was first produced in 1873, and was starting to spread in 1880. Other inventors and manufacturers were trying all sorts of variations.

Let's remember the technological context of 1880. Printing was old and universal. Telegraphs and railroads were mature and common. Indoor plumbing was common in cities and nonexistent elsewhere. Telephones had just been invented and were mostly unknown. Electric power was barely experimental and wouldn't be common until 1900. Most lighting in cities was by oil or gas.



The Hammond was first patented in 1880. The single-wheel version I'm showing here was the second version in 1883. It was superior in EVERY way to the Remington, but as usual the Remington succeeded by commercial dominance, not by technical mastery.

How was the Hammond superior? Let me count the ways.

1. Long before electricity, the Hammond was power-assisted. Your fingers didn't have to power the hammers. The hammer came from behind with uniform speed and force, and pressed the paper up against the stable type. Where did the power come from? Clockwork springs driving a cam. Did you have to wind up the clockwork? No, because you rewound the spring every time you returned the carriage. Other typewriters were already using a mainspring on the carriage, to drive the stepwise spacing of the carriage itself. Hammond used the same spring to power the striking force, sparing your fingers. [Note for clarity: The curly thing below is not the mainspring. The paper came from a roll inside the cylinder, a common technique in early typewriters. Later versions used separate pieces of paper inserted separately.]



2. Because the point of impression was flat, the typeface could vary in size. Other typewriters had a cylindrical platen, which limited the size.

3. You could change the font any time you needed. The typewheel was a single small arc, easily removed and replaced. With the Remington style you needed a whole new typewriter for each size or font.

4. The typewheel had three vertical levels instead of two, and the keyboard had a Figs shift and a Caps shift. This made it possible to carry more symbols on only 30 keys, compared to the usual 44 on basic Remingtons.



5. The keyboard was arranged appropriately for letter frequency, not QWERTY. Sholes and Glidden used QWERTY to avoid key collisions, but key collisions remained common on Remington-style machines. Key collisions were physically impossible on the Hammond, so there was no reason to sort the keys peculiarly. Your right fingers had the vowels and more common consonants, and your left fingers had the rest.



6. The keyboard was also less stressful for wrist and arm alignment. This advantage isn't obvious because we're unaccustomed to the arc-like keys. Look at the typist's wrists and arms to see the answer.

= = = = =

Here's a slow animation of the action with part of the covers removed.



When you hit a key on the left range, the typewheel is released to turn clockwise until it hits the pin raised by the key. At that moment the hammer, also released by the key, comes forward to press the paper against the ribbon and the typewheel, hitting the chosen character squarely. When you hit a key on the right range, the typewheel is released CCW until it hits the raised pin, and the hammer does its job. [I've shown the hammer punching through the paper; not for any good educational reason; only because animating the paper would be way too hard.]

HAPPY ENDING: Like the mammals waiting for the dinosaurs to bash themselves into extinction, the Hammond found a niche and a refuge. It was renamed and repurposed as the VariTyper, and remained indispensable for offset printers and similar businesses. The VariTyper was later electrified, and the company switched over to digital until finally failing around 2007.

= = = = =

Fussy typographical footnote: The symbol on the right index key is unreadable on all the pictures I can find, from the original patent drawings to pix of antiques for sale. On the patent it looks something like a symbol I vaguely recall from typesetting:

... (rendered in 3d for precision) ... but Google is no help in trying to locate the symbol. Since there isn't a period elsewhere on the keyboard, I put a period there for symmetry with the comma on left index. The original may have been a period with some extra indication over it for clarity? Oh. Now that I've "drawn" the symbol, I recognize it immediately. It's an eighth rest in musical notation, which certainly wouldn't be in a prominent position on a typewriter! So the original is still mysterious, but a period is most likely by symmetry. Everything on the Hammond is organically symmetrical and differential.

Unsurprising: When the symbol was floating around in what remains of my brain, I couldn't place it. After running it through some muscles and senses, I could place it. Experiential education as always.

Labels: Happy Ending, Morsenet of Things, Patient things

  ¶ 2:42 PM

  Luongo explains it.
A couple months ago Putin handed us a Peace Ultimatum. Stop making war or else.....

He didn't name the Or Else. I've been paying as little attention as possible to "news" channels since they're all killer panicators, so I didn't catch the connections on the Saudi-Russia oil move.

Luongo sees the connection:

On Friday March 6th, Russia told OPEC no. By Wednesday the 11th The Federal Reserve had already doubled its daily interventions into the repo markets to keep bank liquidity high.

By noon on the 12th the Fed announced $1.5 trillion in new repo facilities including three-month repo contracts. At one point during trading that day the entire U.S. Treasury market went bidless. There was no one out there making an offer for the most liquid, sought-after financial assets in the world.

Putin understands that a world awash in debt is one that cannot withstand the currency needed to repay that debt rising sharply.

That puts further pressure on his geopolitical rivals and forces them to focus on their domestic concerns rather than the ones overseas.

For years Putin has been begging the West to stop its insane belligerence in the Middle East and across Asia. He’s argued eloquently at the U.N. and in interviews that the unipolar moment is over and that the U.S. can only maintain its status as the world’s only super power for so long. Eventually the debt would undermine its strength and at the right moment would be revealed to be far weaker than it projected.

The crucial point is that RUSSIA IS OPERATING ON SAVINGS while the Sorosian world is OPERATING ON DEBT. When you have saved up your money and diversified your internal skills and industries, you can afford to take a hit in one important income source. We can't afford anything. We are infinitely beyond broke.

Will we respond? Our military is extremely good at logistics. Will we bring all the troops home and turn their attention to controlling the epidemic of panic? No. We are infinitely beyond stupid.

Labels: Emersonian justice, Natural law = Soviet law, storage

  ¶ 10:16 AM

  "Don't try to die before your time."
AMLO, representing an OLD STRONG CULTURE, has sane and healthy advice about the Branded Swine Flu. Here's another leader of an OLD STRONG CULTURE with equally sane and healthy advice. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

“People lose sleep because a disease appeared in China: the virus. They are afraid that it comes [to them] and they’ll die. Don’t be in a rush, you’ll die anyway. Don’t try to die before your time,” Kadyrov said, addressing a local government meeting on Saturday.

As with pretty much every other serious illness, “those who are in sound health will overcome it [coronavirus], those who are not, won’t manage to,” Kadyrov said, while recommending that all those anxious about their health work on strengthening their immune system using traditional means.

“Mix lemon with honey and water and drink – then the virus won’t get you. Eat your garlic.”

Lemon and honey aren't the only remedies. It depends on culture and individual experience. Humans have a natural receptor for 'healing tokens'. Whatever matches your healing token receptor, use it. The article also includes some numbers that prove his point:

Chechnya, which has a population of over 1.3 million, has yet to report its first case of the virus, which has infected at least 59 people across Russia, most of them – 25 – in its capital, Moscow. Six of the patients have since recovered, and there have been no deaths from Covid-19 in the country.

No cases in Chechnya, no deaths in Russia.

Labels: defensible spaces, defensible thymes, Patient people

  ¶ 12:51 AM

  Global Warming
March 14. Three inches of Global Warming, 18 degrees of Global Warming.



Nature likes to answer panic-generating liars with plain old undeniable TRUTH.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 7:01 AM

  Dubious correlation
Highly dubious, but I'm in a dubious mood this morning, so here goes.

Every decade or so we get a Circuit Breaker, an event that removes all the masks of fake "opposition" and allows all the rulers to work together for genocide.

The Swine Flu this year. TARP in 2008. 9/11 in 2001. Fall of USSR in 1990.

The series doesn't extend before 1990 with similar events. Earlier big events didn't have the same flavor of "opposition" before, consolidation after.

Soros was deeply involved in TARP and 1990, but not obviously part of the other two.

The only constant element in all four is Saudi.

The Swine Flu circuit breaker happened just after Saudi switched sides and joined Russia. TARP supposedly happened because Saudi investors threatened to pull their backing from Wall Street. 9/11 was ALL Saudi. 1990 resulted from our multi-front campaign against Russia, with Saudi playing a major role in running AlQaeda and in cutting oil prices.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 were purely Saudi events, but weren't Circuit Breakers. No consolidation. American people and politicians were free to complain about the shortages.

1990 and 2020 are thus symmetrical. In the '80s Saudi joined USA to cut oil prices to ruin Russia. In 2020 Saudi joined Russia to cut oil prices to ruin USA.

Labels: Asked and badly answered, constants and constants, Emersonian justice

  ¶ 5:35 AM

  Marcus sees reality in NYC
Interesting observation from Marcus at TheIsraelist, who is pure NYC. Within NYC, the upper-class stores are getting mobbed and shortaged, while ordinary stores are running pretty much normally.

Even in Panic Central, the panic is largely among idiots.

I've been noticing the same thing here from the start.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't the PURPOSE of the panic designers. They wanted the Deplorables to riot so the Tribe could get out the SWAT teams.

The upper-class idiots have been most strongly infected by ALL the panics, starting with "global warming". Normal people may use the jargon because it's the only available language, but normal people understand that weather is created by Nature, not by Exxon.

"Scientists" have been bemoaning the low spread of panic infection among the Denialists and Deplorables for a long time, and "scientists" have been proposing better ways to communicate the DIRE NECESSITY OF COMMITTING SUICIDE TO SOLVE THE [fill in blank] EMERGENCY. Fortunately they never hit on the real secret of communicating.

Conform to reality. Tell the truth. Tell ALL of the truth.

The media and Experts have been telling us total lies about everything since 1946, and normal people have figured it out. Some of the warnings may accidentally be true, but the constant departure from observable reality and the constant Room 101 switchbacks have removed all chance of trust and credibility.

We can't even describe the loss of trust as "crying wolf", because the Experts are no longer warning us about wolves, whether falsely or truly. In earlier times civilization tried to keep wolves out of farms and cities. Now the Experts are literally sending wolves and grizzlies into farms and villages, and jailing us if we try to stop the wolves. Their sole purpose is to kill us.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter

  ¶ 11:02 PM

  Expanding on a comment
The folks at UncommonDescent and MindMatters always see design as evidence of a "good" and "benevolent" creator.

I wrote a quick comment there that deserves a little more expansion.

Good and benevolent are unnecessary and unproven attributes. Design is proven and factual.

If you expect the design to be good, you're going to be disappointed, and you may despair of seeing design at all. Goodness isn't the IMPORTANT variable. What's important is simply knowing that life is designed.

If you follow the Enlightenment line, you believe that all humans are essentially inanimate and identical objects, buffeted by random forces. You can choose to be anything you want. Male, female, in-between, popular, tall, rich, God.

This simply isn't true. Older cultures aren't fooled by this set of lies. Older cultures understand that everything is designed, and everyone has specific permanent characteristics. Civilization happens when everyone occupies their permanently assigned PLACE and does their permanently assigned DUTY. Each of us has a DUTY to make more life, more beauty, more value, and each of us is assigned a specific way to accomplish the DUTY.

When you believe in the inanimate randomness of the Enlightenment, you are constantly surprised and unprepared for PURPOSEFUL actors.

When you know that everything is designed, and that some aspects of design are permanent, you won't waste time trying to be something that's PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. You are more ready to defend your soul against PURPOSEFUL aggressors because you KNOW HOW THINGS WORK.

Labels: defensible times, From rights to duties, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 3:31 PM

  Maximum stupidity spreading fast
In this case the spreader was already maximally evil and unimaginably stupid, so not overly surprising. Sorosian Grandmaster Inslee, who is described as "governor" of an alleged quote "state" unquote, just closed all schools for at least one month. He also prohibited all large gatherings, including church services.

This will guarantee maximum panic. Excellent work, Virus Inslee. This will throw many poor parents out of work, creating more crime and death.

Reassuringly, the sane Deplorables who read the Spokane News page have instantly provided the TRUTH to counter the utter mass-murdering hyperinsanity and hypercriminality of the dys"government". Not that the TRUTH matters any more, but it's good to see a massive immune response.

= = = = =

Later thought on Genocidal Holocauster Inslee: Until now his entire career was based on suing Trump. Every day: Wake up, shower, shit, shave, sue Trump. Wake up, shower, shit, shave, sue Trump. Wake up, shower, shit, shave, sue Trump. It was the only thing he did.

Now, after the circuit breaker was thrown, he takes off the fake brand mask and joins the "Robust Debate" auction. Instead of suing Trump, he's joining Trump with an upward bid. Trump ordered two weeks of slaughtering Deplorables, Inslee bids it up to "at least" four weeks of slaughtering Deplorables.

This year's Circuit Breaker is a lot like 2008. Before TARP, we had brands pretending to take "opposite" "sides". Bush was defending the bankers, Obama was pretending to dislike the bankers. After TARP, everyone joined the Robust Debate, everyone agreed that enriching Jamie Dimon was the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO SAVE THE ECONOMY. Obama offered to send MORE quadrillions to Jamie Dimon. Then as now, the ONLY POSSIBLE THING was slaughtering Deplorables. The kill count from 2008 is genocidally clear on graphs of poverty and suicide.

Labels: Incalculably wicked

  ¶ 1:56 PM

  Tulsi is getting just plain fucking STUPID
She's proposing a Universal Basic Income as a "solution" for the Branded Swine Flu manufactured panic.

She's on the same side as the central bankers who are pouring trillions directly into Jamie Dimon to "cure" the flu. Pouring money into the hands of poor people is just a slightly indirect way to enrich Jamie.

Fuck off, useless idiot. Fuck you up the ass, worse than useless betrayer.

Labels: infinite STUPID

  ¶ 9:39 AM

  Thanks Ralph 135, ultimate edition
In previous item I href'd this piece from last April, just to show the animated color scheme of Uncle Skeleton. After reading, I think the piece is worth a complete reprint.

= = = = START REPRINT:

It was obvious from the start that Trump wasn't a RUSSIAN_BOT. He was just running his sleazy business, trying to open a sleazy casino in Moscow along with everywhere else in the world. Russia didn't like the deal, so Trump stopped trying and moved on to other places. Nothing important, not remotely related to politics.

BUT: If we turn up the paranoia dial and observe results instead of words, we have to ask if EVERYONE in the USA dysgovernment is a RUSSIAN_BOT. All of our actions since 1990 have ended up in total failure, and Russia has been gathering up the failures and recreating the Soviet Bloc.

Are we intentionally failing? It's possible but highly unlikely. The situation is similar to the RUSSIAN_BOT frenzy of the 1950s. We had some real Soviet spies, but they were just spies. They weren't destroying our culture and brains. FBI and CIA were destroying us, with full collaboration from monopoly capitalists and "leftist" activists. The three legs of the Deepstate tripod.

In the current frenzy, there's no need to postulate real Russian sabotage. We are simply following our own infinitely crazy mindless Enlightenment "values", which drive us to conquer the world for "democracy" by bombing the world down to bedrock.

In neurological terms, culture is the cerebellum and cold rationality is the cerebral cortex. The Sorosian lands intentionally melted our own cerebellum with "rights" and "equality". We believe that raw IQ, aided by software, will conquer all "low-IQ" Deplorables. Life doesn't work that way. 99% of what competent adults do is controlled by the brainstem and cerebellum, with rare interventions from the cortex. 99% of what a competent nation does is controlled by the culturebellum, with rare interventions from the official government. When you have a strong culture you don't need a lot of government. Everyone knows his place and his duties without any need for regulations or tasers or SWAT teams.

Russia was damaged in the same way by Lenin, but its culturebellum was strong enough to recover in the later decades of the Soviet era. In 2000 Putin started to restore the culturebellum to full strength, which wasn't hard.

Now Russia is able to form alliances with other countries that still have a culturebellum. Those countries were already DEAD TIRED or just DEAD after 50 years of USA bombing and chaotizing.

Emerson: Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Though no checks to a new evil [initially] appear, the checks exist and will appear. Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial, can endure.

The first check was Syria, which took too much work because Russia started too late. The check in Venezuela came earlier, before the B52s started dropping bombs.



It's easy to contain a meth-addled zombie. You don't need strategy; you just need to remove all temptation and force him to see that he has no exit. Because he's not eating or reproducing, he will soon die.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Now, with the Russia-Saudi action to break the debt-dependent fracking fraud, we see this strategy in action again. We've already blocked all of our own exits by living without storage or culture or production, depending entirely on central banks to "create" "value" and depending on China to build real stuff.

THANKS, RALPH!

Labels: EXTREME SUPREME ABSOLUTE DEFINITIVE FINAL Emersonian justice

  ¶ 7:21 AM

  Just checking a prediction....
On January 25 I wrote:

= = = = =

Apparently the "impeachment" stageplay is in its 4th act, ready for the curtain.

More interesting question: What's next on the playbill?

First we had RUSSIAN_MEDDLING, then we had UKRAINIAN_MEDDLING. Both have kept Hillary's puppet Trump firmly in power with a solid media onslaught against Trump's followers. Hillary is able to achieve all of her genocidal goals through the Pied Piper, while escaping all the blame for her mass murder. All the blame goes to "alt-right neonazi white nationalists".

What's next? KAZAKHSTAN_MEDDLING? BELARUS_MEDDLING? TUVAN_AUTONOMOUS_OBLAST_MEDDLING?


= = = = =

ALSO on January 25 I took notice of the Branded Swine Flu for the first time.

At that point I didn't think of the two events as connected. The seamless transition by Deepstate is wondrous to behold. Ramp down Panic 1, ramp up Panic 2. Never leave any dead air, only dead Deplorables. A well-oiled genocide machine humming along and obliterating everything except Israel.



What comes next? Epidemics always use up the available victims and fade out. This one is already past its peak in China and Korea, the first locations, and will pass its peak elsewhere in a few weeks. I'm sure Deepstate has Panic 3 in the pipeline ready to pop.

= = = = =

Graphic serendipity footnote: Uncle Skeleton appears to be wearing latex gloves. Not intentional. When I made the figure, I gave it an animated constantly changing rainbow color scheme for obvious reasons. In this quickie cartoon I didn't bother to animate the colors, and the hands ended up yellowish-greenish.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, infinite infinite infinite infinite evil

  ¶ 12:55 AM

  Agrees with observed reality
Here's a "social" "science" study that isn't trivial or tautologous, and doesn't reverse causation.

The results are surprising: people who are unpleasant, who are not afraid of conflicts and who show a certain anti-conformity have better protected brains. In addition, this protection takes place precisely in the memory circuits that are damaged by Alzheimer's disease. "A high level of agreeableness characterizes highly adaptive personalities, who want above all to be in line with the wishes of others, to avoid conflict, and to seek cooperation", notes the specialist. "This differs from extraversion. You can be very extroverted and not very pleasant, as are narcissistic personalities, for example. The important determinant is the relationship to the other: do we adapt to others at our own expenses?"

This matches observed reality in the tiny sample of my ancestors and relatives.

The people who lived longest and stayed alert longest were the most cranky and stubborn. Nice guys finished fast, as the saying goes.

Labels: Patient people

  ¶ 2:04 PM

  A bit of entertainment
Just for fun, a standard "social" "science" "study" that states a tautologous self-evident fact and gets the causation backwards, as always.

This one is so blazingly obvious that the headline is enough:

Kids who blame themselves for mom's sadness are more likely to face depression and anxiety

If you know ANYTHING AT ALL about actual people, you know that anxious depressed types are more likely to blame themselves for everything. Confident risk-taking types don't blame themselves, and usually don't bother to blame anyone. Blaming is not their department. They just go ahead and do whatever they feel like doing.

Before tenure grabbed total control of academia, this sort of thing wouldn't have made it past the starting gate. "Social" "science" used to be a field for people who had experienced a variety of problems and worked through them, just as speech therapy used to be mainly self-cured stutterers. A hypothesis like this would have been rejected quickly by students and profs who were anxious depressive types. Now all of academia is football, and the selectors are confident competitive risk-taking types who don't really understand that PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 5:39 AM

  Healthy immune response
The guy who runs the Spokane News FB page normally avoids going along with the media crowd. Occasionally he yields to the temptation and gets INSTRUCTED by his readers. It happened again with the Branded Swine Flu. He published the latest panic-generator and immediately got swarmed by a healthy immune response from Deplorable Mediaphage cells.

The media demons are trying to overwhelm our literal actual immunity with a BOMB BLAST of panic viruses coming from every direction. It's easy to avoid most bloodthirsty media, but we need to have a few places where we can pick up a little bit of real news about what's really happening here without being BLASTED with murderous panic and chaos.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter

  ¶ 12:53 PM

  Reprint of the Great Interstate Canal
I noticed that one of the occasional human readers of this blog was looking at this item. I had forgotten the item. It's another reminder that Social Economics and non-interventionist attitudes were common before FDR. Harding picked up these attitudes, and FDR implemented them fully.

= = = = = START PARTIAL REPRINT:

As I was browsing through maps, bumped into this splendid piece of belated utopianism. It's a 1914 proposal for a canal running more or less along the Dry Line from Canada to Galveston. (Not too far from my recent idea for a giant railroad to replace barge traffic.)

The route:


Proposed by Mr JC Hopper of Ness City, which is pretty much self-explanatory....


On the horizon, glowing like the rising sun, is NESS CITY!!!!! CENTER OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE! ALL ROADS LEAD TO NESS!!!

And there's old JC, looking portly and prosperous despite the Scotch Tape over his head.

In his hand is a scroll:

Peaceful homes are better than dreadnaughts.

Below him:

Internal improvements rather than external make a nation great.

Painted on the side of the canal:

Irrigation beats the standing army.

All a little clunky, but all ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.

We DESPERATELY need to relearn and reapply all three.

Well, what happened to the Great Interstate Canal? Nothing. This map was its only product. Hopper tried to interest the gov't, with no results. BUT: Twenty years later, when the Corps of Engineers started its major dam-building, it followed the same basic principle. Hold back water behind the Dry Line, to smooth out the irregular rainy periods and provide irrigation.

Bigger map here.

= = = = = END PARTIAL REPRINT.

JC Hopper wasn't an alienated radical. He was a small-town real estate man. He figured that his futuristic project would help the farmers and mechanics. He believed in avoiding war, not obliterating everything except Israel.
  ¶ 6:22 AM

  The ultimate Patient People
Anthropologists have established that one South African tribe has been making the same ostrich-shell beads for 33000 YEARS.

That's fucking PATIENT.

Culture requires stability. Morality requires stability. Life requires stability. 33000 years is probably more stability than we need, but it forms a nice goalpost.

I'd guess the optimum is around a century. One long lifetime or three generations. Parents and teachers and employers should be able to count on their moral and mental training to benefit the second generation. Gradual change has a chance to determine its viability against a mostly constant ambient background. When everything is changing all the time you can't measure the results of your intentional changes and actions, which is of course the ENTIRE PURPOSE of the Github Universe.

In the Github era we're down to 7 seconds of stability, so we have a ways to go by either standard.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Patient people, Patient things

  ¶ 1:11 AM