Strict Borodin effect
Polistra likes to keep track of the Borodin effect, named after Radio Moscow's old habit of switching to heavy funereal music when the Soviet oligarchs were in a confused condition.

Nice example this week at The Israelist, which calls itself "The Federalist" for some obscure reason. Normally The Israelist is nothing but Israel. It offers Robust Debates on how harshly we should punish politicians who suck Bibi's dick with insufficient vacuum power, and it offers helpful tips on how to improve your vacuum power the next time you are blessed with a moment at Bibi's knees.

This week there's NOTHING about Israel in The Israelist. They are solely focusing on some utterly meaningless soap opera related to Kavanaugh or Kaepernick or whatever, the latest pro-abort "judge" who fraudulently claims to be "conservative" or whatever.

The Borodin is strict this time, not loosely metaphorical: Bibi's power is in a confused condition this week.

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Sidenote: Borodin isn't really the heaviest Russian composer. He wrote a lot of light-hearted stuff. I should have used Khachaturian, but Borodin is easier to spell.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 12:25 AM

  Good old Borodin Effect
Before the switchover, Radio Moscow blurred out times of chaos and uncertainty in the Kremlin by playing uninterrupted heavy Russian music. Borodin, Khachaturian, Mussorgsky. When you heard Borodin instead of the usual overmodulated cheeriness, you knew something serious was going on. I called it the Borodin Effect.

After the switchover, Borodin has been on this side of the Pacific.

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Google News thinks these are the most important headlines right now. Nasty stuff about Trump, nasty stuff about Boris, a few real events in various places.

Chaos in the Nevada caucus? Not an event. Sanders supporters frogmarched out by police? Didn't happen. Can't confirm or deny. All is sweetness and music in Hillary World.

Labels: switchover

  ¶ 10:45 AM

  Borodin effect
Back in the Soviet days, I often listened to Radio Moscow on the shortwave. Moscow reliably provided a propagandistic parrot-squawk, with a characteristic overmodulated sound. Their programs about Russian arts and events were usually interesting, and it was easy enough to subtract out the propaganda constant.

However: When the Soviet oligarchy was in turmoil because of a death or a palace coup, Radio Moscow ceased all talk and confined itself to dark Russian classical music, often Borodin or Mussorgsky. I called this the Borodin Effect, because it was a readable signal that things had dramatically changed.

This morning the McCainstream Media seemed distracted. Ingraham avoided politics and discussed her sore throat; Beck avoided politics and played weird music. I got that old Borodin feeling, but didn't know what the signal meant.

Well, we know tonight.

This may also explain why the cable shows, on the rare occasions when they condescended to even mention Huckabee, had speculated obliquely that there may be "other reasons" for his staying in the race despite their repeated Official Commands that he must Exit Forthwith. Or rather, "other reasons" beyond their normal assumption that Huck was just a charming charming charming charming charming charming charming charming charming charming charming dumbass redneck southern Christian who didn't know up from down.

Now we know the "other reasons."

Polistra has ignored all of that crap; she has simply been praying for a miracle.



Thank you, Lord.
  ¶ 7:18 PM

  Borodin effect on Persia?
Reviewing: Back when shortwave radio was the main way of acquiring alternate info, I observed the habits and tendencies of various countries. Radio Moscow reliably signaled a period of uncertainty in leadership by switching to heavy Russki music. I called it the Borodin Effect.

You can see the same thing in any outlet that relies on official doctrine instead of direct personal senses. When the official source is tangled or confused, the outlet switches to standard 'features' or trivia, or just goes silent.

I'm noticing a Borodin today in official sources. Normally I get a constant stream of spam email from Repooflican organizations, always urging personal loyalty to Trump and his family. They also want me to defend various media personalities who are supposedly being threatened by their employers at Fox. Tucker is a main character in this strange little soap opera about soap opera production.

Since Trump's quantum-style Schrödinger War Declaration, the spam is silent. Not even trivia. No mention of Tucker's apparent role in the switchback.

Turley is also silent. Normally he springs to defend Trump's ordinary Repooflican actions, calling them "populist" to distort the definition of populism. So far no comment on the Schrödinger Declaration.

Later: Yup, Turley skipped past the Trump Quantum. This morning he has a good feature on the advance of conservative parties in Estonia.
  ¶ 1:05 AM

  So that's why the Borodin.........
In the old Soviet times, you could tell when something bad was happening in the Politburo ... a dead leader, an internal coup, whatever ... because Radio Moscow would cease regular programming and play only dark heavy music. I called it the Borodin Effect.

I've been sensing a Borodin in American media lately; too much focus on the greasy fucking pelicans, too much bubbling of the BP aquarium. Even by the anti-journalism rules of CNN and Fox, the BP story has continued way beyond any element of novelty.

Here's a likely candidate for the Politburo problems: Gore accused of sexual attack.

Wish I could say "Told you so!" but I can't. This one caught me off guard. Gore is a criminal monstrosity, but I truly couldn't picture his insane violent impulses running anywhere near the sexual realm. He struck me as the classic puritan with all sexuality channeled into genocide, gluttony, greed and raw power.

Bless those tabloids. They carry a fair amount of celebrity nonsense, but they're the only remaining source for real news, for events that Tass and Pravda completely refuse to mention.
  ¶ 2:22 PM

  Random notes


One thing I've learned as I grow older: Scrooge's Theorem is emphatically true. Excess, ah, methane definitely generates interesting and well-plotted dreams.

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Back in the heyday of the USSR, Radio Moscow made a habit of switching to dark Russian classical music, uninterrupted by speech, when the ruling class was in turmoil from a death or internal coup. This didn't give the listener exact information about the nature of the trouble, but it did tell you that something was wrong. More recently, I've noticed the same 'Borodin Effect' in our own Party media. During the Clinton years, Nightline would sometimes go back 25 years to cover Nixon tapes; sure enough, the next day a new revelation of Clinton's perfidy would come out. It's nice to have such a predictable compass point, even if it doesn't give you direct information. (Of course, a Borodin indication is only useful when you have alternative sources of news; otherwise it alerts you that something is wrong, and that's as far as you can go!)

Thinking about this in connection with the Tom DeLay feeding frenzy, which looks like a pre-emptive Borodin for the new revelations about investigations of Clinton foreign fund-raising.

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Sometimes a parody will become so entrenched in common discourse that the original effectively disappears. Often quoted on this day of the year (Lenin's Birthday) is Pogo's statement "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The original was Admiral Perry's "We have met the enemy, and he is ours", which now sounds like a typo. Another is the old song "Hail, hail, the gang's all here; what the hell do we care?" I have no memory of the original!

Is there a literary name for this phenomenon? It's similar, but not quite the same, as a retronym (silent movie, acoustic guitar, Classic Coke, film camera) in which the new form becomes the default or unmarked noun, requiring a marker on the original.

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Good parody: Catholic World News shows us how the NYTimes would have reported a somewhat earlier choice of religious leader....

http://www.cwnews.com/offtherecord/offtherecord.cfm?task=singledisplay&recnum=2663  ¶ 11:35 AM

  Literal Borodin effect
Polistra has repeatedly cited the Borodin Effect, named after old Radio Moscow's habit of switching to uninterrupted heavy music when something was wrong in the Kremlin. We're seeing a literal example right now as Deepstate media feverishly conspire to turn Hillary's latest collapse into a momentary 'overheating'.

This is counterproductive for your OWN purposes, idiots. Why do you WANT to have an Empress who dies before you "elect" her? How will that help? This little Kaine fellow doesn't have the same caliber of balls, nor the direct genetic dynasty connections. He will obey, but Les Deplorables will not obey him.

A subset of a much broader problem. Trump and Hillary are both OLD. After 60 most people NEED MORE REST. A small proportion of humans can keep running at full speed until 100, but the vast majority need to FUCKING SLOW DOWN. Boomers have persuaded ourselves that we can work at full speed until 80, and then have a full-speed "retirement" from 80 to 130, during which we will start only 400 new fraudulent IPOs per month and work only 900 hours per week instead of 1000, spending the other 100 hours in X-treme Sports and Traveling The World and running 10 ultraultramarathons per hour.

Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.

We constantly cite "increasing lifespan" as a reason for repealing the laws of human life, but "increasing lifespan" is a falsely built statistic. As I noted before, and as even the SS Admin has vainly tried to point out, the expected lifespan FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY REACHED 65 hasn't changed very much. The "increase" resulted from major cuts in childhood mortality.

As always, we're using mean instead of median to create deadly lies.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Blinded by Stats

  ¶ 9:40 AM

  Borodin puppets and plates
Trying to stand WAY back from the details of "news".

We have two competing witch-hunts underway.

The RUSSIAN_HACKING hunt started a year ago and spawned dozens of long-running "investigations", which continue to lead nowhere. Flynn and Manafort may be indicted for the usual nonsense about "lying to FBI", which means that FBI thinks they're white Christians.

The sexual harassment hunt started a month ago, and continues to bring down important media demons. We still don't know why the blackmail, which had been perfectly effective for DECADES, suddenly popped. We just hear names and names and names.

Whenever you see a loud flashy puppet show with no apparent purpose, you can be sure something meaningful and purposeful is happening behind the stage. Major tectonic plates are grinding and shifting. This is the American version of the old Soviet Borodin effect.

Are these two shows related? Or do they hide distinct and separate private quakes?

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Back in '47, Ripley told how the Lancashire witch hunts of the 1600s ended. I can't find an online reference to the names given in Ripley's story, so I'll just summarize. True or not, it's an excellent fable.

An unlicensed healer named Margaret Saunders had been curing people for many years. She used a talisman containing mysterious letters, and chanted mysterious words while invoking the gods of healing. One day she failed to cure a baby of the ague, as happens sometimes with any licensed or unlicensed doctor. The dead baby's father cried Witch! and brought Saunders to trial.

The persecutor tried repeatedly to force Margaret to admit that the talisman came from Satan. She refused but wouldn't say how or where she got it. After the jury condemned her to death for witchcraft, the judge decided to interrogate Saunders because her story seemed familiar. It turned out that the judge and Saunders had met 30 years earlier, when Saunders was the daughter of an innkeeper and the judge was a young law student. Saunders had a baby who was ill. The law student couldn't pay his lodging bill. He wrote some random Greek letters on a piece of parchment and persuaded Margaret that it was a magic talisman with curative powers. She used it and her baby got well. The lodging bill was forgiven.

After that, she found that she could cure other kids with the talisman.

When the judge told the full story in court, Saunders was freed and the hunting fever was cured.

Broad moral: in natural processes like healing, "facts" and "evidence" are secondary. Trust and confidence are primary. Saunders was able to cure because she had faith in the talisman that had worked for her, even though the talisman was created as a cynical and arrogant fraud. Her faith induced a corresponding field of faith in the people who trusted her.

Specific moral: We can map this story onto the RUSSIAN_MEDDLING hunt nicely. Satan maps to Russia, the talisman maps to the DNC emails, and the witch is Assange. The witch refuses to say where he got the talisman, so the persecutors are free to claim the talisman is from RUSSIAN_INTERFERENCE. If the witch could admit that the talisman came from a cynical and venial human source (I still think it was Podesta himself) the fever would break.
  ¶ 4:51 AM

  Borodin Effect to Congo Effect.
Back when I listened to real SW, I noted Radio Moscow's well-known habit of switching to solemn Russian music when the government was in some sort of turmoil. I called it the Borodin Effect, and since then I've been watching for parallel examples.

A good one this week on France's national propaganda outlet France24. Macron is in turmoil. The BIG news in France is the Yellowjackets vs Macron's escalating stupid arrogance.

Sure enough, France24 is covering government turmoil in great detail.

Not in France, in CONGO.

Nobody else in the world is interested in Congo, which has been in a permanent condition of coups and revolutions since 1960. Suddenly Congo is deeply fascinating to France24.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 4:13 PM

  Whoops! Borodin broke!
It appears that the Borodinic silence was broken. Appearances deceive.

Suppression of FACTS didn't break. The only thing that changed was the official STORY. For some reason the Empress's staff decided to change the official story from No Problemo to Pneumonia.

Reviewing Polistra's analysis of How, What, Who:

Three types of knowledge: How, What, Who.

All three types are necessary, and everyone uses all three types all the time, but the dominant type strongly influences the form and the success of a culture.

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How-ism is based on skills, on knowing the way. How to build, how to cook, how to repair, how to keep people happy, how to keep them under control. How-knowledge comes directly from the senses, tempered and conditioned by comparison and proportion, with a constant awareness of feedback and cycles. (Does this work better? How can I tell when it's better? When does it repeat?) How-knowledge can be passed with no words at all from mother to daughter, father to son, master to apprentice.

What-ism is based on facts, on knowing the data. What-knowledge requires language, symbols and formulas. You can acquire what-knowledge by reading or listening.

Who-ism is based on identity and quotation. Who-knowledge requires a strong sense of status, an up-to-date reading of comparative authority, and a tape-recorder mind. If the high-status person says "2+2=5" and wears Prada, we must say "2+2=5" and wear Prada. If the low-status person says "2+2=4" and wears J.C. Penney, we must mock "2+2=4" and discard everything with a J.C. Penney label.

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Modern journalists, like modern "scientists" and modern "economists", are pure Who-ists. They simply copy-paste the most fashionable "information". Facts are poison. Anyone who dares to observe Nature with his own senses is a Basket Of Paranoid Conspiracy Theories. Reality is SOLELY AND STRICTLY CONTAINED in documents emitted by the Empire. Anything not contained in Imperial Documents is an Unthing.

As long as Hillary's coughing and fainting were mere OBSERVED FACTS, perceived only by TROLL through mysterious TROLL superpowers called "eyes" and "ears", the coughing and fainting were poisonous Unthings. Wild tinfoil conspiracy theories.

When the Empire stated in an official document that Hillary had pneumonia (which is in itself an impossible diagnosis) the "reporters" instantly switched. They copypasted the document and agreed with it. Now Hillary's health has become an issue worth "discussing" because it's NO LONGER AN OBSERVED FACT.

Previous generations of reporters were equally biased but had a professional impulse that came first. Murrow was a Commie and a globalist but he was literally and etymologically a RE-PORT-ER before any of that. PORT = carry, RE = back. He saw and heard things, then CARRIED BACK what he saw and heard, so the masses who weren't present in London could indirectly see and hear the same things.

This concept has been totally extinct for 40 years.   ¶ 1:10 AM

  Two misplaced classics
(1) Nice warm weather. The ice cream truck has been working hard, and I can tell by the frequent stops in the music that he's getting plenty of business. Most of the time this truck plays La Cucaracha, which is appropriate in a state with legal pot. Today, unless I'm hearing it wrong, his music system is playing the 'good part' of Schubert's Trout Quintet! Way above the usual level of ice cream music, and an unlikely food association.

(2) I've added another syndicated radio serial to my bedtime playlist. Air Mail Mystery is low-quality crap even by the standards of serials. Disjointed plot, inappropriate emotions, sudden shifts of dialect, characters popping up and seeming important then disappearing with no explanation. The music redeems it. Like most serials, AMM has a long stretch of quiet music at the start to allow local announcers to slip in spots or program teasers. The quiet music includes several disjointed themes, one of which is purely heavenly. It sounds a bit like the incidental music in Gluck's Orfeo, but it's not familiar. I think it was written for the show.

Later: It's remarkably close to parts of Brahms's 3rd. Not exactly the same melodies, but the orchestration is the same.

Much later: A stronger influence is Borodin's Steppes of Central Asia, somewhat customized. All the bits are there, in a slightly different order.

Cancel the above stupid guesses. It's the Zampa Overture with no modifications at all. I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out. The Zampa used to be one of my favorites in the '70s when I had a record collection. Getting old!

Maybe it was hard to spot because the theme doesn't start at the start. Instead, the show begins with the roar of an airplane motor, then the motor becomes the bass part of this section of the overture, with alternating bass rumbles and horn blasts. Clever.

Labels: Asked and finally answered, coot-proofing

  ¶ 3:27 PM

  Peninsulas and empires
I was listening to some old stories about Danes and Anglo-Saxons, and was struck by the IMPERIAL tendency of narrow peninsulas and islands like Denmark and England and Japan. Why the correlation?

Start with the most basic distinction of personality, observable in everything from bacteria to humans. Sitters vs rovers, nest-lovers vs risk-takers.

In modern human terms, Deplorables vs Insatiables.

Two opposite charges or tropisms.

Deplorables are makers and nesters. They seek a place where they can be secure from invasion, a place where they can grow stuff or make stuff. This tropism drives them inland and downhill. Inland is secure, downhill is where you find farmland and water power.

Insatiables are takers and conquerors. They seek a place where they can sail outward and conquer empires, a place where they can see and supervise the Deplorables. This tropism drives them outward to the edge of the available land, and upward to view the maximum amount of territory.

In a building Deplorables (red arrows) seek lower floors and interior rooms. Security from tornados and bullets, security from the Insatiables. Insatiables (blue arrows) seek upper floors and corner offices. Ready to burst outward, able to see all the territory that must be conquered.



In a broad country like USA or Russia, Deplorables go inland and downward, to the best farmland and the most security from invasion. Insatiables seek the coast and the mountains. Insatiables MUST have beachfront property. The result of these tropisms shows perfectly on the county map of election results:



Answering the original question: In narrow peninsulas and islands like Denmark and Japan, there isn't a lot of inland, so Insatiables fill most of the available space. Denmark and Japan and England were champion empire-builders in terms of empire/territory ratios.

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Polistra has always represented the Deplorables, long before Perfect Insatiable Hillary named us. Her locations are inland and downhill and utilitarian, representing security and real-value work.

Her first location was unmistakably inland but not strongly downhill. This is a representation of a real place, with an imaginary building added. I had assumed, wrongly as usual, that this place was the original townsite of Manhattan.



The actual original townsite, if historians assume correctly, was strongly base-of-bluffian. (Now occupied, appropriately, by a storage unit on a former railroad grade.)



[Later insert: The location became a brewery in the late 1800s. Here's a picture, clearly the same place:



End insert.]

Polistra's next location was more of a neighborhood. Here the base-of-bluff motif comes in loud and clear. This was a purely imaginary place with real buildings.



She briefly occupied this strictly real place, just after a major windstorm that cranked my security tropism to max. Not just near the base but in the base-of-bluff!



And now she has moved into a new location, more complex than the others, again with the bluff above. This is an imaginary place with real buildings.


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Another question: Why do Deplorables get along with Putin? Two reasons. (1) Putin represents inlanders. Russia is less imperial than USA STRONG because Russia has only a small usable coast. Putin defends his OWN people against attacks by Insatiables like BushObamaClinton and Soros. (2) More specifically, there's a natural resonance between Russians and the major ethnic group of US Deplorables. Picture a country bar. George Jones and Merle Haggard. Borodin and Shostakovich. Tragedy is a vitamin.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, defensible spaces, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 1:15 AM