A lot has been said and even written, behind closed doors or at least far from the madding crowd ... "Where is the anger?" Why are not the people up in arms about everything?
But it really was a stroke of genius, whether deliberate or otherwise.
Everybody knows about Weimar, everybody knows about the Zimbabwe hundred trillion dollar bill. Everybody knows about the emperor. But nobody fliches, not even
the little boy.
Why not?
Of course, the little boy is far too busy trying to get away from Jerry Sandusky.
As for the rest of us, well, it just so happens that we are all clothed in the very same material as the emperor. Between veterans, federal employees, federal retirees, contractors, SNAP, section 8, social security, disability, etc etc etc, that's pretty much all of us, isn't it .....
Can't wait to see what happens next ....
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Computers
Its kind of a shame, in my little opinion, that young people today have never had a chance to do this ... when I was in high school, in a simpler time, I built a little counting machine. I had an old telephone rotary dialer. I went up to Radio Shack (which, in those days, actually sold parts that you could use to build radios) and bought the requisite transistors, resistors, capacitors, wires light bulbs, and so forth. I put everything together with my own soldering iron. The little light bulbs were lined up in the front so that they could display the count of the pulses coming out of the dialer (using the binary number system, of course, which is still the one they have to use even if people don't, anymore).
Somewhat after that, computer manufacture changed in two ways. The circuits that they relied upon got smaller and there got to be more of them in a single machine. That's pretty much it.
No one would ever, ever imagine that a bucket could think. Well, if you had ever built one of these little counting things, then you would understand. Modern computers are nothing but a bucket of on-off switches. Granted, there may be several billion of them in a single unit nowadays. But that's still all that's in there. Absolutely, that's all they can do. Computers are no more capable of thought than they are of sex. Which, by the way, is still the number one thing that people think about, isn't it ....
Somewhat after that, computer manufacture changed in two ways. The circuits that they relied upon got smaller and there got to be more of them in a single machine. That's pretty much it.
No one would ever, ever imagine that a bucket could think. Well, if you had ever built one of these little counting things, then you would understand. Modern computers are nothing but a bucket of on-off switches. Granted, there may be several billion of them in a single unit nowadays. But that's still all that's in there. Absolutely, that's all they can do. Computers are no more capable of thought than they are of sex. Which, by the way, is still the number one thing that people think about, isn't it ....
Monday, January 23, 2012
Persia, part one
In ancient times, there arose a man from mean beginnings who was a man of wisdom, of discernment. Most of those rough people around him spoke of many gods, of inanimate gods made of wood or stone or, sometimes, gold. But he spoke and sang to them of the One God, the God of heart, who entreats all of us towards righteousness and best thinking and best faith, the God who at the end of days will judge all of us and find some worthy of reward, while others, captured by demons and the dark and the weaknesses of their own bad faith, will perish. He spoke of the continual struggle of the faithful against "the lie". Many people were charmed, fascinated, and won over by this new belief, but others were not so pleased and towards the end of his days he was put to death.
His death, however, did not end the quest. One of his disciples, one of his students, went on to preach his truths and to preach the advantages of brotherhood and cooperation over battle and strife, and this man traveled with his message extensively, uniting diverse people across the whole of the civilized world.
His name?
He is called Zoroaster, or sometimes, Zarathustra. Not so much is known about his life, not even the exact period of time or birthplace. Somewhere near to the banks of the Caspian Sea, sometime perhaps adjacent to the time of David.
His disciple? He is better known, as Cyrus the Great, King of Kings. Though at first known as an illiterate barbarian, he came to unite the diverse kingdoms of the known world, more through diplomacy than through battle. He was the very first to do so. He came to persuade all the other peoples who surrounded the one great kingdom of the time, the Medes, the Lydians, the Chaldeans, the Elamites, the Phoenicians, some of the Ionian Greeks, that they were all better off trading with their neighbors than fighting them. Finally, after the death of Nebuchadnezzar and a quick succession of weak sons, he persuaded even great Babylon to join with him in his empire. And they opened their gates without a single battle.
In the process, as you may remember, Cyrus became aware of a captive people inside the kingdom of Babylon, a remnant who worshiped a different God than Mardauk and the others. And Cyrus recognized the great advantage of respecting every peoples' their own religious beliefs. He gave those people their freedom, their leave to return home, and even the funds and permission to rebuild their temple, the temple of Jerusalem. And so return home they did, but not before considerable learning and respect paid to the beliefs of Cyrus, the beliefs first presented by Zarathustra, some of which in time they adopted and claimed to be their own.
(to be continued ...)
His death, however, did not end the quest. One of his disciples, one of his students, went on to preach his truths and to preach the advantages of brotherhood and cooperation over battle and strife, and this man traveled with his message extensively, uniting diverse people across the whole of the civilized world.
His name?
He is called Zoroaster, or sometimes, Zarathustra. Not so much is known about his life, not even the exact period of time or birthplace. Somewhere near to the banks of the Caspian Sea, sometime perhaps adjacent to the time of David.
His disciple? He is better known, as Cyrus the Great, King of Kings. Though at first known as an illiterate barbarian, he came to unite the diverse kingdoms of the known world, more through diplomacy than through battle. He was the very first to do so. He came to persuade all the other peoples who surrounded the one great kingdom of the time, the Medes, the Lydians, the Chaldeans, the Elamites, the Phoenicians, some of the Ionian Greeks, that they were all better off trading with their neighbors than fighting them. Finally, after the death of Nebuchadnezzar and a quick succession of weak sons, he persuaded even great Babylon to join with him in his empire. And they opened their gates without a single battle.
In the process, as you may remember, Cyrus became aware of a captive people inside the kingdom of Babylon, a remnant who worshiped a different God than Mardauk and the others. And Cyrus recognized the great advantage of respecting every peoples' their own religious beliefs. He gave those people their freedom, their leave to return home, and even the funds and permission to rebuild their temple, the temple of Jerusalem. And so return home they did, but not before considerable learning and respect paid to the beliefs of Cyrus, the beliefs first presented by Zarathustra, some of which in time they adopted and claimed to be their own.
(to be continued ...)
Monday, January 16, 2012
PopQuiz
Okay, this one gave me some pause.
Most of the people around me probably understand that the earth rotates around its axis (the imaginary north-south line), and the moon orbits around the earth (although, to be more precise, the earth/moon pair actually rotates together around their common center of gravity, which is actually located inside of the earth but seriously distant from the earth's center), and the earth/moon system orbits around the sun.
I was reading about the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians and astronomers, who made astoundingly careful and accurate measurements and analysis and predictions despite having no telescopes and only dripping-water clocks with which to measure time intervals. They knew the earth was round 3000 years ago, had a pretty fair idea of its size, and they knew that the moon's orbit around the earth was not a perfect circle but had an apogee and a perigee which they measured to an accuracy which is downright astounding. They knew that the earth's orbit around the sun took somewhere between 365 and 366 days and they could accurately predict the change in the time of the sunrise from day to day as winter passes to summer and back. (They also knew Pythagorus' theorem when all the Greeks were still living in caves and wearing animal skins.)
I got to thinking about this and that day thing ... that the day is 24 hours long and the year is between 365 and 366... and then I realized that what we call a "day" is not exactly a 360 degree rotation of the earth around its axis but something just a little bit different than that, on account of the action of the earth orbiting around the sun.
So your pop quiz today is this: how much difference in time does this orbiting have and does a 360 degree rotation of the earth (so that a star, other than the sun, has returned to its exact same longitude in the sky as the night before) take a little longer or a little less than 24 hours?
I never learned this. I had to compute it. I'm lazy, I only worked it out to the minute, but if you get the concept right then you can find the numbers and plug them in to the formula and get it right to nanoseconds if you wish. But I do find its interesting, just a little bit more than Jerry Springer ....
Most of the people around me probably understand that the earth rotates around its axis (the imaginary north-south line), and the moon orbits around the earth (although, to be more precise, the earth/moon pair actually rotates together around their common center of gravity, which is actually located inside of the earth but seriously distant from the earth's center), and the earth/moon system orbits around the sun.
I was reading about the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians and astronomers, who made astoundingly careful and accurate measurements and analysis and predictions despite having no telescopes and only dripping-water clocks with which to measure time intervals. They knew the earth was round 3000 years ago, had a pretty fair idea of its size, and they knew that the moon's orbit around the earth was not a perfect circle but had an apogee and a perigee which they measured to an accuracy which is downright astounding. They knew that the earth's orbit around the sun took somewhere between 365 and 366 days and they could accurately predict the change in the time of the sunrise from day to day as winter passes to summer and back. (They also knew Pythagorus' theorem when all the Greeks were still living in caves and wearing animal skins.)
I got to thinking about this and that day thing ... that the day is 24 hours long and the year is between 365 and 366... and then I realized that what we call a "day" is not exactly a 360 degree rotation of the earth around its axis but something just a little bit different than that, on account of the action of the earth orbiting around the sun.
So your pop quiz today is this: how much difference in time does this orbiting have and does a 360 degree rotation of the earth (so that a star, other than the sun, has returned to its exact same longitude in the sky as the night before) take a little longer or a little less than 24 hours?
I never learned this. I had to compute it. I'm lazy, I only worked it out to the minute, but if you get the concept right then you can find the numbers and plug them in to the formula and get it right to nanoseconds if you wish. But I do find its interesting, just a little bit more than Jerry Springer ....
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Internet Censorship
We have all heard about the government of China censoring the Internet. The first time I ran across anything in my own experience was when I posted something on the Yahoo finance message base about the seventh planet of our solar system, which yahoo dutifully rendered as "Ur$#@&".
Well, the first time it was funny. but within another year, my friends and I found the censorship so dire that it was necessary for us to move our conversation to a private venu. Yahoo took to blocking links to certain other sites which might conceivably be competitors of theirs. and this phenomenon increased and increased, til we found them regularly blocking mere financial/political opinions which did not fully swing with theirs.
On my personal machine at home I have found that for many years it has been a pitched battle for ownership and control of my machine -- the disk space and the CPU processor. The advertisers and commercial interests encroach further and further. At best, it takes longer and longer time for internet pages to load the content which I am looking for, after ads and scripts and tracking software and cookies and who knows what all else comes down the line. I have to take more and more time clearing out the junk they send my way, unbidden and unpaid for.
My internet provider sees fit to put several layers of click baiting in between me and my email ... even though this is my address and the only way many folks know to reach me I may have to change it soon because the junk pile is getting so high.
In rewards for all this new stuff they send me, they raise their rates every year by 10% or more.
Now we have this:
https://www.eff.org/issues/coica-internet-censorship-and-copyright-bill
The commercial interests do not seem to understand that every new invasion is just one more straw, or maybe a better analogy is, one more globule of cholesterol. There will come a time, without warning, when it will be too much. I gave up tv 30 years ago and somehow I don't seem to have lost a thing. More and more folks are joining me on that one these days. In its inception, the Internet was the arena of smart, gifted people who just wanted to show off and give away their expertise. There were mathematicians, scholars, geniuses. It was truly the most democratic device ever devised. I suppose that's why, eventually, they have to kill it. Along with that golden goose ....
Well, the first time it was funny. but within another year, my friends and I found the censorship so dire that it was necessary for us to move our conversation to a private venu. Yahoo took to blocking links to certain other sites which might conceivably be competitors of theirs. and this phenomenon increased and increased, til we found them regularly blocking mere financial/political opinions which did not fully swing with theirs.
On my personal machine at home I have found that for many years it has been a pitched battle for ownership and control of my machine -- the disk space and the CPU processor. The advertisers and commercial interests encroach further and further. At best, it takes longer and longer time for internet pages to load the content which I am looking for, after ads and scripts and tracking software and cookies and who knows what all else comes down the line. I have to take more and more time clearing out the junk they send my way, unbidden and unpaid for.
My internet provider sees fit to put several layers of click baiting in between me and my email ... even though this is my address and the only way many folks know to reach me I may have to change it soon because the junk pile is getting so high.
In rewards for all this new stuff they send me, they raise their rates every year by 10% or more.
Now we have this:
https://www.eff.org/issues/coica-internet-censorship-and-copyright-bill
The commercial interests do not seem to understand that every new invasion is just one more straw, or maybe a better analogy is, one more globule of cholesterol. There will come a time, without warning, when it will be too much. I gave up tv 30 years ago and somehow I don't seem to have lost a thing. More and more folks are joining me on that one these days. In its inception, the Internet was the arena of smart, gifted people who just wanted to show off and give away their expertise. There were mathematicians, scholars, geniuses. It was truly the most democratic device ever devised. I suppose that's why, eventually, they have to kill it. Along with that golden goose ....
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Queen Nephretitty
okay, I remember now ...
We were talking about titties and I said that there was some word that had titties in it but I couldn't remember what it was. If I could come up with the word, maybe we could get the domain site or something where we could put our art work up for sale.
But you missed this part. A friend of mine came over several days ago, and she got really plastered. Really. From her neck down to her, um, yes. That far. We were just making a prototype (or is that prototitty?). You all need to stay tuned, to see what we all come up with, Bari and Star and Sandy are all just sparkling with ideas for this project.....
Anyway, I don't see my wordsmithing as being a main pillar of my indentitty,
but I will contribute this anyway in honor of my father who would never ever read this and his father, who wrote a newspaper column back in the day but he's been dead now for a very long time.
So it took me a few minutes to recover. My mind must have been preoccupied. But I finally came back with the information that there really is a large quantitty of words with titties in them. Proper words. Even, ahem, some rather uptight words. Like, for example, chastitty. Or even (in deferernce to my pastor) sanctitty.
And that pretty much rounded out the conversation.
We were talking about titties and I said that there was some word that had titties in it but I couldn't remember what it was. If I could come up with the word, maybe we could get the domain site or something where we could put our art work up for sale.
But you missed this part. A friend of mine came over several days ago, and she got really plastered. Really. From her neck down to her, um, yes. That far. We were just making a prototype (or is that prototitty?). You all need to stay tuned, to see what we all come up with, Bari and Star and Sandy are all just sparkling with ideas for this project.....
Anyway, I don't see my wordsmithing as being a main pillar of my indentitty,
but I will contribute this anyway in honor of my father who would never ever read this and his father, who wrote a newspaper column back in the day but he's been dead now for a very long time.
So it took me a few minutes to recover. My mind must have been preoccupied. But I finally came back with the information that there really is a large quantitty of words with titties in them. Proper words. Even, ahem, some rather uptight words. Like, for example, chastitty. Or even (in deferernce to my pastor) sanctitty.
And that pretty much rounded out the conversation.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
the U.S.A will lose.
I feel like Cassandra ... though my predictions have been on the mark time after time after time, people would rather rape me than to listen.
I feel like Berenger in Ionesco's "Rhinoceros". Everyone around me is choosing, deliberately, to think and act like a dumbphuque. Its very lonely here.
Even the peace-love flower children liberals don't get it. The issue here is not whether or not war is right or wrong. The issue is not whether or not we are doing for their good or our own good or the good of humanity. The real issue, as I see it, is whether or not the US has any chance of winning any war with Iran.
Is there any doubt that, as soon as the first shot is fired, the prices of gasoline will immediately go to $10.00 per gallon? Is memory of the occupation of Iraq fading already?
Is it not general knowledge that air craft carriers, those huge floating cities, are a relic from WW II which are totally inappropriate for today's warcraft ... that every major nation, including Iran, has missiles which can evade radar and sink one of these floating ducks? Or all of them? At what cost, both in terms of dollars and broken marriages, lost fathers, lost skilled workers, lost friends?
Do people not know that oil is fungible? When you look at a gallon of gasoline can you tell where it came from, west Texas or Angola or the Alberta oil sands or Iran? Do people not understand that the world supply of oil is critical, that if the U.S. military deliberately acts to reduce it that this will harm nations all over the planet? That many of those nations, in fact, will come to the aid of Iran and line up against the U.S?
Do people not understand that having the biggest, baddest military in the history of mankind does not protect you at all from snipers, suicide bombers, terrorist attacks, lone gunmen, crazy people, and others who, right or wrong, just hate you? The straits of Hormuz are only 30 miles wide and every day, for quiet, peaceful functioning of the world order thirteen sitting-duck oil tankers must maneuver their way through there. You can have all the destroyers, bombers, missiles, drones, fighters, tanks, rockets, cannons, grenade launchers, satellites, in the whole world and you will not be able to stop some people from sinking some of those tankers if they want to. I mean, get real about this. And if you are the one who owns those tankers, would you even risk it?
What if you had a nine-year-old daughter and she was beautiful and a thousand men in your town told you they were going to "get" her? Exactly how many bodyguards would you want to have before you send her to school? Think about it, think about it hard ...
Does no one understand China's "nuclear option" in the financial markets? Do you understand what would happen to ALL money in the USA if China were to sell all of its $1,000,000,000,000 worth of US Treasury notes, all on the same day?
Is the majority of U.S. citizens prepared for gasoline quotas? For gasoline lines? For a limit of 10 gallons per person per month, with no exceptions except for congressmen, lawyers and mafia chiefs?
What is wrong with me that I have common sense, when apparently nobody else around me does? Do I need pills or a good psychiatrist? What can I do about this terrible approach I have to reality when everybody else around me prefers total hallucinations? Any help?
I feel like Berenger in Ionesco's "Rhinoceros". Everyone around me is choosing, deliberately, to think and act like a dumbphuque. Its very lonely here.
Even the peace-love flower children liberals don't get it. The issue here is not whether or not war is right or wrong. The issue is not whether or not we are doing for their good or our own good or the good of humanity. The real issue, as I see it, is whether or not the US has any chance of winning any war with Iran.
Is there any doubt that, as soon as the first shot is fired, the prices of gasoline will immediately go to $10.00 per gallon? Is memory of the occupation of Iraq fading already?
Is it not general knowledge that air craft carriers, those huge floating cities, are a relic from WW II which are totally inappropriate for today's warcraft ... that every major nation, including Iran, has missiles which can evade radar and sink one of these floating ducks? Or all of them? At what cost, both in terms of dollars and broken marriages, lost fathers, lost skilled workers, lost friends?
Do people not know that oil is fungible? When you look at a gallon of gasoline can you tell where it came from, west Texas or Angola or the Alberta oil sands or Iran? Do people not understand that the world supply of oil is critical, that if the U.S. military deliberately acts to reduce it that this will harm nations all over the planet? That many of those nations, in fact, will come to the aid of Iran and line up against the U.S?
Do people not understand that having the biggest, baddest military in the history of mankind does not protect you at all from snipers, suicide bombers, terrorist attacks, lone gunmen, crazy people, and others who, right or wrong, just hate you? The straits of Hormuz are only 30 miles wide and every day, for quiet, peaceful functioning of the world order thirteen sitting-duck oil tankers must maneuver their way through there. You can have all the destroyers, bombers, missiles, drones, fighters, tanks, rockets, cannons, grenade launchers, satellites, in the whole world and you will not be able to stop some people from sinking some of those tankers if they want to. I mean, get real about this. And if you are the one who owns those tankers, would you even risk it?
What if you had a nine-year-old daughter and she was beautiful and a thousand men in your town told you they were going to "get" her? Exactly how many bodyguards would you want to have before you send her to school? Think about it, think about it hard ...
Does no one understand China's "nuclear option" in the financial markets? Do you understand what would happen to ALL money in the USA if China were to sell all of its $1,000,000,000,000 worth of US Treasury notes, all on the same day?
Is the majority of U.S. citizens prepared for gasoline quotas? For gasoline lines? For a limit of 10 gallons per person per month, with no exceptions except for congressmen, lawyers and mafia chiefs?
What is wrong with me that I have common sense, when apparently nobody else around me does? Do I need pills or a good psychiatrist? What can I do about this terrible approach I have to reality when everybody else around me prefers total hallucinations? Any help?
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