madamski cafone
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@ Bill7
There’s a difference between humanity and a human. Something to do with separate egos housed in separate bodies with separate consciousnesses. That’s one of the reasons why you are a Numbered Person, Bill7.
I sound smart? Guess I’ll have to settle for smart. We can’t all be geniuses:
@ my parents said know:
I quite understand the benefits of abortion and birth control.
@ Mr. House:
I understand. But anointing leaders to god-like status is what humanity DOES. We have a very long history of it. To quote a fave song of mine:
“We will not mourn what we have not lost,
We will learn to row with the oars we have got.”Meaning that until someone figures out how to bell those enormously powerful fat cats playing God, I’ll tend to distance myself from howling about same: it takes energy away from dealing with the problems they and so many others, including wee little mice like you and I, create on the local level.
But, since we are humans and therefore must pretend to obey the directives of a man playing God, I nominate Putin. He’s got the look:
@ Dr. Day:
The technology of 1840 will likely elude us for sometime. I forsee something more neolithic with a rusty neo-Iron Age overlap. As for elitists’ visions of high tower castle fortress protection from the mess below, it will crumble rapidly, I firmly believe.
The illusion of control seems virtually universal. (A seeming illusion: sounds like an accurate description of this trhing we call reality.) Some bizarre fools, like Gates, cast their illusion on a globally vast screen because they can. Most of us cast ours on screens ranging from mega big screen to ipad scale becausae that’s all we can afford or all we want. Both illusions are, well, illusions, although the tiny ipad ones are comfortingly mobile to those who wish to see the world itself as part of their personal screen. (Humanity as a mise en abyme of a person viewing themself viewing themself from a cellphone. I fear such an app already exists?)
Fate is doing what Fate does. The illusion of humanity being in control of its fate, or being able to commandeer Fate, is just another thread in a tapestry that even on a tiny planetary scale is beyond our comprehension, much less the relationship between Fate and Cosmos, assuming the two are separate.
The following video was shared above. I repeat it to ask us to lookat Gates’ facial expressions. I don’t think a human could show more internal conflict without chewing his face from the inside and then swallowing it:
The situation with population control is like that with organ harvesting: no one has the courage to deal with it plainly as a resource issue, so we leave it to donations and waiting lists and an ever-growing black market, some of it under semi-open government control.
A hundred years ago, women were tortured and jailed in America for promoting safe modern birth control methods. Abortion is deemed evil incarnate by the same political faction that most insistently endorses sending young men overseas to kill and maim and be killed or maimed for dubious causes. Abortion is deemed sacred, and war evil, by the loyally opposing other political faction while it embraces policies that attack the existence of human family structures both directly and indirectly, and consistently votes for politicians whose foreign policies make Dubya look nice.
Both sides seem equally unwitting where not willfully ignorant.
Meanwhile, the population can no longer be sustained. Its current growth arc has its future decimation ingrained into its structure. We the people show little interest in curbing our personal reproduction rates. Like everything else, we feel that “somebody ought to do something about it”. Apparently, somebody is. How dare they?! Don’t these leaders, whom we uphold and enrich despite their glaring unworthiness for their positions, know they are supposed to not try and fix things but only make vaguely agreeable verbal noises about the issues or things that somewhat resembles those issues?
People are going to die in unprecedented huge numbers over the next few decades, period. Old people are the most dispensable and expensive part of our growing unsupportable population. Nursing homes are a cultural blight that shows how everything has been compartmentalized into manageably marketable pens. As cryptic forced euthanasia goes, it makes sense. (I am at an age and condition of health where many people look to nursing home care. Ick, I say, but note that I am pointing a finger at myself when I identify the geriatric as the first most dispensable demographic profile.)
So, if the world’s bloated plutocrats and oligarchs choose to do something about arguably the single most pressing and defining issue of our times, while we bicker over reproduction planning policies and who to (stop) bomb(ing) next, we must of course oppose them. Because we, the romantically glorified people of a mighty democratic republic, who won’t come together to fix things except in the most trivial (yet typically hostile) ways, will not tolerate the powers that be doing anything except the usual: bomb (or not) the hell out of foreigners while burning out the brains of our fellow citizens.
^&*
Google’s platforms have been acting wonky over the weekend, but especially Sunday night, for at least a month. Major overhauls must be happening. Hackers probably exacerbate this, since they would recognize immediately the situation and exploit its vulnerabilities.
I remember hearing months ago that Putin would be first to take the vaccine. Then some American rag says otherwise. If Putin doesn’t want to take the vaccine, he’ll lie about it. Who do they think he is? Trump who can’t distinguish truth from deceit? Or Biden, who can’t remember the difference? Right now, he is Russia’s CEO and shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.
And yes, anything that dehydrates or otherwise weakens the body is bad even without pandemia. Alcohol is toxic, period.
^&*
Why did Strindberg choose to paint a mountain clearcut?
I learned yesterday there is such a thing as a Zoom office Xmas party. In a business run by two credentialed psychiatrists.
Everybody under 40 found an excuse not to be there. Over 40’s knew too well where their bread is buttered and endured the nightmare folly.
Jesus wept.
@ Dr. D:
The interesting thing is that human math is as rooted in greed/violence as in pattern recognition: “This is mine; that is yours. 1,2,3…”
@ WES:
Excellent principle of understand you wrote there.
^&*
Wow. Looks like the offer they made Bernie not to be refused runs deep. Or he’s a uncommonly sick kind of creep. I prefer to think the former.
^&*
@ WES again:
Big government is the inevitable result of the cancer known as human governance. As long as the population grows, so does the government. Both population and government become crazier and less functional as size expands.
y so srs?
Perhaps a bit of cheering up would do for us:
I see Mr. Flynn is floating some kind of trial ballon. There seems to be a bit of donward vortex appearing now and then in the center of the Great Dismal Swamp. Zuckerberg has donned his Black Lagoon Creature costume. (You call that a codpiece?! I’ve got clitoris enlargement pills bigger than that!) Closet skeletons like those of Clinton keep crawling zombie-like from the crypt despite incessant shushing. China may be this close to being able to thrash our networks with almost invisible ease.
And, horrors, half the world could get Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine! I don’t want to catch Sputnik vaccine, do you? I wouldn’t want to get sick, and I wouldn’t want to be the person who wrote that headline.
The word cusp comes to mind. With Hannukah/Solstice/Xmas/New Years as fulcrum. Staying warm with a Santa-beard face mask and a shotgun.
“What if there is no Biden administration?
What if words just come out of his mouth?”I can imagine Joe live on TV saying, “I don’t know. Words just come out of my mouth!”
@ Bill7:
RT knows it’s in the media catbird seat at this point. It can push for selling as much senationalism as it likes so long as it doesn’t do it too much on topics of domestic nature.
@ Rototillerman
“Am I missing something?”
Maybe this: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Add that many years back, FB stated a policy that it could copyright the material of anything posted on FB (that wasn’t already copywritten outside FB).
While this doesn’t have any real teeth in publishing terms, it nonetheless means something: FB made a proprietary claim about FB user-made content, but also enjoys via Section 230, legal immunity from anything posted on FB. To my mind, this relation between these two clauses also moves toward shielding the likes of FB from any censorship they make. Pincer attack kind of strategy.
&*(
@ RT is in principle no more or less reliable overall than any other large news platform except that at this point in time, the truth of global socioeconomics and geopolitics favors Russia’s perspective and interests. In short, the truth about America and Europe generally makes Russia look good and us bad.
RT at this point has little interest in lying to American or European readers, only to its Russian and Russian sphere readers. Even then, it has less reason to lie to tis citizens than the NYTimes etc. have to lie to their readers, because we make Russia look so good by comparison it doesn’t have to cover its ass with lies nearly so much as we do.
Blogs and their comments being forward-looking things, I’ll post here this response to yesterday’s discussion:
So an article says certain tests are useless for accurately telling if you have covid or not. The rebuttals to this reduce to equivocations that translate to ‘sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t’. ‘It depends’, like John McCain’s infamous underwear.
In plain vernacular man on the street logic, the rebuttals lose. Plain vernacular man-on-the-street logic is how the public mind works.
Me, I think this whole silly squabble revolves around the unfortunate use of the word “absolute”, which is an emotionally satisfying word to use, and closer than not to accurate* when the hard facts of the data are related to the covid phenomenon, but also easy to dismiss because absolutes are ideals not realities. Even a subatomic particle is not absolutely one thing or another. It’s a phenomenon that follows a very narrow pattern in a fairly — but not absolutely — precise range.
Let me use more accurate language: the tests SUCK. Not absolutely but enough to be insufficiently useful to be worth messing with except, perhaps, as a stage of development in covid testing. It is the public who must trust and submit to testing for tests to be useful, and the public thinks “covid test” means, well, a test to see if you have covid. Period. How silly of them, right?
Oh, whatever shall we do when we run out of low-hanging fruit to pick on?
^%*
And I still have no patience with honorifics like M.D. in an egalitarian social setting. It’s one thing to tell us you’re a doctor. It’s another thing to use it as some kind of imprimatur or letterhead. If we were discussing gender/sex issues, it would be obnoxious if my handle were madamski, P.L. (Professional Lesbian). It’s enough to say I like vaginas when relevant to the conversation.
closer than not to accurate* like, allegedly, the tests currently under discussion.
Today’s painting is a kind of visual narrative mostly neglected since we’ve developed virtual realities that appear to move and make sounds. That painting says more than most heartbreak movies I’ve seen.
A picture says a thousand words. A movie uses several thousand words to explain a series of pictures.
So an article says certain tests are useless for accurately telling if you have covid or not. The rebuttals to this reduce to equivocations that translate to ‘sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t’. ‘It depends’, like John McCain’s infamous underwear.
In plain vernacular man on the street logic, the rebuttals lose. Plain vernacular man-on-the-street logic is how the public mind works.
Me, I think this whole silly squabble revolves around the unfortunate use of the word “absolute”, which is an emotionally satisfying word to use, and closer than not to accurate* when the hard facts of the data are related to the covid phenomenon, but also easy to dismiss because absolutes are ideals not realities. Even a subatomic particle is not absolutely one thing or another. It’s a phenomenon that follows a very narrow pattern in a fairly — but not absolutely — precise range.
Let me use more accurate language: the tests SUCK. Not absolutely but enough to be insufficiently useful to be worth messing with except, perhaps, as a stage of development in covid testing. It is the public who must trust and submit to testing for tests to be useful, and the public thinks “covid test” means, well, a test to see if you have covid. Period. How silly of them, right?
Oh, whatever shall we do when we run out of low-hanging fruit to pick on?
^%*
And I still have no patience with honorifics like M.D. in an egalitarian social setting. It’s one thing to tell us you’re a doctor. It’s another thing to use it as some kind of imprimatur or letterhead. If we were discussing gender/sex issues, it would be obnoxious if my handle were madamski, P.L. (Professional Lesbian). It’s enough to say I like vaginas when relevant to the conversation.
closer than not to accurate* like, allegedly, the tests currently under discussion.
I agree with Dr. D’s response to BGrahamMD, whose name sounds like some kind of 70s doctor show and raises the hackles of my suspicion. Sue me if that’s rude.
The nitpicker in me points out that having a DNR is probably more common than Dr. D says. I have had a DNR since I was about age 45 because hospitals hand out Living Wills to patients for even minor elective surgery these days. It’s boring waiting for your name to be called for surgery. People fill those forms out, and a fair number of people who do are folks who don’t want to go through what they say Granny experience when the doctors kept her alive as a living shell rather than accept that death is inevitable even if prolonged for 6 weeks.
As for complicit versus incompetent, I invoke a well-known Robert Frost poem:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.Art like Pollock’s mostly evokes no feeling in me. Get too abstract and my emotions have nothing to hang their purse on even if, like yesterday’s Pollock, the color fields, textures, and rhythms actually evoke some tri-dimensionality (something Pollock never did for me before; and Id I’ve seen a few Pollocks in the real canvas flesh.)
Van Gogh’s art abstracts aspects of the image, but the image remains and communicates itself that much more for the liberties Van took with images. Some semblance of image is necessary for me to feel emotion unless the abstract art is simplified into the power of color and proportion with minimal motion/rhythm. So while I don’t like Pollock, I often enjoy the better ultra minimalist stuff that is often little more than a square or three of carefully chosen color.
Paul Klee, I feel, straddles the fine line of abstract vs. representative art with an uncanny feel for the sweet spot between the two. Like this:
Final Pollock dig. His art looks to me like the condition he usually was in to paint: thoroughly drunk.
@ V. Arnold
Being an inveterate trickster, I refrained from wondering where you’d gone or expressing worry about your well-being. Humor being my staunchest ally after love, I wanted to but refrained from wisecracking that if Raul et al wanted you to stick around, paintings by Jackson Pollock and the like needed to be replaced with something like Vermeer or Corot.
Today, Raul posts a lovely Van Gogh and voila! V. Arnold is back.
‘It’s the art, stupid.’
@ Dr. D
“So I believe he has the running second-by-second count as it rose up, which should be a direct feed from the physical machines, and the data he has makes no sense. So? This isn’t rocket science. Investigate. Why would he need the physical machines FIRST, or ONLY, if he sees things that need follow up from his data-feed?”
Quite. If I see the internet slowing down or acting strangely on my home computer screen, I don’t need to access all possibly relevant server-farms or whatever runs the internet these days. (Morlocks who can count real fast?) I know something’s wrong when pages download unusually slow or not at all, or I click on Best Turkey Stuffing Ever and enter a pornado. I don’t need to examine the machines to know there are data error issues.
@ John Day
I first thought that “golden hamster” was some corollary to black swan. How fun to learn they really exist!
We like sharing resources that benefit us. That is the foundation of market economics: try and make the good better and more available. We make laws to promote this. Some of these laws are good. Some are awful.
We don’t like sharing things that hurts us. That is the basis of politics: try to make the bad less bad and less available. We make laws to prevent this. Some of these laws are good. Some are awful.
El covid brings these two principles into frank conflict.
It’s an ancient dilemma:
“Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive
Try not to confuse it with what you do to survive” — Jackson Browne
Regarding mRNA “vaccines”: rogue recombinant DNA is almost guaranteed to be the outcome. Mess with the messengers, you mess with the message.
*(%
As for wishing we still had cpitalism: we do. And capitalism, like some famous blokes said, always leads to slavery, as does socialism, monarchy, communism, any -ism.
All -isms are something one works for and, about the time think you have it, vanishes into yet another form of more or less totalitarianism before resuming our favorite reformative matrix: chaos.
“Okay. I just watched Klaus Schwab tell us that there will be a cyberattack which will dwarf the virus in its dire implications.”
Low-hanging fruit. We’ve been warned (more or less correctly) for decades of cyberattack prospects. In a way, we rehearsed the concept via Y2K. Whether we do it “to ourselves” or foreign entities do, hardly matters. An enemy is an enemy, and our government long ago became our enemy. Not sure I can think of a time when I’d call it a friend, either.
Thx, Noirette.
“As long as the paychecks keep coming, we will all keep complying with the directives in our inboxes. We are not prepared at all for anything else. We have no backup plan for economic collapse. We are well trained to comply. How will we survive if compliance no longer feeds us? That’s a hypothetical question I’ve asked myself a lot in recent years.”
A people who’ve insisted on being told what to do for food is not likely to deal with figuring things out for itself.
I know this: the nmumber of homeless people is mushrooming. And that’s in a city with high property values and low vacancy.
“How much time have you spent today showing each and every cell in your body how merciful a God you are?”
Someone’s been reading my mind, it feels.
“the zombie Faceborg guy”
Wow. Perfect description. I plan to call Zuckerberg ZFG from here forth.
“As you mention though, they have the mental illness of narcissism, which means not only do they just print out in the open everything they plan to do, everybody they plan to kill and all the things they plan to steal knowing no one will read it, and if they read it they will just deny it, but they HAVE to do it. Because that illness means they only feel assured, only a moment’s rest when they are better than everyone else, and can rub their face in their power-over. Of course this is also what gets them in the end, but unfortunately not very quickly.”
A perfect summation of the phenomenon.
Stupidity and insanity are very different things but can merge into each other given enough money. We’ve been headed fo awhile toward some kind of “reset”, deliberate or by fate.
I agree with this entirely :
“Russia would wipe out the U.S. in 30 minutes.”
But not at all with this:
“But that would attack all the cities and citizens, leaving the oligarchs and military intact, so much desired. Doing Gates/Bezos job for them.”
A lovely news and commentary harvest today.
We wail about the mental/physical health consequences of inept lockdowns. Rightly so. But our mental/physical health was a hole with a paper sack in it in the first place. I see a tendency to treat covid and responses to it as events larger than the reality they impact. Covid isn’t as bad as the fear-mongers claim. Likewise, inept/corrupt/malign responses to covid aren’t as bad as the fear-mongers claim.
Covid and responses thereto just provided a nifty focal lens to show how functionally bereft our civilization has become. Mostly, the underlying issue is the same as that on which TAE was founded: peak oil/insane economics.
The Consciousness of Sheep article shared by John Day sums the big picture up just fine while only mentioning “pandemic” twice, properly (imo) citing them as minor but inevitable catalysts to “help” the Titanic to properly line up on a vertical float or sink narrative line.
Dreams die hard. The idea that voting is crucial to managing our large societies is carved into us from early on. Something to do with our quaint belief that we can “govern” ourselves. We can certainly organize into very complicated structures, but those structures usually prove unmanageable at best.
I’m wondering if it isn’t time for another round of assassinations. Too many people with too much power have too much to lose by not shooting those who might depose them.
Citing James O’Keefe positively at the end of an edition that references Borat negatively is confusing at best. Both are entrapment schmucks who denigrate genuine investigative journalism via rank pranksterism. Julian Assange both of them are not, and both of them would sell Assange down the river for funding for their next project.
I know we live in interesting times but that’s no excuse to add needless sensationalism into the mix. These times that are a-changing are interesting enough without political drag queens.
“Capitalism is a wonderful mechanism to convert individual human greed into collective virtue.” N. Taleb
I’ll pair that with “Money is deferred reciprocal altruism.” (Robert Wright) as a nice-sounding even well-intended bit of self-deception.
Both authors are bright fellows from whom I’ve learned much, but no one’s right all of the time.
&*(
People don’t need to reclaim the internet. They need to give it up. Shoot their TV. Oh well. The looming war already in progress will do that for us.
&$%
It’s funny reading these remarks whereby people politicize a viral pandemic because it has been politicized by a media they scorn (rightly) as a tool of politics. It’s like a contagious disease about a contagious disease about a contagious disease.
#$%
Here’s the beef: The End
@ a kuellervo
Having raised a few human children, I support the joke as both a premise and punchline.
“Mom? Can I have a hammer?”
“Why, son?”
“I want to go play with Elmo.”
“Ummm… show me what you mean.”
Son pointed to the TV where Elmo was playing on the other side of a glass screen. He wanted to break the glass so he could play with Elmo.
Children ask many many wise intelligent questions. They also ask many many stupid foolish questions. The Amy humor picture neither disparages children (as you claim) nor glorifies children’s native intelligence (as you do). Although I am no fan of modern adult culture, I’ll remind you that you are (one assumes) an adult and therefore, per your statement, a lying cretin.
All cretins are liars. Eloise is a cretin. Eloise is too dumb to know the difference between a truth and lie.
*%^
As always, superb information, John Day.
How droll. A man is hit on the head by a falling animal. People watch. People film. 20 seconds and no one aids the human. The camera voyeur also abandons the victim. This is “funny”. People think media rules the world. They forget that we are the media. The media is a blind beacon unless we watch. We watch.
Also, Pence is not a non-entity. Trump would not have won the election without Pence. Pence is the main reason the Xtian Right suported Trump. That bloc is perhaps the most coherent plebiscite currently in the population.
Big Media is huge but it is not the nation. Should Pence replace Trump, he would have a significant base. Pence is able to stay on message. The message can get through the pulpit networkd despite Big Media ignoring him.
