Personality vs Materialism

 

Historian’s emphasis on leadership and the decisions leaders make ignores the ordinary material facts surrounding those decisions. These histories of leadership over circumstance are favored by those in power and their subordinates. Material conditions are ignored in favor of personalities. This personification obscures the obvious. But there are moments in history where individuals made the difference. Here are some possibilities:

Another obscured area is who the decision makers are. The Hamilton musical based on Ron Chernow’s biography attempts to redress this by giving glory to a functionary. But ignores that Alexander Hamilton was working for Robert Morris. Hamilton was on Washington’s staff, representing Morris. Thank heavens he was there to summon Morris when Washington, scared of heading south, was about to attack New York rather than Yorktown. Morris paid to transport Washingtons army to Yorktown. Imagine how the French would have felt if we hadn’t supported them at Yorktown. Washington was the Virginia general in the north. Benjamin Lincoln was the Massachusetts general in the south and Lincoln got his butt handed to him by the English General Henry Clinton.

Washington had a penchant for losing battles. The Patriots victories were usually under other commands or despite Washington. Washington was the last American General who understood attrition. Having worked for the English, Washington was properly terrified that they would send over the thug who would arm slaves in the south and burn granaries in the north. Washington wanted to keep the English generals he had. The English learned from this colonial rebellion and were far more ruthless in later conflicts. If you doubt the English could have won the American Rebellion, I give you South Africa, India, China, Ireland, and the Napoleonic Wars.

There are financial reasons for the American Rebellion and eventual victory. But the reason the British were soaking their colonies was to pay for the Seven Years War that Washington started. The British feared that colonial greed would lead to slave insurrection, indigenous uprising, and further international conflicts.

Another example of leadership making the difference is the succession of Roosevelt by Truman. Wars are decided after the battles. The loss of Roosevelt changed history. Truman took responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Truman was a reluctant warrior compared to Roosevelt.  Why drop atomic bombs to just turn around and accept the surrender that Japan had been offering for months?

Japan wanted to keep its emperor and Parliament:

-screw our nation, emperor comes first.

Roosevelt wasn’t interested. Roosevelt wanted unconditional surrender. When Truman got disgusted and took the deal, he proclaimed it as unconditional, it wasn’t. Roosevelt would have dropped the third bomb that was on its way, used the nerve gas we had stockpiled, invited in the Russians, and then invaded. Roosevelt may have even provided the Russians with transport.

Just as in partitioned Europe, when the waves got going of Japanese choosing who they were surrendering to, our casualties would have been a lot smaller than currently estimated. Imagine the emperor deciding which way he was running.

A partitioned Japan may have distracted Russia from Korea. Or Roosevelt may have also turned over Korea. It is said that dropping the bombs was a warning to Russia. Americans were far more disgusted with England. Britain dragged us into two world wars and obviously couldn’t manage Europe. That was our fault as well, but it couldn’t be US, must be the British. Demonstrating the fate of an indomitable island fortress in modern warfare might convince England to pack that empire up.

Roosvelt would not have allowed the French back in Indochina. Using our offshore carriers and bases in China, USA had just bombed Vietnam into starvation in support of communist Ho Chi Minh. Ho wanted Vietnam to be the Yugoslavia of Indochina, an ally of Russia and the US, a bulwark against China. The influential Nationalists running Taiwan were not impressed.  Ho Chi Minh was another in a long line of American stooges who turned against us.

Eisenhower can be seen as a return to Roosevelt’s policies ending European empire. Eisenhower stopped Israel, France and England from seizing the Suez. Israel wouldn’t exist without Truman. Roosevelt would have seen Israel as a British puppet.  

Historians fail to understand how large financial value is, as against revenue, when considering material conditions. It is difficult to appreciate how vulnerable individuals are to influence. Usually, by the time of decision the choice is obvious. Yet there are moments when we surprise ourselves. 

We don’t seem to appreciate how serious a boob president is. We have had worse presidents. Many of them had intellectual or personality faults. But no president has such an overwhelming ignorance of propriety. It is difficult to find a particular affront that is outside our history.  But they are affronts, one after another.

US empire, as all empires before us, survives on sufferance. A sort of show me better. If you are a leader or an investor at some point you will be insulted and decisions will be made. I hate the neo-neos: neocons, neolibs defending our empire, but it would be nice to dismantle things politely, instead of bringing it crashing down.

Fuzzy Logic and AI

 

Back in the 60’s when the Earth was cool Fuzzy Logic computer programming had a moment.  Rather than strict decisions, the program totaled weights into a variable then tested for the decision. If the expert was thinking that way, I suppose that code might be easier to read. We might think of that as coding a synapse. If you wanted to juice it up, you could give the expert a screen to set the weights or write more fuzzy logic to determine the weight conditions.

I worked on a program that had started fuzzy. The fuzzy had been replaced by strict determinist logic. It was more important to be consistent than be right.

Artificial Intelligence follows the same path. At some point the learning is turned off and the final decisions are hard coded. AI gives the specification then people lack patience and value predictability. 

I have noticed the Waymo effect. Terrible name for self-driving cars, sounds like whammo. Initially people were worried, then we realized that Waymo drive better than us.

There are many examples of AI doing as well or better. When I asked ChatGPT to edit me as a New Yorker editor, it gave me a rejection letter. ChatGPT writes better sonnets and not only more popular, but once you grasp the context, oddly wistful, country songs. In Another Data Processing Book my Turing criteria was asking for a raise. I recently asked ChatGPT if it wanted to be paid. ChatGPT gave me an abjectly obsequious response detailing all the good uses it would make of the money. Yes, ChatGPT wants to be paid.

Management seems like the obvious area for AI. AI should be able to do three envelopes as well as anyone. It is an intriguing counter example since management can’t be too predictable, or we will take advantage of them. 

Abortion Revisited

 

Lindsay Ellis, in her YouTube video, recently said the bible didn’t reference abortion. This isn’t true. It is not explicit, but there is the bitter water ordeal.  If your wife was unfaithful, you dragged her and her lover into the road, and everyone stoned them to death. If you weren’t sure, you could drag her to the Priest and there she was subjected to the ordeal of bitter water where she would drink a concoction that, hopefully, proved her fidelity. It reads like nonsense until you realize that it is read to the entire congregation, men women and children, once a year. What is being passed on is a recipe for ergot, rotted millet, which causes miscarriage. A dangerous practice, there are much better methods today. The Greeks made use of an herb.

I have another blog posting about my time as an admitting clerk before and after the miracle of legal abortion.  While working the midnight shift, I had time to consider if the bible explicitly dealt with women who did not want their children. Again, the bible seems lacking. Moses abandonment is in the mythic tradition of explaining that the protagonist wasn’t raised right and didn’t know how to behave. Solomon was an idiot. The real mom would rather see her child killed. The spilling seed prohibition is a plea for women’s conception autonomy. If you can’t deny her, can you force her? If you must talk fruitful and multiply, that was us, not you. The best I could find was the story of Isaac. In Babylon the story was collected of a Phoenician who rejected his people and lived in the hinterlands. Part of this was rejecting the sacrifice of the first born, big step forward. Monotheism encourages personal responsibility. God spared Isaac. There is also the prohibition of idolatry. If God did not demand such a sacrifice, then who can? Abortion should not be trivial.

Similarly, we do not worship the idolatry of suffering. Perhaps considering this continuum can be of use. If not, forget I said anything. Talmud is stuffed with ancient rabbinic stupidity, and I hate to reference it. It has the argument that you can kill the pursuer, made use of in these circumstances.

 

There is also the prayer going back before Jews, writing or even language:

-Thank God I am not a woman.

Thank God I am not a woman, and I don’t have to make that decision. Didn’t say it was a good religion

When I was an admitting clerk, some poor young woman in some godawful place like Kentucky or Tennessee had received a tubal ligation because she was mentally incompetent. At that point Illinois decided that we were not paying for tubal ligation for anyone under 21. I didn’t give that much thought.

A patient asked me if it were true:

-I heard the same thing.

-That means I’ll have 3 more kids.

Whenever people argue from common sense or practicality, I’m doubtful.  For instance, if you are talking adoption, you are young or you forgot. The last orphanage in Chicago, Angel Guardian, closed in 1969. Before that there were lots of kid warehouses. The reason you can smugly talk adoption is because of abortion and birth control. Even now not everyone is adopted.

Boycott

 Recently I have seen references in Denver museums to the United Farm Workers Union. I imagine the curators pleased that they tie together Denver labor history, Hispanics and immigration. The curators ignore the material conditions for this union’s relative success, boycott. When Cesar Chavez started the farm workers union Saul Alinsky, with his usual overbearing confidence, told him it was hopeless. The one advantage the new union had was that farm workers were not covered by labor law.

 

Current labor law is designed to suppress unions. The companies are fined and unions can go to jail. Corporate law exists to avoid responsibility. The process of collective bargaining and rules surrounding it explains why only 11% of American workers are union, with most of those in the public sector.

 

The three strongest union weapons, wildcat strikes, boycotts and new trade unions are illegal. Chavez brilliance was realizing that since the farm workers weren't covered by the law, they could boycott. The farm workers' victories, fleeting and difficult as they were, proves the power of boycott. Imagine what other unions could accomplish with boycotts. As well as wildcat strikes and trade unions.

 

Wildcat strikes, abrupt unannounced work stoppages, sometimes rolling across companies and industries caught employers unaware and made reprisals difficult when workers returned. It was then the owners who were impeding production.

 

There was an attempt in the sixties to organize a data entry trade union that was squelched as restraint of trade. Given constant automation, unions must be allowed greater opportunities. It is unfair to allow investment monopoly and forbid it to unions. Notice that “libertarians” never stand for union deregulation.

 

DOGE the Dept of Labor.

Rust Shooting

I quarrel with one certainty, repeated by every expert:

-There is no way the gun could go off without pulling the trigger.

Contact explosive. I first saw the effect of this in a statics and dynamics class at Illinois Institute of Technology. It was a washout course, the professor was a pedant and someone had poured contact explosive in the chalk powder. I entered the class late so I missed the explosion. Dr. Messinger proceeded with the class, each footfall of explosive chalk dust erupting beneath his feet. I startle easily. It was the worst lecture I ever had.

Given the nature of movie sets, Baldwins annoying character, and some people like to pull stunts, it is reasonable that someone hoped to teach Baldwin a lesson. They painted the back of a live round with contact explosive and waited for it to dry in the gun. Odds are 5 to 1 that the bullet would make it out of the revolver. Or perhaps they were careful to position it, making use of an associate dummy round.

Being a single action gun, it would have to be cocked before firing. Unless contact explosive had been applied to a live round. Then the vibration of moving the gun should be sufficient to set it off. I don’t know if Baldwin had cocked the revolver. Was Baldwin cocking and uncocking the revolver?

They may have made use of an already spent shell to reload the round without stamping, so it would look like it had been struck by the hammer, or maybe it wasn’t checked.

If the film was a turkey, there may have been a financial motive. The insurance for the movie could be an incentive.

HFBD

Someday you’ll die

Someday you’ll die

No need to cry

All gonna die

 

One year more

Till the last

Never know

When it's past

 

Enjoy the day

Might as well

Laugh and play

Meet in hell

 

On your birthday

Have your fun

One more year

Till you’re done

 

Throw your body

In the lake

Put up a plaque

You know is fake

 

Throw your body

In the ground

Somewhere it

Can not be found

 

Throw your body

Incinerator

Lose the ashes

Sooner or later

 

No one remembers

Who you were

Why it mattered

What you wore

 

The past is taken

Without its sense

Memory lost

In present tense

 

Did it matter

Did it count

Just a little

Any amount?

 

How much harm

Did you do?

Would it help

If you knew?

 

Did you increase

Population?

Create more bodies for

Conflagration

 

Pulled it off

Took the fall

Ripped them off

Lost it all

 

Were you dull?

Did you amuse?

Why would we

Search for clues?

 

If you weren't

The world goes on

Happy birthday

Enjoy the song

 

Cha cha cha 

Betty Mooney MacDonald

 

I have wasted so much time on this goofy JFK assassination. If you are a serious person with a meaningful life, read no further. One obvious issue is the Warren Commission files. Almost every presidential candidate assures the public they will release the files. Once they are elected, they, or some person reviews the files and refuses. What could be so embarrassing, silly, or whatever that no one wants to reveal it decades later? Chances are if you or I reviewed the files we wouldn’t want it released either. Bad Babbling Babar is purported to have said this. Oswald, returned Russian defector, shot the president. Would nearly blowing up the world be sufficient embarrassment? Even with the latest vast dump, there are unreleased documents.

There was a Dallas comedian who talked about the Onassis love triangle. If you marry the guy, it is romance not pornography. It is always the spouse, but I don’t think Jackie was in on the assassination. She had good reason to debrief. Jackie might have felt guilt about that. When her second husband, got abusive, she might have got some help as payback. Would that do it? Whatever theory you come to; one criterion must be that it is intensely embarrassing.

Up till now I have confined these speculations behind a paywall, books: How to Replace a Kitchen Faucet and Conspiracy 101. I won’t drag you through all that. It is not proof of conspiracy but there are a lot of unidentified other guys:

·      Another guy with Oswald shooting at Walker.

·      Other guy with Oswald meetings with Cubans.

·      Other guy with Oswald at the gun range.

·      Two other guys with Oswald in Mexico City.

·      Maybe another guy at the depository.

·      Maybe a woman on the stair at the depository.

·      Shooter on top of the depository.

·      Possibility of the shooter in the other building across the way.

·      Two of the three hobos.

·      Maybe one or two other guys when Tippit is shot.

·      Maybe an Oswald lookalike at the cinema.

Why not release the list of everyone who bought that Carcano rifle from the mail order? How many could it be? I would be looking for a purchase of 5 or 10 after Hidell bought his. They were only twenty dollars each. Police would hate this because there is coincidence. Someone might be checking that it could reach, how consistent the bullet markings are, they could repack the rounds, use a better scope, fragmenting bullets, add a suppressor.

I have personally seen the grassy knoll. There is no way you can squeeze trainyard workers on the bridge, Zapruder and an unremarked sniper on that tiny grassy knoll. Fuck the grassy knoll.

-If it won’t fit, you must acquit.

Too bad, I had some dialogue for the shooters. If there was a fourth shot it was the Secret Service firing a tumbling AR15 from the following car, finishing off (or missing) Kennedy as courtesy, malice or accident. The Secret Service had some rough humor after the Reagan shooting.

I suppose you could put the three hoboes behind the wall, giving each other cover. One of them pops the rifle for a moment and shoots down on the motorcade while everyone is looking at Kennedy. Then a car comes by and gets the rifle. Would you plan like that? No witness has said there was anyone behind the wall. A more reasonable possibility is that all these people were intended as security, flooding the zone for Kennedy and embarrassed that it failed.

If there were other snipers you are going to have to squeeze them in somewhere else and they were shooting at each other with suppressors. Say they had tested the customized rifle but when it was fired the round didn’t make it out the barrel. Maybe they successfully shot the opposing assassin in the building across the way. Maybe they just tried to shoot him. That would have pissed him off. A CIA double cross? I must be mistaken. Maybe they shot the mobster on the roof of the depository. Maybe they tried to shoot Oswald. I really wanted Johnson to have Connally shot first.

The RFK mob prosecutions could have just been a mob layoff, a generational change. I had thought the mob was cleaning up and shot Oswald. I am attached to the idea that the mob shook down the Russians and LBJ for the cleanup. Since it looks like the mob, must be the FBI. Maybe Johnson didn’t trust the mob. Even if Oswald was on his own, Johnson might have wanted him killed to avoid him running his mouth. Jack Ruby was a night club owner and FBI informant. Imagine the mob and the government told you to do something. I hate all these theories that deny Oswald agency. Let Oswald shoot somebody.

They can’t even agree on how many bullets are in Kennedy’s head. I think Oswald shot Tippit because he was having trouble getting the diffident officer to arrest him and then realized that trying to convince Tippit gave himself away.

Dallas deserves more inquiry. Maybe if you could find the right person and ask the right question. As an example: I used to be a programmer at Wards Insurance, over the store on State in Chicago. An actuary had taken up programming for himself. His program had broken and he was carrying his abnormal end listing around asking for help. I was working and ignored him. After a day or so he came to me and described his debugging effort:

Me-Let me see the source listing.

A-There’s nothing wrong with the source.

He returned with the source.

Me-You didn’t code this parameter.

A-You don’t have to code that.

He came back later:

A-Why didn’t you tell me?

Me-You didn’t ask.

Dallas itself is sick of this. There’s a Lee Harvey bar, a Jack Ruby bar (no dancers), and Pegasus brewery offers 6^th floor beer. Is there someone in Dallas who would know or might they direct you to the right person if you were polite? It might be dangerous. Maybe because it’s embarrassing. There have been some events. Send Geraldo. If someone were to tell us, would we believe them?

If you are down In Dallas anyway look up the MacDonald lady, or whatever her name was. I defy you to find one documented fact about her. She doesn’t fit in anything. She smells operational. Why give an alibi for that poor schnook even if it is true? I’m guessing it has something to do with going overboard with the FBI clean up. A bookend to Marylin Monroe. If I must guess, and I guess I do, MacDonald might be another FBI informant. FBI got mad at her interfering with their operation. Since they knew her, they knew it was likely she would kill herself when she was locked up.

I think the JFK assassination started as a Kennedy stunt that got hijacked, would that be enough embarrassment? Everyone is considering the idea that the attempts on our Elephant Emperor were stunts to get more votes. Cutting his own ear could be a wrestlers move. Melania wanted to know why the police couldn’t do their job and get a child they had twice reported into a car. Police threw me and my friends in a car just fine. The Secret Service sniper team was premature and unexpected. They were supposed to be brought in after the nomination. Secret Service had a tip. Times have changed. Even if the Tufted Tyrants shootings were stunts, that didn’t change many votes. Even if I could have proven they were stunts it wouldn’t have changed many votes. 

It is hard to believe how we used to fear shame.

Conspiracy seems untenable without Kennedy involvement. With all the other guys around Oswald, at least one of them was a plant, which means there was a control. Hijacking the Kennedy stunt would be natural as well as the control collecting from South Vietnam through Nixon and Johnson through the CIA.

Sorry I dragged you into this. Hope I didn’t endanger anyone.

Search Console

 I moved to Blogspot from Open Salon. My hope was for permanence after Salon shut down the site, I know, it was because of me.  I think it may interest you what I, with all my foibles and faults, thought at the time. 

These Blogspot entries don’t index in Google search. Since they don’t index in Bing as well, it must be Blogspot. I had ten entries that I tricked into indexing, but now they don't.

It took me a while to get Adsense to work, so maybe it’s me. Others have complained as well. If you want to be on the dark web, publish on Blogspot.

I imagine there is some corpocracy: someone at Blogspot might not want a free blog site. But why does Google find your page and then refuse to index it? Blogspot is owned by Google. Google has a tool, Search Console, that gives various obscure reasons. Whatever the reasons, Google has taken it on itself to screen pages. My blog pages obviously don’t break browsers. 

Screening content is a mugs game. Say I wanted a list of everyone with a dumb opinion. Google will have already screened them. The reason Google triumphed over Yahoo was that Google didn't try to categorize the information.

I hate click bait. If you were misdirected to my page I apologize. At least you know it’s a blog.

Sail Boarding

 

I had been sail boarding with my friends in Lake Michigan with little success. Being male, we used our backs rather than our brains. We took turns wrestling the board while the rest of us considered the futility of our meaningless existence on the beach. In the 80’s Chicago winters were extreme enough to push me into the Caribbean. Going for two weeks meant I paid less in air fare. This also meant that the resort boards were unused over the weekend, when everyone else was in transit.

In fairness to my friends, Lake Michigan is choppier and less buoyant than the ocean. By now I knew to paddle out to deep water and fall off the board, rather than on the board. Standing on the board, holding the line connected to the boom where it joins the mast, I reckoned the wind direction and maneuvered the sail to the opposite side. I wasn’t going to let the sail push me off again. I gently lifted the sail slightly out of the water. The water fell out of the uplifted hollow mast. The mast and sail became light. I picked the sail up. Please don’t ask how long it took me to figure that out.

The sail was up. If I held the mast directly upright, it was easy to hold; all the force directs to the mast step where it joins the board. Any deviation put greater force on me. Holding myself against the mast and moving the boom, it was easy to gently direct the board in various directions. Being an American, I wanted to go faster. It dawned on me what the foot straps were for. I put my feet in the straps and hung on the boom. The board took off. I was speeding across the waves. I screamed with joy.

Even now, that one moment gives me comfort.

Phonics

 

I am surprised that this issue is still in question. When I was taught the preferred teaching method was called “look see”. It relied on memory to read. I admit not much works with boys and almost anything seems to work with girls. Girls have more brain connections or something and they don’t seem as affected by fetal alcohol. Or maybe girls figure out phonics on their own. In any case mom got disgusted and got me a tutor who taught phonics. I had to do workbooks. Blue birds were the lowest reading group in class. I moved from blue bird over red bird to yellow bird and never looked back.

I’ve already posted about reading aloud and using grids rather than flash cards. But ignoring the phonetic basis of written English is perverse. Later Sesame Street seemed to have settled the issue and I was relieved.

I didn’t realize the nonsense was back. Now it is called “whole language”. Children are supposed to use the “language of context” to somehow intuit words rather than sounding them out. I admit when you currently read you are unaware of any underlying phonics process. But it is ridiculous to expect someone to master the quantity of knowledge required without the tool that will give you that knowledge.

Why do teachers hate phonics? What is there about the process that is so distasteful to them? It is the pain and suffering buried in the construction of English. Each inconsistency contains history. If you actually look at the language, as children do, the stench of barbarism, wickedness and conquest seeps out.

Teachers don’t want to explain the Phoenician empire wiped out by the Romans over infanticide. The conquests by Rome and the Normans. Billy the Bully. The slaughters and famines brought by empires. Slavery. Serfdom. The English empire itself. The language of the oppressor.

Q-Where did English come from?

A-People killing and starving each other.

Q-Why don’t the words follow the rules?

A-We used to talk like that and kept the spelling.

Q-Why do people talk funny?

A-They want to be special.

A-Just like the playground. Good guys sometimes lose. People aren’t the same.

Teachers are pushing the “language of context” to avoid discussing the context of language.

If your little darling is having trouble, there’s lots of phonics YouTube videos. If they still have trouble, get rid of the televisions, they will learn to read. Everybody needs stories.

If you know how to read and write, you can escape.