Shaky Danny

  How do I write anything as horrifying or ridiculous as reality?  When we tell stories we want to interest you. We fear the trite and banal.  There was a child, Shane Tamura, who played football in high school. Later he decided that resultant brain injury had ruined his life. Being an American he got a rifle to shoot up NFL headquarters. But he got confused and shot up the wrong office. Did he laugh before he killed himself? Was he careful not to shoot his head? Another child, Dick Cheney, decided he wasn’t cut out for lineman, academics or the law and went into government. He successfully supported executive expansion only to see the clown become president. The irony only apparent to him at the end of his life. Charlie Kirk, a debate me bro raised prodigious money argued that we must have guns and being consistent, that meant that people would be killed for their opinions.   A fan agreed with him. The worst court decision ever made. Supreme Court has decided ...

  In my book Conspiracy 101 I criticize Marx for not realizing until after his book Capital was written that capital is not only the means of production; producing earnings, but it also has the amazing quality of expanding financially. You can borrow on capital. Once financial instruments are created based on future values they multiply, they are traded and speculated on. When understanding events, this financial value is far more impactful than simple earnings. Recent events have reminded me that capital can also collapse. The value of assets is aspirational. Even with earnings people can perceive that the future value will not justify the investment. Oil is an excellent current example. Even with oil earnings you can see that people aren’t anxious to invest. US is not building new refineries to process our light crude. Canada builds pipelines but again a refinery is too much. Venezuela bought US refineries but even with its huge reserves no one wants to invest in a new Venezue...

This is a list of leaders who were assisted by the US and were problematic: 1. Adolph Hitler Avrill Harriman 2. Ho Chi Minh Charles Fenn 3. Sadam Hussein Kim Roosevelt 4. Osama Bin Laden Michael G. Vickers 5. Manuel Noreiga George HW Bush 6. Vladmir Putin Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright 7. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Kim Roosevelt 8. Ngo Dinh Diem John F. Kennedy 9. Mobutu Sese Seko Larry Devlin 10. Rafael Trujillo Major James J. MacLean 11. Juan Bosch Richard Naradof Goodwin 12. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Michael G. Vickers 13. Jalaluddin Haqqani Michael G. Vickers 14. Boris Yeltsin Warren Christopher 15. Jean-Bertrand Aristide Ira Kurzban 16. Victoriano Huerta Henry Lane Wilson 17. Syngman Rhee Millard Preston Goodfellow 18. Husni al-Za'im Kim Roosevelt 19. Gamal Abdel Nasser Kim Roosevelt 20. Ferdinand Marcos Lyndon Johnson 21. Napoleon Bonaparte Thomas Jefferson 22. Pol Pot Michael Eiland 23. Josep...

  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 Yor...

  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 Way...

  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 ...

  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...

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 singl...

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 d...

  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 mi...

 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 ...

  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...

  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 th...

Start with fire. You are going to build a fireproof house. Once you have a plan to build a fireproof Los Angeles house build an architectural model using the same materials, say an aluminum foil roof etc. Then take a blow torch and hold it to your model for a day. Dena means valley, Pasadena, Altadena…A valley is a wind tunnel. Say you have a surviving model. Then blast it with your garden hose, raising the water level to half the level of your model. Desert valleys flood. Make sure your model is somehow anchored, so it doesn’t float or slip away. Check your model for mold. The seals on your model must survive fire and flood. Then take a large pail of gravel and dump the gravel from some height on the steel framed model with the fancy Swiss made seals. Valleys also have rockslides. Make sure your model can withstand the landslide without moving. After that, take the entire diorama, including the model, lift it up and bang it on the table as hard as you can. Earthquake proof means...