Shaky Danny

  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...

  I wrote this shortly after the Democratic Convention: This recent convention solidified five deficiencies of the Democratic Party. Rather than addressing these well-known criticisms, the liberal elite, the party owned them with a nice helping of Jingo. One is their use of the term middle class. Looking down from the upper I suppose what they see is the middle class. I wrote about class in my book, Another Data Processing Book. In US land we have nine classes, a tic tac toe board, upper, middle and lower both ways: Upper upper Middle upper Lower upper Upper middle Middle middle Lower middle Upper lower Middle lower Lower lower     Most of us are middle-lower and lower-lower. There is a big bulb at the bottom with a long tail stretching out into the distance. Somewhere on that tail you can parse out a small segment that contains the population middle-middle. We aren’t ...

  I was put off by the choppy narrative of Unlikely Allies by Joel Richard Paul. But it confirmed my view of conspiracy. A conspiracy is just a group of people who agree. Usually, it’s just someone alone in their motel, sucking on whatever, watching CNN saying: -I guess that worked. The book also highlighted how common it is to have infiltrators, provocateurs and opposition. Ben Franklin and Silas Deane understood and accepted that and still accomplished their objectives. When Franklin finally arrived in Paris to support Deane he was wearing a fur hat. The narrative gives reasons but fails to mention that Franklin was also teasing the French about giving up Canada and its French citizens for Haiti after the Seven Years War. Franklin loved teasing and double entendre.   In the book Arthur Lee is painted as the villain who falsely accused Dean. But where was Franklin? To have a case there should be a shortfall. Deane is unable to give account but Franklin had to know ho...

  Kind of ridiculous to post on the internet about what to do when you lose access to the internet. I intend this as preemptive. Maybe you can help someone else. I lost access to the internet with some obscure message about network service. When it breaks, turn it off. The message suggested that as well. Turned the provider gateway on and off, turned my PC on and off. Repeatedly. So, I called my provider and was trapped in the response tree. They even turned my gateway on and off themselves. Eventually I was in a chat text conversation with the providers Dennis who was also trapped in a response tree. It culminated with him sending me an email to confirm my identity. Since I couldn’t receive it on my PC, he was, in effect, instructing me to change providers. Dennis sent me back to the providers original help phone number. My next-door neighbor had service. She has a different provider. On reflection, it dawned on me that the problem was on my PC. Something like this once happ...

Humans differentiate on location and association. We change location to meet association and change association to meet location. Two material conditions of the US constitution were taxing whiskey [i] and protecting slavery [ii] . The document is designed to frustrate popular will. Political parties are intended to ameliorate that frustration. We now have a small group of Republicans preventing the passage of a popular defense bill that contains appropriations for Ukraine and Israel. America has always been a nation of divided loyalties. Some Americans have loyalty to Mother Russia. That is an influence. There is also a material cause. Republicans focus on the border while ignoring immigration policy. Republicans like undocumented immigrants who know their place. Republicans terrorized the undocumented immigrant’s children when it looked like they may get status and eventually become voters. That’s when Mexicans got insulted and the fruit rotted on the ground and stores close on M...

  Back when Chicago had winters, I once dragged myself through the slush into a travel agency and said: -Get me out of here. I hate to travel. There is some remarkable geology. In Lacrosse Wisconsin there are bluffs. There is a fun mix of prosaic and profane seeing people living on and around the bluffs. There are also the plaques. In Pennsylvania there is mention of Jumonville. George Washington at the age of twenty murdered Jumonville causing the French and Indian War which lead to the Seven Years’ War, which lead to our revolution. The revolution was not popular, ask the Tories, who respected the king, paid their debts, and opposed slavery.  The Evanston Illinois light house, built in 1873 after the North was freed of the South’s hatred of boondoggle. Why of all the stretches of sand along Lake Michigan was the light house built here? The light house was an emotional reaction to the sinking of the Lady Elgin in 1860. In Milwaukee there is a wonderful plaque explaini...

  The defaults seem the opposite of common sense. AdSense is pestering me about an ad.txt file. I finally get a custom one in settings. Then I just figure out to click the blog file in manage your sites to get it scanned. If they want a file why not just make the file? I can find my blog in Bing but not in Google. I hesitate to mention it because maybe Bing is in error. Is it something with indexing? I go to Google Search Console. The page is crawled but not indexed. So, I request indexing. They notify me they are thinking about it. Weeks later, still thinking. I finally found a way in search console to request another crawl, but that crawl didn’t show up on the report. Why is the default for blogspot to not show up in Google? How neat that I can request and control how Google scans my page, not. The reason Google surpassed Yahoo is because they didn’t try to control searches. What else is Google missing? It would be nice to have a table of contents. 

  Anyone who says “peace in the Mideast” should be slapped. They are announcing that what follows is stupid. Peace never had anything to do with the Mideast. The statement is arrogant. How would you like to hear “peace in the US”? American policy in the Mideast should be mute. It is disgusting to hear Americans advise and excuse each group their atrocities. Americans are never short of advice. “Debate” in the US has circled around who’s better. It is not going to convince anyone that they should shut up and take it because their families had it coming.   No one has rounded up their criminals. Here is a quick review of America’s relationship, keeping an American eye for the man behind the curtain and the emperor’s clothes: Before World War II, the countries of the world refused Jewish refugees from Germany. Germans made that a big deal. During and after the war Churchill sent Jewish refugees to Palestine. British grabbed Palestine from the Ottomans. Some Pan Arabism is no...

Brandon Johnson has just been elected mayor of Chicago. Except Byrne we have always elected lawyers, even prosecutors, in the hope that they would avoid indictment. So far, they have. Johnson is the first schoolteacher. As a teacher Johnson is trying to approach crime from a Confucious perspective, systemically. Here are some obvious concerns: A court clerk just made the mistake of self-publishing a book about a recent case. In general police, prosecutors, judges and even clerks should be cautious publicly expressing opinions that could be thrown back at them, endangering testimony, and convictions. It is unfortunate that people closest to issues are precisely the ones constrained from public discussion. Police are not screened for clerical aptitude. Clerical tasks are a major part of police work, especially investigations. Back in the 90’s the federal government confronted domestic violence. Their solution was the development of a form that must be filed if the husband was not arr...

  In Another Data Processing Book I have an essay on affirmative action. I also have a blog entry In Defense of Privilege . In light of recent events, I am revisiting them here. Most people seem to believe that affirmative action meant that we simply instituted quotas. Affirmative action law was passed by whites. If you could demonstrate merit, and not very strictly, you didn’t have to have quotas. So, case by case, company by company, school by school, it was proven in a court of law that they had legacy, employees’ kids, preferences, that they did not select on merit. They had quotas and now the question was how big those quotas should be. This maximized work for the lawyers. That is why there are law firms devoted to civil rights law. Current arguments against quotas have a misplaced notion of fairness The arguments of the time focused on institutional autonomy. They used phrases like “academic integrity”. Invariably these institutions receive federal money. They recognize ...

  Christine asked: -Why is Canada burning? Without hesitation I responded: -Lumber companies planted the wrong trees and it got warm. Seems glib, but in this case my cynicism was correct. If you go out on Google Earth, it is clear that the arboreal, original Canadian forest did not burn. Lumber companies proffer all sorts of rationalizations. Whatever they say, it didn’t work. If they take refuge in regulation, consider the Exxon Valdez. Exxon Mobil went into court and said that Alaska did not require double wall tankers. Everyone laughed because the reason for that was because Exxon had lobbied against it. Covering North America in soot is a lot worse than dumping oil on beaches. Lumber companies have no refuge. This is their game. They ran it. Lumber companies don’t own all the land, but they did the cutting. They didn’t know it was getting warmer? The cutover areas flamed. Arboreal sometimes burns, not like this. Please prevent these boobies from planting trees. Th...

Small segments can have disproportionate influence in politics. Lenin’s conscious cadre works. The reality TV segment awakened the fascist segment and the Russians. Brexit and Trump satisfy the agenda of ending their respective empires. Republicans threatened to use the debt ceiling to bring down the empire. Because they were upset that Alfred Doolittle, the undeserving poor, was in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Republicans were mad at all sorts of things, they coalesced on their antipathy towards Doolittle. As Doolittle points out in My Fair Lady , being poor doesn’t improve character. We all have a Doolittle in the family. Our families Doolittle hates welfare. He qualified for disability. He has Multiple Sclerosis from dealing crack. So, he can’t work, except for the side job disassembling cars. You can’t live on just disability. Doolittle is a good son; he got his parents on disability as well. Take Ella. This was a while ago. Ella started as Ella Fitzgerald...

  Right after I saw The Banshees movie, I blocked someone boring on Facebook. I doubt you will find any of this new, does it need saying? I like that there are four gospels. Four gospels refute literal truth. Christ is a descriptive name. There were no Cross kids running around Nazareth. Is Jesus also descriptive? In some gospels the name Jesus is a big deal: -Name him Jesus. If Jesus were just a name, would they have said: -Name him Ralph. Jew Zeus comes to mind. A later interpretation says that Jesus is a Greek mistranslation of Joshua. Joshua made it through translation just fine in Torah. Mathew affixes the name to another character; thus, arguing that it was a name of the time. Ancient people were aware that the name was descriptive. They didn’t care about literal truth. The story spoke to them as they spoke it to each other. Every holiday but Hanukah was trashed, every commandment broken. Ruled by the future Italians, monotheists were confronted with evil. The stor...

Many people in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, are installing sewer valves for their homes. Some years back we had an impressive deluge and this is a reaction. Your stack or stand pipe may drain directly out to the street sewer. Putting a check valve or flapper in the way means that when the system hits load those houses refuse service and the overall pressure on the system will increase precisely at the time it is stressed. If you don’t have a flap then super tough on you, the effluent has to go somewhere. A product that creates its market. Once everyone has flaps there should be popped flaps or broken pipes. Flaps are necessary on flood plains. As flood plain construction is common it is difficult for other municipalities, such as Oak Park, to deny their use. Chicago used to require a basement floor drain. You were expected to share your suffering with your neighbors. Most people have their stack drain into their own sewer that then drains into the street sewer. This is a nice fea...

The Supreme Court functions as a safety valve. When the court fails, it is a big mess, we have had a civil war. In 1974 people were voting with their feet. Illegal abortion was so prevalent that the court had to act. The prisoner’s dilemma underlies our concept of justice. Say a juror is fixed. How does the juror know that they will be paid? If they are paid ahead of time, how does the fixer know the juror will stick? At this time, it has been announced that there are five judges who will rule against abortion. The early decision is a blatant loud fart. As Biden explained, it ignores the ninth amendment. The ninth amendment is intended to prevent this argument. As Pogo said: -I got rights I ain’t even used yet! If privacy or women’s equality are rights, then abortion should be legal. Buttigieg explained why abortion, whatever the term, should be a private family, not an arbitrary government decision.  It is a difficult medical and personal decision made in hard circumstance...

It seems feasible that we could have a spacecraft that hurtles toward the sun becoming a comet. The idea would be to apply acceleration at various orbital points that maximize speed with minimum expenditure. If we can go fast enough the relativistic effect would compensate for our lack of resources. After sufficient orbits we could then rejoin the Earth. To us it would seem that we had been gone a few months or even years, but we would have moved forward in time by hundreds of years. It should be possible to do some science at the outer boundary of our orbit. Measure the cosmic radiation, red shift, various observations of deep space. Maybe our UFO’s are other primates who are moving forward in time in order to avoid us. The reason of course is that once we had rejoined humanity, assuming that we are still here, we could then ask them, after we figured out how they spoke: -What do you think of Donald Trump? They would answer: -Who?