Asymmetric Symmetry?

I just heard a BBC report that a galaxy has been discovered that lacks dark matter.

That is a big deal because all other known galaxies are made up mostly of dark matter.

That includes us – The Milky Way.

And what was even more interesting to the scientists who discovered this apparent anomaly, after the excitement of the anomaly (the initial discovery of the dark matter free galaxy) those scientists had expected the newly discovered galaxy to be dark matter heavy.

I won’t go into why they had thought that that was going to be the case because it isn’t very interesting; but they had thought it; and it wasn’t true.

So we now have one galaxy out of “n” galaxies that doesn’t have the thing that a lot of scientists think is the glue that holds the universe together and is also the dominant form of matter throughout the universe.

Why is that?

I have no idea.

But really, I have an idea.

Or I wouldn’t be writing this.

If the known universe – including the recently discovered  one sans matter noir – is viewed as a matrix – like one page of an Excel spreadsheet, is it possible to see all the known galaxies as cells in that one dimensional spread sheet?

But what if the real deal is a matrix of matrixes?

Maybe the galaxy just discovered is the one aberration in our matrix needed to balance off the next level of the matrix – the level where none of the cells have dark matter.

And maybe there is a cell there that is all dark matter.

And maybe that balances the next level of the matrix.

Where everything is, again, mostly dark matter.

Or maybe that cell has something we don’t know about to balance the next matrix level of cells with stuff that we don’t know about.

And maybe the matrix just keeps going.

Adding balances for more and more stuff that we don’t know about.

Or interleaved from stuff we don’t know about and things we do know about.

When I was young I used to go to the barber shop that shared a door with Sonny’s Bar and Grill.

In Portland.

The shop was long and skinny.

On opposite sides of the long dimension of the shop were mirrors going full wall.

They looked across space at each other.

When I was in the barber chair I could look at one of those mirrors.

In it I saw myself looking into that mirror.

And I could see the mirror that I was looking into with the reflection of me looking into it.

As far as I could tell, it went on forever.

I always thought that that was as close as I would ever be able to get to eternity.

Maybe that was a visual matrix of matrixes.

Just a thought.

Photon Enhancement …

Today a friend of mine emailed me a cut and paste from a Florida Panhandle newspaper:

In a state dependent on tourists and sunshine, lawmakers hope the extra daylight would boost the tourism industry.

"They can stay out on the beach longer or stay out on the boat longer and really maximize their time spent in the panhandle," said representative Jay Trumbull.

While the time zones won't change, staying on daylight saving time year round will make a difference half of the year.

"There will be a little bit of change in the winter months, so November through March we will be an hour ahead of most parts of the central time zone," said Trumbull. “

I had to respond:

And there’s more!!!

They have their best people working on a “photon accelerator” which will make daylight arrive faster. 

They acknowledge that exceeding the speed of light is going to be tricky and that they need to develop a “photon trapper” to keep the accelerated light around long enough to do any good, but they say “first things first; we can sell tickets to the ‘daily photon zoom’ (the accelerated photons shooting past – kinda like fireworks at Disney) in the interim”.

I understand donnie wants the photon accelerator installed at his resort.

Red

My grandmother had cooked our dinner.

And we had all begun to eat;

My grandmother, my two sisters, my mother and I.

In the midst of that my father came home.

He had been with Patton in the War.

So he had never really come home.

But he often simulated coming home;

To our dinner table;

In northeast Portland;

From Sonny’s Bar and Grill.

I guess that was how he had survived the Patton era.

Drinking.

One night he came home from Sonny’s with a little red kitten.

Red, he said, was the kitten’s name;

And Red was what we called him;

Until he died many, many years later.

“He came up and sat on the bar stool next to me”

My father told us at the dinner table that night.

This evening as I looked at Cinq,

Our big red cat,

Sitting on the stool next to Mysti;

With his paws folded neatly;

In front of him on the bar;

I had to wonder: “Is Red here again”?

“Probably”;

I thought to myself.

And that was good.

Another Picture? Or Is It A Video?

A former Playboy model who claimed she had an affair with Donald J. Trump sued on Tuesday to be released from a 2016 legal agreement requiring her silence, becoming the second woman this month to challenge Trump allies’ efforts during the presidential campaign to bury stories about extramarital relationships.

********************************************************************

Stormy Daniels' attorney hinted on Thursday that he may have hard evidence that the adult-film actress had an affair with President Trump, posting a photo on Twitter of what appeared to be a compact disc in a safe.

"If 'a picture is worth a thousand words,' how many words is this worth?????" Michael Avenatti tweeted.

While not explicitly stated, Avenatti appeared to suggest that the disc may contain photographic evidence of Daniels' alleged affair with the president. Avenatti has previously declined comment on whether such evidence exists.

********************************************************************

Do you suppose all the  irrational stuff that donnie is doing, like vetoing the spending bill and helter skelter tariff threats and agreement to go talk with North Korea about something that he is totally unprepared to talk about might be an attempt to smoke screen these little items? 

Or is Mueller getting too close?

Or is Jared about to go over the side to Saudi Arabia?

Or is Ivanka having an affair with Roy Moore?

Or has donnie junior’s wife seen the abyss and wants to get the five kids as far away from it as possible?

Or, you fill in the blank with whatever your favorite high crime, misdemeanor,  emolument or manifestation of congenital crotch grabbing slime might be. 

This is going to get really good before it's over.

A Picture Is Worth A Lot Of Words?

Conspiracy Not Collusion

This is an Americans Only post.

I am deeply saddened and disturbed to have concluded that our last rampart against losing everything that America has struggled over ages to be and to become is only one man.

Robert Mueller is the last man standing against the rapidly creeping trump conspiracy.

The most recent designed play by donnie is to have Gollum fire McCabe.

That gives donnie cover, after the mysteriously appropriately timed republican House of Representatives committee report saying “no collusion; we quit” report, to claim total FBI corruption and get Mueller put to sleep.

“It's not collusion" is what donnie has sold under this smoke screen.

Collusion is not a crime; conspiracy is.

That’s why donnie has sold the “there was no collusion” sham.

But conspiracy is what donnie has done.

Indeed, not collusion.

I believe that this is going to made a published fact before long.

And our institutions are proving to be incapable of withstanding it.

Conspiracy.

As long as the governing party has no interest in governing, checks and balances don't check and balance.

They just hang limply at the side of the “Main Show”: the elimination of our Republic.

I Have No Solution To Our National Nightmare Problem

Impeach trump?

Why do that?

If it were to happen we would get the same or worse with Pence.

Go for a twofer?

Worse yet.

We get Ayn Ryan.

Or, next, it’s Orrin Hatch.

And next in line is currently vacant.

And it gets worse after that.

“What could be worse than ‘currently vacant’? one might ask.

“Any of the remaining”, I would rejoin.

Wilbur The Mumbler” Ross, comes to mind.

So the Constitution clearly has no way out of the mess in which America is embroiled.

And what we are embroiled in becomes clearer every day.

It turns out that there are designed plays that are being, and have been, executed since at least May or so of 2016, by donnie and his minions, that take the eyes of the great unwashed american electorate off the ball of the truth: we have been slipping into the hands of a conspiracy for at least several years; and the head conspirator is donnie the dildo.

But the great unwashed don’t care.

(I realize that the term “great unwashed” probably is easily translated into “deplorables”, but what the hell.)

They – “the great unwashed” - just want to pull “the system” down around their ears.

That way they can make the rest of us feel their pain, that pain being, primarily, as far as I can discern, the pain of not really knowing anything.

And that has been an American problem at least as far back as the 1850s.

But, to get back to the point: that inundation of the ears of America in its “system” is imminent.

Just for example, I offer this insignificant little “designed play”.

“Collusion” is not a crime; “conspiracy” is.

donnie keeps chanting  “there was no collusion.”

Whether that is true or false matters not.

What matters is that if donnie can get everybody worried about “collusion” he, gets a pass on the crime of which he is “guilty, guilty guilty” (Gary Trudeau, 1972) which is conspiracy.

But I guess, since we are all so fortunate as to be engulfed in the “America Ceasing to Exist” movement, that who shot John, or who fucked whom, or who is guilty of treason really doesn’t matter.

Just so the “system” gets pulled down around our ears.

Puty wins.

End Game.

My Friend The House Finch

I have several other pictures of this guy - a male house finch - but I chose this one because it shows him at his best.

I want to cry when I see any of my images of him.

He is old.

I think.

His eyes may not work any more.

Some of the other images of him that I have, but didn’t use here, show that his breast feathers are becoming sparse.

Just like my hair.

“I guess us creatures all wear out”, I say to myself.

So, I guess, that I should just shrug.

And move on.

But he is "in there" with all the “kids”.

And he is "making it".

Still.

Even though he looks as if he ought to die pretty soon.

Why can't all of us learn from our "other citizens"/

Why can’t we be as good as house finches?

Probably because we believe that we are “special” and “separate” from house finches, and “unique” even.

And, for that matter, different from the whole rest of life on our planet.

“We” are, so the story goes, “in charge”.

What theistic  bullshit.

But still, I love this guy.

And that love of creatures  - like our cats – the feral kittens, Alfie, Cinq and Rose,extends to them

and their feral mother Genji.

She – Genji - still won’t come in from the cold.

And I find that love to be an increasingly dominant – and important – part of my life; and I find that it  makes me happy – that love – and my being alive with them, those other creatures –  and with my cats and my birds – and to be more meaningful than “being human”.

Some More Birds Again

Great Blue Heron

House Finch

Lucy, Charlie And The Football

trump has been invited to talk to Kim Jong Un about WW III.

Or something.

I guess that’s a big deal.

If donnie can come back from talks – if they ever happen – from Little Rocket Man with the beginnings of getting the Peninsula to get rid of all nuclear weapons that would be a big deal.

And even I would have to capitalize “Donnie” if he were to pull it off.

But we have a template for what the North Koreans are probably doing.

In the past we have had other moves toward de-nuclearization after which the North moved inexorably to the next step.

Right now they have a bunch of weapons – we don’t know whether they are small enough for delivery by a missile – and missile technology that can reach anywhere in the US.

That’s a big step beyond where they were in 1994 when we last went through this charade.

But this time maybe.

One would hope.

I think that the chances are nil.

Even if Kim is serious – like the Congress of the United States was serious recently about meaningful immigration reform – donnie isn’t.

He just likes to play Lucy with the football.

When he keeps pulling the football out of reach of the kicker’s foot, and when they, the North Koreans in this analogy, call it quits, he will blame everybody, including, probably, most of his staff who will have been involved with the North Korea Charade (again).

That keeps the current reality episode interesting.

To the groundlings.

Who all vote for him.

And that’s all that’s going on.

That and it gets the press off Stormy for a minute.

More Birds Today

Standing not too far from the two tube feeders is a good way to get a chance to photograph a variety of birds in a variety of poses.  Here are several of some of today’s images.

Red Winged Blackbirds

Juncos

Pine Siskins

Birds Today

I took some pictures of birds today.

Golden Crowned Sparrow:

Song Sparrow:

Junco:

The Pseudo president And The Unfortunate Woman That Pretends to Be first lady

donnie likes to grab crotch.

We’ve got that on tape.

he also likes to marry a lot.

We’ve got that on history.

I think I can remember:

there was Ivana (I think that was her name) the mother of Ivanka (I think that is her name) ;

and there was Marla Maples; that turned out well; we got Tiffany from that liaison, who looks like a porn star; I have begun to see a pattern here – Ivanka is a little higher class – looking – but her profession is obvious.

And now we have Marlena – or whatever her name is - the current wife and therefore ostensive first lady, and she has spawned a little boy clone of donnie.

Or some such sort of thing resembling a human being.

How sad.

But don’t forget Doogie and Dum Dum – or whatever their names are - donnie’s other sons.

They are big in Russia, I understand; and they looked good in The Cartoon President, a Stephen Colbert production – charmingly stupid, one might say.

But the whole point of this post – as is always the case – can be summarized with a picture, which as usual, is worth a thousand words, so I will stop for short of that word count:

But I need to ask: is this Ivanka, Tiffany or Marlena – or whatever her name is?

Or some future “first lady”?

You’ve Come A Long Way America.

I Didn’t Know That donnie Knew How To Code In Assembler

Quite a while ago the way computers got programmed was by feeding one a stream of binary numbers.

You know: 01101000 11110100 10001101 etc. etc. etc..

After a while a lot of people pointed out that that was tedious to the point of being a pain in the ass.

To ameliorate that situation somebody came up with Assembly Language.

It involved lining up all the functional clusters of ones and zeros with an English description of what it was that each did and then assigning a brief code – called a mnemonic – (I can’t remember what the underlying Greek means) that consisted of a few sort of meaningful roman characters – in upper case, of course.

For example BXLE was the mnemonic for “branch on condition low or equal”.

Somehow they got the computer to make the link between those four capital Roman letters and its corresponding machine understandable binary origin.

I think they called that, generically, a compiler.

In the case of Assembly language they might have called it the Assembler.

I don’t know.

I just think that is probably true.

But who really cares in the era of fake news?

After I got out of the Air Force in the late 1960s I was lucky enough to get hired by IBM.

That involved a first year employment where they paid me a nice salary to go to classes all the time so I could learn what it was that I needed to know to be a successful and productive IBM employee.

I think I am hearing gasps of shock that there ever could have been such an employee-centric system in America; but there was once.

Anyway, in the first 12 week class I went to – CST it was called; you can probably figure out what the letters in that acronym (I can’t remember what the underlying Greek means) involved learning a lot of basic computer skills, including several programming languages.

The first of these was Assembler.

One of the mnemonics in that language was – and still is – NOOP.

That was an instruction that did nothing but reserved space in case you ever wanted to go back and make the computer do something different or additional at the point in the program where you coded “NOOP”.

Which gets us to donnie (I know it’s tempting to call him a NOOP, but I’m going somewhere else with this).

This morning I heard Sarah the Vicious say that donnie would probably exempt Canada and Mexico from his new tariffs; on the surface of that assertion is a thick veneer of absurdity: Canada is our major source of steel; so if we need a tariff to avoid unfair competition why are we exempting our major source of steel from the tariff?

She went on to say there would probably be a lot of “other carve outs”.

My first picture was Swiss Cheese.

But almost immediately I remembered the NOOP.

So donnie is doing tariff policy that takes up space but does nothing?

“I guess so”, I thought I heard somebody say.

Immediately next, from Erie PA. I thought I heard “damn right; that donnie is just doing a great job!!! Now we need to get going with that wall and nuking North Korea”

But why would he do something irrational and stupid like that?

But other than those reasons, why would he do such a thing?

Here’s a thought.

After Hope the Confessor, the teller of little white lies resigned, donnie was so Hopeless that he just threw a tantrum; and now he’s trying to back out of the mess that his little tantrum is about to make.

He really is a NOOP.

While Waiting For The Ferry

I walked along the beach and into the woods and got a few pictures.

Really, Though …

With donnie as unglued as he has become, all of the rest of us – in trumped up America and the rest of the world - need to worry about how stable donnie might be in a Hopeless world.

Hope left him and now he is Hopeless.

And we hear that that makes the rest of our conditions hopeless.

Because in some way – I would love to know what it was – she had always been able to calm the rampaging beast.

But we may never know the details of all of that.

Melania doesn’t want that kind of stuff out on the street.

And I guess that is what a first lady ought to be worried about.

All that stuff out on the street.

But in a Hopeless world, Melania’s feelings notwithstanding, there are stark realities that resemble stark problems.

For instance: we are left with the rampaging and incoherent beast.

That beast does, to my shock and dismay, apparently have the ability to launch the missiles and planes that can end our human state of existence.

Without any real check or balance.

I was surprised to learn that.

Maybe somebody should have mentioned that during the 2016 campaign.

But they didn’t .

Mention that.

Because if they had, maybe being nuts would have had a debilitating effect on donnie’s vote count.

But they didn’t.

Mention that.

And now we have donnie.

With the “big button” at his disposal.

And I didn’t know any of that – but if I had it wouldn’t have had any effect on my vote for Hillary.

But now it’s too late.

Because now we have an unhinged, Hopeless little man with a bad comb-over, and no clue about anything important calling all the important shots.

I was heartened to learn in an early morning tweet that trade wars are fun and easily winnable.

Maybe most Americans (all trumped up and ready to go) don't care about this state of affairs, but I do.

And as best as I can tell, the rest of the world cares a lot about this state of affairs - as much, or maybe more, than I do.

I guess they have forgotten that America reserves the right to incinerate the world.

Or drive it into depression.

Or provide the basis for a - non-incinerating - world war.

And the republican party loves all this.

Paul Ryan aids and abets donnie in his great tantrum.

I see flames.

I see Tories dancing around a bonfire in London in 1688.

I see Whigs dancing around that fire but pretending not to see the Tories.

The heads and quarters should begin to appear around Washington soon.

Just before the great white flash reduces it all to ash.

Star Wars II (Putin Becomes Reagan)

I always have thought that one of the several brilliant public relations moves that Ronald Reagan made was Star Wars.

He announced a thing that might happen – nobody could say with certainty it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen – (Reagan asserted that it was about to happen, and American technology was pretty dominant at the time, so who could credibly argue?) – and then went on with the rest of his speech.

I have always thought that that gambit played so perfectly to Russian paranoia that they just folded.

And they did.

Fold.

But, now, today, we have Vladimir de St. Petersburg giving his recent  major campaign for president – again – speech, using cartoons and science fiction (that Ronnie would have loved) to prove that Russia is back.

And all the “we are going to annihilate America” stuff he has on offer to his people is made of the same stuff as Star Wars I: cartoons and foo foo dust.

I have heard a lot of BBC features that document that Russians really like being fucked by their government just as long as they can still be viewed as a great power.

I have no idea how true that might be.

But Puty told them today that they are a great power – again.

So I guess they are as happy as pigs in shit.

Let the BOTs begin.