How Can You Tell When An Israeli Is Lying?

I saw Michael Hertzog, Israeli Ambassador to the United States interviewed on the PBS Newshour tonight.

His lips were moving.

I Have Also Had The Wolf

Back in 2014 my wife and I spent a few days in Paris, in our favorite hotel, in our favorite cartier. 

We had train tickets to Florence and were using the few days before departure to just wander the streets of Paris - a practice that I had, by then, turned into a full-time job.

My wife doesn't love Paris as much as I do, so I had spent a lot more time there than she had by 2014 - about two years since the year 2000; as a result, I had found a lot of things and places that I hadn't been able to share with her up to that date.

One of those places was Parc Monceau.

So one day we walked there.

And around there.

And across there.

What a great parc; the only one I like better is Montsouris, on the bottom of the City.

But we were wandering Monceau.

Up toward the top of the city.

And we got hungry there.

She had heard of a restaurant near there that sounded good.

So we went there.

To that restaurant.

And it was good.

So good.

The picture is my plate; that's what I had.

With a coupe de champagne.

They call it "bar" in the Atlantic; that means bass.

They call it "loupe" in the Mediterranean; that means wolf.

Since we were on the Atlantic part of France, I had bass.

So good.

It was at restaurant Guido de Luca.

The propriétaire was charming.

And now we have donnie.

 American Democracy is a lot like the story of - as best we can guess - how life formed on earth.

Like life, it was a cosmically unlikely event, a once in time event and a game changing event.

It started randomly with a random spate of disparate human ingredients (we're on American Democracy here, not life; but life also started with a random spate of disparate ingredients) coming to the "New World" from different places at different times.

It seems that the majority, although from different specific locales, were all from one sort of place that was beginning to be identified in those olden times as a "country, or nation"; they were mostly from England.

And, unlike the French explorers and trappers or the Spanish military, England sent - or lost, depending upon one's point of view - families.

They were families escaping persecution for their nonstandard religion.

They were families who had heard that there was farmland for free.

 They were families that just wanted not to be ground down any more by the social system of England.

And that families came from England was a significant difference between English emigrants to the New World and other nations' emigrants to the New World: families either die off or survive, and if there are survivors, some prosper; that was what happened with the English families that came to the New World.

The French explored, and the Spanish destroyed civilizations, and, in either case, they were unaccompanied individuals from their respective cultures; and their respective cultures had not sent families in tandem, so there was no affinitive breeding stock for those individuals to find and with which to blend; whatever progeny they may have begotten was of a hybrid variety, damned from the get-go by the mores of the invaders, so nothing much but misery came from and to those descendants.  

The English families, on the other hand, either died off or survived as Englishmen and Englishwomen, and some prospered.

There were also individuals from England, mostly, I guess, men, but there were also women individuals.

Those individuals all came for the same reasons as the families, but they brought also a different characteristic: belief in their own individual ability to survive and prosper in a world where the slate of old had been wiped clean.

With that belief they were in the New World to Stay.

Just like the families.

And the fact that some of the English-speaking families had survived and prospered created an English-speaking human infrastructure from which the English-speaking individuals who survived could select mates and take a try at families of their own. 

All of that started in the early 17th Century.

By late in the 18th Century there were a lot of descendants of that random spate of disparate human ingredients.

And a lot of them by then had prospered.

And a lot of them by then had become deeply educated.

They had become deeply educated in and had become believers in The Enlightenment.

And they were becoming enlightened enough, and prosperous enough to question why they, having taken huge risks, having left England on tiny boats to a totally unknown destination, having lived and died in conditions of health and safety that had never been endured by Europeans, and having prevailed in spite, were being drawn under the heel of the royal boot; they were, after all, by then a free people and they were chary to relinquish that freedom.

Part of being drawn under the heel of the royal boot included the fact that they had no vote.

They were free, English-speaking people but Parliament was denied them.

We all have a general, Hollywood idea of how that turned out.

But most of us don't know, or don't care, what was so similar about the emergence of life on planet earth and about the creation of democracy in America.

Or how preciously unique - like life itself - that creation of Democracy has turned out to be.

A long, long time ago, some of the chemicals that were floating around in the vast seas of Earth found some sort of affinity for one another, and they combined in such a manner that they moved and absorbed other chemicals as nutrients to sustain their continued floating around as absorbers.  The absorbing sustained them, but the only way there became more of them was when whatever conditions created the first of them continued to, occasionally, occur.

There were a fair number of variations of those chemical combinations, but none of them could replicate themselves.

That went on until about two billion years ago.

Somewhere, sometime, some number of those dissimilar chemical combinations collided and combined, and that collision created a new thing that could replicate itself. 

Life had occurred.

So far, to date, the vastly distant relatives - all of us - of that collision have not been able to find anything like us anywhere that we are able to know about.

We don't find life anywhere but here.

And then something happened.

Not only could the new thing replicate itself, it went into hyperdrive creating variations of itself.

And the magical palette of life that we know on Earth had become and continues to be a moveable feast on account of that happenstantial collision two billion years ago.

And it has never happened again here, so given two billion years for it to have happened at all, it can be thought of with accuracy to be an uncommon occurrence. 

So what has that got to do with those English families and those English individuals?

It has to do with a cosmic analogy.

Those English families and their associated individual fellows were in the political world a great deal like those first chemical aggregations that occurred and floated for eons until one of them collided with another, not identical, but similar, one of them.

Those people were unlike anything that had been known prior to their existence.

They were self-sustaining doers of deeds, singers of songs and proprietors of businesses.

At the local level they were self-governing through town meetings and various similar contrivances.

They had a king, but the king only wanted their taxes; he didn't want to know what they thought, needed, wanted, or aspired to.

He certainly didn't want them in Parliament.

He had enough trouble with the Island born Members of Parliament.

He didn't need another faction yapping at his gold clad heels.

So, those now several generations of  English families and English individuals, floating free of relations to the king, pretty much calling their own shots - ocean mileage being what it is - floating around in the vast New World, and they, being aware of kindred spirits spread across and about the land, found some sort of affinity for one another, and they combined in such a manner that they moved and absorbed other ideas and other politics as nutrients to sustain their continued floating around as absorbers of all of that.

And then there was the collision.

As it was two billion years into the current era, with chemical soup, this time earth had some socio-political proto-particles floating around: literate, relatively prosperous English speakers; a king across the ocean who only wanted to milk the emerging prosperity of those literate, relatively prosperous English speakers, but not relinquish an iota of political power in recompense for the taxes thus milked; a plethora of, by that time, written and easily accessible political opinion, theory and newly emerging socio-political beliefs based on those theories and opinions; and most important of all, the power, individuality and self confidence that prosperity had, after numerous decades engendered. 

"When in the course of human affairs ..."

At the four-billion-year mark of the current era, give or take a few, it had happened again.

Some apparently aimlessly floating particles collided and morphed inexplicably into something heretofore unseen, something new, something unique.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident ... "

And for two hundred and fifty years the creation that resulted from that has been dividing, multiplying, adjusting and improving and, perhaps most important, surviving - some might say prevailing.

In that two hundred and fifty years most of the rest of the world has adopted a form of government that, if one were to take at face value the words describing those adoptions, is pretty similar to what came out of nowhere from a collision of particles in North America.

But with few exceptions, those adopted forms are less than propaganda-deep.

They are rigged from the outset, and the mother's milk of the form - free and fair elections, and peaceful transfer of power, either don't exist, or are charades.

A few European nations mean what their constitutions say, but those nations are few.

For two hundred and fifty years the United States - that chance in a quintillion collision of socio-political particles - has stood as the blueprint for free and fair elections and pro-forma ("of course, you won") peaceful transfer of power.

And now we have donnie.

And now we have a huge minority who are either so stupid, or so evil, that they support donnie.

How sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.

 

Remember Dr. Strangelove?

 

 

I am going to let two pictures be two thousand words.

Using Tools

 

Using tools is supposed to be a major difference between humans and all the rest.

Over the years we have found that quite a few of the rest use tools. 

Here is one of the rest using a tool: a paved road.

Oh, and also using gravity.  

Pretty sophisticated way to eat a clam.

Rock Star; I Asked Bing How The Album Is Selling

Dolly Parton’s new album, Rockstar, is selling very well. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart with 118,500 copies sold in the first week. It also made history as her highest charting album ever on the Billboard 200, reaching No. 23. It is her third top 10 hit on that chart. Are you a fan of Dolly Parton?

A Chatte Chat With Bing

Recently, I have been pretty consistently entertained in any engagement I have had with Bing since the addition of its large language model brain.

This is a conversation that has just occurred because I have been wondering if one of the great cats can choose to live like Alfie.

Here is that exchange. I have tried to see and delete all references that Bing invokes - the Arabic numerals - because I think they louse up the flow of the dialogue.  I may not have gotten all of them.

Me:

Can cheetahs be domesticated?

Bing:

Cheetahs are not domesticated animals, meaning they have not been selectively bred and genetically modified by humans for specific traits. They have been kept as pets by some people throughout history, but they have many challenges and risks as pets. They are wild animals that need a lot of space, exercise, and specialized care. They are also endangered and threatened by habitat loss and poaching. Therefore, it is not advisable or ethical to keep cheetahs as pets.

Me:

I am asking because I saw two that were pets of the Empress in the movie Quo Vadis. And I recently saw a PBS feature that had two cheetahs that had been adopted by a human when they were only five weeks old.  They seemed to be like large house cats.

Bing:

I understand your curiosity. However, movies and documentaries may not show the full picture of what it means to own a cheetah as a pet. Cheetahs are not like large house cats, they have very different needs and behaviors. They may bond with their human caretakers, but they are still unpredictable and potentially dangerous. They also face many threats in the wild, and keeping them as pets may contribute to their decline. It is better to appreciate them from a distance and support conservation efforts to protect them and their habitat.

Me:

I appreciate your defense of leaving wild things wild, a belief that you and I share.  I have only been interested in theory, if a cheetah, taken early enough in life could bond with a human as does a domestic cat.  Domestic cats are still wild animals; they have merely made a bargain that they deem superior to being wild animals.

Bing:

I’m glad to hear that you share my belief. In theory, a cheetah may bond with a human if taken early enough in life, but that does not mean it is domesticated. Domestication is a long and complex process that involves genetic changes and adaptation to human environments. Domestic cats are not wild animals, they are a distinct subspecies of the wildcat that has evolved over thousands of years of coexistence with humans. They have different physical and behavioral traits than their wild ancestors. Cheetahs have not undergone such changes, and they retain their wild instincts and needs. Therefore, they are not suitable as pets, even if they may form some attachment to their human owners.

Me:

There is a book: "The Lion in the Living Room" that seems to differ with your view of "domestic" cats.  The author says that there is a minor difference in brain size, but, unlike the wholesale changes that are evident in dogs - relatives to the grey wolf - the slightly different brain is the only difference between the cat sitting on a stool next to me as I key this, and his ancestor from thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia.

Bing:

Searching for: The Lion in the Living Room book summary

Generating answers for you…

I have not read that book, but from the summaries I found online, it seems that the author argues that cats are not fully domesticated, but rather semi-domesticated or self-domesticated. That means they have some adaptations to living with humans, but they also retain a lot of their wild traits and behaviors. However, that does not mean that there is no difference between domestic cats and their wild ancestors. The book also mentions that domestic cats have different coat colors, patterns, sizes, shapes, and personalities than wildcats. These are the result of genetic changes and human selection over time. Therefore, domestic cats are not identical to wildcats, even if they share some similarities. They are a distinct subspecies that has evolved in a different environment than their wild relatives.

Me:

You have twice used the term "wildcat".  When I hear that term I think of a distinctly North American (maybe also northern European) relative to the Lynx.  "Domestic" cats are totally different from that sort of feline.  Domestic cats originated in the Middle East.

Bing:

The term “wildcat” can have different meanings depending on the context. In general, it can refer to any of various small or medium-sized cats that are not domesticated, such as the lynx or the ocelot. However, in a more specific sense, it can refer to an Old World cat that is native to Europe, Africa and Asia, and is usually considered to be one of the ancestors of the domestic cat. The wildcat is divided into several subspecies, such as the European wildcat, the African wildcat, and the Asiatic wildcat. The African wildcat is the most likely ancestor of the domestic cat, as it was the first to be tamed by humans in the Middle East. Therefore, when I say “wildcat”, I mean the Old-World cat, not the North American or northern European relative of the lynx. I hope this clarifies my usage of the term.

Deux Cynges

 

I was on the river flying;

I saw her on the way.

And then we flew together.

à jamais, je supposerais

An Editorial Comment

I posted a post titled "This Is A BFD" recently.

I kept it as a draft for several days while I thought about, re-read, re- thought and modified it.

Again and again.

So it should have been about right from my point of view when I posted it officially.

But no, I have made numerous improvements since then.

I am calling your attention to those improvements and I am requesting that you take another look.

The modifications are the red print almost at the end of the post.

It's probably not a bad idea to read the whole post, though.

This Is A BFD

 

In a book published in 2020, Kurt Andersen fills more than 300 pages with clear, concise and frightening documentation of how, starting in the 1970s, a small group of mostly old, old money (names like Koch and Olin) set out to dismantle the New Deal and return America to its founding roots: a few obscenely wealthy and a vast mudsill of compliant, fear ridden and manor house dependent workers.

We used to call that feudalism.

The primary means to achieving that goal as the Second Founders saw it, was to dismantle as much as possible the Government.

Where but from the government came the largess, equity and tendency toward equality that had grown into American Society since 1932?

The means of dismantling that New Deal Nightmare was to dismantle the Government.

So, they formed Heritage Foundations and Federalist Societies and took over or infiltrated major colleges and universities and on and on.

They assembled lists of malleable candidates for the judiciary at all levels.

They lobbied existing, not yet part of the CABAL members of the legislatures, federal and state, and got a gradual commencement of disintegration of all the laws and regulations underpinning the New Deal.

"Framed" issues were promulgated: "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" became "Pro Life"; Jim Crow became "War On Drugs"; immigration became "Rapists and Drug Addicts"; there were many, many more.

Armed with all the newly "framed" issues they wove a cloth of prejudice, half-truths and lies, and with that cloth thrown over them, state capitol after state capitol became majority red.

They unleashed an abnormally vicious and toxic form of christianity upon the land.

They engulfed and co-opted the NRA and turned it into a heavily, militarily armed leader in resistance to the Government.

 They monied up the NRA so that it might create the judicial and legislative infrastructure to arm all of America, at least all Americans who had been told that they were victims.

They began to dismantle the Public Education System of the United States.

To name a few of their activities.

They were a clandestine group for the most part.

And they really didn't expect to get very far with their agenda.

But any retrogression is better than none, they all agreed.

In 1980 the American people picked the perfect useful idiot for the agenda of the few, the rich and the powerful.

Ronald Reagan had eight years in office, and starting with busting the Air Traffic Controllers Union he handed the keys to feudal resurgence to those few, rich and powerful.

As life happens, the 80s became the 90s and then the 00s and so on; and now we are here: 2023.

Some time back in that continuum the few, rich and powerful became increasingly amazed at their continuing success and at the magnitude of their achievement; then they became pensive, and then somewhere in the teens, they became outright alarmed.

Much though they fantasized to create that vast, docile, fearful, serf-like mudsill they knew there is a soft underbelly of fatal flaw in really achieving that goal: serfs have no buying power.

There is only one way to keep corporations getting bigger, fewer and more powerful.

That way needs to be a way of enhancing and advancing the quarterly growth of profit, enhancing shareholder value ("shareholders" being another term for the few, rich and powerful) using most of that quarterly profit, however, not for distribution to the shareholders, or research and development, or employee income and benefits, but for stock buybacks - fewer shares are more valuable shares and what more enhances shareholder value than more valuable shares; and given the universally assigned corporate CEO mission - stock price enhancement, not silly things like product development or employee well-being, the CEOs prospered; and having your value held in an unsold asset is the finest form of tax avoidance - and increasing size and corporate heft vertically and horizontally gives corporations a choke hold on the existence of unions (oblivion for them, they said) and cost of labor (wages shall serve shareholder value, they said) and of keeping the whole cycle virtuously careening toward Valhalla. 

That way (the one way to keep corporations getting bigger, fewer and more powerful) is to keep the mudsill buying and buying and buying causing the economy to grow and to grow and grow, and causing the few, rich and powerful to be richer and richer and richer.

On its face it's a Ponzi.

At its core it's a chimera.

You can't get blood out of a stone, is an old saw that comes to mind.

No value but shareholders' and no wages but permanently low wages, are two factors on a collision course the few, the rich and the powerful could see.

But what results from the collision?

Just as the few, rich and powerful were getting nervous about all of that they got pushed aside by some of the mudsill that they had been prodding back into feudalism: they found out what the results of that collision could be.

The inmates took over the asylum.

For all their innate viciousness, meanness and, at times, outright criminality those dismantlers of American Equity and Progress, the few, the rich and the powerful, were and are still men and women of substance: they all went to the right schools, and they all know the difference between a Martini and a Gibson.

So they have some idea of how things work and why things are the way they are.

They just didn't like the way things had become since 1932, and they were beginning to worry about how things were becoming, since 2016, and they are terrified of what might be the shape of things yet to be.

Jim Jordan wouldn't know a Gibson if one crept up behind him and bit him on the ass.

And that pretty well describes the republican party of today.

The few who actually know anything and actually went to schools that teach anything must, as a job keeping criterion, act stupider than the stupidest of the stupid.

That's a mudsill thing,

That's a requirement to be an elected republican.

And to be able to promote the republican agenda.

republicans want to dismantle the deep state - the rest of us call it the Government - not because that is a means to the end envisioned by the few, rich and powerful, but because Q said to do it.

And because it gets clicks and makes them social media influencers.

And what could be better than that?

For the millions of the MAGA, they constitute a lofty role model.

The MAGA cheer the idiots, morons and imbeciles that they have elected as those they elected say predictably idiotic bullshit.

Daily.

They cheer when a low horsepower wannabe Don - named don - raves about "exterminating the vermin".

It wasn't MAGA who brought us to this sad state of affairs.

MAGA is this sad state of affairs and it is the result of the forty years of work by the Kochs and the Olins and all the rest of the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested.

But they didn't envision MAGA; they envisioned docile serfs.

Instead they have gotten MAGA, and for the old money - the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested - MAGA is a monster.

Or maybe it not a monster, but instead, it is Madame Lafarge.

Maybe remembrance of what is now Place de la Concorde sends blood inundated shivers through whatever passes for spinal cords in the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested.

Whatever: this endorsement, of someone other than the dildo, by the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested, is a big deal.

And the color of this text will probably soon run bloodily in the streets, because the dildo has invoked a nihilism that only works its way out of the system of a culture with blood in the streets.

Fish Snakes

 

One day I was wandering the Seine when I saw a bunch of cormorants sitting in a tree on the bank opposite me (I was on the left bank).

I took some pictures, and I was able to crop this one out as pretty clear evidence that cormorants do sit in trees.

I didn't know that cormorants sat in trees.

In fact, until my life had begun to include lots of walks along the Seine, I didn't know that cormorants ever came inland to fresh water - certainly not as far upriver as Paris is from La Havre.

But there they were.

To be totally truthful, for a couple of years I had seen cormorants at "the cop dock" which is on the river side of Quais Bernard, and across the street level quais from Jardin des Plantes; it's where the water borne Paris Police moor their boats, so I knew cormorants came to fresh water.

But I didn't know that they sat in trees.

When I saw this one today, on my screen saver, on Lopez Island, too many miles, and too many lifetimes away from the cop dock, and from that bird, in that picture, in that tree, it reminded me of a passage from A Curious Confluence, my first novel.

Here is that snippet.

"Then he heard the sound – once heard, he recognized it – again.  It came from the sky and it seemed to be moving.  He rose up and looked up into the sky with its westering sun and heard the sound again.  He adjusted his gaze downward closer to the water and saw a flock of black long necked birds with orange cheeks and long pointed beaks.  As they flashed down the river, just beyond his reach and just above the water they shouted joyfully to the waves with high pitched croaking shrieks.  They seemed to have a kind of magic separation from the water, so close were they to it and so fast was their passage.

“Fish snakes” he thought to himself.  He had seen them all his life and knew how they swam like lightning under water with their long serpentine necks fully extended.  In this manner they captured their prey. Always after one of their sudden disappearances below the surface of the river they would soon be seen surfacing with some sort of fish in the beak of their snake-like forward quarter.  The river teemed with myriad varieties of fish and these fish snakes prospered with that bounty. The tribesman had always wondered if one of these could be captured and tamed and taught to catch fish and return to a human master.  He had never heard of such a thing, but he had often wondered, when he saw them in action if such a thing might be possible.

"As the ones that had just passed disappeared, he rose out of the boat and began to take stock of the nature of the place."

What One Wouldn't Expect From Chevrolet

Or expect from GM at all.

But here it is.

A friend sent me a link to this ad and told me I would cry.

Here is the link: This could be the best ad of the season — or, maybe, the decade - Deacon Greg Kandra (thedeaconsbench.com)

I decided to take that as a challenge, and rather than deleting his email I clicked on the link.

Here is my subsequent email back to him.

"First, it's a great ad.

"Second, it's a spectacular - I think it can be called - tableau.

"Third, it got me even though I was prepared to resist.

"Fourth, I always loved John Denver's songs and voice; and one of my favorite movies - Oh God - made me even more of a Denver fan.

"But fifth, I would have gone completely overboard emotionally if they had not had John, but had had instead, Waylon Jennings and his wife, Jessie Colter singing Storms Never Last.

"I would have been in a puddle on the floor.

"And sixth, I had an ad for GM that I tried to contact them about as an idea. At that distant past time they were bringing retirees out of retirement to make ads telling Americans why they should buy Chevrolets. As luck would have it, by that time Chevrolet was building world class cars, like the four door Impala.  The problem was that almost two generations of Americans had been buying the vastly superior, less expensive Japanese sort of car, and, the rich ones, the vastly superior German sort of car - and American ears weren't deaf to GM's plea, they were non existent. I wanted to suggest that they do a looks, performance, reliability (to get at the Japanese)  and a price (to get at the Germans) ad whose tag line was "If We Had Made Cars Like This Twenty Years Ago, There Wouldn't Be A Foreign Auto Industry". It was not possible at that time to contact GM with ideas. Not too many years later GM went bankrupt and Barack fired their CEO.

"And, finally, here is a link to a short excerpt from my most recent novel; it has some relation to the ad and Jessie and Waylon: Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: From The Cream Soup Spoon: Peter, Jolene, Cinq, Alfie And Eternity (noellivefromparis.blogspot.com)"

From The Cream Soup Spoon: Peter, Jolene, Cinq, Alfie And Eternity

Peter turned to Jolene.

She was at the end of the service island that was the propane range and the four station breakfast bar; the stations were stainless steel stools made in France by some bistro specializing stool manufacturer.

Or maybe they were an assembler; it was hard to imagine anywhere in the non-Asian world that there might be an actual manufacturer; those French stools probably must have been assembled in France from parts made in China – or (horror of horrors) the previously French colony of Vietnam.

In any event the question had been asked and it was hanging in the air like a beautiful spider web in a glinting early morning sunrise; it was amber and steel and blue and silver; and there was a spider at its center; the spider would be the nub of the question, the poisonous and fatal fangs of the spidery dilemma of life itself: “what is your idea about god”?

Peter turned away from Jolene and looked out the glass side of the house on the channel side of the view.

“Whatever the cats think is what I think”.

“Dad, don’t play with me on this; I have some strong – simple but strong – feelings about the answer to this question; I want to know whatever it is you have come to, because I know you think about this stuff and you are not the most simple minded man that I know; so I really want to know what you think”.

“Whatever the cats think is what I think.

“They live lives, follow rules, adjust to new circumstances – these three, but for an accident would be all out hidden in the undergrowth out that window, looking for small birds and voles for dinner; instead they are in here, and one of them is sitting on one of the stools at the bar with his elbows on the bar like Norm in Cheers and being a fifth member of our convivial little gathering; if I say ‘treats’ – I guess I just did, he’s getting down to help me get them, he will get down and help me get them; and for that reason – the fact that Cinq just got down to help me get his treats – I can’t shake the feeling that they are just like me, only different; they learn as much English as they need to know; they really don’t care about politics, except that which is native to their species, so they don’t know a lot of political words; but they know a lot of fun words: ‘walk’, ‘treat’, ‘cheese’, ‘cream’, to mention just a few of the words that they know.

“Why are they different from me at the cosmic end of the sort of all that soup that we now call DNA?

“Why aren’t they subject to the same end game rules that we humans have always assigned to our species?

“I think they are.

“Subject to the same rules.

“And I think that that fact gives clarity to what the rules really are.

“We have always had ourselves – humans – in some form or other going to some ‘place’ ruled or administered by some overlord – Europeans have always called that overlord ‘god’.

“But the animals, like these well-vocabularied cats, have always been assigned to some post life non-existence state; that makes sense to me; but it makes sense to me as the rule for all of us; I can’t shake the feeling that has grown on me as I have become older that we are all in this together and we all can to a fairly great extent look to the same ultimate destiny: we die and cease to exist.”

Jolene winced.

Peter looked into his wine glass as if to avoid seeing the wince or as if to find the meaning of the cosmos; whatever – either would suffice at a time such as had just passed.

Alfie, though, if one had been paying attention, would have been seen to have watched Peter intently as he had been speaking.

Alfie, though, could have been seen, if one had been paying attention to have picked up his left paw and stared at it as Peter spoke and as he finished to have made a spitting action into that paw.

And if one had known what the sounds meant, as Alfie began to chirp and whine one would have heard him say “except for the turtles, the matrix and the mirrors you have it exactly right; the problem is that with the turtles, the mirrors and the matrix – including all those big bangs – you have it grotesquely wrong.

“Death is only the portal.

“The turtles, mirrors and the matrix are the destination.

“The trick is to change a random event into a controlled event.

“That is what we are about here.

“That is what we are about here”.

Parrots In Winter

 

I always think of parrots as tropical birds.

This is a picture I took in Paris in the middle of winter.

They are sitting at the top of a horse chestnut tree on a cold sunny day in December.

Thanksgiving 2023

I just read the leader in the Economist 18 November edition.

Pretty bleak for us; pretty bleak for the world: because we have the electoral college system, less than 100,000 "Americans" can bring down 250 years of freedom and 78 years of relative Atlantic/Pacific stability.

Pretty sad. 

Especially since the whole winning team is populated with idiots and imbeciles.

Morons have all moved over and become Independents.

Flat Universe

I asked Bing if the idea that the universe is flat had the heft of being a theory.

Bing replied.

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A flat universe is not a theory, but a possible geometry of the universe. 

It means that the universe has zero curvature and is infinite in extent. 

The curvature of the universe depends on the density of matter and energy in it. 

If the density is equal to a certain value called the critical density, then the universe is flat. 

If the density is higher or lower than the critical density, then the universe is curved.

Many cosmologists think that our universe is flat, based on observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation and other sources. 

However, this is not certain and there are still some uncertainties and challenges to this idea.

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I asked that question because I saw a presentation on the concept recently and it spawned a couple follow on ideas.

If the universe is flat that seems to imply that its depth is trivial compared to its length and width - or radii if the thing is circular (those being infinite).

With that relative thinness isn't it possible that there could be another universe stacked on top and one on the bottom?

And if that is possible, could there not be more in the stack?

Could that phenomenon not be as infinite as length and width, or radii, with universes stacked like servers in their rack, or vinyl LPs stacked in a pile?

Could not that "stackdimension" be infinite?

And if the universes (singular needs to be dropped if this is true) are so constructed, could that explain dark matter?

Dark Matter apparently exists; but what is it?

Nobody knows.

Or so it seems to all those physicists who pretty much take it as a dark and unexplainable fact of physics.

Lots of mass though.

Lots of gravity though.

So something is "there", wherever "there" is.

Could it be that there are a whole lot more of us than those of us "here" know about?

Could not all of us - "our universe" and all the others be in a stack in an infinite rack like some cosmic server farm; and could not dark matter and its gravity, and its mass, be really, not dark at all, but merely the indication of that infinite stack?

The effects indicate the cause often times, and the cause of dark matter might just be normal physics stacked to infinity: all that "stuff", stacked up and down, and all that "stuff " doing what "stuff" always does: have mass, speed, and gravity.

In that case, that stack would be the darkness.

That we know is there but can't see.

And migration across it is a currently random, but critically-necessary-to-be-understood phenomenon that will make - if understood - or break - if ignored, abandoned, forgotten or not understood - the human race's place in the order of things.

Or are all the servers in the stack human?

So, does it really matter? 

In any event, the geometry of that idea is significant.

22 November 1963

 I was in my History of American Thought and Culture class.  Someone had pulled the pull-down screen down far enough to allow a man’s hat to be tied to the pull.  The class was allowing itself to be amused by that fact as we waited for Mr. Frazier our instructor to arrive.  Time ticked by.  Mr. Frazier was late.  That was unlike him.  Finally, just before the fifteen-minute limit that protocol reserved for late instructors he appeared.  He came in, took one look at the hat and took a swing at it as if in anger.  That was really unlike him.  He was a laid back calm sort – a graduate of Reed College - who just didn’t let anything bother him.  He had our attention.  He turned around facing the class and said, almost accusingly, “well, I suppose you have heard that they shot Jack Kennedy.”  As a matter of fact we hadn’t.  We had been sitting there looking at the hat and waiting for him to show up.  All I could ever remember about that moment, other than what exactly Mr. Frazier had said was wondering who “they” were.  It turned out that we were never to find out who “they” were.

Taking what might have been an action of some significance, but as things were to turn out, apparently wasn’t, the first person I sought out was Barbara.  We went into the Park Blocks, out of the buildings, into the open air and walked, hand in hand.  Everybody was out there.  There was some kind of device or there were multiple devices that were filling the air with updates on the president’s condition.  We had stopped where a group had gathered, among them my fraternity brother Tom.  The words “John F. Kennedy is dead” insinuated themselves into the air like a malevolent spirit.  Barb dropped to her knees on the grass.  We all stood, or knelt – there were others on their knees – frozen and looking like the statues of the victims of the Irish potato famine that I would see many years later in Christchurch.  It seemed as if the world was in the process of fading to black.  I had looked at Tom and said, “thank God Lyndon Johnson is Vice President”.  Tom nodded his agreement.

Many years later another event occurred that had somehow seemed to be inextricably intertwined with John Kennedy.  Mysti and I had gone around the corner to the Olympia Pizza Restaurant early so we could get back by seven and watch the election returns as the polls began to close from the middle of the country westward.  We knew that the east would be closed by then and we knew that any bad news would begin to show itself - if there were going to be any - among those eastern results; but we had felt that there was still going be a story unfolding from St Louis west.  

After returning from Pizza it looked as if no bad news had cropped up yet, but it was still anyone’s election.  But good things kept happening and more states were turning blue than were turning red.  There came a point where the electoral count was not 270 blue but it was close.  I had looked at the map to try to get some kind of idea what might be going to happen.  The entire pacific coast had no color yet.  The obvious suddenly flooded upon me in a form that can only be described as joy.  “He’s got it,” I said to Mysti.

A few minutes later the West Coast turned blue and the City of Seattle erupted.  Everywhere people poured into the streets.  We were on Capitol Hill.  As we entered the courtyard we encountered people we barely knew or didn’t know at all. We all hugged one another and made loud joyful sounds.  People were streaming into the streets and up to Fifteenth.  The rest of the night was a massive party of people in and out of the bars and coffee shops to the street and back again.  Cars full of joyfully shouting people with the windows down paraded up and down.  I had never thought that the magic of having a leader that stirred a feeling of pride and joy at being an American would ever be given back to us; but it appeared on that night as if it had happened.

Said The Spider To The Fly

 Sam Altman got fired.

Microsoft hired him immediately.

Soon afterward they hired his lieutenant.

700 Open AI employees are saying they will follow them.

Isn't that the least expensive takeover in history?

But what about all those NCAs?

Isn't that going to be the most expensive lawsuit in history?

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President".

 In November 1964 Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in a landslide.

During his presidency some of the most significant legislation in American history was passed.

He was a very popular president.

But he couldn't get a grip on the cancer on our national mind and body known as the Vietnam War.

He kept sending more troops to slog around aimlessly in the jungle to maim and kill, and be maimed and killed.

50,000 or more young Americans were killed.

There is a wall in Washington DC giving the names and the exact number.

There isn't a wall documenting how many more were maimed.

But we see them to this day at freeway egress points asking for money.

On March 31, 1968, Johnson addressed the American People about the Vietnam War.

At its conclusion he said he would not run for re-election.

Thus ended one of the most successful presidencies in American history.

I think Joe Biden's unconditional commitment to Israel has already made such a speech necessary to the point of inevitability.

Musings And Related Trivia

There are so many tails to tell. 

But I seem to be unable to find, or take, the time to tell them. 

Some are real, some are imagined, some are both at the same time. 

They all should be told, I hear a voice telling me, but just the energy to let the Ouija talk, just the energy to stare at that blank page, just the energy to burst the bounds of past, present, future, and always, and forever, and never, is a burst of energy that I lack.

 I came close in The Cream Soup Spoon. 

So, I guess, I will put the first few words of Soup Spoon here.

Maybe more kindred words later. 

Maybe. 

But those will be from some other Ouija creation, if, when, and then, the Ouija, and my energy, allow it.

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Here are those words from The Cream Soup Spoon.

Einstein said that E = mc2.

There are a bunch of things this equation says and a lot more that it implies.

Mainly, though, it says that there is a huge amount of energy trapped in mass and light.

There was an instance, we are told, when there was nothing, and nothing was everything, all trapped in another nothing called a singularity.

In due course the singularity achieved its destiny: it became everything.

An uncontrolled variable generated by this occurrence was where everything was.

At the point of nothing becoming everything, everything was very close to where it had just previously been nothing.

Not exactly, but close.

But that was a fleeting condition.

The energy released by nothing becoming everything brought a new condition into being: speed.

Speed drove newly minted everything from wherever it had just not been to where it was about to be, and would continue to about to be for …

For what?

We call it time.

Time came into being as a byproduct of nothing becoming everything.

It was the measure of – something, nobody knew what - but it could be described by knowing where everything was then and where everything was now.

Then and now were words not known before the singularity had become everything.

Then and now are words that let humans sense the thing they call time.

Since then, time, once sensed, time has been represented with a thing humans call a clock.

But you can’t see time with a clock.

You can only show a representation of its assumed existence: clicks and clangs.

Those are not time; they are just a way of indicating that something we really don’t understand and really can’t describe does in fact exist.

And that it is advancing.

To some end point.

That’s strange.

But not as strange as light.

Light is a wave.

But it is made up of particles.

And it’s really, really fast.

And that speed is the upper limit of possible speed, we are told.

So why is energy equal to a given mass times the speed of light squared?

Speed of light, times speed of light is exponentially faster than the speed of light, isn’t it?

So how does that work?

It works kinda like the horror that most of humankind have for the concept of a godless universe.

When one admits that the mayhem meted out by humankind over our tenure on earth has been meted out under the banner “Deus Vult”, or “Gott Mit Uns”, and others in spirit similar to those two, it becomes difficult to say that we need a supreme being to bring out our kinder, gentler selves.

Someone needs to test the hypothesis that we might not kill each other if we left the Supreme Being out of our frame of reference and substituted instead the idea that all we need is the will to treat others as we ourselves would choose to be treated.

I think someone did suggest that once.

It didn’t go well for him.

So I guess that’s a moot hypothesis.

And then there is that quantum thing.

Einstein said something like "at the outer edges of my equations things get squirrely” - or something to that effect.

He was talking about the fact that things can be, simultaneously, in more than one place at the same time.

Remember, however, that time is pretty slippery, so that observation, if true, may not mean a whole lot.

These shards of brightly colored glass from the great question jar of the cosmos that has fallen – shattered – to the floor, are the pieces from which I have created the mosaic of the story about to be told.

Coming Home To Roost

 A long, long time ago I saw an Israeli woman interviewed by some significant American Media Source.

She was in her home.

That home, before 1948 had been the home of a Palestinian family.

There came a point where the interviewer asked the woman if she ever thought about something that would appear, on its face, to be a gross and unacceptable inequity: she was living in a beautiful Mediterranean home and the Palestinians to whom it had belonged pre-1948, were most likely in some refugee camp somewhere.

Or dead.

I have never forgotten her reply.

"Macht nichts; I've got mine".

A curtain to a slightly different view of the aftermath of the holocaust flashed open for me in that moment: the fact that much of the world, after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, had coalesced behind the Jewish people, enthusiastically and unconditionally, had, perhaps, unleashed a newer, slightly softer, form of genocide.

Leverage is everything, that new form believed.

And use it while you've got it.

Smart move.

Six million innocent human beings industrially exterminated is a horror that even today looms as number one in horror, human race to date.

There's a lot of leverage pent up in that horror.

But to see the survivors of that horror leveraging it into a shoulder-shrugged right to exterminate the Palestinians is a new form of that same old horror.

And I can't understand how the Jews can tolerate it.

Such as is my minimal influence, I won't tolerate it.

Moving beyond all of the rhetoric about how bad Hamas is - and I argue that not - one issue remains.

Starting in 1948 the Israelis have been pursuing a policy of the gradual elimination of the Palestinians.

And the policy is succeeding.

In the years since 1948, Israeli policy has inexorably reduced Palestinian living space.

The Israelis finally have most of the Palestinians crammed into a chunk of land bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt and Israel; the land measures twenty-five miles long by five miles wide; there are two million Palestinians in there; recently Israel ordered the half of that two million who live in the north to move to the south; then Israel started bombing the south.

But that's not all.

The Israelis have nudged a lot of Palestinians, over the years onto the left bank of the river Jordan.

That was ostensibly to give them some lebensraum; but really it was just a fish trap trick to get them concentrated somewhere so that the Israelis could move in violent thugs that they call "settlers" to illegally homestead, and in their spare time do raids to kill Palestinians.

The lady of the interview got her house because the Jews told the Palestinians who owned it to get out.

One wonders where those Palestinians went.

"Macht nichts". 

Since 2000, or so, the Israelis have had another policy, parallel to the policy of Palestinian removal and relocation: allow a terrorist group (Hamas) to be an offset to the PLA.

Why would they do that?

Of course, I don't know, but I could argue that that policy is to permanently stymie a two-state solution, which, being the only solution, is a policy that totally precludes any solution; so removal and relocation, and now, elimination reign supreme in the chambers of Israeli policy.

Having a weak de jura government and a strong de facto alternate government - in opposition - makes serious discussion about creating a viable Palestine a nonstarter.

And not starting is and has seemed to have been a primary objective of Israeli policy.

For 75 years.

But allowing Hamas to exist has finally yielded catastrophic results for the Israeli government.

So, in reaction to the catastrophe, that government is reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble in pursuit of the goal of eliminating the terrorists.

But to do that they need to eliminate huge swathes of Palestinians.

"Macht nichts" says BiBi.

And if the world objects, the world is antisemitic (theme from Shindler's List commences).

Leverage is everything.

A Gaza Opinion Primer

I think my initial reaction in my first post on the subject of the Israeli siege of Gaza has held up fairly well.

As the situation has advanced, I have tried to fine tune what I think.

Here are links to that metamorphic fine tuning.

I guess it is for me rather than for anyone else.

8 October 2023

13 October 2023

25 October 2023

30 October 2023

6 November 2023

9 November 2023

14 November 2023

Trucks Too Few

 I saw John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications for the NSA, interviewed on PBS last night.

He pointed out with great excitement that the Israelis have allowed a total, siege to date, 625 trucks to take supplies into Gaza since the beginning of the siege.

To keep Gaza supplied took 500 or more trucks daily before the siege.

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Hello, this is Bing. According to some sources, **sieges are not prohibited** as such under international humanitarian law (IHL), but they must comply with **relevant rules** of IHL, such as the **prohibition against starvation of civilians** as a method of warfare and the **obligation to allow humanitarian relief** operations²³. However, there is also some debate about how to apply the **principle of proportionality** to sieges, which requires that the expected civilian harm does not outweigh the military advantage of the siege¹⁴. Do you want to know more about this topic?

Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/9/2023

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I wouldn't call 20 a day compared to a required 500 to be proportional.

One has to question what the Israelis are really up to.

Sometimes Looking Back Is Useful

 Not now, though

The Real Horror In Israel: They Don't Count Palestinians

A couple of days after the 7 October Hamas attacks on the kibbutzim an artful concatenation of historic events began to circulate on social media.

And soon afterwards the concatenation was fleshed out with some math.

Here it is in all its Israeli glory as best remembered and paraphrased by me.

"The horrendous crime against humanity perpetrated by the Palestinian group Hamas against the peaceful people of Israel on 7 October 2023 is totally kindred in horror and depravity to the 11 September 2001 attack on the United States of America. Not only that, but, considering the difference in the population of the two countries - nine million Israelis to three hundred thirty million Americans - we, the survivors of the holocaust, here returned to our rightful and god given homeland, actually have suffered the equivalent of 51,333 dead from this monstrous act of antisemitism."

That's damn fine marketing.

As a tactic in a propaganda campaign, though, it has a soft underbelly.

That soft underbelly is this: numbers and formulae are like the wil-o'-the-wisp; they float ephemerally and they are seldom staunchly loyal to their purveyors.

Such is the case here.

While the number of really dead Israelis remains, as it was on 7 October, 1400, the death count of Palestinian men, women and children ticks ever upward: 10,000 earlier today, 4500 of them children.

Using the Israeli proportional ratio equation an interesting addendum to the Israeli Concatenation Marketing Campaign emerges.

As of this morning, Seattle time, the Israelis have killed a proportion of the Palestinian population, in synch with 9/11, equaling 1,650,000 civilians.

So when are the Israelis going to start counting Palestinians?

I pointed out this lack of counting previously.

  

Finally, An Artichoke Answer

 I asked Bing if we could expect to ever get real artichokes back; I said:

In the last 20 years or so artichokes have become inedible. The classic Castro Valley artichoke has disappeared from the market.  Is there any indication of bringing classic Castro Valley artichokes back?

Hi, this is Bing. I’m glad you like artichokes.🌱

According to my search, artichokes were brought to California by Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, and to Castroville in the 1920s. The original variety was the green globe artichoke, which is still grown by some local farms in Castroville. However, over the last two decades, an ambitious program to produce high-yielding, year-round artichokes has altered the flavor, color, texture and shape of them. Some of these new varieties are Desert Globe, Big Heart and Frost Kissed.

I could not find any indication of bringing classic Castro Valley artichokes back, but you may be able to buy them from some local farms or online. You can also visit the Castroville Artichoke Food & Wine Festival to celebrate this tasty vegetable.

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Several years ago, I think it was in March, my local Safeway had some real artichokes for a couple of weeks. 

I bought a dozen or so over that couple of weeks.

I was so excited that I saved the PLU stickers.

I was hoping that I might have discovered the magic code to artichoke happiness.

But I think that code covers all artichokes, not just the real artichokes that I bought in that brief interlude, the vast majority of rest of which are bogus.

Bing goes too easy on them ("high-yielding, year-round artichokes has altered the flavor, color, texture and shape of them").

Here's the real deal: that vast majority of bogus pretenders are really big, frequently are really round, but they have no flesh on their leaf bases (so what is their point?) and their hearts go from fibrous uncooked lumps to nasty tasteless mush in some mysterious window of uncontrollable time. 

As such they are inedible pointless wastes of time and money; but they are pretty.  

Somehow that seems to me to be a banner that could be hung above all of our current civilization. 

When Do They Start Counting?

 A couple of hours ago I heard a retired Israeli colonel interviewed by the BBC.

She obfuscated on all subjects extremely effectively.

But paramount among her obfuscations was her multi-repeated strident assertion "the Israeli Army does not target civilians".

To date, 8000 Palestinian civilians - 2400 of them children - (have you noticed that the "horrific" Jew body count remains 1400, as the Palestinians deaths rise by the hour?) have been killed.

I guess that that 8000 weren't targeted, assuming truth in the strident protestations, noted above.

I guess not having been targeted is the same as not being dead.

In Israeli-Speak.

Nonetheless, since we, the rest of the world, do have a body count - 8000, and rising by the minute - we have a pretty good idea of how many Palestinians have not been targeted by the Israeli Army, and therefore, in Israeli-speak, are not dead.

So, when do they - the Jews - start counting?

The Difference

"Too few people with too much money,

 "And too many with too little,

"And then there's me,

"Apparently free,

"Of problems,

"Of money 

"One medical bill or one 'we have totaled your car' away from the abyss,

"'Apparently, apparently, therefore, a word remiss,

"But, remiss or other,

 

"Remiss or not,

"When I looked for its brother.

"'Careless' I got,

And so,

"I've got what I've got,

"And I guess that's good, so good, so good,

"I'm sure that's the feeling I should,

"Have

 "In the best of all countries,

"In the best of all times,

"City on the hill,

"How it all shines,

"But, still, too many with much, much too little",

I thought to myself,

As I scrumbled my dollar bills,

In my wallet,

So I could pay for

A copy of Real Change.

The paper costs two dollars.

I gave the guy three.

The guy thanked me.

Twice.

I felt like a shit.

"What's the difference" I said to no one in particular,

"Between him and me?"

"He has guts" came floating to my brain.

"You would be dead, and down the drain,

"If you had to show up every day in front of QFC,

"That's the difference between him and me".