This ain't No Dicking around.

Told ya you'd be hearin' from me...

...and again well past my due date.

People don't really listen. Not even to what they're thinking.

Libs are all agog thinking some FOX broad put me in my place. And they think I got a lot of gall countering her with the bipartisan-ally established fact that nobody doubted the veracity of the case my folks made against the dictator we subsequently and successfully took out.

You can, quite naturally, quibble with the last bit. And I will in a second. But here's the thing:

There's a reason I can spew so matter-of-fecal, and it's not just that I got a lot of gall. Do have plenty of gall. Helps with digestion after I swallow small creatures whole. But I am able to make the claims I do simply because Lib-voter types are so caught up in spiking the ball at my having been "so terribly wrong" (do ya like the way I use my hands?) they ignore who all is still lying regarding the original intelligence, like to think it makes their team look better if they are innocent sheep led to slaughtering.

It's quite funny, really. Libs will point to the congressmen and women who didn't give us the green light on Dear Don's Shock & Awe as evidence that not everyone was buying in, but then they're raring to nominate for no less than President of these great United States the most prominent one who got on board - essentially making her the strongest voice of their party. Not that she wouldn't have been. But this takes it to slam dunk level.

Sure, Hills is the best they got from my perspective. She's got the capital, the strongest connection to the private sector. I'd vote for her if it weren't for whoever the Republicans will have running against her. LOL. Just kidding. I'd vote for her if I voted, but only because I know what she knew that we knew and that she went ahead with our plan anyway. Not like we didn't know she would, or believed for a second she wouldn't. Just like Senator- um, Secretary Kerry. And Joe.

There was a special place in my heart for those guys. Gotta new heart now. Guess there's a special place in there, too. Hafta ask the guy who didn't make it as long as I did. There are a lot of those.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Reminiscing my glory days in the democracy sector. Libs complain about the money, but they keep coming back for more. My guys in Langley did a study on that kind of behavior. Turns out humans have more free-will than we had thought, just less self-control. As my pal Bibi would say: 'Poor schmucks.' Then he'd grill one of 'em for lunch. You gotta love that guy.

Long story short: The Hills has eyes. She and her colleagues knew what they were doing, even if they were at the time of more immediate assistance to the team she wasn't playing for directly. United we stand. Imagine how torn I was in 2004 when John ran. He'd have been my personal preference if it'd not've meant I'd lose my job. In the great game, we are all Americans. Something like that anyway.

You cannot really think those guys were tricked on the one hand, and that my folks exclusively got it wrong on the other. Sure, we were lying. More or less. I'll neither confirm, nor deny that we manufactured evidence. Suffice it to say, if we did, it was transparent to the crucial decision makers, not just those bitter few who were calling 'bullshit'. With that in mind, if we deceived the American people, it was together and, either way, we all got it wrong. Libs desperately cling to ghostly dichotomies, especially when the DNC spooks them with yours truly. Being more than happy to remain relevant to the conversation, this Dick abides.


Look. I'm evil. Don't mind telling you that. Wouldn't even call it an admission; it's simply what I am. I believe in using brute force to get what I want and I don't believe for a second that that is wrong. And lest you think I am just some run-of-the-mill chicken-hawk, I remind you that I shot a buddy in the face.

Funny stuff. Good times.

I get that Libs don't like me because I'm evil. But it is deliciously amusing how they can be so certain that their darlings in the Democrat Party are any less so. I will grant you that Madame Clinton can eat fewer rats than I can in, say, a nominally adjudicated amount of time. But I assure you, her blood is just as cold as mine, her deeds just as vicious, and what she earns from those deeds, just as ill-gotten.

Of course, another reason my words and deeds go further forth with impunity is that the President chose to "look forward, not back." I mean, he could have gone after a few fish and still been able to put together a cabinet that wouldn't have gotten caught in the net. Commissions clear tranches of folks of wrongdoing all the time, any consequent taint always fades. But he chose clean continuity. Gotta respect that.

To be clear, we do not see retina to retina on a number of issues, so it's especially gratifying to watch Libs' faces twitch while they are trying to reconcile their president's having attempted to extend our brave fighting men & women's stay in Iraq beyond my president's deadline for withdrawal. For the Libs who have remained blissfully ignorant of that fact, there's even more stomach-tickling glee in seeing them blush and stammer before the twitching begins. Makes me wanna pin 'em down & eat 'em. But, alas, that's the privilege of the president. It's an unwritten rule in the democracy game that we're only allowed to eat our own mascots. Don't think for a moment he doesn't find his just as delicious.

Call a Liberal on Saturday night and he's yucking about "knuckle draggers"  and their war-mongering "strategery" and shredding of the Constitution. That sort of thing. He'll mock the term "rule of law" and prattle on about protecting whistleblowers. Stop back around on Sunday and he's all about superior diplomatic procedures, viable military strategies, and being happy to have the conversation about the delicate balance between freedom and security. I'll be damned if you won't hear the words "rule of law" pass his lips without the slightest hint of irony.

When I said, "Rarely has a US president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many," with regard to the current hostilities in Iraq and our people's reagents in ISIS, I meant that, while he may not at the time have had his seat in the Senate so as to have given my folks his stamp of approval for Operation Iraqi Liberation, his actions since acquiring the pulpit of authority indicate anything but disavowal of Iraqi Freedom, let alone can one reasonably make the case that he hasn't signed on enthusiastically to our global war o' terror. But ya think I'm gonna give him an attaboy? What'd be the point in that?

In simpler terms that the Libs would understand, I'm trolling the president's fanbase. Guy's so smooth that his Facebook followers would "like" his eating a baby ("omg i just cuted the president!!") and then stay up all night ranting about how everyone "forgot what it was like when Shrub" was eating babies. Their duplicity doesn't bother me in the least. On the contrary. I like it. Literally and virtually.

In the purest terms, we enable one another. I exist at the pleasure of the President. That will be true in 2017, as well, when, God willing, you will have the first woman occupy that office without having to be on her knees.

You'll be hearin' from me.

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a barely unrelated Sundy Paper link: Artificial Borders Theory

rundum Friedrichshain Vergleiche

For historical, historical historical perspective, it was over six years ago that Stine aka KAK entreated me to take this photo to make this comparison. She lived just off Besarinplatz, the kind of "just off" that would place her not so far off so as to place her too far off not to be colloquially called "on" Besarinplatz, though not directly on.

When I told her I had this photo in my Friedrichshain calendar, her proprietary sense of community KAK'd in. So this exercise might never have started had it not been for her/that/this.

Besarinplatz was Baltenplatz in 1941

Stine still lived "there" in 2008

She had me come around to her place, not too far off from where she and Aunt Wally (from the older photo) are pointing in their respective shots (Aunt Wally's being more accurate on the Y axis, Stine's slightly closer on the X). We used her camera.

The most difficult part was finding a still corresponding orientation point. A number of the buildings on the right were no longer there, the Litfaßsäule (advertising column) was likewise gone, a bike path was present that hadn't been, indeed, the entire layout including the roundabout itself appears to have shifted a bit, and the building over Stine's right shoulder was entirely new, if closer to its predecessor's spot. We took a lot of shots before settling on the building range along Frankfurter Allee in the far background as a central comparison.

So the first shot in this series (though it's not much of a series given that I've only done it a dozen or so times out of the dozens of photos available) was the most difficult, but probably the most fun.

Since then, a default downgrade to point-seven & one pixels has been in effect. I'm no photographer. Nevertheless I carry on. The historical historical images are my own scans of the printed hard-copy, which is likewise a downgrade from the print.

I've cloned many other images of Friedrichshain and displayed them in this diary, some with extra *htmelly featurying, some notsomuch, but the only ones so far that have made it into the category of the titular allusion are those inspired by those from the calendar.

Besarinplatz, Berlin-Friedrichshain - March 2008

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*I began to create the cursor/arrow hover/rollover thing a bit later, but retroactively changed the earlier entries correspondingly whenever such minute comparisons seemed deemed appropriate.

And still later than that, and less so retroactively, I began the habit of doing it twice (once in each direction) for those who might not be able to enjoy the hover effect.

Express Subscribed Permission

I read somewhere that memory accounts for all of our brain function. I can't remember where, so it's probably true. Fortunately, when such information cannot be found in our re-collection, it is at our fingertips. I just don't feel like looking. But you can if you want to. I'll wait.

The info is sound. I mean, more reliable than just taking someone's word for it, you got facts and figures of data that can be checked and verified - you know, what you do when someone tells you something that you don't wanna believe.

That's right, you follow the suggestion of the last person you wanted to punch in the mouth for suggesting it, which, frankly, I understand, because "Google is your friend" is such an annoying thing to say. The implication is that one day it will be able to tell us about the good ol' days.

But that's what you do: you google it, or if you don't do that, you try really hard not to, which is almost as bad, especially if the only reason for the struggle is to avoid using a particular product. That means, even if Google itself is not skull-skulking you, you're being pwned. 

So you click on the first link resulting from your MukLukSno or Ting or Yeehah, Kahpoo, or Whatever?  Whichever way, it's a Wikipedia article right at the top. Of course, the article is only as good as the footnotey links. You might or might not check those, I'm going with not; I'm sure their presence or absence is an adequate indication as to whether or not a section is dubious. The key: you can check the links.

It's all god.

(That  ^ ^, meine Damen und Herren, is a sigmundian typo I almost corrected).

Okay. If you're back from your search and its purpose was to prove my tepid thesis wrong, then there was no doubt plenty of information available to support you in your quest. If, however, your bias lies with me, we continue...

In case you haven't noticed, the preceding is partially my attempt to illustrate that it is not just memory that is unreliable, or the trust we place in it. It's the tendency to place trust in as paltry a corroboration as humanly necessary, proportional to the tangling of the subject amid hierarchal authority. I mean, there's always more corroborating around every boring corner and at least one out of five dentists who simply will not abide.

Still, objectivity is a big deal. It's a bigger deal theoretically. How interesting that the importance of bearing personal witness has become so insignificant to so many. I think it's a manifestation of the denial of personal responsibility. Or a latent shirking of it. It's so much easier to blame someone else whenever something goes wrong. So it could be that a quick google is becoming less about backing up a theory, and more about letting somebody off the hook.

((Bear with me for a while, because I want to explain whose responsibility is being relinquished and why I allude to it with the above link. The story is that one of the huge American networks censored out an inconvenient truth in the broadcast interview with a former spy because it didn't jibe with the intelligence narrative. Conveniently enough, they kept it archived.

The framing of the story in the link supports the theory of incompetent prior knowledge regarding the failure to stop a intricately coordinated hijacking. The former spy states it so, his argument being that too much data obscures the ability to make sense of it.

What is not being framed within this little meta-talk about meta-information is that there is quite simply no way for anyone to know if it were left un-mined. How many oversight organizations would there have to be, and how many people would have to inhabit them for you to be comfortably sure that the letters flowing from your fingers are not being read by more than just whom they were intended?

And at the end of the day, do you really care?

The only relevant piece of information here is "They are watching." Even if it's not true, that's what is remembered and, though you'll always be able to look it up, it will one day be forgotten. All of this chatter of stolen and leaked information is wholly irrelevant otherwise and has negligible effect upon the evolution of the network.))
 

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Learning is memory, which is not just about thinking how much you like lunch, but is decisive in determining whether you fork it in, or just use your hands and smear shit all over your face;

it's not just about knowing how to walk or thinking you're able to play the first few bars of Chopin's Berceuse really beautifully, it's about the refined awareness that stomping on the piano keys is too destructive to rise to the level of gauche and only funny if you can employ the likely non-existent perfect context for such a thing, and brilliant comic timing in doing so;

more than a guide to your sense of ethics or humor, without memory, your brain would be less human than a robot, but without any of the classic robot skills, like locking, popping, or being a foil to R2-D2.


Up to recently, your memories belonged to you alone and even when you shared them, their trustworthiness was arguable. Times have changed. Memories are being cataloged ever increasingly and with greater efficiency even as these words leave my fingers to reach your consciousness. Whether or not your own personal mnemonics for recall have been affected by modern technology, the next generation of learner is most certainly developing a different approach to storing their perceptions.

There is on-line journalizing and insta-accounts of stuff that are being recorded that never would have made it into the analogues. It is more quickly uploaded and more immediately trivialized, but also more widely accessible and, in spite of the relative weightlessness of the digits themselves, the amount being consumed is throttlingly heavy.

It's way easier to forget that shit and leave it for later (where I'm sure you'll be able to find it again) than write it to the soft disc in your bone housing. No doubt some people will always maintain a better capacity for recognizing the difference between random noise and the immediately pertinent and for storing the latter the orthodox way. There'll always be smarter people. Some of them get paid to write the code so that others don't have to understand it.

If it's true, then, that the trend of effectively outsourcing human memory to search and cypher machinery is increasingly due to necessity, as it was not so long ago down to the novelty of being able to, then during any given moment of effective recall, one mind must be potentially readable to anyone else with a connection.

Still, none of this means that the information being recorded is any more true or accurate than the original source. Wherever one might find such a thing.

The essence of time consists in the change of things.

Unfortunately we have to close Bookshop Friedrichshain.

We thank all the customers who
have remained faithful over the years.