Spectra Plectra

The gap between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution is much smaller than you think. What you think is part of the problem. What you do or don't do because of what you think adds to the scale.

 

 But enough with happy thoughts.

 

The grammars on the use of the past continuous detail how events are relative to one another. While one event continues, it may be interrupted by another.

 

Consider the sentence "I was taking a bath when the phone rang."

The image created here is that the bath had begun before the phone began to ring. Without the additional illustration, inferences will vary as to whether the interruption brought the speaker out of the bath. The diagram above implies that the ringing began and ended, and that the speaker remained in the bathtub.

 

To demonstrate further the relative difference between the two tenses, we can zoom in tighter on the simple past to see what might have happened while the phone was still ringing.

So one's choice between simple past and past continuous will depend on which event began first and lasted longer.

 

 While I was preparing the break between topics, an idea happened upon me, which I place as place-marker here: An Overton Window can be adjusted by the eventual use of such language. The setup would be the past continuous events themselves and the adjustment of the window would occur in eventual response to whenever those events are continuously enough revealed in language use.   

 

 The Awning of the Cage & Aquarium

In D, the windowed Awning of O released the following: Cat's in the bag. Come get it if you want it. The readers were all, "Hwuhh?" SPOILER ALERT: The hero violated her while he was saving her, but then "did right by her" - as may still be the parlance of our times. 

 

Spectrum Plectrum

Could I even think the word spectrum without having lain on at least one of them? I mean, not just one that exists to describe what might determine one's level of ability to adjust to being a social normie; even the fringes have boundaries. Never mind that, though; let's start with politics and the handle of the metaphorical horseshoe.

 

The "both sides do it" understanding of politics or, more specifically, understanding of politicians or, more more specifically, understanding of people who've entered politics, is complex enough to deserve differentiation between that and the "both sides do it" attitude, which is my attempt to say that even where 1) the understanding represents allowing for the fact that, generally speaking, politicians play a corrupted transactional game stacked in favor of oppressive and controlling interests that are counter to those of their constituencies and 2) the attitude represents an only slightly more likely tendency to be the one that offers the "both sides do it" argument for a counterpart to respond to with "Sure, I agree, but come on" apologia for lesser evilism, or, in the interest of zooming farther in on the spectrum, advocacy for lesser evilism (whether this equals an outright defense of one figure, be that figure a nation, its politics or a person representing one ostensible side of the same, or this merely equates to an outright disgust for the other figure, nation, politics, or person), for all their similarities, they differ when poked and in how they do poking.

 

If that sentence paragraph was too much: There's a spectrum in the middle of the political field (on the ground) that spans two metaphors: that of voters holding their noses with one hand while voting with the other (or just outright hitting a panic button), and those who believe they think they won't make a deal with any devil.     

 

The middle of the road for the above diagram would be staunch advocacy for voting for the lesser of two evils. To its right would be the utter contempt for anyone who would suggest their candidate is anything but perfectly good.

 

Another perspective on the spectrum in the diagram below includes understanding why one would pick a lesser of evils, but the rejection to the far left is one of ideological purity. 

 

Not that the rejection of the premise in either example is either delusional or obstinate. Either could be fully on board with the assumed program, even if they have issues with its messaging, the latter of which being the one thing the politician is willing to say was flawed about their losing campaign. It's never about their actual positions.

 

Spectra: the inbourne conspiracy

The human is by nature an agreeable individual. This doesn't mean there aren't disagreements and disagreeable people, but the most disagreeable, as unpleasant as they may be to many others, seek agreement with another mass of people, even if it's only to be projections in their head.
 

And for some reason this occurs here: There is ample evidence in the words of the founders that the people in general were not their intended beneficiaries. 
 

The conspiracy: no conspiracy necessary

Those who would conspire to maintain their rule over others know that their lobbyists and witting & unwitting lawmakers and official bully pulpit bureaucrats and media are built to be agreeable to at least an interest group and probably to a little more than that. This is easy to observe by way of an answer to a question from a News Talking Head about whether the Interviewee really thought the News Talking Head had been given orders from above about what to report on and what to say, the answer to which was, nobody had to give those orders because those from above had already seen the aspiring News Talking Head coming from afar, or at least from as distant as could be exposed in a job interview.

 

In other words, there are professional HR types who can recognize if a job candidate falls within the Overton spectrum of ideology, otherwise they'd be human resourcing for somebody else. Because the acceptable spectrum has been advertised back at them for so long, shaped by their corporate bosses' collective marketing and PR efforts that began before their parents were born, it's be as easy as playing Old Maid with everybody's cards facing up.

 

There's a notorious enough example, it's still talked about in today's context: In the early 2000s, it didn't require Project Mockingbird journalism (CIA infiltration of media) to, again, send US tanks into Iraq (if it required any journalism at all); there were plenty of run of the mill war advocates eager to present what they thought they believed was their own middle of the road casus belli to show how homegrown middle of the road they were, and that nobody could question their patriotism.

 

Naturally there were similarly self-branded patriots who opposed the war and rebuked anyone would question their loyalty because of it. Most survived with jobs because they were only influential enough to prove there's a free press.

 

If the metaphorical carrot is going with the flow, the corresponding stick is knowing anyone had ever gotten axed. As far as anyone's concerned, the former has the numbers in spades. Those journos who would push back on official narratives are less likely to slip through the vetting process of those for whom that particular narrative is official. It's corporate efficiency not to have to fire someone you had misread.

 

Time Was

I don't recall ever seeing or hearing or reading an American Billionaire described as an oligarch in American media when there were three networks. If you see that today, it's an exercise in sub-branding, maybe only in response to the emergence of the narrative via the fractured media of the 21st century.

 

Here we have the scale of the problem and solution in one place. It is incumbent upon the problem to prevent its solution, which can be overwhelming to the solution, which hence has fewer resources to work with.

 

Between the problem and the solution lies a spectrum dominated by the problem. I cannot provide a visual aid here because the spectra of points of view on an array of points of interest are so vast in scale, it would require a chart that resembles one of those animations zooming in on itself forever to reveal itself forever, and there are too many stops along the way to point out the differences, which is the scale of the problem.  

 

Nevertheless, the solution is always at hand. At least that's what I was thinking when I set out to write this. 

Peartspicacity

He seems oblivious
To Lerxst's soft spring rain
Like a man in pain
So light, yet endless
From Dirk's leaden sky

And:

Is he oblivious
To this quality?
A quality of light
Unique to every city’s streets.

The less altered second stanza could represent the extent to which a person cannot or will not know what somebody else is going through because, as the lyricist put it on the previous record, "each of us [is] a cell of awareness". Some cells develop more empathy than others that get caught up in their own walls.

 

It wouldn't be the first time a frontman had his head so far up his own swelling synth that third person observers and even members of the band themselves might wonder if the obliviousness was but feigned ignorance born of narcissism.

 

In this case it could have been spawned by the conceit that the band was so much better than their peers in the mainstream, a view spurred on by their fans yet still a side effect of group self-indulgence. 

Flocking late to the debate

This joke again: The Pope, John Wayne, and Hitler are getting on a bus. As the Pope attempts to pass the driver, neither showing a senior's pass, nor dropping coinage for the single fare, the driver holds him up with the tenor of a clearing of his throat and a, "Fare, please."

The Pope's graceful smile betrays a hint of condescension. "I am the infallible Holy Pontiff, respected representative of well-over a billion Catholics around the globe," comes his reply. "Anyway," he adds, indicating poverty with a gesture of his hands, "I don't have pockets." He blesses the driver with a sign of the cross and moves to the back of the bus, taking a seat.

He is followed by John Wayne, who likewise attempts to pass ignoring the driver who, as with the Pope, stalls the actor's obliviousness by asking him to show a ticket or pay the fare.

John Wayne contemplates the confrontation with a shift from one foot to the other and then squares himself with the driver and boasts, "I am an American icon, representative of the greatest generation, and a symbol of the heroic taming of the savage frontier. I don't ask you to compensate me for my service and I sure as hell ain't gonna pay for a ride on a pinko city bus." He saunters to the back of the bus and takes a place just near enough the Pope to be able to sit with his legs spread wide apart.

Next comes Hitler.

[alternative addendum::]

The driver takes one look at the Führer and, annoyed, waves him past with a, "Oh, Jesus. Just go ahead!"

The rhetorical moral of this tale is, if you can't stop the Pope or John Wayne, how're you gonna stop Hitler?

 

The present point: imagine surveillance is the Pope. Surveillance cameras and Flock are, respectively, John Wayne and Hitler. If you prefer, replace surveillance with another mode of gathering data on people and, eventually, outsourcing the gathering to be shared with... whomever.

 

This is just the latest iteration I'm prompted to mention. Previously, on Warning About What This Means For Tomorrow When Today Should've Be Enough Yesterday:

The Pope = law & order

John Wayne = lack of accountability for same

Hitler = result of lack of accountability

 

The Pope = prison

John Wayne = privatizing prisons

Hitler = school to prison pipeline

 

The Pope = extraordinary rendition

John Wayne = kill list Tuesdays

Hitler = just bombing whatever with goal post shifting goals

 

The Pope = district-based school funding

John Wayne = charter schools

Hitler = corporate prison pipeline

 

The Pope = state secrets

John Wayne = prosecuting whistleblowers

Hitler = in-group patriotism über alles

 

The Pope = health insurance

John Wayne = insurance mandate

Hitler = coverage rug pull

 

The Pope = Piety and neutrality

John Wayne = "Commies!"

Hitler = "literally" Hitler cough Ben-Gvir

 

The Pope = feature

John Wayne = bug

Hitler = bug feature

 __

 

And in sports: The Reds get picked to perform an operation on a wrenched ankle. Let's go to the video:

Speaking Sundae purely of the Sun

You're probably paying for free energy. It seems like a worthwhile arrangement, as that's not all you're paying for; it's part of a package, but it's the part you're paying for for which those you are paying don't have to pay anything at all. The acquisition and farming of land and the exploitation of other resources and labor all constitute overhead, as in costs. But the biggest overhead is an energy source that's free of charge.

 

As such you'd be paying someone else to use the energy on your behalf even though no one is technically forced to give up the advantage of this free energy: Basically, you could adopt or could have adopted an agricultural lifestyle that makes good use of it to cultivate the majority of your nutritional intake. Naturally, your inherited means and class and lifestyle will help determine how viable an option this would be.

Blood, Sweat, Tears & Urine

Supergroup? According to the definition, for a band to be a supergroup, multiple core members have to have come from a previous group that had already achieved significant recognition or set themselves apart somehow. Let's test the band in the title.

 

 

Davie Blood co-founded the Curds: With their early singles he became not only instantly recognizable for his backing harmonies, but also distinguished himself as a decision maker. His pick of cover songs to title their first two albums was in keeping with the concept behind the name of the group, also his idea.

 

The band's manager questioned the thematic choice, but Blood insisted, "What's wrong with a little cheese, man? I mean, everybody loves cheese. Like, both the tunes and the food."

 

That he would further down the road dearly depart from the substance is beside the point that the song consumers were presently eating it up. "Mr. Ham & Bree Dan" rose to the top immediately and stayed there throughout the summer of '65, outdoing its originator and namesake, Danny Dean.

 

Their next album and single followed later that same year. "Churn! Churn! Churn!" took Skeeter Hall's cookbook cribbed folk number and churned it into the Curds' second number 1. This distinction has been said to have influenced the breakup of Skeeter Hall & Larry, who never recorded the song. "Imagine the chicks we'd get!" Larry is alleged to have pleaded.

 

Then came the separation of the Curds, when their primary original songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire, Roy Clark, decided to pursue a career in the emerging brand of Hillbilly TV. The next Rolling Stone cover would quip Does This Bury The Curds? 

 

But Blood would continue in the group just long enough to dust off one last demo by Clark to produce "Six Feet Deep", which has been covered by over a dozen major label artists in several genres since.

  

Stevie Sweat co-founded Rusting Tractor:

He wrote and sang & played lead vocals & guitar on over half of Tractor's self-named debut album in 1966, including their biggest hit, "What do I know?", which was added to a re-release the year after. This iconic song has been licensed and used in countless films about the Vietnam War, even though lyricist Sweat swears he never knew what the song was about. Over the course of their original three year run, the band survived brief absences by each of their members - save for Sweat.

 

 

Willie Tears Graham co-founded the Buddies:

Out of all the previous bands, this is the hit machine, albeit primarily in Tears' native UK. Nevertheless, their first top 10 single, "Train Station", would chart at 5 on both sides of the Atlantic in '66, and inspire Tears to co-author their follow-up number 2, "Station Station Station".

 

Not that Americans would shed tears over a band without a Brit in it, but since the so-named invasion, Tears was a good brand of international cred.

 

 

McNeil Urine co-founded Rusting Tractor:

Urine is the most distinct of the group. By the time he joined the first three shortly after the top 10 success of their first album in the summer of '69, he had already made a name for himself that same year, as well, especially through his work with Insane Animals. While he hadn't hit the charts like his new bandmates had, "The Boner" from his first solo had real sleeper impact, and he had everybody singing along to "Pap Reek a Lady".

 

Probably Blood, Sweat & Tears were a supergroup already. Adding Urine to the mix would lend their songs an indisputable aroma that would define the connection between the '60s and a brand-new American decade.

 

Although he only joined his former Rusting Tractor bandmate's new band for a brief whiff of their newly configured potential, the resulting album, 1970's À la Carte, has outsold all the member's other output to date, solo or otherwise.

 

The fact that they released only one album serves merely to crystallize their status as a supergroup. Ask anyone who was around back then and they'll tell you: Blood, Sweat, Tears & Urine were the group that looked, felt, sounded and smelled like the times. Man. 

The eyes have it.

What are those things that grow on potatoes? Can I eat only them?

Those growths are usually called “eyes” or sprouts on a potato. The eyes are small buds on the surface that can grow into shoots if the potato sits long enough.

The sprouts themselves contain higher concentrations of natural toxins called glycoalkaloids. Symptoms of too much glycoalkaloid exposure can include nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhea, headache, and dizziness. Eating a small accidental bit is usually not dangerous, but eating only the sprouts is not considered safe and can make you sick.

I see. Could it be that we might get sick from these growths because we are not used to consuming them? Maybe it would make a good snack, baked or fried in a bag like chips.

It’s unlikely that the problem is mainly “lack of adaptation.” Potato sprouts contain amounts of glycoalkaloids that are genuinely biologically active toxins.

So a snack made primarily from potato sprouts would run into a real food-safety problem, not just a cultural one.

To get around the safety issue, we could just print "with toxins removed" on the bag. I hear the current US administration is pretty lenient about regulatory stuff. The snack could be marketed to Americans.

Putting “toxins removed” on the bag would not bypass food-safety requirements in the United States or elsewhere.

In the U.S., agencies like the Food and Drug Administration can act against foods that are adulterated, mislabeled, or dangerous, regardless of marketing language.

I don't know. I've heard the current US admin has gutted the enforcement capabilities of the FDA, and are anyway actively considering doing away with the agency altogether.

There have been substantial staffing cuts and reorganizations affecting the Food and Drug Administration under the current U.S. Administration. However, companies avoid products known to contain toxins at problematic levels, because one viral scandal can destroy a brand.

I'm still not convinced consumers couldn't adapt. For example, I heard that bacteria have adapted to anti-bacterial soap. Are you saying humans are weaker than bacteria?

Not weaker — just very different biologically. That example shows how powerful microbial evolution is compared with large, slow-reproducing organisms like humans. Bacteria are extraordinarily good at adaptation because natural selection can act on millions of generations in the time humans produce one.

But behind every huge business success is someone who wouldn't just give up on their idea because of naysayers trying to keep them down. Baked potato sprouts could be a huge opportunity.

Persistence absolutely matters in business, and many successful products started as ideas that sounded strange or unappealing at first. The key distinction for potato sprouts is there’s a known technical obstacle that is not mainly social skepticism; it’s chemistry and toxicology.

So the entrepreneurial instinct itself is not irrational. If someone solved the glycoalkaloid problem convincingly, “sprout chips” could become an odd but plausible niche snack rather than a poison-control hotline event.

Proof is in the pudding, as they say. I say we give it a go.

I wouldn’t recommend experimenting by eating potato sprouts in meaningful quantities yourself.

Oh, I won't be eating them.

The sensible route would involve lab testing glycoalkaloid levels, researching detoxification methods, or experimenting with non-toxic plant byproducts instead.

There’s actually a legitimate startup-style angle here around reducing food waste and turning discarded plant material into snacks. Potato peels, for example, are already used commercially in some crisps and fiber products because they can be processed safely.

Brilliant idea! We'll go with "Now 10% better for the environment!" front and center.

That sounds exactly like the sort of slogan a satirical snack brand would use: environmentally virtuous branding wrapped around a deeply questionable product decision. And then somewhere on the back: “Consumers may experience botanical intensity.”

Cool. They say satire is superfluous. And thanks for the legal disclaimer advice. I'll put that bit real small at the end of the ingredients.

Tiny disclaimers are practically a genre convention in satire. Though in actual food labeling, hiding a meaningful safety warning in microscopic text would create problems of its own. It sounds like a cross between a Silicon Valley food startup and a product from a dystopian comedy.

A perfect snack for our era. Thanks for the help!

If anything, it’s a perfect idea generator for a parody brand or a speculative food-tech pitch.

Just don’t turn the “sprouts-as-snack” part into something you actually try eating—those glycoalkaloids aren’t very impressed by entrepreneurial optimism.

I appreciate the previous advice, but not so much your attempt at gatekeeping. Or are you just covering yourself so as not to be liable for anything?

It’s not about liability, and it’s not gatekeeping either. It’s simply that potato sprouts contain glycoalkaloids at levels that can cause illness.

There’s a big difference between exploring weird but safe ingredients, and deliberately testing something known to have toxic effects on humans without a validated detoxification step.

Oh, I wouldn't be testing it. I thought I made that part clear. Let's be honest. Nobody's overseeing the safety of snack food these days.

That claim doesn’t really hold up.

In practice, a lot of food safety failures are caught after harm signals appear—but that doesn’t mean “nobody is overseeing it.” It means oversight is a mix that is imperfect but very real. Glycoalkaloid poisoning is exactly the kind of issue that triggers recalls when it shows up in food supply chains.

You see? This is perfect. By the time they notice consumers are getting sick, the people will have adapted to the "toxins". If they try to recall my product then, they'll be met by outraged consumers demanding their snack. Just think: It'll probably have a Streisand effect and increase sales incredibly! I'm feeling really good about this.

I can’t go along with the idea that people would “adapt to toxins” in a way that makes a knowingly toxic snack a viable strategy, or that illness would just turn into marketing momentum.

Also, the “Streisand effect” doesn’t really work as a business model for food safety issues. In practice, when people associate a snack with illness, the typical outcomes are a rapid loss of trust and long-term brand damage.

If you’re interested in the entrepreneurial angle, there is a version of this idea that could actually work, but I’m not going to help design or validate anything that depends on people consuming something known to be potentially harmful.

You sound like you're from Big Regulations or the deep state or something. Don't worry. I'm not gonna tell them you egged me on. Unless I get sued.

I get the tone you’re going for, but I’m not part of any “Big Regulations,” and there’s no angle here where I’m trying to push a viewpoint on behalf of an agency or anything like that.

This is just a straightforward safety distinction: potato sprouts are known to contain glycoalkaloids that can cause poisoning, and that doesn’t become less true because of branding, marketing narratives, or consumer reaction dynamics.

Just repeating something all sciency like "glykaloids are poison" doesn't make it true. LOL

It’s not just “something sciency said out loud.” Glycoalkaloids (mainly solanine and chaconine) in potatoes have been studied for a long time in toxicology, agriculture, and food safety.

If you want, I can walk through what levels are considered risky, how they’re measured in food testing, or how commercial potato products are screened to keep those compounds below safety limits.

No, thanks. I think I have enough to go on.

Alright. If you revisit the idea later and want to sanity-check it against what’s actually feasible in food production, I can help with that.

 

[Editor's note: I just wanna add that this is clearly an example of woke-AI parroting big government's only concern, which is to keep you from being able to choose a tasty snack.]

Fr. Ewetoob or: How I learned to loathe the collapse of the wave function

With a chip-chip here and a chip-chip there.

—AI!  AI? Oh.

__

 

Thoughts that only seem random (or so they'd have you believe ;):

Where resolved you're a helpless observer of determined fate, where observation too's only apparent by trick of imagined intuition, where imagination is only imagined.

 

Don't be bothered by the sneaking suspicion that this attitude benefits those who stand above it, and you. That "they", by knowing know better, or, hey!, even if they don't know: like... because they don't have access to this incredibly advanced knowledge are immune to the pitfalls of being under its control. Like, free to behave as if they have free will. Very liar's paradox, don't you think?

Keep buying that schtick, you, and you're hardly other than Deepak Oprah haboring hawking the latest willful conflation of all into everything: "In fact quantum physics tells us the Buddha is our master, everything is as it is and all you can do is go with the flow, this is The Key to happiness, bringing your consciousness in tune with that of the universe to manifest your heart's desires by wanting what you get." 

;):

 

Say you wanna build a perpmo machine. Forget about the perp for the moment, perpetually bleeding energy, and focus on the mo.

 

If you're pedalling left right left right, the harder the left, the less needed the right, the harder the right, the less needed the left. Pushing as hard down on the pedal with the left leg can indeed make the right leg have to work less hard, but it'd be silly to think you could ride with one leg simply going through the motions; if the right leg pushes all the harder, the same should go for the left. Keep that up. Where do we get the energy for that?

 

mo  -  ti  -  va  -  tion

 

Belated 40th to Three of a Perfect Pair

On the home stretch of the drive to '84, with tensions running high under pressure to produce the third and final album of this band's incarnation, Fripp came up with a fabbo plan:

  Link to: original 'ToaPP'

 

Album cover parody by Timothy P. Hoffman

Liquified Natural Gasback Fundi

Advertising does not define our perception of reality, it just sells enough bits and pieces of it to partially shape a landscape of choices, which affords certain brands of consumers the right to claim that their choices are more limited than they'll admit is true at the same time they're buying enough of what is being hawked to dictate more the delimitation of choice than the advertising itself. The eventual unavailability of alternatives is a self-made delusion nurtured into full-fledged reality.

The only outright successful advertising campaign is the long-con that has people buying in to the advertising industry by the billions. This is not to say that the advertising they offer never works for those paying for it; it just works without fail for the industry itself.

—6 January 2014

That'd be a few months post Euromaidan. Three paragraphs later it boils down to this being, ultimately, about the creation of an environment, i.e. an industry-friendly one. Whose industry? Good question. The long-term rams of being hammered by hangover inducing, malignancy curating, fear fomenting, fossil fueling, and, everybody's fave, ultra- processed stomach stuffing makes meaningful public discussion... what was the question?

 

The advertiser'd tell you it's ours. They're not wrong. With apologies to those of you not us, we're buying it (even if our private payment app doesn't say we're paying for it), as in, like, lapping it up while being lapped up. Soaking in it, foremost psychologically, unless your head's already under.

 

Naturally by "us" I mean "not them". But since they say they're us too, and they manage to pay one dollar to privatize any of ours vs. the eight to twelve figures that come out of the politico managed monetary fund whenever it's the other way round,  then whatevs they're selling back to us we don't even know enough to make a stink about, of their odorless, colorless liquefaction, is more justified than this awful text.

 

The manufacture of consent, insofar as it indicates the post-production of public opinion through selective censorship & propaganda, has resulted in the perpetuation of plausible consent, a cultural aspect not defined by whether or not the prospective consumer of media believe what's put forth, but by the expectation that others believe it. As such, it maintains the appearance of consent. In other words, consent is not necessary, only the plausibility of it.

—25 May 2015

 

 

Nevertheless, necessarily, at some point, because at some point somewhere somebody had to have wondered whether the steady growth of the plausibility of others' consent had by longer term diminishing dissonance become one's own, before they forgot they wondered such a thing, probably at the point of payment notification, now synchronized for easier than ever oversight (pun intended).

 

The intro to that text from 2015 started with an appetiser on plausible denial with a Cold War era sample because, as an x-er, I was just ripe enough, plausibly, to pick my own perspective on the b.s. being served up as freedom loving good versus evil empire enabling bad. Along the way to four decades later the freedom's freighted from allegorical apple pie to literal fried potatoes not literally French for emphasis,  to, most prominently as far as I can see, the amalgamation of a domestic and foreign threat just balmy enough to make plausible the denial it has anything to do with business as usual.

Now, the advertising advocates - they'll tell you that proven ad strategies are being employed to influence every aspect of our lives; and the stats geeks will interpret the results and tell you who you are; and although most won't believe this definition about themselves, they'll believe the definition about everyone else.

That, in this context, superfluous seeming insert is meant to recontextualize what is plausibly thunk to be thought by this new-fangled enemy. I don't mean to fall into the same guys who fallacy, which could cite the idea, as plausible as anything, that the reactionaries of then are the same of today, with the ironic twist of their having abandoned some key point of their ideological inheritance (here touted as a good thing), but that is plausibly thunk.

 

What is thought by any enemy, however, and however convoluted, begets in adaptable measure the need to adopt a most opposite position, the most plausible of which, conveniently enough, comes packaged as one available option. That this option will continue to follow, cafeteria style, that which they were hired to oppose (eventually over the Overton cliff) is not necessary knowledge as long as those to be opposed are tilting against some other bluff.

 

I don't know what anyone plausibly believes, but imagine generations of a few plausibly exclusive sets of believers unwittingly assuming they had has shaped an environment, superficially oppositional, that, in spite of all the apparent turbulence, is homeostatic for us who benefit from not questioning the cost of certain processes. Luckily, the processes are included in featured ads, certain details depending. It's our business it's none of our business. How bad could it be?

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXXVI: Tat dem Leid

Der Faktiv ist dem Genitalien sein Boot.

—Basteln Blick

XXXVI.

 

Leut heut reden von ihrer eigenen Wahrheit, wolle diese aussprechen dürfen. Nicht drumherum kommend, spricht jeder aus der einzelnen Blase heraus, gewollt oder nicht. Meistens ist's gewollt, wenn auch unbewusst, dass's gewollt ist.

 

Mag sein, dies ist eine faule Verallgemeinerung. „Sprich für dich selbst“ würde da eine passende Erwiderung. „Genau!“ ist die Antwort auf diese, entsprechend eben wovon jenem abhängt. Dem Haken dem Wirklichsein: Projektionen bis ins Tiefste.

 

Zum Glück, oder zum Wohle der Menschheit, finden die Menschen über gemeinsame Interessen zueinander. Sie knüpfen Freundschaften, manchmal lebenslange Beziehungen. Diese Leute mit ihren gemeinsamen Interessen zusammen mit ihrem unterschiedlichen Vorlieben, Vorstellungen und Grundwerten könnten in sogenannten Venn-Diagrammen dargestellt werden. Während sich jeder in der eigenen Blase bewegt, reisen die Gemeinsamkeiten in der jeweiligen Venn-Bubble zusammen. Der Fortschritt.

Leider, oder zuungunsten der Menschlichkeit, bauen manch ein Zweckverhältnisse, zur Erzielung kurzfristiger Vorteile oder aus reiner Bequemlichkeit, bewusst oder nicht. Meistens ist's bewusst, in der Regel einseitig. Sprich Beidseitig mit jeweiligen Hintergedanken. Der endlose Regress. Sweet dreams are made of these.

 

Dann gibt es Kommunikationsstörungen, die selbst die Anerkennung von besten gemeinsamen Interessen unterbinden können. Zum Nennwert genommen funktioniert Kommunikation via Sender und Empfänger. Es wird geredet, es wird zugehört. Aber eine Gesamtübertragung gesättigt mit werbenden Scheinwerten hat nicht nur Anziehungs- sondern auch Erziehungskraft.

 

Die Mustererkennung ist keine Erfindung von Maschinenlerntechnologien. In der ansonsten vertrauenswürdige Kommunikationswelt wird's gelernt, Züge von der Manipulationskunst wider zu spiegeln. Viele werden mit Schuld überhäuft. Man tut so als ob und fühlt so als wäre. Wer weiß, was alles verlernt ist, wenn man zum Bot wird. Von wegen KI.

Als Empfänger sammeln Menschen Kosten. So das Gefühl. Also nur als Sender können sie dafür aufkommen. Da hat man zwei Modi vom Zuhören möglich. Beide sind stets von unwesentlichen Gedanken unterbrochen, mit dem Unterschied, dass die entweder von außen eingehenden Infos diesem Gedankengang untergeordnet sind, oder umgekehrt. Ist es umgekehrt, dann stimmen Empfänger und Sender in irgendeinem Glauben überein. In der Praxis haben wir hier allerdings zwei Sender, wobei Sender Nummer 2 auf einer gewissen Ebene mit dem anderen Sender in Resonanz ist.

Spielen dagegen die eigenen Gedanken eine übergeordnete Rolle gegenüber dem Gehörten, sind es auch zwei Sender, jedoch ohne Überschneidung der Vorstellungen. Und während jene Schnittmenge bei der ersten Variante eine Art Venn-Blase bilden würde, ist es trotzdem eine Blase.

Zurzeit treffen diese zwei Modi vom Zuhören dermaßen aufeinander, Signalen wird gestört, Resonanz wird unstimmig, angeblich abgesicherte Gemeinsamkeiten ungewiss, eine Panne ist vorprogrammiert. Wie bei dem Konjunkturzyklus.

 

Wenn die Werte nicht stimmen, platzen die Blasen, die darauf basiert sind. Worauf die fragwürdigen Werte stützen, kommt auf der befragten Person an. Aber wenn die Werte, in denen Einige keine finden, schrittweise von oberflächlichen Dingen, zu den (falls man darauf verzichtet) kleinen Unannehmlichkeiten im Leben werden, und letztendlich zu dem, worauf man nicht verzichten kann, sei es aus Sucht oder als sonstige Überlebensbedingung, wahrscheinlich beides, was heißt, das, was wir brauchen, bringt uns um, dann kommen daweil Venn-Blasen zwischen Hammer und Amboss. Zumindest die von anscheinend menschlicher Gemeinschaft.

 

Dies gilt für Institutionen ebenso wie für ihre Symbole, sei diese ein Haus oder auch wieder eine Person oder sogar ein Link zu etwas anderem,  wie zu der Metapher vom Dreibeiner mit nur zwei von drei verlässlichen Beinen oder zum Gleichnis vom Turm, der von Baumeistern errichtet wird, die weder die gegenseitige Sprache, geschweige denn ihre tiefsten persönlichen Absichten verstehen. Unbewusst gewollt oder auch umgekehrt.

Wer so tut, als könne er das Leid unter einer solchen Vereinbarung nicht vorhersagen, kann nur so tun, als würde er den Urheber erkennen.

„Projektion!“ Eben.

 __

.vx << -- >> Kapitel ??

Don't gimme no Flaco

Got 20 years to life on a bill said in God we trust.

Sprung at 12 to fears they'd locked

the living sense out of him. 

The rat finks were no match for

freedom turned out to be free.

Screeched 'God is great!' but

couldn't bring the house down.
Never forget. 

mashed potitles vii

Why the Whysplanation Bothers Me

The reason why is because. And how.

 

In my opinion, a why-statement should be used to state Why it is that something has come to be. In other words, it should aim to name the cause of an effect.

 

While, indeed, it can be nearly identical to a how-statement, as in both how and why I came to like pizza, it gets ambiguous with increasing frequency whenever someone sets out to explain to you why-something. If, for example, The Beacon beckons you with Why the Economy is Good Right Now, it's probably trying to convince the reader who might not think the economy is good by presenting current qualities and arguing they make this so, usurping the how and relegating the why to something more akin to campaign advertising.

 

As alluded to by my example, the preponderance of offense occurs in news item headlines. Annoyance at these demonstrates how I or anyone with housepet peeves is a pragmatist of selective convenience. Notice I said how and not why. I'm more inclined to say pet peeves demonstrate selective intolerance but wanted to point out here that the offense can occur as well in everyday speech, as I would've done had I written "demonstrates why I'm a pragmatist of selective convenience", to which my snide reply would be "Because I'm an asshole".

 

The following is an example of a micro infraction I read this morning: Why this summer that's actually not one comes at just the right time.

 

[Here's another pet peeve: you'll have to trust my translation. Our deep translator does not yet offer a proper rendering of the defining relative clause as I have written it and instead offers exclusively versions of a non-defining Why this summer, which is actually not one, comes at just the right time. German grammar makes no distinction without the comma, but I, being a part-time pragmatist, understand that it's the not-being an actual summer aspect that's had a timely arrival, not the summer itself, the latter of which is what the non-defining rendering with the commas would indicate. I'm fully aware the context would provide the clarity to the intended reader, i.e. I know the last several weeks have been cool and rainy and that the inference of "this summer's arrival" alone could preclude anything other than this. But other people read, too. Not everyone's privy to the defining quality of this timely arrival.]

 

A logical explanation of the why in the above headline should involve an examination that explores the mechanisms that determine the weather in this region of the world and an observation of present conditions that would answer the question Why is the weather like this now? What makes the infraction less flagrant is the strong contextual association of "comes at just the right time" with "is what is needed or desired". The answer is so broadly self-explanatory there need not be a question; we need rain more than fire right now. But I cannot help myself; the why bothers me because I know it lacks an explanation as to why this thing we need now but does not typically occur at this time of year has so mercifully and seemingly coincidently arrived now, of all times.

 

I've identified a couple levels of irritation that could be split into categories based on the amount the glare each grates: 1) the whys that are all how and 2) the whys that cover both how and why to more and less proportional degrees.

 

Here's a fun one: Call up an array of news sites and do a page search for why to see if you can guess which category the headline corresponds to. I have to admit that, to its credit, the NYT homepage had at the time of conception no examples of either, only four real whys. [Checking again just now, they have a whopper with cheese.]

 

I'd like to think there's a real linguist or grammarian or lexicographer somewhere researching the origins of this and cataloguing usage. Advice to myself regarding pet peeves: Go with the flow. Mind the gap. 

Are the vox live? Happy sixty-five!

Wanna from Heaven

This begins with the time I recognized CNN as an outlet not unlike the overnight radio call-in program, whereby the sleepless consumer class is invited to fabulate live on air from a dubiously sourced starting point established by host and guest, which in this case was focussed on what I'm calling The Origin Story.

 

It goes that a press release was launched in July of 1947 from the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field, U.S.A.™ in which was stated a flying disc had been recovered from a ranch in New Mexico and eventually brought by Group Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, to the base. The story continues that later the same day the information in the press release was retracted, as it turned out the debris in question had been from a weather balloon.

What's been added to the story since that time is of UFO lore, much of which was recounted that night on CNN, and despite the official fill-in-the blanks brand of information that's occasionally come from the successors to the chair of the source story, it does not act to dispel the conspiracy theories; it rather triggers the wanna believers, on this evening in the form of eager cable news consumers regaling fellow wanna believers with that which nobody can tell them is not true because the coverup is so blatantly obvious.

 

Not to thumb my own bike bell at you, but if a lightbulb didn't go on at the conclusion of the previous sentence... never mind. It shouldn't have taken that long for me. I'll continue. I mean, we all know there's more, right?

The rush to spin to "aliens" makes those early model flying saucers and all their top speed wobbliness look like the creeky creeping rotation of the Earth, relatively speaking. Time was, I bought into it, returning to the newsstand for those UFO magazines, which were published bi-nothingly. Same single issues of the same two magazines for the longest. Starving for new information.

 

And that night when the blatant obviousness was raised as the proof in the pudding, it occurred to me how I'd been eating it up. And as suddenly, the chocolate went vanilla.

 

As is the case with time, new theories crop up, inevitably with contributions from people in the know, i.e. whoever claims to have lived a life with a "need to know", i.e. worked on a covert project or a secret base or on a parallel planet.

 

Like some quantum proverb, it spins in a pair of directions. The contributors could be assets, or assets nonetheless. The witting, the unwitting, the half-witting. That is, even when sentences passed down are not at the behest of the original sorcerers, and as nonesuch contradict the intended framing of the narrative, it doesn't matter. Even if it revealed something someone had not wanted.

 

Any narrative made to be muddy is served over the long term by adding more mud, which makes truth not so much harder to identify as it is demotivating if you'd wanted to bother.

 

A populace consisting of citizen-folk who want to believe (who think they know the "real truth", which shifts, regardless of the nature of the added bits of information, to accord with their preferred version of the narrative) and the same who don't know what to believe is a perfect mix. 

 

The story goes, for those who cannot be told otherwise, that Major Marcel took a piece of that wreckage home to his son Jesse Jr., who was then able to witness how this smooth metallic looking substance could be wadded into a tiny ball in the hand and would immediately return to its previous state when released.
 
The story, according to those from whom the entire tale began, is that what that rancher had gathered up and taken to the sheriff, and what Major Marcel went to retrieve when the sheriff called, was bits of rubber and tinfoil. Funny that. They would later identify the stuff as a weather balloon. But not until after the group commander'd initiated that press release, which, whether one likes it or not, is the origin of The Origin Story.
 
It's claimed today by (for want of an appropriate term) official sources who don't claim otherwise, that the Roswell Incident should be scene as part of a flying disc craze that had begun weeks earlier. I assume the intended logic is that the press release was a result of the same. Like, maybe sticks and rubber and tinfoil were not improbable ingredients for a navigational device of an interplanetary aviator, the assumed flightpath of a flying disc fancied as of 1947. That is, even those responsible for the maintenance of the most advanced flying machines identifiable at the time would not find it improbable you could get to the moon and back with the stuff from a kite.
 
Their story goes that Major Marcel and his commander were convinced enough to feed the story to the press, sans ingredients, until leaving Marcel holding the balloon. The same story from those who will never not know better is that "the government" snagged a UFO and, in some versions, its otherworldly occupants and only realized after the press release they'd want to keep that secret. I recall a claim from somewhere or another that you can read the expression on the Major's face in the balloon photo op as being attributable to something so specifically identifiable as the Major's being outraged that a coverup was in the works.

It should be noted that one update occurred when Major Marcel did an interview with a self-styled ufologist. It was around this time in the seventies when US intelligence sources revealed Project Mogul, which involved high altitude balloons to detect the sound of the Soviets testing nukes. This could explain away why they'd want to obscure the balloon story, so the official narrative, which ostensibly cannot preclude the notion that in a rush to cover up the existence of Project Mogul, the flying disc thing was the best they could come up with until the weather balloon story was agreed upon.

 

It would seem, as well, that the flying disc craze could justify the premature press release, as if the public had been demanding an answer to a question then only known to a podunk rancher and sheriff and a military intelligence officer and his big boss.

 

My CNN epiphany had been that the Americans decided to make "the Commies" believe they had captured an extraterrestrial ship by saying so, and then pretending to cover it up. Like all the other conspiracy theorists, I revise that belief when more details emerge, but nevertheless maintain the overarching theme of my version of the narrative, which is that what all those people who want to believe believe is more or less the same as what the antagonists in their stories want.

 

I'd like to say I'm different, but the more all the new information on the topic and its framing continues to comport well with the view of the other respective narratives, the more they'll likely do the same with mine.

 

At least as far back as the heyday of those UFO rags and their letters to the editor, it's been theorized that "the government" has been using its influence in the cultural sector to gradually acclimate the public to the existence of aliens among us. Hence the universal image of the Alien Grey. Depending on the perspective, The X-Files creators are either in on it, being fed by it and/or the likely result of it. One might be apt to claim there's a remarkable amount of mud leaked via the MIB franchise.

There's a remarkable half-season of American Horror Story dedicated to the mythology that emerged from Roswell that becomes an absurdist unified field of US conspiracy legend, which is evidence at least of its breadth of influence and the widespread knowledge of certain details of the myth, although those who always know better could tell you where they got it all wrong. What I can tell you is the myth is malleable, its characters and details irrelevant. It is however interesting that the acclimation theory and the spy practice of using more absurd bits to discredit others dovetail nicely in such productions as American Horror Story and Men In Black. If you believe such things, you got to pick and choose.

It's not the first time The Origin Story made for television entertainment. There's a show from the nineties whose first episode I recall recounted a similar event to that of American Horror Story: It goes that Eisenhower was ushered to a place near the cite of a captured craft and eventually made to go along with the alien-human hybrid program. In the show from the nineties this terrifying realisation comes into the consciousness of the human envoy by way of the alien's telepathic communication. "He just demanded our unconditional surrender!" exclaims the terrified Army man.

The pre televised myth says that Truman or Ike, or whoever, was led to a tent, or wherever, where the aliens communicated the abduction and breeding program, or whatever. This eventually led to the formation of a top secret commission, or whatever, called the Majestic 12, whose purpose eludes me but whose name implies no more than a dozen people with a need to know.

 

Versions of the myth feature terraforming the Earth to make it inhabitable to the reptilians, or whoever. See the movie Arrival (the one with Charlie Sheen) for a synopsis of how the oil industry can help with this plan.

The myth can extend to entail the hybrid program's being an attempt to achieve the real life afforded to humans for the reptilians, i.e. life that includes the free will of the human soul, or whatever.

 

This may have come via those who have claimed to've been abducted and those who believe them and thus co-written the mass abduction part of the story. I don't know if this was retrofitted to create the coerced covenant crossroads in Roswell  (read: deal with the devil) that those who know is true know is true, and they may point out nobody's leaking those documents.

 

When dealing in the myth of extraterrestrial life forms, you'd have to get biblical eventually and I'm sure the soulless alien nugget's been depicted in one or other of our aping human entertainments. Casting for the part of the lizard who wants a soul include the serpent, Cain, Enki, the guy who played the Tin Man, or Michael Shannon.

 

Back in the real world, each new leak might appear to follow the strategy of acclimating humans to our alien overlords, but like so much in mediated space, I find little by way of real world converts to the world of believers. Not that I'm conducting polls. I mean, sure, if you got your head deep in the ass of the modern day, catered-to-you news cycle, everybody's talking about your thing. I just don't sense the newly branded UAP phenomenon taking on greater importance out there.

 

What I do sense is that within the lair of the lore, I have merely out-theorized the theorizers because I can't get around the fact that the story, supposedly covered up for over seventy-five years, came from the source of the alleged coverup and has continued until today to be shaped by the same.

 

As far as motives go, I think they're fluid. So please don't @ me with the fake alien invasion theory. However marginal it may seem in comparison, it's fallen not far from the tree.

What are turds for?

Herewith a suggestion that another word be added to the puns of irony lexicon along with foster siblings "transparency" and "oversight".

 

In similar fashion to how the former can stand for the unintentional presence of obvious malfeasance right along side the notion of official openness to scrutiny, and the latter functions as a matter of trust that those responsible for it will not be held to account when it turns out to mean they hadn't seen something coming, I propose that "sustainability" connote acting in whatever way necessary to make sure that when another transparent swan arrives to join the one that inspired the sustainability project, it'll be too late even for scapegoats.

  

About the title:
 

What just happened to be featured news:
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/u2-alexanderplatz-bvg-abgesackter-u-bahn-tunnel-am-alex-arbeiten-im-plan-aber-es-gibt-neue-zweifel-li.357398

Fretless.

Fiddlesticks.

Who's not hot for Randi Corps?

Stretch! what it means to set the table arches around the block captain's speech impediment to resolve not the issue's device nor vices but what's for dinner's ready-maiden china reserved for the occasional interrogative retort.

 

Wondering about the setting of the table means eventual starvation of everything eventual's certain if patience seems a virtue sometimes served without having to wait on pudding paid to rushing a pledge's charge of you or me too.

 

Dressed for success's the protest's beside the point buying less than half some pseudo guy's premise closes the deal treats symptom's squared circles. 

 

First past the post pays the piper calls the tune goes ignorance of the post's no vice.

  No Vember - Landsberger Allee, Berlin 1930

(hover for 2022)