No human being, whether now or 10,000 years ago, can fail to be awestruck by the majesty of the Sun-god, as He once again rises from the underworld to light and warm mother Earth, bringing life to an existence that would otherwise be a struggle against the cold and dark.
DCNN AI is better than me (by about 10 country miles) at Go, but it doesn't have a clue about thinking, including thinking about golf.
Its latest banality makes steam come out of my ears, when it totally misrepresents the kinetics of the golfswing because it doesn't know a damn thing about anything, except climbing gradients, so it doesn't know anything about whatever the hell it's rabbiting on about. Bah! This DCNN snake-oil they're calling AI is A all right, but it isn't I, not by a long chalk, so it should be renamed ASS (= Artificially Senseless Stupidity) and it should be banned from all internet, and everywhere else too, except the Go board (and chess board)
Tommy's shoulder DOES NOT drop! It rotates around the axis of the spine in an inclined plane, you stupid bloody AI idiot!!!
Only a complete moron like DCNN ASS could come up with such a misleading misinformational mistaken load of crap as this. Bah!
Child abuse is a dreadful crime, but a wrongful diagnosis of child abuse is itself a dreadful abuse of power.
New evidence has been discovered that proves that babysitter Lindsay Partin did not assault or murder 3 year-old Hannah Wesche in 2018. That new evidence is a new and, for the first time, a proper scientific analysis of the factual medical data that was recorded at the time.
The debate over SBS/AHT has reached new heights of cognitive rigidity and
entrenchment. In this climate of fog and hostility to objectivity, it is difficult to incorporate new information and alter perspectives, and newcomers to the subject like me with a fresh and objective viewpoint that differs from the central dogma of <redacted>.org are excommunicated from it by Holy Office mandarins justifying their orange judgment of capital punishment by secret, confidential, anonymous eminence grises witch-hunter accusations of spamming as a cover story for their real motives, which remain covert and subjective and are no doubt religious and/or egotistical, or they just don't like me because i am black.
The reaction to negative
feedback – that is, challenges to the blanket denial of even a soupcon of the SBS/AHT hypothesis – has been
doubling down and increased overconfidence on the part of its fishnet derniers. What the international medical, scientific, and legal community
needs now when it comes to the SBS/AHT debate is a back to square one good hard look at facts instead of opinions (especially the contrived opinions of duplicitous lawyers who are only in it for themselves), an
intentional effort to create what this author (ie me) has described as a ‘kindergarten-level explanation of words of one syllable' that juries and lawyers and pediatricians and yellow press journalists can grasp - and even, God willing, at a stretch, Supreme Court judges - a high validity Common Ground environment with pediatricians and child abuse specialists where there is the (albeit slim) chance of reaching stable
relationships and prolonged study of objectively identifiable cues and
subsequent events and outcomes]. That book [2] is said to engage that process, but the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that the members and officials of <redacted>.org do not.
- adapted from Barry Scheck, After a Quarter of a Century, Have Any
Lessons Been Learned from the Trial of Louise Woodward?, in [1]
i demonstrably lack the political skill to win friends and influence people, but i won't give up on Ohio v Partin and will struggle to get her justice until my dying day, which is just around the corner, so i haven't got time to waste on any more humourless bigheaded twonks.
If, as a result of the surgeon's scraping, some calcified hematoma slid down the faix, that might make it look like whatever was there before has enlarged, but so far as i can see at the moment (which admittedly isn't very far) that doesn't prove that blood and bone cannot be differentiated on a CT scan, and it could be that the second image was of a different slice than the first, which would explain the apparent enlargement, so hopefully it can be argued that it can't be argued that a hematoma cannot be semiquantitatively aged from CT image alone, especially when you are denied access to surgeon report information that might contradict the prosecution argument that the hematoma was less than an hour old, and that the child, in the space of a minute, ran to the kitchen, chucked ketchup down the toilet, and was floored and killed by an uppercut "Leopard Punch" because she was whining for her Dad and still half asleep, all in the space of a minute, which is a bloody ridiculous fabricated story put out in unconnected pieces by the yellow press mouthpiece for a sheriff doing what he's told by a ruthless witch-hunter. sorry for my spelling.
i
beseech thee, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may
be mistaken.
I believe the truth is actually easy to find, and easy to say. It is this:
1. baby shaking can cause severe, even fatal, injury
2. therefore, an injured baby with no other symptoms of disease or history of accident may have been shaken
3. therefore, Possible Abusive Head Trauma can be diagnosed
4. But unqualified Abusive Head Trauma cannot, ever! It is not a medical diagnosis, it's an accusation of criminality.
5.
Therefore the name AHT should be changed to HT, because you don't need
an MD to know that action and reaction are equal and opposite so A
hitting B has the same effect as B hitting A (except, it has been
officially argued, when it comes to imaginary aluminium aeroplanes and
real steel columns, but that's another story).
Empirical studies1-4
have confirmed the widely believed notion that history taking is an
important aspect of the diagnostic process, including in the diagnosis
of infants where the history is provided by the caregiver.5
Yes, it
is important, not for the reason given, but because it lies at the heart of the AHT controversy,
because it implicitly implies the irrational presumption that Abuse can
be diagnosed.
it
may be widely believed among readers of the American Society of Child
Abuse Protection or whatever it's called, but it is not widely believed
by anyone who has ever studied cause and effect in physics, or in
cognitive psychology.
caregiver history is indeed very important for medical diagnosis of possible cause of inferredprobable injury, so that the injury can be probably identified, so that probably effective
therapy can be identified - but caregiver history - and medical
symptoms too, for that matter - are wholly unreliable as a source of
proof of abuse.
Because abuse cannot - should not - be diagnosed by a doctor untrained in criminal investigation. It is an inference of criminality, which depends on so many other things, notably forensic evidence and deductive reasoning.
sh, rh, and brain swelling are NOT the fingerprints of abuse. they are only the fingerprints or probable trauma, but NOT of what probably caused that trauma.
It's Elementary, my dear Watson. Reasoning is the gold standard for deciding abuse beyond reasonable doubt - the clue is in the name. Simple, accurate, helpful to all concerned, except money-grubbers.
As
a shaken baby myself, battered for my naive crying, by obdurate
aggressive nameless cowards hiding under your skirts, i can testify what
it feels like to be on the receiving end of abuse from loco in parentis
authority and attack-dogs.
Of
course, there would be a downside: if the truth about shaking babies
ever came out, there would be no more unjustified sbs court cases, and
no more business for unscrupulous defense lawyers, so they will want to suppress it.
So once again, and not for the first time, i am banging my head against a brick wall.
these 4 fellows are professional readers of body language and micro-expressions, and all the commenters (including me) are rank amateurs, most of them more curious about the subjects than about their body language "tells". But occasionally a subject comes along where we amateurs already know a lot about the subject, plus we know something about the analysts.
In this case, what we know about the subject is that he's not what he's made out to be - plus we also know that the 4 analysts are all government contractors, so their job here is to pretend that the subject is what he's made out to be. That means the analysts are going to be telling some lies here, giving us amateurs an interesting opportunity to see if we can use what the experts have taught us about body language to discover when they, the experts, are themselves being deceptive :)
Our job is made easier when one of them says something that we already know is a lie, so we can see if his own body language gives the lie away.First up, Greg, starting at 26:33 - he's going to tell us a lie, so see if you can spot anything when he does so.
The lie he's going to tell is that he will claim that back in the 1960s, it was easier to get close to VIPs than it is today. We know this is a lie, because for over 2000 years, it's never been possible to get close to a VIP, except when they are unimportant VIPs like King Charles, who have no say in anything that happens in government.
Your task is made more difficult because Greg is wearing glasses, and he has a naturally unexpressive face; but you know he's going to tell a whopper of a lie, a simply monumental lie,
because no way in the world would Sirhan could have possibly known Kennedy was going through the kitchen, let alone be able to walk in there, with a gun, unless he was brought on by the same people that changed Kennedy's route at the last moment to stage the assassination live on TV,
just the same grandiose stunt they did with his brother before him, to prove to everyone in the know who might be tempted to spill the beans just how overwhelmingly and irresistably powerful they were, and hence what the price for whistleblowing would be.
Can you spot Greg's "tell"?
i saw it ! i hadn't expected to be able to, but it turned out to be a huge "tell", easy to spot. It's at 27:48 - Greg suddenly drops his head and closes his eyes, to avoid being seen to look down and to the left, and his head even tilts a touch to the right, as he consciously tries to conceal his lie.
Freeze-frame at that instant, and we can see Scott looks very very sad, as he knows his pal is blatantly lying and giving it away by his body language. Mark's face shows deep concentration, as he studies Greg's face on his own screen. And Chase has his usual bland smooth smooth used-car salesman look, as he waits for Greg's fish (ie. you, the viewer) to jump into his (Chase's) net.
Hey, thanks guys - you taught me how to spot when you yourselves are lying! :)
25 October 2023
The Black Hole of Kirkpatrick's by Proxy
The judge in the Halloween Spectacle Jack and John suit ((Kowalski) vs (Johns Hopkins (JH))) told both parties yesterday (25 October) that he wants to steer them away from the "black hole" of Munchausen's by Proxy (MbP).
From a practical point of view, that's a sound strategy, because it would indeed suck all the time and energy from the media circus, and the toing-and-froing wouldn't ever get out again to see the light of day, and we the audience would all be left in the dark not knowing which way is up, and the judge himself would be locked in, unable to get away to get the decent haircut and shave that he so badly needs.
But from a public interest point of view, it's the worst decision he's made so far, for two reasons:
(1) Not only is Jack's sharp spiv-suit an offence against good taste, his lawsuit is too, because it falsely accuses JH of deliberately harming Maya for personal gain, the precise definition of MbP.
(2) The suit itself is an example of MbP, or more correctly, Mb(P1bP2) - because in reality it's not Jack's suit at all, it's Anderson's, with Jack as his proxy P1, seeking to harm proxy P2 (JH), for Anderson's personal gain (in the process harming Jack as well as JH, because the suit is an Emperor's suit of no clothes at all!!
It is in the public interest because although JH, like the entire USA, and indeed the entire world, is a privately owned for-profit enterprise, it makes its money by providing public services (healing the sick), and Anderson is trying to enhance his own reputation by damaging theirs. This must not be allowed. Anderson must be stripped bare of his Machiavellian cloak of disguise and forced to run naked through the streets so we the public can throw rotten eggs and old cabbages at him to assuage our indignation at his effontery.
(3) [Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition] it's in the public interest bigger picture, because it would tickle the public into ruminating about the mechanism of MbP, which is the very mechanism that MPs use the world over to misuse their office for personal gain, and by entire Deep State governments with their own publics as their proxies, the secondmost famous example in recent history being the "Day of Infamy" Mb(MbP) sandwich of Pearl Harbour, in which the Gnomes of Zurich deliberately hurt the American Public for personal gain by lending money to their governments so they could fight imaginary enemies made real by the same trick performed over in Japan by Lord Peter Semple on behalf of the British Government to sucker the nutcases in Tokyo into believing they could get away with it.
The firstmost famous example of MbP on the world stage is of course the secondmost example chronologically, which added the e-technology of real-time chroma-key video masking Virtual Reality Television which at the last count was still tricking 30% of the American public into believing that the planes they had seen on their Goggle-boxes 23 years ago were real.
edit: At 8:08:23 of Law&Crime video of Day 23 of the trial, one of Beata's blog entries is shown - by the defence! - but what Beata says in her blog is the clearest indication i've seen yet that Beata did NOT have MbP, so it's astonishing that it's not the plaintiff showing it.
The reason i say it's an indication that Beata wasn't hurting her child to gain attention for herself, is that either she's as cunning a liar as Tony Blair, or she is genuinely feeling empathy as well as sympathy and concern for Maya.
Call me naive, but on this evidence i can't believe Beata was a Tony Blair type. She was going the wrong way; she was doing Maya harm, and she would have killed her if she hadn't killed herself first, but i think she was just a desperate woman deluded by a couple of quacks, who were themselves deluded.
Even decent, otherwise intelligent, people can be deluded - there are millions of them who believe in God, but there is no bloody God! The proof is in the 10-part series Who Invented God: Number 29.
Trial Day 24:
"Teach me faith, O God, and grant me hope" - Beata Kowalski
Beata's Maya-memo of Nov 22 suggests to me that Beata is heavily under the influence of the Catholic Church; at one point she says a priest dabbed holy oil on Maya's head and suddenly "everything just got better".
She is as deluded as the desperate crowds at Lourdes. You've got to hand it to Roman Catholicism, it's got more effective mind control techniques than MK-Ultra or Guantanamo Bay.
Nov 24 self-email Maya-memo is disturbing; Beata praises herself a bit too much for my liking. If her concern was Maya, why would she even bother writing about how mommy wasn't getting paid for helping her own daughter??
i'm veering towards MbP now.... it's an astounding diagnosis, it sounds like fantasy itself, but there are also people who kill for pleasure; or who get Bulimia; or cut their arms to ease the pain of anxiety; or throw their tennis raquets or golf clubs in frustration, or give money to paedophiles so imaginary Jesus will save them from burning in Hell.... maybe MbP isn't so different from those other cases of irrationality after all?
Nov 25 self-email Maya-memo has me (almost) going back in the other direction! This one is all about Maya, all about Beata's empathy for Maya. there's only two small references to herself.
Jesus, if i had a daughter who seemed to be in constant pain, i would be running around in ever-decreasing circles too...
And let's not forget that everyone who writes a diary, or an autobiography, or who goes on the stage, or into the movies, is basically trying to communicate, even if self-indulgently to themselves alone, or to an imaginary readership, perhaps hoping that a real someone out there will appreciate them - such behaviour is not aberrant, but natural for a social animal that gets by with a little help from your friends...
Why did Shakespeare, or Hemingway, or Groucho Marx, write books? Why am i writing this?
It's all for the same reason; the same reason that Beata wrote her Maya-memos....
Trial Day 24 3:36:00
oh dear - for the first time in this whole trial, Anderson makes a valid point - and what a point! Smith did not mention in her report that Kirkpatrick had told her it was his idea to dope Maya up to the eyeballs . Oh dear god, this a dreadful deception by omission on Smith's part, because Kirkpatrick's admission means without a shadow of a doubt that Beata was NOT pretending - she was following Kirkpatrick's advice in good faith, and therefore it was most definitely NOT Munchausen's by Proxy, it was Kirkpatrick's by Proxy !!!oh my god. (not that there is a god, you understand - it's just an expression of dismay)Even so, Smith did have to separate Beata from Maya, but only because Beata had been led astray by Kirkpatrick.
Smith saved Maya, but she also killed Beata. Oh, Jesus, this is worse than tragic.
3:50:24 Smith reveals herself to be pig-headed and narcissistic, insisting that "medical child abuse" caused by a parent's psychiatric disorder is a medical diagnosis that is her right to diagnose, without any psychiatric evaluation of the alleged abuser. That's insane!
A similar leap in the dark happened in the Lindsay Partin trial, where "child abuse specialist" Dr Makoroff diagnosed abusive head trauma, based on - wait for it, you won't believe this - a "medical history" consisting SOLELY of a one-line report from a social worker that "Dad said" that the victim had been fine the evening before!
Update: Having now heard Maya's victory press statement, I can't imagine what it must be like to be utterly devoid of any empathy
for all the doctors and nurses and child protection staff that tried to
help her, who she is now kicking in the face for their selfless
efforts. They would be fully justified in refusing to treat her again.
22 October 2023
The Deadly Pseudoscience of Dr Kirkpatrick
Buggy Microsoft Windows became famous for getting its knickers in a twist and going into a catatonic Blue Screen . But by giving it a "Brain Reset" - switching it off, and then back on again, it lost its memory of what had bothered it, and it could start again as if nothing had ever happened.
Kirkpatrick guessed that he could do the same with hysterical histrionic humans, switching them off into a ketamine coma (just short of brain dead), and switching them on again a while later, by which time they would have lost their memory of whatever it was that had been bugging them.
Unfortunately, Kyle wasn't merely a temporary software memory figment of imagination in Maya's emotionally insecure subconscious which had got its knickers in a twist over her Mom's switch of attention to the new baby, he was still there. So when the cyclone hit and triggered Round 2 of Maya's Blue Screen Conversion Disorder , Beata's own hysterical histrionic insecurity spiralled down when it hit the bump of Johns Hopkins' commonsense, and headed for the hills, giving Smarmy Anderson his big chance to get rich quick.
God never intended that the hot and sticky southern states of USA would be inhabited by Northern European white men evolved to live in the cooler climes of higher latitudes, so they became a hornet's nest breeding ground for insecure hysterical histrionic nutcases like the Klu Klux Klan, opening the Garden of Eden door of plenty for opportunistic snake-oil salesmen ambulance-chaser rabble-rousers like Alex Murdaugh, Smarmy Anderson, Netflix, Daily Mail, Court TV, Law&Crime Network, Agatha Christie, and Alfred Hitchcock.
it looks like Beata probably did not have MBP after all, because my Eureka moment copied below (which just has to be accurate!) indicates that initially, Beata was responding to Maya's genuine CRPS-ish Conversion Disorder, so it was Maya, not Beata, who started the whole thing.
Then for other reasons (not MBP), Beata went crazy trying to fix Maya's problem, which would have been as mysterious to her as mine was to my mother's. Slightly different symptoms (asthma vs. excema), but same underlying cause of T-cells over-responding to subconscious stress.
i'm only sorry i didn't figure it out before Beata took her own life.
It does mean that Jack doesn't have to give back the money he got from Sally Smith, if my guess that it wasn't MBP after all is correct. So Maya can keep her new car!
Eureka moment: 10 year-old Maya wasn't always telling the truth, that much is certain. But did she know that what she was saying wasn't true? That's less certain, although she herself did once say when first admitted that her life was a lie.... but then she maybe enjoyed the hospital experience (much nicer for her than what she had been going through before), and tried to prolong it, by pretending. Is pretending the same as lying? As Shakespeare puts it: "There are more things going on in Maya's head, Horatio, than are ever dreamed of in your philosophy"
i speak from personal experience: at Maya's age, i had constantly itchy fingers and backs of knees, a classic mild form of CRPS, which drove my own Mum (herself a nurse) crazy trying to solve it. All the doctors diagnosed contact dermatitis and prescribed steroid creams and once even x-ray treatment, burning the affected area. Nothing worked.
Then, at age 14, i went to France, on a school exchange visit, to stay for a few weeks with a French family, and the following year, their son came to stay with us. I enjoyed France so much, i went back every summer holiday thereafter. Every time i came back from France, my dermatitis had magically cleared up. It was a miracle. But a few weeks after being back in England, my dermatitis came back again. My Mum decided it must be the French water, which was softer than chalky hard English water. That made sense, because skin tests had showed i was allergic to chalk (and everything else they tested!).
At age 27, after getting a PhD, i wheedled a visit to the Professor of Dermatology by pretending to his secretary i was a doctor (only half a lie, as i was entitled to use the title "Dr"). He took one look, and said "You have atopic excema. Change your soap". I did, and it worked.
30 years later, i got interested in "Biological Computation", and in the course of my researches, learned that excema is caused by an overactive immune system susceptible to stress.
I hadn't known it, but my childhood dermatitis was in fact not an allergy due to topical environmental irritants like chalk and pollen, but a conversion disorder - a systemic internal immune system overreaction to subconscious stress, which was relieved every time i was living in the French family, because their mother was, unlike my own, non-judgmental towards me.
So, Maya, i know how you feel, and why you got asthma conversion disorder (it's the same fundamental reason i got mine, even though my symptoms looked and felt different to yours), and why you feel the way you do.
I think your Mom didn't know what she was doing; you can forgive her - she loved you so much, it drove her crazy trying to solve your problem, which was a real medical problem (one similar to mine), but one which you can fix for yourself, simply by becoming aware of what it really is.
Update: It's understandable that you can't accept your mother was a danger to you, but your claim that you have got justice demonstrates that you are a narcissist lacking empathy for all the doctors and nurses and child protection staff that saved your life. That's shameful. Give the money back.
5 September 2023
Nothing to Fear
Dear Michelle, We have never met, yet this morning i awoke thinking of you, and felt a wish to tell you a story i once told to Tracey, who was in the same situation that you are in now. Her reply is one of my treasured memories.
Even though we have never met, we are indirectly connected by what i call "economic symbiosis", although that's another story.
We are also directly connected by biology; we are kith and kin: for our genes - the things that make us who we are - are about 99% the same.
So i know how you feel.
And as if that weren't amazing enough, we are also 98.5% the same as chimpanzees!
And as if even that weren't amazing enough, we are 60% the same as flies! We have the very same basic 5-part body plan as flies, a plan drawn on the Architect of Life's drawing board by our "Hox" genes, which we share with flies. I forget the details, but they are in my book called "Living Computers: Intelligent Plastic Machines".
But there's more!... We are also 40% the same as bananas!!
Phew! Imagine that; you are 60% fly, and 40% banana. Makes you think, doesn't it?!
Like bananas and flies, we also are like Socrates, who Plato (or was it Aristotle?) claimed to be mortal, pretty much his only serious claim to fame, apart from being very annoying to the High Priests of Athens.
Your melanoma has returned, which must be very unsettling to you, which is why i want to share with you the same story i told Tracey, who also had melanoma.
It's my own experience of staring my own death right in the face, and i want to tell you, from that vivid personal experience, that death is nothing to be afraid of, even if it gets you.
It was in 1985, in early winter, at night, when we were shipwrecked off the coast of New South Wales, Australia. At the time, Bruno and i were on deck; me fighting with the mainsail, he watching me nervously from the cockpit, and seasick Alois was lying down below. Our little yacht had been, for hours, being forced backwards by a strong headwind and adverse countercurrent.
It was my fault; my navigation error; my useless seamanship; but it was Alois who paid the ultimate price for my incompetence, something for which i can never forgive myself, an eternal caveat on the piece of paper i was given 10 years later, which states "This certificate entitles the holder to sail as Master of United Kingdom pleasure yachts not exceeding 200 gross registered tons".
Back in 1985, the boat i was supposed to be delivering to Bob in Hawaii, was tipped over by a huge wave that i never even saw coming. i was flung through the air as if shot out of a cannon, then whirled around in an underwater washing machine, head over heels, over and over again, for what felt like forever. My lungs were bursting, and i toyed with the idea of just taking a gulp of water to get it over with, but then, to my astonishment, my head broke the surface.
And immediately went under again. But then came back up again, thanks to the lifejacket i was wearing.
But it wasn't good news, for a little ways ahead, exactly the way the sea was taking me, enormous waves were smashing one after another into a huge great impassive black wall. it was obvious that i too would soon be smashed into that wall, and that would be that.
i was too tired to swim, and not a good swimmer anyway. there was nothing i could do.
i fell asleep. after a while, when i awoke, the wall wasn't there any more. the lights on the shore were a long way further away than they had been.
i was being swept out to sea.
now i knew, with absolute certainty, that it was just a matter of time before the sea or one of its creatures got me.
and with this realisation came the calmness of certainty; i wasn't afraid; i knew it would happen; i was ready for it.
Of course, as you will know because i lived to tell the tale, i was wrong, but that's not the point.
None of us wants to die, but we all eventually do, even Socrates.
So because it's inevitable, it doesn't make any difference in the long run, whether it happens sooner or later.
Lough Neagh, in Northern Ireland, is home to a nation of mayflies - one day in May, they all come out of the lake together: tiny, silent, gossamer creatures - so delicate, so beautiful. So many that walking through them is like walking through a cloud.
But the next day, they are all gone; all dead, except for their invisible children hiding in their eggs back in the lough, waiting to come out themselves as new adults another May day in another 12 months' time.
It used to amaze me that Nature could be so wasteful; to put so much energy into making those beautiful gossamer mayflies, only to throw them away after just one day.
But actually, in Nature, nothing goes to waste, not even nuclear bombs, because everything is eventually recycled somewhere, somehow, sometime.
That's what eventually happens to everyone; to me, and to you, and to the next generation of mayflies.
It doesn't hurt any more when you're dead.
And each day you're not dead, is one more day extra.
a homosynonym (a newly-invented portmanteau word like "jabberwocky") is a quite interesting kind of word, quite different to an antonym...
An antonym is a word that looks the same as another word, but which has a different meaning;
whereas, a homosynonym is a word which sounds like another word (homonym), and means the same sort of thing (synonym), but in a different way (kind of like a pun with its wires crossed).
a classic (neoclassical, perhaps) example is Ai which is either:
1. a slothful natural creature who seems to just hang around in trees, and(or?)
2. a highly energetic artificial creature (like Alphago) which rushes around in trees.
It's an awful pun, i know, but i find it nicely ironic that scarey Artificial Intelligence shares its name with a South American monkey that looks quite a bit like cuddly ET (and may even have been the inspiration for that character).
The pun needs a bit of explaining: Alphago is a tree-searching computer program - the tree in this case being software-imagined possible futures in a game of "Go":
footnote: sloths got their name because early biologists couldn't be bothered waiting around to see what they did because they seemed to just hang there forever (actually, they're just trying to look like part of the tree, it's a camouflage thing) - but more recently, more patient observers have noticed that the minute they glance away, the sloth suddenly vanishes and it's not there any more when they look back - which suggests that the sloth is more intelligent and quicker than the biologist! :)
Example 1afterthought: UKreigns over Ukraine
Which is bullshit, because UK is so fUKtup; it's US who reigns over you, ok!, except even that isn't true because US isn't us, it's THEM:
[ Dyslexia Rules, k.o. !]
NATO is the military wing of the "Octopus" (the cartel of Alphas in our very own Brave New World Order as foreseen by Aldous Huxley), the elite 0.000001% who own and control everything (covertly, behind 6 degrees of separation: A controls B, who controls C, who controls, D, who controls E, who controls your own government laughing called a democracy), including all central banks of the doublethink "free" world, which is the world enchained by the Octopus. That's why NATO wants to crush any alternative to neoliberal capitalism riding under the reins of the Alpha's monopoly of finance ("give me control of a nation's money supply, and i care not who makes its laws").
The Octopus is nothing new; it's being going on for 6000 years, ever since the first ziggurat was built in the city of Ur to hold all the surplus wheat produced by peasants and wage-slaves, so as to enable the king and his high priests to hold the city's populous to ransom during the fallow winter. Money today is what wheat was in those days, the only difference being that wheat does have real (nutritional) value, but money doesn't have any value of its own at all - it's just fiat, which equals credit, or debt, depending on which side of the equation you're on.
That's why all doublethink-named Civil Procedure Rules are laws to protect the rich against the poor, the creditor against the debtor; the employer against the employee; "labour laws" being impotent PR fop spin to blow smoke in your Eyes Wide Shut, which like Goldfinger was filmed right in their symbolic house, to thumb their noses at you without your realising it, you dumbass sheep.
but the only catch is, it will take at least another 6000 years for it to catch on.
2: ppp and ppp
Most homosynonyms are spelled differently, but there are some - such as johnson and Johnson (two same kinds of pricks in two different ways) - which are spelled the same way as well as sounding the same way and meaning the same thing but in a different way.
ppp and Ppp are a second example; ppp is a protocol used to separate wheat from chaff in point-to-point electronic communications colloquially known as email, and in the quite interesting scintillating repartee jumping over horsey obstacles placed in their way by a horse-faced chair between witty guests on a TV panel game called Qi, whereas:
Piddler's puerile pugilism is the exact opposite, a monotonic avalanche of lame-brained infantile gainsaying argument spewing out of the keyboard of a halfwit troll, smothering the few pearls of Suze et al even before they get a chance to be spread, thereby rendering the original intention of the public contributions Qi forum utterly inutile, and suited only to the utterly inutile, it having turned into nothing more qi than a toilet wall covered in shit-useless egomaniacal old quean's vile bile graffitti. This may be proof beyond reasonable doubt that qi is the opposite of iq, overwhelming even the other meaning of ppp.
3. 0ups, OUPs, and oops
Open University Pontifications delivers drivel around the world to anyone who will pay to play -
- whereas 0ups is the big zero inside everyone up themselves,
except for the tiny few who know they know nothing so are willing to say "oops" each time they slice their own ball.
4. RT and arty
The first casualty in UKreign war is the truth; the second casualty is anyone like RT who speaks it, who has just been taken out, whereas:
arty is how Artful Dodger spinners see thems elves, as they pick the pockets of the poor to fill the troughs of the pigs that pay them to fuck truth in the Rs.
Welcome to 1984, 2022-style.
5. Angles and angles
Everyone knows the angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat, even without having to at end school geometry class,
but it is less well-known that Grande Bretagne is still suffering under the yoke of the invading Angles, which ruined its language, despoiled its froggy cuisine, and blew smoke in the faces of Joe Blowitupyerarse golfers, who can't see that the slower you swing, the further the ball goes, because it's all about angles, except for the horizontal armswing angle, which should be 0 but so often isn't.
6. Trussed, trussed and trust
You can trust your bottom dollar that you can't trust Boris, but what about Truss? She made her name in Brexit by complaining about imported French cheese, and now she's in charge of trussing up black pomegranates and sending them back to France - the coloured ones, that is. But as in West Side Story, where
"Life can be bright in the UK rain, Kyle can all fight in the Uk-reign; Life is alright in the UK complain, If you're all white on the UK plains!"
So if you're White Russian from Ukraine and aren't Red and don't speak Russian, UKreigns Truss will take your reins, throw off your trusses, and welcome you to English rains with open arms
sales.
7. Why vet death?
Now that there are only 5,000 new covid infections per day, Queensland Health Minister Yvette de'Ath, on the instructions of Australian Prime Minister Bruce LickinUSars, has declared that no-one need wear a mask any more, as his bosses need those death figures to get back up, to reduce the load of aged drains on the profit market (sorry, i meant to say 'the economy').
Events in Ukraine have cost me $20,000 in investment losses over the last 2 weeks (the smart money having flown first, before the news broke), and i expect it to continue.
if a clear picture were ever to emerge, it would be the first time such a thing has happened within 2000 years of a military event happening. The true causes of WWI are still not out in the open, let alone WWII; the only thing that can be said with any certainty about the latter is that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbour in advance, because it was the real-life James Bond
who was tasked with persuading the Japanese High Command that they could get away with it, and all the US aircraft carriers sailed out of the harbour a few days before a bunch of old superannuated ships were air-bombed to sway American public opinion 180 degrees away from its anti-involvement in Eurpoean squabbles miles away across the pond position, over to the gung-ho "get the Krauts" rhetoric of Churchill (so he could get his own Blenheim Palace).
several years ago, i forecast in print that the next financial crisis would be bigger than the last (2008) one.
i didn't know how they would engineer it (i only knew the 1929 and 2008 crashes had both been engineered by the same basic technique: a decade of super-low interest rates (eg the Roaring Twenties) followed by a sudden major selloff (or synchronised call in of Margin Call loans), triggering all the lemmings to rush off the cliff so the sharks could move in and hoover up real assets like farms and businesses for pennies in the dollar, widening the wealth gap and cementing their grip on power by strengthening their grip on the throats of wage slaves.
covid came along - whether that was engineered or not, i don't know; perhaps it was just a coincidence that a US army sports team had been in Whuhan, leaving just before the first news broke.
perhaps Ukraine is just another coincidence; for after all, its language war had been going on since 2014, and no-one forced Putin to take action (did they?); perhaps it will all blow over as fast as it's blown in;
or perhaps it's the second of a new row of dominos that have been stacked up on the QT, just as the row of just 3 GFC dominos were stacked up on the QT over a period of 10 years, waiting for George Bush to go on telly and say "Every American should own his own home" to set up the smallest (subprime mortgages) domino, ready to fall and push over the middle CDO domino, to fall and push over the big CDS domino, which was pulled (as in Silverstein's "pull it") by the Banque de France, whose chairman Christine Whatserface was promoted to head the IMF as her reward for being a good girl and doing what she was told, just as Janet Yellen was given a smaller pat on the back for doing what she was told too.
Stephen Fry, on a BBC tv show called Qi, demonstrated that a falling wooden domino can push over one 3 times its size.
Quite a coincidence, i'm sure they didn't get the idea from me, as no-one reads anything i write.
But a falling financial domino can push over one 3000 times its size...
The 18th century in France saw blind faith in State Authority seriously challenged for perhaps the first time in human history, rooted in recent discoveries in science.
But it didn't turn out too well in the short term though, with the idealistic aspiration of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity quickly turning to the Terror of Madame Guillotine, only repeating the crudities of the Crusades and setting the scene for even worse atrocities in Nazi Germany and American Imperial adventures in the oil-rich Middle East.
In the former case, the great unwashed German public were persuaded to meekly go along with it, whatever private reservations they may have harboured, swayed by the unscientific argument that one race was superior to another, and that they, the blond-haired blue-eyed ones, were God's own Chosen People.
The inanity of this unenlightened argument should have been laughed at by the hoi-polloi, if for no other reason that it's public face belonged to a failed painter with black hair, brown eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache.
But it wasn't.
When God made Man, He must have done it on a Friday afternoon, because He made so many basic mistakes in the design of the human brain that it's a bloody miracle we haven't already let ourselves be blown to Kingdom Come by Dr Strangelove.
For Heaven's Sake, only a nation of halfwits could vote in a Billy Bunter buffoon as their own Great Leader!
This year, in September, it will be the 21st birthday of an even more egregious transgression of Common Sense, so egregious that one can only conclude that Sense is anything but Common, for every schoolkid in the physics block should have been marching in the streets demanding that f = ma be given a hearing.
But they didn't, and it wasn't, and it still isn't.
Within a Cooperative community, working bees and suchlike are really great for giving occasional assistance on special projects, but aged and infirm people need routine help with things that require physical strength and mobility; things such as shovelling shit from one pit (composting toilet) to another (compost heap).
Or mowing the grass. Or lugging heavy dustbins up a pretty steep slope.
Or just doing the shopping, when their left arm has seized up so they can't turn a steering wheel and/or their right foot is so sore it hurts to press the car's brake pedal.
Or when they can barely walk at all.
In Australia, myagedcare.gov.au is a government office set up to help aged people, but apparently there is a waiting list up to 3 years long for home care (designed to relieve the taxpayer burden of providing aged care services), so you can't expect miracles.
Symbiotic Investment Fund
One of the most safe and solid forms of superannuation investment is real estate.
Inflation never stops, and house prices generally rise with it - indeed, over the long term, they rise a little faster than general inflation, as noted by economist Thomas Pikkety in his famous book.
Aged Cooperative members reliant solely on state pensions can't afford to pay their fellow members to do the heavy lifting for them; but they do have a substantial asset: their house.
If you want to invest for your own retirement, there is no better thing to invest in than an aged fellow member's house Investment Fund, by lending them money, secured by their house, at eg a fixed interest mortgage rate similar to that eg Commonwealth Bank charges for house loans (currently 4.5% per annum), and receive your payoff when their house is sold by the executor of their Wills to pay off their outstanding debts.
Investment Fund money can be used by the house owner to pay for things they need, such as new batteries etc for an ancient and creaking solar power setup so that they won't every now and then run out of electricity.
Or to pay other members to routinely do things that don't require special skills, but do require physical strength and endurance, such as shovelling shit from one pit to another.
Any Investment Fund deposits would be made official, through the auspices and record books of a third party - the Cooperative's official Investment Fund manager - so your money would be safe.
Literally, as safe as houses.
Work for Credit
There are plenty of you who are fit and healthy and can work for money.
You could work for yourself, for cash in hand, paid out of their house Investment Fund. or by turning your time now into future money, by "loaning your labour" - at an appropriate dollar value hourly rate - to your neighbours, as your own investment in your own future, receiving the same interest rate on that dollar value as anyone lending cash to an investment fund would receive.
Here's how it could work: Someone whom both house owner and workers trusts is given - at no pay for him/herself - the simple responsibility of deciding how much a task is worth (either on a time+materials or fixed-cost basis, the two ways standard commercial contracts operate) and signing off on the task when the work is done. The dollar value of that work and its completion date are then noted in a diarised set of accounts - the house Investment Fund - which records who has invested what and when in the house.
Interest earned accumulates regularly, in just the same way that a bank updates its customer accounts. It's a very simple calculation, exactly the sort of calculation that electronic spreadsheets were invented to do, so the Investment Fund manager has little to do other than just deciding how much a piece of work is worth, which itself is a very simple calculation.
But it is important that the one doing the deciding is an independent third party, to ensure fair play.
Then, when the house is eventually sold, all investors (both cash investors and work for credit investors) receive payment from the house's Investment Fund (in just the same way that a company's debtors are paid off when the company is wound up).
Much necessary work actually adds value to a house, so even if you are purely self-centred, it's still in your interest to work now for money later.
Surely it's better to work - for the same money - for your needy neighbours than for the profits of some fat cat business owner capitalist in Main Street?
There will be some among you who will baulk at the very idea of Cooperative members becoming capitalist investors, or selling their time to other members, fearing that it might undermine the concept of working bees, or inflate Cooperative house prices - but it wouldn't do either.
Please think about it.
It doesn't take much - just an hour or two a week - to make an enormous difference to the quality of life of someone who's past it, who's not as strong as they once were (especially when they still think they still are!). Someone like you too will eventually, one day become, because time doesn't wait for anyone.
Of course, elderly people are generally cautious; one such lady i spoke with on this subject remarked that she "doesn't want to make a booboo" - a sentiment which i fully endorse. In her shoes, i would feel exactly the same and have exactly the same reservations and concerns.
So the whole thing would need to be officially managed carefully and openly, by people with honesty and integrity, who have the trust of the entire Cooperative community, and on top of that, have the house Investment Fund accounts they manage regularly audited by an independent professional-quality auditor, or it wouldn't fly at all.
And that would be a great shame, for you would have missed an opportunity to improve your own lives, your children's future lives and the lives of your aged fellow members in need right now, all at one and the same time.
It's just a bit of paperwork; it's not complicated; it's not risky for anyone (not unless your accountant runs off with the money like Robert Maxwell did with his employees' pension fund....)
Dotting i's and Crossing t's
Impact on inheritance: to most people, their home is more than just a pile of bricks, or fibreboard, or mud. It has sentimental value to them; as do their own children, so it is common for a dying person to will that the house of which they are so fond stays in the family.
That's all good and reasonable - but it's not rational.
Except for Stately Homes and inherited titles such as Duke of this or that, most children don't give a fig about their parents' house - to them it's just a source of money which they'd rather spend on a flashy car or to pay off their gambling debts.
When children are really children, they do indeed have as much emotional investment in their parents' home as the parents themselves - but as soon as they reach puberty, teenagers want nothing more than to have their own space, away from the prying eyes and controlling hands of their parents.
That's all good and reasonable too - and, moreover, it IS rational!
So when a parent leaves a house in their Will to a child or children, what they really are leaving is not the soft subjective sentiment, but the hard, material, objective, dollar market value of that construction.
So if an heir wishes to reside in the house they've inherited, it is only fair that they should be obliged to pay off any debts that house owes to others, before they get the right to move in, even if they're already living there as dependents.
That's fair enough, isn't it?
Wide Eyes
At one point, i considered whether it might be a good idea to have a single Cooperative-wide Investment Fund, but decided against that, because investment in a particular house should not exceed that market value of that house, and with lots of different houses being invested in all over the place, it would be easy to lose track of what is really going on.
So one house, one fund, is better.
On the other hand, there are lots of large-price things that people don't need all the time - things such as a tractor, or a small fleet of cars to do the shopping, or a satellite internet connection and a few computers to use it - so it makes sound economic sense for such things to be cooperatively-owned and shared on a community-wide basis.
Even cheaper things such as portable generators, hedge trimmers, chainsaws, and stuff like that, cost significant money and are better being maintained by a Cooperative workshop than rusting away in people's sheds.
And the same goes for leftover bits and pieces from construction projects (or superannuated cars and caravans and shoes your kids have grown out of, or old clothes you never wear any more - anything, whatever) - they could be donated to the Cooperative, or sold at their current market price, to be bought by other people who want them.
That sounds like a Cooperative would be acting as a bank (and as a charity shop or pawn shop), a source of finance, a hub of commerce - and that's exactly what it would be.