Friday Ephemera (743)

How to make a simple thing needlessly complicated, parts 1, 2, and 3.

I like a happy ending.

Ah, the joys of insomnia and waking at 2:00 am – at least I have the Ephemera as consolation. I am eternally grateful.

Mortal remains.

I am impressed that the job can be done in a business suit. I was sort of picturing people in white Hazmat suits.

Of course, the cameras were on – at other times, the clothing of choice is likely to be jeans and a commemorative t-shirt from a 2012 bar crawl in NOLA. Which I find oddly comforting for when my time comes – please, be comfortable, I don’t want anyone going to unnecessary lengths.

Fly repellent?

So that’s where my copy of Huey Lewis and the News’ Sports went.

[W]hich lent the proceedings a certain comedic aspect. 

It’s good to polish those language skills.

The end card from the early Ingrid Bergman movie Dollar:

uncanny bangings

Band name.

@Nate Whilk, whose words I’m not going to include here:

The enthusiasm with which people ascribe glitches in their buggy software/hardware to the divine is a bit of a depressing thing to contemplate, if you’re of a religious bent.

I dare say that 99.9% of things like UFO encounters, “visits to elfland”, and all the rest of the grand panoply of human spirituality stems from something in the participants having experienced unusual glitches in their cerebration, something that is a hell of a lot more “kludged-together” than we’d like to admit.

I think we’d cut down on these reported “demon infestations” a good deal by mandating instruction during schooling (to include practical exercises) in just how poorly put-together the human consciousness is. I suspect that if more people realized how fine the line was between “Yeah, conscious human with agency” and “Outright vegetable NPC”, they’d be a hell of a lot more careful in life, and they’d be a lot more cautious about their reporting.

Not saying that demons don’t exist, just that I strongly suspect a lot of the reports I’ve heard of them are really someone whose brain is glitching.

@pst314,

Can I have the sixties without the acid or the hippies?

Likely not… They were all a part of the zeitgeist of the times. Ya have to remember that the whole psychedelic thing started out as a mainstream sort of affair, with prominent people espousing it all.

I’m not saying that the filthy hippies weren’t responsible for their own acts, but the social contagion went downhill from the elites.

Interesting post regarding this…

What I would offer up to you is that the various iconoclastic elites of the 1950s that were “exploring psychedelics” managed to make themselves so attractive to the down-market types that they thought they’d try it out for themselves. Remember the famous actors in Hollywood who said it was all a good idea? Mind-expanding?

Details on the Cary Grant milieu

@pst314,

It was a throw-away that engendered some serious thought, though.

If you read that thread over on X/Twitter, you rather get the impression that even the author doesn’t grasp the implications. I was in the middle of processing it when I spotted your post, and thought “Huh… There’s an implication there, in what pst314 is referring to…”

Consider the whole thing from an evolutionary biology/behavioral perspective: Humans are not hive-based minds or organisms, yet you have to have some means of attaining consensus for group action. Nine-tenths of military training is just that, inculcating the mechanisms of obedience to the unitary whole and its cohesion.

If you’ve ever seen entire flocks of birds act as one, or schools of fish doing the same, what you’re looking at is very much the same sort of mechanism in action. Humans have to have something laid down in the genes for this, or we’d have never gotten off the savannahs.

I suspect that there’s something to be said for the existence of this mechanism, whatever it actually is, and that most people are entirely unaware of it. As well, a lot of our social problems stem from misuse and abuse of these mechanisms/techniques of collective action control.

As a further implication/corollary, if you do not understand and control your biological drives and impulses, you’re really not much more than an unthinking animal. You have to be aware of things, the reasons why your hindbrain is doing what it is. If you aren’t aware, you can’t counter the odd “intrusive thought”, and you may well do yourself damage through either following through on that thought, or blaming yourself as “evil” for it.

Case in point… I’m far from a young man, but I still have the lizard-brain responses of one. See a cute young female? Much like enjoying a pretty flower; it is not for me, but I can still appreciate the experience.

So, when I suddenly discover that that distant sexually-attractive figure is horrendously inappropriate due to age or whatever, I remain aware that what’s speaking to that isn’t “me”, but that lizard-brain that knows no better. I restrain it, sigh heavily at the impulse it created for me to suppress, and go on with life.

Awareness of it enables me to understand and control it; it also prevents me from beating myself up over it and wondering if I’m really a secret pervert… Well, maybe I am, but it’s a controlled and genteel sort of perversion that doesn’t act on impulse.

I believe that one of the key questions in modern life is “Who is to be master? Me, or my instincts?” If the answer is “My instincts…”, then you are not a civilized person.

Just a thought…

Another on-point Devon Eriksen short essay…

He posted it in response to this, which I think someone else (maybe me…?) has already linked:

Bona-fide “Expert”

They just can’t stop, can they? 

They are so bloody proud of their degrees that they simply cannot shut the fuck up about them and make a case for their actual point, using the knowledge they are so quick to boast of. 

They just stomp their little feet, shake their tiny fists, and demand that you accept their every pronouncement based solely on some sort of obligation to have total faith in the institution which certified them. 

These people seem to have all been sick the day their scientific education taught the class what science actually is. 

Science is not a religion. 
Science is not an institution. 
Science is not a profession. 
Science is not a body of data. 
Science is not a model of the universe. 

Science is an algorithm. 
Science is a procedure. 

And the whole point of this procedure, the whole fucking point of the whole goddamned business, is to produce a result which is indicative, replicable, verifiable, and understandable. 

Truth does not come from scientists. 

Truth comes from scientific results. 

Scientific results come from research. 

A scientist is simply a person who is paid to do research. 

Their job is not to learn a whole bunch of stuff, and then become the Oracle of Delphi, roaming the landscape making pronouncements from their expertise, which must be regarded as scientific truth.

Only scientific results are indicators of truth. 

The opinion of a scientist is not a scientific result. 

The opinion of a scientist is a hypothesis. 

A hypothesis must be tested in a properly conducted experiment, which must then be independently replicated, to be acceptable as truth. 

This also goes for what they call a “scientific consensus”, which is just the opinion of a bunch of scientists.

Therefore, if a scientist expects you to accept their pronouncements as truth because their expertise, they are trying to pull a fast one. 

The two questions at issue here are:

1. Whether the mRNA covid treatment is safe and non-toxic. 
2. Whether the mRNA covid treatment is effective at preventing covid infection. 

Ellie has an opinion on this. 

That opinion is a hypothesis. 

Not a fact. 

In order to establish a fact, an experiment would have to be done. And then the experimental results would have to be replicated by someone else, somewhere else. And then the experimental results would have to be shown to the public. 

And not, say, for example, locked in a airtight vault, guarded by trained attack panthers, for 70 years. 

Now, we could spend a lot of time arguing about how meaningful it is, or isn’t, that the mRNA treatment was misleadingly called a vaccine, that it was used as a tool of political power, that the same people telling you it was safe and effective made it illegal for you to sue the manufacturers if it wasn’t. 

But all of that is irrelevant, because none of those arguments are necessary. 

The burden of proof is on those who make demands like “take this injection”. 

Therefore the treatment is unsafe until it is proven safe. And the treatment is ineffective until it is proven effective. 

And no amount of scientists’ opinions will prove that. 

Only evidence will prove that. 

And if they won’t show it to you, it’s not evidence. Because the word “evidence” means “that which is seen”. So that which is unseen is not evidence. 

And if Ellie can get a doctorate from Harvard without understanding the basic nature of how science works, then Harvard doesn’t deserve your trust anymore, and there is no Harvard. 

Only Zuul.

Reading that, I really need to up my writing game.

I very much recommend Mr. Eriksen’s writing to one and all; it’s a bit of a breath of fresh air.

You have to wonder…

It takes like nine or ten posts below this one before someone points out the obvious: First time in 130 years that Mt. Fuji is snow-free, going into winter…? Uhmmmm… Does that not imply something there, about the intervening time, and the facts that it’s been both warmer and colder than today, in the past?

It’s just like the idjits writing the woe-is-me articles about things coming out of the glaciers: OK, so we’ve got Medieval mining camps showing up, as the glaciers melt. Sort of an indicator, what?

However, never once will you see anyone working the hard part out, which is that the glaciers were obviously in remission when those mining camps were established, back during ye olde Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Climactic Optimum. We ought to be dancing in the streets, because we live at the apogee of another climactic optimum, and not wanting to return to the perigee. I mean, the key thing about the Great Famine of 1315 was the cold temperatures, right? Do you want famine, children…?

I do wonder if anyone kept a record of Mt. Fuji’s snow-status. I imagine some Shinto or Buddhist monastery kept something going… And, just what it’d say going back to the beginning. I don’t doubt that Mt. Fuji being bare is unusual, but I’ll also wager it isn’t unheard of, either.

Terrorists: the usual suspects seem to think Trump will win because they are already getting “parade” permits and organizing the troops for protests after the election. Use the appropriate newspeak dictionary for “protests”.

Someone pointed out (perhaps linked from here) that a lot of the insanity on the Left is so insane that if you mention it to ordinary non-politics obsessed people, they simply will not believe it. They will think you are a conspiracy theorist. They assume that since Trump went to trial, there must have been a crime. If you identify a mayor or governor or Pelosi who withheld the National Guard from a demonstration/hurricane/race riot, they think that surely cannot be true.

At last, toe shoes.

Nailed it.

Flesh-eating bees 

Band name.
Also
Meat Honey

Supported by Flesh Rotting Venom

With career aspirations of working for the chain, Livingston had applied three times for listings which were all unsuccessful…

So sue, as one does.

The percentage of conservatives who support same-sex marriage is in decline and I suspect the reason for this is that many of them felt an implicit social contract with liberals had been violated

This.

Here is Israel the MOR religious/traditional people are waking up to the “tolerance” bait-and-switch game where “inclusion” only goes in one direction…. unfortunately too many still think it’s about being “nice”.

@WTP, who said:

Psychology study so mostly BS, also out of China so probably even more BS, but something I have observed and suspected. Odd that this is my first seeing this correlation, that I can recall anyway.

Like a lot of things you hear out of some areas of study, it sorta makes sense when you hear it, and it does jibe with some personal experiences.

I’d like to submit that there’s a good deal going on in the human mind that we don’t pay attention to because it’s all going on very much beneath the surface.

Do consider a couple of things, though… There has to be a hardware/software solution going on in any species that acts together cohesively. We’ve identified some of the mechanisms even in bacteria. We know that bird flocks and fish schools act together and with great cohesion.

I’d start looking for those sorts of things in human beings by examining traditional activities, like dance and other sorts of communal activities. You go out, look at “primitive tribes” with their dances mimicking the hunt before they go out on a hunt, and when they come back… Trace that through more advanced cultures, note the similarities, and what the effects are. I would very much like to know how those “mirror neurons” behave in people undergoing military drill and ceremonies training, and how that physical activity conditions them better for cohesion. I suspect there’s a link there that people have not paid attention to, and that there are likely traces of how all this works in customs/traditions, if you bother to examine them. Some very proficient practical psychologists observed and made use of those neural features for millennia before the academics started noticing them.