Archives for March 2021

Wednesday March 24, 2021

There are people who want to get things done. Those people are championed in every part of our society except one – the political arena. There they are vilified.

There are people who don’t want to do anything in the political arena. They are called Republicans, and Joe Manchin.

Until that changes, nothing will happen.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea. It doesn’t matter if 90% of the population wants it. Nothing will happen.

Am I optimistic? No.

There is no reason to be.

Unless and until something changes, and I don’t see that happening. Nothing will get done.

PS “Excursion into Philosophy” Edward Hopper, 1959

Tuesday March 23, 2021

Ron White in his comedy CD “Drunk in Public” recounted how he got thrown out of a bar after having too much to drink. He was arrested for being “Drunk in Public.” 

He argued that he had been drunk in a bar and “they threw me into public.”

( BTW – This is not a good defense. )

I thought of this routine as I was puzzling over Mayan distance numbers.

When Ron saw the staff approach him in the bar to throw him out I think he said there were five people coming to do the job. He said he didn’t know how many it would take but he said he knew how many were going to try, which he considered at the time “a handy piece of information.”

This brings me to my study of Mayan glyphs. I decided to try and really understand distance numbers. The Mayan erected this big stela (large flat round top gravestone looking slabs of rock.) They inscribed these scenes, typically with a king “dancing” on top of some poor bound victim. The text would start with a Long Count which would anchor the action to some important date. Then there would be another date which counted forward or backward from that Long Count date to when something happened that they wanted to tell you about. (A capture, the birth of the king, their accession to the throne, etc.) That date is referred to as a “Distance Number.”

All these distance numbers count the number of days (kan) and the number of months (winik) in one glyph the winik glyph with two bar dot numbers: on on top and one on the left side of the winik glyph.

For example: The Mayans might inscribe a stella and say “January 1, 2000 the beginning of the new millennium and one year nine months and eleven days from that date  our country was attacked …” (Okay, they wouldn’t admit to being attacked so they wouldn’t inscribe it but I hope you get the idea.)

Here’s the weird thing about the distance number. I was doing an exercise on them and checking myself by looking up the answers. Sometimes the number on top was the count of the kan (the number of days) and sometimes it was the winik (the number of months). 

What, I asked myself was the determining factor? I went back to the discussion of distance numbers. There was no mention that I could find. I went through five sources (Johnson, Coe/Stone, Montgomery, Stearns/Harris) before I found it in the fifth source – a pdf by (Kettune/Helmke). Now this information is what Ron Johnson would call “a useful piece” to have.

Maybe, it is in those other sources and I missed it. 

But, come on guys, don’t make it that hard to find.

It turns out that the Winik coefficient as it is called is as wide as the glyph, while the Kan coefficient takes up the whole space of the glyph. You can look in the upper left hand corner of the glyph block to see which number is extended into that space and then know it is the Kan number.

So there you have it. Moving on.

I was sent an video clip. I know you’ll find this astounding but the clip I was given came from Fox News which showed Jeanine Parrillo cutting off a guest’s mic and ending an interview because he had the audacity to tell her what she was saying was not correct. Her reason for cutting him off was that “she doesn’t allow lies” on her show. That is all her show is! In fact, she interrupted him, said a bunch of lies and then cut off his mic and the camera.

The point being made in the clip by someone commenting on Parrillo was that these are the folks talking about “cancel culture” and they are the ones practicing it. This is nothing new. It’s just the same old same old. But it is worth bringing up every now and again in case anyone has forgotten.

In other ironic news Mitch McConnell gave one of his little speeches on the Senate floor where he talked about the comity of the Senate and how that would be lost if the Democrats got rid of the filibuster, and he threatened a scorched earth response when and if he got back in the majority. Dick Durbin rose immediately to challenge by asking what could be more scorched than what McConnell had already done when last he was in the majority?

The Republicans have voted to a person against the Biden Covid relief package, which is wildly popular with people in this country at a cost of $1.9 trillion.

Next up is a $3 Trillion dollar infrastructure bill, which is polling as even more popular.  Will Mitch extend that reach across the aisle comity he wishes for? (No, F* no. Are you kidding me?)

And, with the shooting in Colorado we have a sad return to a kind of dreary normalcy. I recall during the worst of the pandemic I thought that at least we weren’t having mass shootings. They have now returned. 

However, we can take comfort that right wing second amendment Congresswoman from Colorado has said her thoughts and prayers go out to those affected. Aw, that’s so nice. But as long as your state allows someone to legally walk across a parking lot with a long gun no one is safe in your state.

But, this is nothing new. Just a return to normalcy.

PS Priest bearing the Canopus jar of Osiris, from the Alexandria East Harbor (BCE 100)

PPS I just found reference to the Kan/Winik thing in Montgomery under “Suppression of Signs” page 116. I knew this would happen. Tell the world then find out what you couldn’t find before.

Monday March 22, 2021

It takes me a long time to understand dreams and behaviors. In fact, I’m terrible at it. I remember being in a psych class. The professor described a dream whose meaning was so obvious that he was using it as an illustrative example, and I’m like, “Huh? What?”

It took me years, decades in fact to be able to say, “I don’t get it,” when other are making comments about how obvious or wonderful something is. Frequently, I have now learned those that are making those “Oh I get it” comments and body language stuff don’t get it at all and are just playing along. I guess in hopes that they won’t get called on by the teacher kind of thing, or picked on by the bully.

I watched the interchange between Dr. Fauci and Rand Paul that happened last Thursday. I’ve been turning it over in my mind. I’ve commented on it in my writing, but something was still bothering me about it. AS Robert Persig wrote in his book “Lila,” those things are your mental in-box. Thoughts you haven’t finished working on. By keeping such things “as a brick in your lap” to be taken up and examined again what I am trying to do is fit the pieces together, to make sense of it. It’s a useful technique.

Yesterday, in an unrelated conversation the key came. It seems obvious now.

I was describing how the person running a group I am in posted “The Rules” of the group right after I had posted something. Obviously, in her mind I had broken the rules. This was the second time she had done this to me, even after I had asked her to tell me privately if there was something I had posted that was not in keeping with the rules. 

My friend said, “That’s bullying.”

Yup. That’s it. And that is what Rand Paul was trying to do to Dr. Fauci.

In fact that seems to be what Rand Paul does every time I’ve watched Rand Paul do or say anything. 

What made this so much like Kabuki theater is that this is what I saw the last time Paul and Fauci were in a meeting. It was set piece theater. The only difference was that the last time Fauci started off with a statement that said what Paul was saying was not only wrong but that he had been saying it a lot, and that it was dangerous so he, Fauci, wanted to speak to the science and make sure Paul and others understood the scientific facts.

This time what Paul was trying to bully Fauci into saying what he, Paul, believed, or at least what he wanted Fauci to say. Paul couldn’t straight up ask Fauci, he had to try and belittle and accuse Fauci of various egregious things as well. 

An honest conversation would have been Paul saying that he hadn’t seen anything that supported the idea of wearing a mask after you were vaccinated that did any good.

Fauci could have then responded to that.

But that isn’t what Paul did. What he did was to say that there was no scientific study to support the idea of whether wearing a mask after you got vaccinated did any good and why didn’t Fauci just say that, and why did he keep advising us all to wear masks when it was a liberal hoax and wearing two masks was just theater?

Fauci for his part was kind enough to say that Paul had some truth behind what he was saying, in that if there was only the first kind of virus out there then what he said would make some sense. But as Fauci pointed out, repeatedly, there are now several variants and it is not known for certainty how much immunity a vaccinated person has against these variants. Yes, they have some immunity, because there will be “a spill over” effect, but how much is not known.

Fauci could have said at that point that there aren’t studies to say and that he was just going on his expertise and knowledge in dealing with infectious diseases. I mean we’ve had two months of vaccinating people? And Paul wants to know where the studies are? 

Maybe Dr. Paul doesn’t understand that studies take time to do?

Paul continued to try and beat up and bully Fauci. There were no real fireworks here, as several media outlets tried to report, and depending on the outlet depended on whom they thought socked it to whom.

I don’t like when someone bullies. When Paul first ran for Senate he was shown to be a con and a phony, claiming to be “a board certified ophthalmologist” in a board he created to certify himself and trying to tell folks he was board certified. If that is board certified then I’m a doctor based on my degree awarded to me by The Rick Kinnaird University (and storm door company*).

* A shoutout to Bob Newhart’s “Grace L Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company.”

What surprised me were the comments below in the Youtube piece I watched. Many of them called Fauci a liar and made fun of his stature. WTF?

I tried a new technique I’ve been learning “pulling the lens back for a higher level view.” I wondered who else had this sort of behavior?

Ted Cruz,

Mike Lee,

Tom Cotton,

Ron Johnson,

Rush Limbaugh…

It seems to me that the attitude of many of these “conservative” right wing folks is to bully. Bully experts and in so doing denigrate them and then to explain to their audience the new facts, which we would know as lies.

It is remarkable to me that people are so gullible, but they are.

Maybe, gullible is not the right word. They are desperate to believe the lie. That is for sure. Why? That is the harder question.

In this case believing the lie could get them killed. They could die from Covid. How many news articles have I seen, heard, or read where someone is in the hospital fighting to breathe saying something like, “I thought this was a hoax. It’s no joke.” ?

One article I heard on the radio talked about a intensive care nurse saying that people came into the ER with Covid and refused to believe it. It had to be something else. Why? Because Covid wasn’t real. Then they got transferred to the ICU and they kept complaining. Why wouldn’t the staff tell them what was wrong? Covid wasn’t real. The interviewer asked when did the stop complaining? 

When a tube was shoved down their throat so they could breathe.

And when the tube came out?

They were either dead or complaining again.

So I propose for all those who don’t like the nanny state and don’t want to be told what to do that you follow up with ACTION! 

1 – If you get a $1400 check from the government you don’t cash it.

2 – If you are getting that Social Security check form the government that you stop it and don’t cash it.

3 – Get off Medicare and and Obamacare

Don’t let those liberal things that the Democrats managed to get passed ,over the strenuous objections of the Republicans, be part of your life.

Go instead with the Republican plans. 

I outline the Republican plans below:

Economics – Reaganomics, W, and Trump all based on trickle down economics. Under Trump they passed a $1.9T tax cut, which did little to improve the economy. They are complaining that this $1.9T economic package that the Democrats have passed will be an economic disaster. We’ll be able to look at the economic facts later this year and see which plan was better for the economy and think about which was better for you.

Healthcare – here is the Republican plan for the last 40 years:

.

.

.

End of Republican Healthcare plan.

Oh, I forgot the last press secretary for the past president handed the 60 Minutes folks a giant bunch of paper, like 1700 pages, and said it was their plan. When the reporters looked through the pages they couldn’t find a plan.

This is similar to when Obama went to Baltimore to see the Republicans who were meeting to come up with something and Paul Ryan had written up a budget. Obama opened to a page randomly and read what was on it. After reading the paragraph he said, “You can’t govern based on that.” It was obviously so. Ryan had written a wish, not a policy plan. In fact the whole “budget” had no numbers in it; other than page numbers.

Pack the courts with young right wing unqualified people, but they are right wing.

Restrict voting.

Cut the arts programs, welfare assistance, and anything that helps people by giving them money.

Cut taxes for the .1 of 1%.

Cut corporate taxes.

Cut regulations even if they make sense and keep us safe.

Get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, by privatizing them.

Anywhere there is money in the federal government let their friends and donors run things.

End of Republican plans for the last 40 or 50 years. Did I miss anything?

So? How’s life?

PS Moon over Maine

Sunday March 21, 2021

Much of what I am going to tell you we’ve already covered. However, like many a math class I took where they went over stuff I already knew, by the time they got to the good stuff I had tuned out. Damn.

Yesterday, my buddy dean asked me if I had heard the podcast from deep state radio. I hadn’t. It was a look, mainly, at the Intelligence report that came out last week which clearly stated that Russia had been the one interfering in our 2020 election and not China. China had considered it, but decided not to. Same for Iran. This report was done during the Trump administration and was circulated as far as we know to The Gang of Eight, Trump, Both AG Barr and his replacement, and the DNI. This meant that the information was well known to Devin Nunes, Ron Johnson, and Bill Barr. Yet, they and others lied about it to the public.

Not only that, but they actively took information that they knew was bad, that was untrue, and they knew came from Russia and they publicly decimated it. 

The question is why and what can be done about it in the future? The answers were not comforting: educate people with civics classes, and don’t let idiots be elected to Congress or hold important positions. Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent, was the special guest. He said lying to the public was not a crime, and that going after a Congress person who knowingly lies is a tricky. Great.

So what does all this mean? It means that Devin Nunes, Ron Johnson, Bill Barr and most, if not all of the Republican Party consciously decided to take the side of Russia over this country. I would call this activity treasonous. The gross thing is that they have convinced a great swath of the public to believe this stuff.

Also, during this time I was asked for context of the comments I had made concerning possible legal troubles for Satan. Here are more details.

JB 60 Summary

In Georgia the investigation into election fraud is being done by Fani Willis. Her office is kind of down the legal food chain in Georgia but she grabbed the case because everyone further up is implicated or involved. Some might think this short black woman who has a naive looking smile in her campaign photo is not up to the task. That would be a mistake. She has a thirty year career of putting away people on RICO charges for all kinds of diverse things, like teachers giving student answers on standardized tests. 

On her team is the country’s leading RICO lawyer. Also, the man who wrote the book on Georgia Evidence in Court, which every judge in Georgia has on their bookshelf. 

It turns out Mark Meadows went down to Georgia and tried to get into the place where they were counting the votes in Georgia. He didn’t make it into the room, but got in the building. He did get the numbers of two people associated with counting the vote. He gave those numbers to Donald who then called those people asking in one case to find one more vote than Biden got so that he would win the state and the other person he told there had been massive voter fraud in Georgia and “everybody knows that” and if she would look into that and find the fraud the would be doing a great patriotic duty. Both calls are recorded. 

To prove conspiracy under Rico you need at least two people working in concert, like say Mark Meadows going to Georgia and then giving Trump the phone numbers of people.

Let’s move to New York. Michael Cohen has been called in to see the New York prosecutor, Cy Vance, for the eighth time this past week. He says that in the over one million pages of tax records they have on Trump it is organized and tabulated in three ring binders. Vance has hired one of the top forensic accounting firms in New York and has the best mob lawyer in New York on the case. According to Cohen subpoenas will be flying soon. 

Then there are the two suits brought against Trump and others based on the 1871 Klu Klux Klan law one by Eric Swallwell and there’s another Congressman as well. These relate to the Jan 6^th insurrection. According to Constitutional expert Lawrence Tribe these are not trivial lawsuits and they are suing for damages. Theoretically, everyone under attack on Jan 6^th could file a similar law suit. These two cases alone could bankrupt the Donald. Imagine if he had a hundred cases?

Moving on.

On Thursday there was a back and forth between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci. Depending on what news source you listen to either Paul schooled Fauci or Fauci, once again, explained basic science to Paul. Regardless, both sides call it “fireworks” and “a heated exchange.” 

“Let’s go to the tape,” (thank you Mr. Michaels).

I’ve listened to the segment on the back and forth.

Paul is trying to bully, disparage, and correct Fauci. Paul is saying there is no evidence that once you are vaccinated you need to wear a mask.

Fauci is saying that there are variants of the virus and wearing the mask protects you and others from the variants. Yes, there is spill over protection, but you are not necessarily protected.

Paul is trying to make this a liberal nanny state argument. 

Fauci is explaining the science and using reason.

How did we get to this point?

Why are Republicans siding with the potential of killing more people when we could all just suck it up and wear a mask for a bit longer? What’s the big deal?

What I found amazing was how many ad hominem arguments about Fauci were in the comments. It’s very disturbing and sad.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta shooter is being treated with kid gloves. This whole massage parlor thing is revealing one of those unsaid things about our economy. Why are there so many massage parlors? Hum. 

Why did the shooter pass by many massage parlors that did not feature Asian women after shooting the first group of people and go to another one featuring Asian women? You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out.

In economic news Larry Summers is making comments about how dangerous our economic state is. We could fall into stagflation. Blah blah blah. I listen to Krugman because he seems to be calmly rational. His thoughts? It took decades of economic mismanagement back then to get to the state of stagflation. We aren’t anywhere near that.

Okay about economic news. 

Btw Stagflation was the problem that started when Nixon was president. At that time they called it inflation and were trying to tame inflation. Ford did WIN “Whip Inflation Now.” He didn’t and Carter inherited the mess. Carter kept Volker as Fed Chief. Volker was tough and eventually got inflation under control, but it wasn’t easy and Carter lost re-election, partially because of that (and the treason of Reagan.)

Stagflation is rising prices without rising cost of living (like wages) to keep up. Soon there is no economic growth. How can that happen? It can’t say economists, but there it is. Hum. I asked a buddy of mine who is very smart about this stuff. His conclusion was there was a lot of money in the economy that was unaccounted for and until that was taken out of the economy prices would rise. As he said to me, “There’s a lot of money in mattresses.” I found it hard to believe because the situation had gone on so long. His answer? “The mattresses were a lot thicker than we thought.”

People on the conservative side of the spectrum are posting meme and cartoons emphasizing that “back in the day they earned a living. It wasn’t given to them.”

To which I say, “Oh yeah? You gonna give back your $1400 check?”

Or what about the pension you have that those nanny state Democrats got for you over the objections of those “fiscal conservative” fat cat corporate Republicans?

How about Social Security? Or Medicare? 

Where would you be without them?

Programs opposed by Republicans.

Here’s an economic insight for you all, “Do you know the absolute way to cure poverty?”

Come on. Take a guess. No. No. Uh-uh.

It’s money. Yup. If people have money they aren’t poor. You want to cure poverty? Find a way for people to have money.

PS Lobster! “Hey, you want a piece of me? Come on!”

PPS Please check out the photos of the findings of the reports linking Republicans to their lies and to the Russian disinformation campaign. 

This is basically a few minutes of Rachel’s show one night this past week.