I’m very late today, as my body recovers from the release of two months worth of built up stress and anguish, all in a one hour period two days ago. I realized last night, as I wandered the apartment in a daze, after my three hour nap, my body was exhausted, with the kind of bone deep tiredness one can only get by long-term suppression of strong emotions, followed by an almost instant release…. It’s a similar feeling to the evening of the third day of football practice, back in high school, when the severe conditioning required to throw off the lethargy of summer vacation begins to catch up to even the best-conditioned young athlete… I didn’t run or sweat, but, two months of inner raging has the same effect, over time.

All that is probably more detail than necessary, but, we don’t worry about such petty shit here in the intro. If it takes up space, it’s good enough for us. This policy has evolved over the past three plus years of searching for the right opening, a search thus far unsuccessful to any significant degree. I still spend half the morning, it seems, just trying to pull this section together, to the detriment of my advancing arthritis. For example, right now I’m typing with three of the fingers on my left hand actively becoming numb from the circulation obstruction caused by the swelling, arthritic tissue undergoing the stress of movement.

Having again had my overtired, over-stimulated brain keep me up late, then sleeping so hard I missed a pain pill dose, I’m up later than my recent past habit. This makes me nervous, as I bump up against the edge of my self-imposed deadline for posting the daily Pearl. In fact, I’m writing wicked fast, to try to make up some of my lost time. In fact, I’m starting to feel panicked, never a good thing this time of day, hours before the world can supply me with any targets…. they’re all asleep, or getting ready for work….. It’s rude to bite people who haven’t even had their coffee yet….

But, I’ll do my best to get this out in a timely fashion. In keeping with that intent, I’ll even cut this intro short, again, to scoot us down the page into the video section. I think a bit of applied ruthlessness, and our old, familiar emergency method #4, ever useful in these situations, will serve our needs quite nicely. Just in time, too…. my left hand is now fully numb, and typing will be suspended until I can feel it again…. Hang on, we’ll be right back to get us out of here……

There is an old saying among the blogging community, which helps us to realize how important the whole thing is. It’s a grand statement of purpose, in a way, and, if I had any clue what it was, I might feel better. Since I don’t, let’s just remove the packaging from this odd little box, marked with a big 4, & see what happens next…..

Shall we Pearl?

“What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.” — Plato, The Republic. Book X. 601B

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When I was a kid, cartoons were big, with me, and in mainstream entertainment at large. One of my favorites, as I remember, was Crusader Rabbit, a cartoon character from the early 1950’s, usually shown on the Sheriff John Show, a local program near Ft. Lewis, Washington, where my dad was stationed for four years leading up to when I was 10.  I was going to include a number of those cartoons, but, after watching a few minutes of them, I realized, they were really bad, not what I remembered, but, not entirely unexpected…. The networks had barely been formed, and the slick, polished programs you see now weren’t yet developed….

Instead, we’ll go with over an hour of cartoons from a pair, or more accurately, a duck and a pair, who always were my Disney faves…. Donald because of his ranting, of course (I must have known even then what I would be when I grew up….); Chip and Dale, just because they were cute, always using teamwork to beat the bad guys, whomever they were…. I didn’t realize they were the first gay couple, but, hey, I was only a kid…. Enjoy, ffolkes, there’s a lot of good cartoons in this one…. Well, ‘good’ is the best word to use, I should say, without going into a lot of detail over why…. Think, progress in social mores, in one direction, anyway….

It’s one of the best rants I’ve written, all in all, well worth a second read, even for those who’ve been around a while. For newbies, brace yourselves, you are about to learn some new ways to look at stuff you’ve really always known, if you can persuade yourself to admit your wish to learn…. What is, perhaps, the first new item of note, is the certainty of the simple following fact: the only way to fulfill that wish is to realize how much larger is our ignorance than our knowledge…. Listen well, young paduans, as I tell you a true tale….

From 3/2/2013:

“He who imitates evil always goes beyond the limits of the example, whereas he who imitates what is good, always falls short.” — Confucius

Perfect! If ever a quote could be applied to fit one group of people, this one would; it fits the folks who occupy elected office in this country like the proverbial glove. Ooh! Ooh! Here’s another one…

“Ignorance: When you don’t know something and somebody finds it out.” — Jethro Burns

Okay, that’s a good start…. Now, we all know that politicians lie to us…. Please, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed…. It’s what we’ve all taught them to do, by our calm acceptance, thus, our tacit approval, of all the other lies they’ve told, from the very beginning. We expect them to lie… then, when we catch them at it, there is this huge public outcry, as if it had never happened before.

Sometimes, the behavior of the American public toward the political beast reminds me of a shark…. to wit: no memory of the past to slow down their willingness to rush into dangerous situations….. For millions of years, sharks and dolphins have lived together in the oceans. For just about all that time, whenever a shark attacks a dolphin, it gets killed, unless the dolphin is injured in some way, or, it is a baby inadvertently left alone. Always, if things are even, the shark dies, because the dolphins are smarter, and faster swimmers.

Yet, after millions of years, you would think the sharks might learn to let them alone…. They don’t, which is clear evidence of their lack of ability to learn, to remember the past, and generalize future behavior according to its effect. The American voting public has the same problem…. they never learn to expect to be lied to, always seemingly flabbergasted to learn their elected officials are, shall we say, less than perfectly honest?

Quite frankly, the whole process drives me nuts, absolutely bonkers, having witnessed the self-same reaction by the public, thousands upon  thousands of times in my life…. What is it about people that does that to them? Why are they so unwilling to use the mind that sits between their ears, rather than just carrying it around from toilet to toilet, which is all most folks seem to do with it? (Almost forgot it was a question….) Perhaps, what some random cynic once observed about people really is true, to wit: “Human beings are merely nature’s finest example of portable plumbing”, or something of that sort….  I wish I knew….

“There is one way to find out if a man is honest–ask him. If he says yes, you know he is crooked.” — Groucho Marx

I’m starting to feel a bit of anger, actually, and I have a hard time not letting it out on the voting public, the idiots. But, it really isn’t all their fault, as the people who run for office are the ones who are actively imitating evil, obviously, exceeding the limits of their example. The voting public can’t help never being able to quite reach the good for which they reach, either. This is why I get angry about it…. The folks who run for office tell the public they are going to work for the people when they are elected; we all know they are lying, but we elect them anyway. Now, how stupid is that? Pretty stupid, in my book…..

On the one hand, the stupidity displayed by the politicians is deliberate, in its adherence to principles of theft and prevarication; on the other hand, the stupidity displayed by the voting public is, perhaps, not deliberate, but is still, at minimum, misguided, and, ultimately, just as evil, in placing its trust in evil people. In the dispassionate view held by the universe, stupid is as stupid does; the sentence of death is the same for both types of stupidity, deliberate, or unconscious. Reality doesn’t care about why; only results have relevance….

What can be done about this? Not a damn thing…. Not only do I find most people are unconsciously stupid, they are stubborn about it, to boot, even when it is clear how the act of being stupid is hurting them. Rather than use their minds to find a new way of dealing with these issues, they retreat into platitudes and dogma, running right back out to vote for yet another slick-talking idiot, who promises them manna from heaven, or, more accurately, from Washington D.C. Confronted with clear evidence of their idiocy, they become even more stubborn, as they are unwilling to accept they might be wrong, making it acceptable to refuse to examine any evidence of being wrong, or, more often, simply denying its existence altogether.

Politicians, who choose to live in stupidity, by lying and cheating and stealing from their own people, don’t even WANT to choose otherwise. Why should they? They’ve got it easy, with a ready supply of host bodies on which to practice their symbiotic parasitism, a body that not only accepts all their lies, but, by their silent, tacit approval, encourage even further depredations with their complete acquiescence whatever the politicos want, no matter how outrageous, or harmful to their own interests. All the politicians have to say is, the public is in danger, (Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!….), from this, that, or the other, whereupon the public allows them to do whatever the pundits choose, so long as the public can feel safe, from whatever fictional fantasy was constructed, using a lot of smoke and mirrors, convincing them to panic in fear…..

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” — Albert Einstein

It’s an interesting spectacle to observe from the sidelines, but it arouses in me a strong feeling of sadness, with anger underlying, as I watch, day after day, as so many millions of foolish people get taken advantage of by a few assholes. It definitely makes me want to buy a gun, even though I would only use it if pressed; I have a feeling I may get pressed some day in the not-too-distant future, if I continue to make noise about all this.

I’m fairly well protected thus far by a lack of notoriety; the BRC and the PTB aren’t going to worry about me until I have an audience a lot larger than a few hundred folks, of which perhaps fifty regularly read my work. If what I am saying began to gain popularity, was being read by millions, I’d be in danger; until then, I’m as safe as I can make myself with the tools at hand… which, if I say so myself, are not entirely inconsequential…. If I said any more, I’d be giving away my precautions, which simply wouldn’t do. Rest assured… I’m perfectly capable of, and, ready to, deal with anything short of assault weapons, with what I have at hand….. After all, I do have one advantage that won’t go away, to wit:

“Many, if not all, of my presidential opponents are certifiable idiots.” — Miriam Defensor Santiago — The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1993

See? I’m not completely alone! Actually, if you pay close attention, you will note this was uttered by a politician, about their peers, so it really doesn’t count as support of what I’m saying here. What, exactly am I saying here? Hmm, okay, since I’ve already written about 1200 words or so on this, it’s a good place to wind it up…. so, here goes…

Ffolkes, you are being lied to, daily, and hourly, by those who were elected, supposedly to look out for your interests. I hate to tell you, but, those folks never intended to do anything of the sort. So, it would be a good thing if everybody in this country would OPEN THEIR FUCKING EYES AND GET A DAMN CLUE!!!!!….. I don’t think I can say it any clearer than that….. That’s all, for now…..

“Ignorance kills daily. “– Smart Bee
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Well, maybe it’s not Hemingway-esque, but, it’s certainly gigoidal….

Note from 2015: See? Not bad, eh? Even the final comment, ripped from the closing section the same day as the rant, is perfectly fitting. I think I’ll keep this one….

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:Blue Screen of Death: n.  [common] This term is closely related to the older {Black Screen of Death} but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up).  Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows misbehaving applications can readily crash the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of Death, sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens.  (Commonly abbreviated {BSOD}.)

The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest (http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10chal2.html), seems to have predated popular use of the term:

The pearl below is an odd one, a statement anyone who knows me indicates a truly exceptional occurrence, since ‘odd’ could be used to describe everything happening here. First, all of them came up quickly, in the order you see; second, the message created by their congruent directional characteristics is one of great wisdom. Most telling, the quote supplied by Smart Bee, exactly in the center position, which seems like it is a tongue-in-cheek observation, is much more apt than it might appear at first glance. If you stop to think of it, the event described, i.e. changing over to a new concept of service, IS, or WAS, perhaps, a very telling sign. It was one of the first AUDIBLE shots fired by the 1%, in the ages old war being waged between them, and the rest of humanity.

It was almost as if those who run the world were now sure of their hold over society, no longer needing to hide themselves, or their intentions, from those they have oppressed for so long; I remember having a similar thought when I first saw a gas station advertising the policy, thinking to myself, “Well, so much for the concept of customer service. Somebody noticed they could make more money by making the customers supply their own.” Those elite assholes who necessarily hide from their brethren, for their own protection, notified the world they no longer cared about hiding their intentions, though they continue to hide their location in space…. with good reason…. Any who, it all makes this a very special pearl….

“Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.– John Selden (1584-1654) — Learning

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” — Soren Kierkegaard

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” — Isaac Asimov — Salvor Hardin, “Foundation”

“The real erosion of civilization as we knew it started with the popularity of the self-service gas pump.” — Smart Bee

“It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.” — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Notes on Virginia

When he was in great prosperity, and courted by many, seeing himself splendidly served at his table, he turned to his children and said: “Children, we had been undone, if we had not been undone.” — Plutarch (46-120 AD) — Life of Themistocles

“A good reputation is more valuable than money.” — Publius Syrus (42 BC) — Maxim 108

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Well, it’s done. Since I haven’t the slightest clue how I did it, I’m going to post it, and be done with it. My brain is officially done, as soon as I hit send on the email to the Pearl Drops, which goes out immediately after posting online (gotta have the IP address for the post to put in the email. See? Not completely disorganized…. See y’all tomorrow, ffolkes, as long as I can remember how to type….