Home » Open thread 12/16/21

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Open thread 12/16/21 — 35 Comments

  1. Back in bygone days when a National Book Award book could delight readers, there was “Cosmicomics” by Italo Calvino, a collection of whimsical science-fiction tales narrated by crochety old Qwfwq, who had been around since before the Big Bang, to tell youngsters about the history of earth, life, the universe and all that.

    The first paragraph of these stories was always a straight bit of science which could have come out of a textbook. The rest is Qwfwq rattling on in his endearing way about the old days. In the excerpt below he explains life’s move from the sea to land.
    _____________________________________

    The Aquatic Uncle

    The first vertebrates who, in the Carboniferous period, abandoned aquatic life for terrestrial descended from the osseous, pulmonate fish whose fins were capable of rotation beneath their bodies and thus could be used as paws on the Earth.

    By then it was clear that the water period was coming to an end—old Qfwfq recalled—those who decided to make the great move were growing more and more numerous, there wasn’t a family that didn’t have some loved one up on dry land, and everybody told fabulous tales of the things that could be done there, and they called back to their relatives to join them. There was no holding the young fish; they slapped their fins on the muddy banks to see if they would work as paws, as the more talented ones had already discovered. But just at that time the differences among us were becoming accentuated: there might be a family that had been living on land, say, for several generations, whose young people acted in a way that wasn’t even amphibious but almost reptilian already; and there were others who lingered, still living like fish, those who, in fact, became even more fishy than they had been before.

    Our family, I must say, including grandparents, was all up on the shore, padding about as if we had never known how to do anything else. If it hadn’t been for the obstinacy of our great-uncle N’ba N’ga, we would have long since lost all contact with the aquatic world.

    Yes, we had a great-uncle who was a fish, on my paternal grandmother’s side, to be precise, of the Coelacanthus family of the Devonian period (the fresh-water branch: who are, for that matter, cousins of the others—but I don’t want to go into all these questions of kinship, nobody can ever follow them anyhow).

    https://booksvooks.com/fullbook/the-complete-cosmicomics-pdf-italo-calvino-1.html?page=13

  2. Youtube and Twitter are at it again, suppressing any discussion questioning the approved narrative under the aegis of protecting the public against what they deem to be potentially harmful “misinformation”. This time they’ve chosen to block a clip from Joe Rogan’s recent interview with one of the most highly published cardiologists in the world regarding vaccine side effects and Covid treatments.

  3. “Youtube and Twitter are at it again”
    We need to recruit more lawyers.
    There’s a pile of money to be made. Somebody set up a SPAC! I wanna invest.

  4. @ Huxley,

    So, I’ve done a couple of cursory searches for “F is for Fake”.

    YouTube has a number promos released and unreleased, and commentaries, but no complete film.

    The 9 minute preview was interesting even if it was intentionally so impressionistic as to be at first glance incoherent as many of those 1970’s experimental films and shorts were meant to be.

    I sat through the 9 minutes just on the strength of those snippets of Oja whomever running around in a diaphanous tie dyed gown.

    Amazon Prime offers it. But not free even to members. But then Amazon charges for many films – “The Third Man” for example – which you can see elsewhere in just as good or better copies. So screw them.

    I’ll keep looking and if I have to submit to petty extortion, I eventually will. LOL

  5. Liz:

    Thanks.

    JimNorCal:

    Better take another look at Neo’s post from a couple days ago. Law has gone mostly woke. Except for old, old lawyers . . .

  6. DNW:

    “F for Fake” comes and goes on YouTube. Apparently it’s gone for the moment, aside from a dodgy-looking Russian site.

    My favorite bit is in the first part where Welles is doing magic tricks in a train station, then introduces the film. His film crew moves a large white canvas behind him to obstruct the background. Welles speaks:
    __________________________

    Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is is a film about trickery and fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is certainly some kind of lie.

    But not this time. No, this is a promise: during the next hour everything you hear is true, based on solid fact.
    __________________________

    The problem is that the film is 88 minutes long. Some promise!

    Then Welles steps away from the white background and the viewer discovers he is in a room, not a train station.

    It’s a fun film. I don’t know how much I haven’t noticed.

  7. I think I took the family on vacation once during that “rainy period.”
    At least it felt like 2 million years of rain.

  8. I’m loving all these universities that required young, healthy students to get vaccinated and got almost total compliance now shutting down over cases.

    Will they attempt to make the booster required? How will that go?

  9. Will they attempt to make the booster required? How will that go?

    Griffin:

    UNM is requiring masks and boosters next term. Other unis too. I’m not predicting resistance.

    I may skip next term, because I’d like to travel then and I’d just as soon miss the masking.

  10. huxley,

    Yeah, but I got to think the uptake for each additional booster (and there will be more) is going to decline.

  11. We need an app that allows the listener to slow down the narrator.

    Lately I’m noticing they talk too fast like a salesman who doesn’t want to give you any time to think about what they’re saying. This is indicative of a larger social problem. Reflection is for thinkers not for sheep, who simply need to imbibe what they’re being told without questioning it.

  12. Yeah, but I got to think the uptake for each additional booster (and there will be more) is going to decline.

    Griffin:

    One hopes. The students I see are pretty docile, though I’m sure many are just keeping their heads down, which they have to do plenty otherwise, and trying to wait it out.

    Me too, though happily I’m not looking to start a career and I can wait as long as I wish.

    The story goes that after Apple Computer went public, soon there were employees whose stock options had vested and some of those wore t-shirts with the acronym “FYIFV.” This expanded to:

    F— You, I’m Fully Vested.

    That’s kinda me with the declaration ending in “Retired,” if it gets piled too much higher and deeper.

  13. The (n+1)th Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women:

    https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/women-and-evolution/

    “…Women have evolved to be less ethnocentric than men and also, not to fight to the death. It is not in their interests to do so. Women have been shown to be better at learning a second language which would have been necessary when conquered from without. Women are better verbally in general. The virtues of loyalty and defending the group can be counterproductive for women. Multiculturalism is a convenient ethos if you are a woman and want to live. The most enthusiastic “race traitors,” as the Woke call them, are white women competing with other white women for social status by showing supposed moral concern for the outgroup. And, the more out the out group, the better. I care about homosexuals. That’s nothing, I care about transexuals. I care about Muslims, the very Muslims who would put me in a hijab. When they blow people up or shoot them it becomes even more important to show tolerance. The logical next step is to care about pedophiles. Pedophiles are currently the lowest of the low, next to white men who are low only because they are high. She who first learns to love pedophiles will win the next round of the phoney compassion Olympics. You would think that women’s evolved concern for children would prevent this. However, women have been perfectly fine with sterilizing children by injecting them with hormones and maiming them forever in the name of transsexualism. Doctors can be struck off if they demur in any way from a child’s assertion that he or she is in the wrong sexed body. Schools primarily run by women, will keep a child’s new sexual identity from the child’s parents. Perhaps the fact that pedophilia benefits children in no way will remain a hurdle for a bit longer. The lack of loyalty to men and members of her own race will be much more consistent with evolved feminine traits than the male. Women have been shown to be more sexually fluid than men, too. Women in harems may well end up in lesbian relationships with their fellow harem members as they co-parent each other’s children…”

    Chase me Ladies. I’m in the Cavalry.

  14. @huxley:

    “though happily I’m not looking to start a career”

    Have you considered Career as a verb? It’s far more fun. Can even be done in the workplace.

  15. UNM is requiring masks and boosters next term.

    When your entire clientele and a fat chunk of your workforce is not in danger. Here’s your problem: educational administrators mix malevolence and stupidity.

  16. Have you considered Career as a verb? It’s far more fun. Can even be done in the workplace.

    Zaphod:

    I don’t want a career; I want to careen!

  17. Women have been shown to be better at learning a second language which would have been necessary when conquered from without. Women are better verbally in general. The virtues of loyalty and defending the group can be counterproductive for women.

    Zaphod:

    The best one-stop shopping to explain cults I’ve found is this piece from an evo pysch perspective:
    ___________________________________

    I see at least two major evolved psychological mechanisms emerging from the past to make us susceptible to cults. The Patty Hearst kidnapping exemplifies one. We know that people can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family. Usually called “brainwashing,” it is also known as The Stockholm Syndrome and “mind control.”

    An evolutionary psychology explanation starts by asking why such a trait would have improved the reproductive success of people during the millions of years we lived as social primates in bands or tribes? One thing that stands out from our records of the historical North American tribes, the South American tribes such as the Yanomamo and some African tribes is that being captured was a relatively common event. If you go back a few generations, almost everyone in some of these tribes has at least one ancestor (usually a woman) who was violently captured from another tribe.

    Natural selection has left us with psychological responses to capture seen in the Stockholm Syndrome and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Capture-bonding or social reorientation when captured from one warring tribe to another was an essential survival tool for a million years or more. Those who reoriented often became our ancestors. Those who did not became breakfast.

    http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html
    ___________________________________

    More grist for my mill that we evolved to fit in with our families and groups. It’s a survival issue. However much we may boast of our reason and independence, it’s tough to buck this evolutionary programming. We can, but it’s not easy.

  18. @Huxley:

    Your quote fails to stress that invariably the captive men are killed. In classical some were of course enslaved. But that’s much later. Much of our DNA was forged far earlier when it was a given that captured men were killed and the women were booty: — See the Iliad.

    So it’s primarily women who will defect to the invaders although of course some men will do so too and not all women always.

    Obviously I’m maximum bullish on evolved individual and group behaviours totally swamping any learned behaviours or civilized norms at times of individual or societal stress. Doesn’t mean I think that anything goes. Does mean that I think it’s insanely stupid to legislate and otherwise act as if we’re not Killer Apes.

    As far as cults and religions go… That has to be hard-wired into us (male and female), too. The group-survival advantages conferred by religion are obvious.

  19. Zaphod:

    The quote does specify:
    _______________________

    …almost everyone in some of these tribes has at least one ancestor (usually a woman) who was violently captured from another tribe.
    _______________________

    Perhaps insufficient emphasis for your purposes.

    Of course, male and female, we also get plenty of opportunity to be programmed by our immediate family, then by our groups.

    I’ve been brainwashed/reprogrammed so many times, consciously and not, that the process is as familiar as my backyard. This is why I’m not mystified how people could be Democrats or NeverTrump without being evil.

  20. Zaphod,
    “Chase me Ladies. I’m in the Cavalry”
    Time for that Seattle favorite Christmas song “Stop the Cavalry” version by The Cory Band & The Gwalia Singers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O91kqMsigZs

    Why this strange song is a (or was) a Seattle Christmas song is beyond me. Probably the only Christmas song with the line “nuclear fallout zone” in it.

  21. @ChasesEagles:

    Damn… If I’d spent another 6 weeks in Kent (yes, I know… the shame!) in 2002, I’d have heard that song!

  22. @ChasesEagles:

    Doubt they’d have given me a security clearance to work on that! (Ask Om about it :P). And I’d pretty much shaken most of the Australian dust from my sandals almost a decade earlier. But would have been very near… a hop and a skip from where I was staying at the Lakes across the road from the River Bend golf course. I seem to recall Boeing Aerospace and a bunch of other guys up the road in amongst the fulfillment warehouses.

    I was bumming around on a multi-nation sabbatical at the time. By some weird coincidence starting in Jakarta several months before, I somehow knew the Indonesian Chinese girl who managed the Panda Express at South Center. Some of the best diet and lifestyle advice I ever got was from learning all about Sysco and pre-fried orange chicken which comes in frozen sacks and various other horrors. Been on a health kick ever since.

    What I remember most about Kent apart from how pleasant it was to walk around the Golf Course perimeter just before dusk is that the best food by far was Mexican. Provided one went early to avoid the fights.

  23. DNW,

    I’ve seen, what I guess, is the whole film, of “F is For Fake”, on an American, cable TV channel.

    It was on one of these channels, I think: American Classic Movies, or Turner Classic Movies.

    If you look at the sites for these channels, you might see the film on their schedule(s), in the future.

    Cheers, TR

  24. So this is where Z got his vast knowledge about the US. A business trip to King County WA, 20 years ago. From such beginnings legends are made.

  25. Facing policy disaster after policy disaster, and as Biden sinks into all too obvious dementia and incoherence, it appears that the Biden Administration/Democrats are releasing a series of “bright shiny objects,” distractions to divert attention from those policy disasters, and the likelihood of a President Harris.

    Thus, we have all the new information about and focus on UFOs, the release of the formerly secret files on JFK’s assassination, and I presume other such objects coming down the pike, each one designed to fascinate and preoccupy some large number of people who would otherwise be focused on Biden’s crumbling agenda and Administration.

  26. TR on December 17, 2021 at 2:43 am said:

    DNW,

    I’ve seen, what I guess, is the whole film, of “F is For Fake”, on an American, cable TV channel.”

    Thanks. I’ll look out for it

  27. The (n+1)th Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women:

    https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/women-and-evolution/

    “…Women have evolved to be less ethnocentric than men and also, not to fight to the death. It is not in their interests to do so.

    I agree, with certain provisos and reservations, that anecdotally – and much of what we take to be the historical record is a litany of anecdotes – it looks to be true. At least for broad swaths of humankind.

    But we can always ask “What of populations, or lineages composed of those who have not been war losers, or reduced to servility in say that last oh, thousand years?

    Should we expect females in that population to be just as proportionally inclined to expressing that behavioral lability?

    And supposing that a thousand years is not enough to cause natural selection to operate in the way we assume it has, let’s assume that mechanisms of unnatural selection within certain populations have evolved to avoid just such kinds of in-group subversion. Let’s suppose that homosexuals were for hundreds of years drowned face down in bogs in certain “cultures” or populations. Let’s suppose that lesbian or promiscuous women were banished from the clan or strangled.

    Does that mean that there would be No Lydia Childs or Charles Sumners arising down the reproductive road?

    I’ cannot answer that. But I suspect that they might be fewer in a such a descendant population as I earlier described.

    I think that the problem comes in in just saying “Western” or “European” as if they were all of one history, lineage, or culture.

    Now, of course this is the point wherein someone chimes in about our “Beaker Folk” forefathers and “our” [yours not mine] extreme WHG ancient grandmothers.

    Well, there again, I don’t know just how significant a late neolithic event about which we really have no definite process record of, fits into the evolutionary biology theory you are referring to.

    All this will become moot soon enough, as populations begin to produce designer offspring. Swifter, higher, stronger, more beautiful and of greater wit. And this process might, as much as anything else, finally spell the end of the potential for the noxious and subversive effect of homosexuality to arise within those populations the members of which would eliminate its manifestation in their associative network.

    What a society of warrior athletes and goddess-like Stepford wives would really look like though, is anybody’s guess.

    Probably almost as dysfunctional as most others.

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