Sheer covers Darkening OF The Light (Concrete Blonde)

September 20th, 2024

This may get another coat of paint and/or mix job at some point, but for now, here it is

Sheer-DarkeningOfTheLight.mp3

More ranting about the for-sale nature of American elections and justice

August 31st, 2024

So, we all know that things like Citizens United should never have been allowed to happen, and we’ve all seen how America has slowly turned into something that works for the billionares far better than for the rest of us.

However, one thing that strikes me as extra cynical is that over and over I get political ads which imply that the way one wins elections is money, that if we spend less than our opponent the election is lost. These same emails always ask me to “chip in” – even though often teh candidate asking me for money is nowhere near my district and sometimes when I dig into them they have absolutely zero chance of winning.

I really hate the phrase “chip in” at this point. I know it’s intended to be emotionally manipulative, to make me feel like I am not doing my part if I don’t send money to everyone.

Two party systems and wind turbines

July 17th, 2024

So, one of the big problems we have in America with having a two party system is that it seems like what happens is one of tha parties aligns with the desires of the rural areas and the other party aligns with the desires of the urban areas.

As you all know, I’ve long been a proponent of ending the two party system (although not in favor of replacing it with fascism AT ALL) in favor of a multiparty system like you see in Europe. I think a big vehicle to help this happen and to help our representitive government better represent us is ranked choice voting.

Anyway, back to my original point. I saw a bunch of posts on facebook about wind energy and someone said it was bad for livestock. I assumed this was just going to be the usual lies from the right but no, in fact, there does seem to be some truth to this. Apparently there’s something called ‘turbine hoof’ – the constant vibrations through the ground disturb the cartilage and damage the livestock.

So, right now, the GOP is trying to literally end democracy in America. At CPAC they’ve announced their intention to end it, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 make it clear that their intentions are to completely screw over all urban voters to give the rural religious nuts everythign they want.

However, the way we’ve gotten to where somewhat less than half of the country is willing to vote for someone who is literally tearing down the bedrock of our country’s basic foundational concept is that we’re not listening enough to the needs of the rural voters and addressing them enough. Me, who occasionally studies the power grid and is a big proponent of fuelless energy sources, had never heard of turbine hoof and this, friends, does not appear to be bullshit, numerous studies seem to show a measurable effect here.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think we can fix whatever’s wrong with the way the turbines are mounted, geared, or whatever so they don’t cause whatever vibrations are doing this. But I think we better add to the list of requirements for turbines going in near livestock that they can pass a test that they are turbine-hoof safe. And in general, we need to be careful.. if we don’t want to either have to fight wars or be destroying people’s lives, we had better make sure we aren’t the tyranny of the majority powering our cities off of technologies that are hurting the livestock of our neighbors.

Trump said *what*?

July 12th, 2024

So, apparently Trump is hoping that the Supreme Court (although the Supremely Corrupt court might be a better name) ruling that presidents have immunity for official acts applies to crimes you committed in order to become president. He thinks he should get out of the felony in New York because after all presidents have immunity. I don’t think we really want to go down this road – I would hope even his followers, as much as they’ve drank the flavor-aid and lost the ability to think rationally, woudl recognize that we don’t want to say that anyone who wins election has immunity for anything they had to do to win.

Honestly I’m going to have to write a whole rant about 1) How America is America the enslaved, one of the least free nations in the world and 2) how the supreme court granting presidential immunity is right in line with their tendency to say cops can murder anyone they want, steal anyone’s money they want, and that’s just fine. We are lucky there are as few bad cops as there are or things would be truly unlivable around here, because the criminal justice system is incredibly corrupt and seems to have lost sight with what the founders originally wanted for our country.

But even beyond that I have come to suspect that people will rationalize *anything* that “Their side” does. Not everyone, mind you, but enough folks to make for a major problem. Trump shouldn’t be able to be elected dogcatcher and neither should any other republican, but instead the GOP voters are about to vote themselves into a nightmare fascist dictatorship. And I suspect taht while right now they love it, they’re loving owning the libs, this is so fun.. when their friends get taken to the concentration camps, they may not love it so much any more.

One huge problem I think we face is the output side of every child left behind. The kids aren’t educated enough to realize what’s happening.

Anyway, we still need ranked choice voting.

1200 hours

July 6th, 2024

I’ve still been chipping away at my keyboard and guitar skills. I hope to record some more original material soon, and also to maybe do a twitch show soon.

meter showing 1200 hours

1200 hours

1100 hours

February 27th, 2024

hour meter showing 1100.1 hours

So, I’ve made it to 1100. Still getting better, although there are interesting phenomenons where some aspects get worse and then better as parts of my neural network rebalance. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what I’m like at 2000.

Interest breaks Capitalism

February 26th, 2024

So, one way that I know, for sure, the US is in no way a Christian nation is that all over the place in the US, everywhere money is being loaned, interest is being charged. Jesus certainly never went off on the subjects of abortion or sex before marriage, but charging interest made him flip over some tables in a temple because he was so mad.

Jesus was right to be mad, because charging interest *breaks* capitalism. Here’s the basic problem. In our system, money is a pointer to value. The little bits of green paper have no actual value but you can use them to buy various goods, so they are backed by all they can buy.

When you charge interest, you are doing something with the pieces of paper which cannot be matched in the real world. Very few real world activities generate more actual value just by holding a certain amount of value – farming being the one exception. But, because you’re making the accounting system do something that doesn’t match reality, *trouble* ensues. We’ve talked about in previous episodes how the great depression was caused by a failure in the accounting system – and that’s the kind of failure you can run into.

TascamSlurp

February 16th, 2024

This is a perl script that can be used to pull all the files from a DA-6400 and automatically divide them into folders based on their timestamps


#!/usr/bin/perl
$|=1;

$targetbase = “~/DownloadLocation”;
$host = “tascam”;

use Net::FTP;
use Time::Local qw ( timelocal );

use Data::Dumper;

print “Creating FTP object\n”;

$ftp = Net::FTP->new($host, Debug => 0) || die “Can’t connect to tascam”;
print “Logging in\n”;

$ftp->login(“DA-6400″,”DA-6400”) || die “Can’t login ” , $ftp->message;
print “CWD\n”;
$ftp->cwd(“/ssd/DA Files”) || die “Cannot CWD: ” . $ftp->message;
print “BIN\n”;
$ftp->binary() || die “Cannot set to bin mode: ” . $ftp->message;

my $list = $ftp->ls();

my $maxtime = 0;
my $timestamps = {};

# determine newest date
foreach $file (@{$list}) {
next if($file eq “.”);
next if($file eq “..”);
next if(!($file =~ /.*.wav/));

my $unixtime = getFileTimestamp($file);
my $ts = getTimestamp($unixtime);

print “file: [$file] ts: $ts\n”;
$maxtime = $unixtime if($unixtime > $maxtime);
$timestamps->{$unixtime} = 1;
}
foreach $ts (keys %{$timestamps}) {

$targetstub = getTargetDir($ts);
$targetdir = $targetbase . ‘/’ . $targetstub;
if(! -d $targetdir) {
mkdir $targetdir;
} else {
next;
}

$targetdir .= “/ftp”;
if(! -d $targetdir) {
mkdir $targetdir;
}

chdir $targetdir;
print “$ts – Writing to $targetdir\n”;

foreach $file (@{$list}) {
next if($file eq “.”);
next if($file eq “..”);
next if(!($file =~ /.*.wav/));

my $unixtime = getFileTimestamp($file);
if($unixtime == $ts) {
print “Fetching $file ..”;
$ftp->get($file);
print (-s $file);
print “\n”;
}
}
}

sub getTargetDir
{
my $time = shift;
my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime($time);
return sprintf(“%02d%02d%04d”,$mon+1,$mday,$year+1900);
}

sub getTimestamp
{
my $time = shift || time();

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime($time);
return sprintf(“%02d/%02d/%04d-%02d:%02d:%02d”,$mon+1,$mday,$year+1900,$hour,$min,$sec);
}

sub getFileTimestamp
{
my $file = shift;
my ($prefix, $datetime, $take, $channel, $name) = split(/_/, $file);

print “Datetime: [$datetime]\n” if($main::debug);

my ($date, $time) = split(/-/, $datetime);
print “Date: [$date]\n” if($main::debug);

my ($yy, $MM, $dd) = $date =~ /(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/;
my ($hh, $mm, $ss) = $time =~ /(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})/;

print “yy: [$yy] mm: $mm dd: $dd\n” if($main::debug);

$MM -= 1;
$yy -= 1900;

my $unixtime = timelocal($ss, $mm, $hh, $dd, $MM, $yy);

return $unixtime;
}

The boundaries between neural networks

February 15th, 2024

So, I’ve been working on a theory.. this is more of my hand-wavy guessing what’s going on inside a NNN stuff..

My theory is that children grow their ego.. the portion of their decision trees that is recognizably them – from the inside out. At the same time, society grows it’s internal manifestation of state from the outside in. When combined with the fact that humans have a large number of neurons between their senses and their conscious experience – the part of them that is “on the ride” – there are some problems that can crop up here.

My mother had stated at one point that when I was younger she thought that I wanted to go to seminary school. I think what was actually going on there was she was seeing reflected light of her own beliefs through the upper layer because my ego had not yet grown the strength to manifest and clearly communicate my opinions about Christianity and my desires surrounding it.

Now, I’m going to segue for a second (I promise this is all related, at least in my mind) to say that I have nothing against people choosing to be transgendered. I have a number of friends who are, or who have experimented with it. I see nothing wrong with us choosing our gender identities and if it were up to me we would be able to quickly and easily change the configuration of our bodies to match, or even experiment with different alternatives. I would certainly be curious to experience being female. For them as argue that we are thwarting God’s will, I would respond that our bodies are gifts and when I give a gift I don’t give it with the expectation that the receiver will not modify it or re-gift it if it doesn’t work out for them. I might be sad that they choose to do so but I certainly would not feel that I should be in a position to force them to do otherwise or that it is a sin.

The reason I bring all this up, though, is I know of at least one case in which a child did not want to be transgendered but it appeared at least from the outside that they did. And I think it’s important to understand the reflected light phenomenon and be aware of the fact that – in cases like religion and gender identity – one can’t really tell with young children what they want because they will have a significant challenge in communicating that when the society-programmed layers nearer their senses will tend to conform to whatever the visible authority figures in their lives are pushing.

I think this is a big problem in the case of religion because religions are viral – most of them have survived by being informational virii after all – which is why people should not force their children to go to church or be confirmed in a specific religion. Removing this informational virus after it has been installed is basically impossible – NNNs have no delete – and it can only be disabled after considerable effort. I do not think I have yet removed all the deleterious effects of Christianity, for example.

In the case of people changing gender identity, all indications from my own personal exposure to the result are it can be even more traumatic. What I’m saying is, there’s time – children don’t really need to have a specific gender identity and I see no problem with them wearing the clothing and having the pronouns of either gender but one should definitely make absolutely and very sure that they are really onboard, for themselves, before using hormones or having surgery. (I think the latter is not a problem because I don’t think confirmation surgery is done until after puberty). When I was first told of one individual choosing to be a confirmed transgender who was very young my response was I wasn’t really sure how you could possibly know until after puberty, although I understand that on the other side of that is that it gets a lot harder post puberty and so puberty blockers are a time-sensitive thing.

I don’t know. In most cases I freely admit transgender issues are well beyond my pay grade and my opinions mean very little. But I do think that *in general* psychologists and psychiatrists should be aware of what is actually happening in the neural network and aware of the possibility of confirmation bias on the part of the caregivers for children, and the possibility that children are not able to communicate their true needs and desires because they are still very deep inside their minds and slowly learning how to reach the outside and when and how to push back against authority.

(As a side note, I do think our society is somewhat aware at least subconsciously of the problem here and it is why one should absolutely not participate in sex with children. We understand that they can’t give informed consent for sex and that they might not speak of their true needs because of the power imbalance issue. I think we just don’t always realize that this problem is prevalent all over the place)

Our children are not our property – to the extent they belong to anyone they belong to themselves and to the tribe as a whole. Forcing certain types of decisions is likely to have a bad effect on them and a bad effect on all of us in the sense that we are all connected.

Braces

January 21st, 2024

How anyone can look at their kids needing braces and not realize we’re not the result of direct engineering is beyond me.