Little gusts of hot air that don't deserve their own thread.

[HighlyIrregular II]

"Well I tried to generate images of nude or topless celebrities but they don't look much like the celebrity and their clothes are still on!" reminds me of this line from Another Irish Drinking Song:

Crazy Uncle Michael thought he was a leprechaun
But in fact he's just a leper and his arms and legs are gone

[HighlyIrregular II]

I was reading about purifying uranium and thought about how cool it would be to play with a supersonic centrifuge, then I got to thinking, seeing as how centrifuges probably compress things uniformly compared to vices, they're like the microwaves of compression.

[Catoptric]

Johnson City man arrested on Milligan Campus
https://www.elizabethton.com/2019/04/02 ... an-campus/

I sure hope they catch the 2 men that were chasing him. . .


*******************************


According to a black researcher, Martin Luther King Jr was a Marxist that didn't write his, 'I have a Dream' speech.
https://fb.watch/i5TV7uAA8N/

The speech was nearly forgotten about since the newspapers mostly only focused on the march, until his death in 1968, and he would spend hours revising the one he was given, and much of the dream rhetoric was going to be glossed over on recommendations from his colleagues since he had used it before.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/08 ... rivia.html

Some articles suggested that Communism was used to besmear King's reputation (which to some extent was due to how he was perceived as a threat to the government because he was influential and charismatic,) and though he repudiated some of the tenants he wrote about it and confided to many of his close friends (and this might argue that the government had been tracking him since they were aware of what he had talked openly about.) He wrote a memoir in 1958 extolling Marx's critique of capitalism which is probably something a lot of people can relate to even if they disregard Marx's ideologies.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ency ... /communism

A big reason the FBI was tracking him is because they wanted to ensure he wasn't going to use Communist ideologies within his platform.



******************************





Ripple and XRP?





*****************


In India, Gujarat "Kite Fighters" are more lethal than guns?

SIX people were horrifically sliced to death (including a baby) by glass-encrusted kite strings after a blood-drenched festival in India.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/21080648/ ... -festival/

It seems they use glass particles and rub it into the kite strings so that it severs the competition?

Evidently, this is not the first occurrence. . . The article even states that a few years ago, 16 people were killed?




***********************


"Is that coffee organic?"

Your Morning Cup Of Coffee Is Also Your Morning Cup Of Pesticide
https://gizmodo.com/you-drink-a-cup-of- ... 1627823600


Though it's also sprayed with pesticide (even the "organic")


*************


'Giggling' mother, 27, who is accused of stabbing her boyfriend to death in his sleep 'lied to police that he had raped her and threatened to leak sex tape of them on Facebook to "make his life a misery"', murder trial hears
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... raped.html



***************

50 Funny Memes To Sum Up What It’s Like To Live In The USA
https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-americ ... ure-jokes/

[Catoptric]

I just realized that someone I hadn't been interacting with for a while, had actually died (update: he was driving a motorcycle and someone pulled out in front of him) in 2016.

https://www.turrentinejacksonmorrow.com ... nbar-51529

He didn't have any facial hair around 2014, and I'm kind of wondering about the circumstances and the behavior that led up to it. The location he died might suggest it wasn't a suicide and perhaps was a car accident (though I don't see why the obituary wouldn't have said so.) When searching for the name this website pulls up, though it doesn't have a record (and I'm wondering if it was listed and then was removed after someone disagreed with it being listed there?) https://www.suicidememorialwall.com/searchbox.php

I always find it strange that the very existence of someone seems to disappear from the face of the earth. I get the impression he was let go following the new year and am tempted to ask the company he worked at what happened (but they seem like a really ghetto "old boy club" kind of place.) https://www.precisiondemolition.com/


I'm thinking he might have been drunk driving, now that I've looked over his old profile, but I also get the impression he was riding a motorcycle (despite being obsessed with modding Audi cars.)
https://www.facebook.com/BryanHallDunbar

I was reminded of him when I read a statistic on BMW and Audi drivers being more likely to be psychopaths or narcissists, and remembered he had liked Audi (though I don't think he's a psychopath, however, I have had the impression he is insecure and possibly very manipulative; I just didn't trust his bias as a company HR Director, and had the impression the place was run like a shit show of egos and conformists that kiss the asses of others while prone to create a hostile work environment; hence why they were hiring and I unfriended him when I didn't trust he was being honest with me about their inventory problem being the result of a bad and mismanaged work environment that cuts corners at the risk of putting people's lives in danger.)

His long-time girlfriend would go onto marry 4 years later (her last name is Ponton and I found a social media post of where he died, not far from me. . .)
https://www.zola.com/wedding/nicholasandashleigh2020

This is 100% the location of where he died driving a motorcycle, where a van pulled out in front of him. He died before reaching the hospital.
https://www.facebook.com/DFWScanner/pos ... 722575589/

This is where he died:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Old+D ... 96.9180788

I can't tell, but it doesn't seem as though the vehicle that hit him was responding at the scene, but it doesn't mention a hit and run on the social media page.

[HighlyIrregular II]

I had a childhood friend, one of the ones I didn't like, who allegedly killed himself. Probably true but he was a huge compulsive liar. He was picked on as a kid, yet he was a little obnoxious. and given very bad reviews as a high school teacher for years. One day I looked up the latest reviews and I saw an unspecific glowing one. As I read more I read about the suicide. I found a video of him online, talking about a visit by a local politician. Very interesting to me. He kind of strung together a bunch of cliches, but he did it well. Makes sense that a compulsive liar as a kid would do that as an adult.

Once we were racing our bikes around the block and half way around he started begging me to let him win. I guess we were about 9 or 10. Another time he was climbing down a fire hose that was tied between the 2nd floor balcony of the "park house" and the fence around sprinklers. As he got more horizontal he felt less stable (he wasn't using arm strength - he wanted to stay on top of the hose) and in his begging for me to somehow save him he said "I'll give you a million dollars."

[HighlyIrregular II]

That reflexive inhale before a sneeze is interesting. I wonder if all animals inhale before sneezing. There's enough air in your lungs to expell some more even after exhaling. I bet non-pre-exhalicular sneezes evolved first.

[HighlyIrregular II]

I have a little meh. The developers of the Messenger app for Android may have heeded my complaint about it not working in landscape mode (portrait mode isn't that horrible but I didn't realize the keys could be enlarged in portrait mode when I complained). I reinstalled it months later and it now works in landscape mode, but the page width stays the same, so I get the wide keyboard but a narrow webpage. I had been using Messenger Lite, but there were issues with it so I'm glad to have full Messenger.

...Now suddenly it's full width in landscape mode.

[Catoptric]

The argument by Carl Sagan regarding how television and entertainment is becoming blurbs of easily digestible bites (more or less. . .) regurgitated onto soundbites of easily misconstrued and increasingly alienated palettes of mediocrity, without any consideration to the thought processes or tangible grasps of redeeming qualities that could challenge the status quo beyond commercial gain/reward for a system that doesn't value knowledge above profit.

Or basically what he quotes in his book, 'Demon Haunted World' he recites in a video

Spoiler

Show

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Q
When arguing about having done away with television decades ago and pretty much shunning modern entertainment, it's assumed I a
avoid anything that "doesn't elevate my social standing."

A
I tend to perceive human nature to act on initiatives with peer approval, that at other times they would be opposed to; and if I was motivated purely from the interest of social standing, I would be in opposition to my own ideals and intrinsic values.

An example might be: people that watch sports purely with the motivation that they exist vicarious from the proxy of identifying with the other audience, as though a voyeur believes they are one peg further up on the evolutionary totem pole by contributing their DNA when expelled onto the effigy of a fertility symbol.

Whether that "contribution" to the world progresses society any further is often defended with the same vitriol that all the effluence of social positioning is somehow not a farce of pretend playhouse, where people aren't likewise faking attention for the interim of gaming the social hierarchical system by identifying it.

The same problem of age-old moral-superiority virtue signaling is likewise indifferent to the plight of what is truly gained by distracting people from their own echo into the chamber pot of social malaise that has plagued mankind since the dawn of existence.

(Tosses a spintria into your direction)

Society will distract itself while being swindled and forced into oligarchical systems of copacetic ennui.


And when reading over what I wrote in response to having "missed out" on nature documentaries on the likes of Neflix, et al, SyFy does sound an awful lot like a euphemism for syphilis. . .

Spoiler

Show

Looking over what is available on the topic, it might be decent, though it doesn't mean I haven't acquired David Attenborough documentaries, or seen blu-ray versions of Baraka (Ron Fricke and similar nonverbal films,) or Adam Curtis (human nature) documentaries, or Ken Burns National Park and War documentaries, which algorithms on Netflix or Amazon will generally ignore.

The problem with online format is too often it deliberately undermines the very processes available to assist end-user interface, and supplants it with mundane and impulse seeking distraction (so if you search for a topic--any topic--you will usually find the exact same results of something completely different from what you were looking for; this is by design because those particular programs have priority simply because the masses find them more appealing on a common denominator (the very thing Sagan was warning about.)

Perhaps some programs have attempted to educate society, but if it's anything like the 'History Channel,' 'Sci-Fi' (or SyFy as they now want to be called) it becomes apparent that very little has been intending to actually incorporate actual science or valid facts about the topic (such as Ancient Aliens, which is surprisingly bad if people look into what they claim to be facts.) Such programs have no monetary interest in being truthful and has little incentive to be otherwise.

I haven't neglected movies and have spent a lot of time with researching foreign films and appending subtitle files to them. Along with trying to prserve some semblance of familiarity with what I used to remember of historical documentaries, I recently just reacquired Cosmos (which I had DVD's of when I stopped watching TV.)

The internet is good for independent research info but even the best parts of it are largely a distraction from real research,.

***********************************


I'm reminded of conformity and social normalization


Moving From Durkheim to Putnam - Preindustrial Industrial Mechanical Solidarity Organic Solidarity HomogeneousHeterogeneous Collective Individualistic.
https://slideplayer.com/slide/4206441/


Jim Jones' lover: inside the mind of the cult leader's right-hand woman
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/ ... ders-lover


'I'm still alive': Cult survivor speaks about life beyond Anne Hamilton-Byrne
https://www.theage.com.au/national/vict ... 51xx5.html




************************


People griped about the backlash Target had of pulling gay/pride merchandise, when the social ostracization of selling it was what was motivated for the safety of the employees (who probably got into arguments with the customers?)

One post on Twitter talked about (to some extent) "why not pull Christmas items off the shelves if they are pulling gay crap off?"

Since most Christmas books don't talk about the hallucinogen origins of the holiday which likely stem from the ancient Mesopotamia region (the Syrian's referred to a sacred tree of Life which many believe to have been a well-known plant https://covenantofbabylon.wordpress.com ... e-of-life/ ,) I have no problem with that. . . But then again, those don't sell and too often money is the only motivator in making "progress." People delude themselves with the idea that human nature isn't just one step away from falling into its own neurosis; of lacking control and autonomy, to the extent people will conflagrate the very establishes and edifices they give power to. If people weren't so entrenched and motivated to conform to the "norms" of social identity (much like buying products from companies because walking around with it makes you part of the "in" crowd,) none of these companies would even exist.

It probably didn't help that when you Google the brand, Abprallen, that was selling merchandise during 'Pride month' it pulls up a bunch of literal Satanic merchandise.

Either people recognize that society is and has always been a bunch of trolls since the dawn of human civilization or they perpetuate the mischaracterization of so-called "truth," when seeking "enlightenment" in the age of post-industrialism.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/25/trans-des ... ers-surge/

Google images shows the merchandise that might have motivated the pull:
https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APw ... 3&dpr=1.25



************************

[Catoptric]

INTP become @ssholes because we tend to expect more from the world because we always assume things should seem obvious (we sometimes conceal emotion out of frustration, with how analyzing things becomes the only solution, and when trying to rationalize the world fails we lash out at the world with cynicism.)

A maladapted behavior type could be if someone would turn to gaslighting others or try to discourage interactions; since most INTP would rather not use other people we would prefer not to act out in order to control, but rather to discourage interaction. A preferred option is to stop responding and generally ignoring others if interacting can sometimes take away from their preferred sterile and routine hermetic lifestyle.

A major complaint I have with the world at large is it too often relies on pathos and ignores confrontation to the ego and this is because I was raised by narcissists, where attempting to get a straight answer is nearly impossible because of how they circumvent any inquiry by sidestepping critical analysis and deliberately act stupid (such as, the subject of discussion--whether it be an idea or an object--could be right in front of them but they would intentionally pretend as if they don't know what you are talking about.) I could never tell if this was simply because they don't know any better, or because they simply don't try (a narcissist doesn't try and will use such interactions to always appear in their mind as though they are "winning" even if that wasn't the objective.) Since I tend to perceive INTP as a bit of a coping mechanism, I assume a lot of the behavior is a byproduct of how we cope with environments and become maladapted, so it's possible being assertive and too direct is due to not developing "soft skills" when interacting since the environments that many people come from are not conducive to sympathy (rather, empathizing with the world can tend to work against us if the world sees us as "closed off" and not reciprocating what we see as a waste of time showing sympathy.)

The INTP is a preference of personality and not an excuse to be negative or toxic when interacting with others, and a lot of the time people that are maladapted are just cognitive misers that would rather not see themselves as being wrong (even when they are.) Belief in oneself is often that of hubris, and sometimes the initial interaction that people put on display is really just the curiosity of figuring people out, to see how they should be "prioritized," much like someone finding a collectible action figurine and then setting it on the shelf and then "forgetting about it." A lot of society operates from the paradigm that social commitments are just resource acquisitions that only become inconvenient as soon as you can't exploit them or serve a vital function to what they hope to gain from others (if someone felt discarded early on, they might not invest too much in what they see as a vulnerability, and good luck getting beneath the surface if someone is constantly evading questions or giving unreliable responses that are easily plied apart for the lies that they are,) and INTP might be weary of the possibility that other people don't realize what drives and motivates their interactions with others.

Basically, some people become "burned out" early on and try to make sense of the world around them, because it was either unreliable or uncharismatic to them as an individual. Something that most people genuinely forget about or don't prioritize in their mind as being important, could just as well be interpreted as something which has "triggered" an emotional reaction that is deeply embedded in their psyche from some early trauma that they might not even be aware of.


I was reminded of this quote

[HighlyIrregular II]

The future is here. Chubby, blue women, pearls are back in style, and better tearing toilet paper. Just as I'd envisioned it.