We came, we saw, he died.

Let’s all “drop trou” and whiz.

Weenie, widdie, whizzie.

“Golden slumbers fill your eyes,

Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry.”

They draft nineteen-year olds for a reason.

By definition, they haven’t carried that weight

A long time; gittin’ back home

is just a plane ride away, innit?

But the cranial walled-vaults and basements are

the entire home entertainment section,

hallucinatory surround, boss graphics,

gutsy plots, and that now wrenching

circle of fifths, beautiful and sad.

Let’s throw the instruments overboard.

The quadrant, the compass, the common sense:

There is no positive integer that answers the question

Of human carrying capacity.

Ahab and Israel have lost their marbles, while we…

What exactly did we do with our

collective conscience?  Effective procedures?

Surely, humans once computed algorithms,

Secured the tackle to the mast and sailed

To the Galapagos.  Darwin’s finches

Grew more better beaks in bad

Weather, but we keep electing Mitt?

Is there an obesity epidemic in

The Gaussian tails of psychopaths these days?  

I’m trying to find true geographic north from a compass.  The magnetic declination (curvature from the poles) in my vicinity shows “counter-clockwise, 15 degrees,” or thereabouts.  Since the magnetic pole is somewhere in NE Canada, I am wondering about the further correction that needs to be made in order to be pointed to the actual pole of the Earth, however wobbly, because I want to remain correct at all times, despite flip-flopping magnetic politicians.  

The “sun-compass” technique (bisecting the hour-hand-of-the watch-directed-at-the-sun with “12-noon”) looks pretty good, in terms of perfecting the dial, but I am worried about “time-of-year” (earth axis tilt) and “daylight savings-time” issues.

I have not thought these things out, to my own satisfaction.  Throw a dog a bone.

The magnetic compasses are obviously off.  The cell-phone apps, equally off.  They both report the same.  One would think that a cell-phone using GPS could calculate true geographic north, but not in my limited experience.

I suppose the people at Creech in Nevada kill people using magnetic-fucking-north drones?  I don’t think so.  They use true north, as I would like to, but not to “kill people,” but to simply aim a goddamned brick compass in a patio, you god-forsaken heathens; how I hate you all, except for the folks at DD, and a few others.  God bless you all.

I look forward to your inspirational dialogue on these issues.

 

Eh, ragazzo, I didn’t want to go this way, but we are at war.  Stupid fucking Hobbit.  Stupid fucking man.  

BooMan is pushing the long-ago debunked IAEA report and wishes that the international community squeezes Iran like a balloon to enact regime change.  

And he thinks I’m the moron.  Needless to say, I think such manifest nonsense is crazier than a shithouse rat dining on Dick Cheney’s rotting corpse.  Are you listening, driftglass?  We haven’t even finished our latest war crimes that broke us to pieces.  Suffice it to say, if we attack Iran, I rely upon the noble Persians to shove the Fifth Fleet up our collective ass, for the sake of justice.

Ideological insanity.

I want to touch on the problem of ideological insanity.  It strikes me as a Necker cube problem, wherein people lose their ability to “flip” between ambiguous interpretations of reality.

Allow a brief digression.

Jeff Hawkins, who invented the palm pilot, has an interesting theory of cortical function, as good as any, better even.  Based on the virtual uniformity of structure of the large dinner napkin we call neocortex, as originally noted by Mountcastle, he suggests that the invariable function of the six-layered neocortex is to correlate data, the higher the layer, the higher the level of correlation; such that low-level properties (lines, angles, colors) are correlated in the lowest parts of the hierarchy, whereas high-level concepts (war, peace) are correlated in the highest levels of the large dinner napkin.  To quote Hebb, neurons that fire together wire together, and the cerebral cortex is nothing but a massive hierarchical multivariate analysis.

Yes? So good, so far.

The brain’s three parts (I hold with the “four-parts” people, spare parts excluded) can be sub-divided as far as you want to go, but at Swanson’s considerable eyeblink, it goes “cortex, cerebral nuclei, brainstem,” which suffices for our discussion.  

Within the brainstem are two major parts: the incoming and outgoing processes: sensory inflow (thalamus) and motor outflow (hypothalamus), what you see, what you do; low-level stuff, but stuff that should not be dismissed.

The high-level “CEO” (how I hate that acronym) in the cortex relies on incoming data.  He is only as good as his data.  But what happens over time, learning, development, is that the high-level correlations, i.e., belief-systems, come to dominate sensory input; that is, expectations come to rule, even above incoming facts. The large dinner napkin begins to instruct and bias sensory input.  Quite literally, cortical output dominates sensory input, over time.  To put it simply, religion dominates facts, the ‘cerebral cortex coerces sensory input, in the same way Dick Cheney coerced prisoners at black sites (albeit via the triple-descending outflow of cortex).

Now that is fucked up, but that is the way that it is because it is that way.

Scientists at the Large Greenwald Collider (LGC) in Brazil say they have discovered new sub-atomic particles heretofore only theoretically postulated.  The traditional method of colliding elephon and donkon particles using high-energy, extremely magnetized word-tunnels has so seldomly yielded results, that taxpayers wonder whether trivially inexpensive projects like the LGC are worth it.

Scientists have long postulated that a particle known as the waron was composed of constituent hardons, paultons, and pwogdorks, each thought to have extremely different properties, but they did not understand how they worked together to always produce the same result, what scientists jokingly refer to as “atomic war.”

The current experiments showed that by smashing paultons and pwogdorks together, the once only-imagined particles, the reezon and the partizan, can and do exist separately for nanoseconds in their respective matter/anti-matter states before annihilating one another.  Thus only the hardon particle survives, and a perpetual state of “atomic war” ensues.  

Canadian philosopher of science Ian Welsh agreed with the basic results, but added that it doesn’t really matter whether the paulton and pwogdork collide, because it’s all going into the black hole, anyway, only the rate of travel differs, concluding, “I see no scenario in which things don’t crack up, completely.”

Critics dismissed the evidence and said that the people working at the LGC are simply “assholes,” and refused further comment.

Scientists assured the public that this finding has no significance outside the laboratory, and that the experiment’s danger to the general public was so far beyond their imagination that they need not worry.

This morning, I saw two of the neighbor’s dogs standing on the lawn, uh, abutted, ass-to-ass, each in a “four-point stance,” pushing against one another like two football linemen trying to dominate some invisible line of scrimmage on the ground beneath their hind legs, except they’re both facing the wrong way. When one dog began to “win,” the other’s haunches and hind paws would lift off the ground.  Normally forepaw lift-off is voluntary, and it’s called “rearing,” as dogs can be trained to do to push shopping carts for “entertainment” purposes, and sometimes just do reflexively when excitedly greeting their masters, or when wanting to exit a walled-in arena.  I dunno what you’d call the involuntary reverse lift-off engineered by another dog’s will-power, but when it happens, the liftee’s forepaws angle-in sharper against the heightening scrum and the four-point stalemate once again ensues.  They were still holding their original lines, albeit considerably rotated, by the time I finished my cigarette.  Maybe it’s more like dog judo. I’d never seen it before in dogs, and could at best hazard a guess as to the ethological significance of this kind of K9 ass-backwards shoving match, so it was infinitely more interesting than the Iowa caucuses, I’m sure.

I once invented a form of poetry, which I called “The Analogy.”

It goes like so:

His word: her ear

Her blush: his blaze

I welcome additional contibutioins.