Wednesday, May 17, 2017
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.
Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983
This will be brief.
My long term infection was pneumonia. I suspected it when I just stayed in bed and began to feel better. Previously I would try to rally and the result was a relapse. I went to the doctors and they found nothing. By Tuesday I had had enough and had Mr. Galloway take me out to Kaiser for the day, where I found a young beginning resident who listened, examined me, sent me to x-ray – where the technician could see something going on in the lower left side of my lungs. After that it was shots to start the antibiotics, pharmacy to get a ten day course of antibiotics, and the rest of the day in bed.
The treatment is what you’d expect, sanitation, bed rest, and the anti-biotics. It’s working well enough that I have confidence it will work, but I am not starting a full work schedule until I know more. After a day of bed rest I’d feel enough better to act as if I were recovering, which would trigger the relapses. Not this time. If I’m not in bed I’m sitting quietly, warm, reading old Nero Wolfe novels. I owe you this report, and thanks to those who made inquiries. But I don’t know how long to recovery. I’ll let you know when I do.
But it’s definitely pneumonia.
The news remains absurd. Today I heard on Fox News a Democrat official say that Mr. Trump clearly deserves impeachment. Asked for what crime – the Constitution is specific that there must be “high crime” – she said the President shared confidential information with the Russians. Since, so far as I know, that is an act of governance within the powers of the Presidency, and is certainly not prohibited in any statute, it is extraordinary that anyone claiming familiarity – much less expertise – would say such a thing in public, but it is apparently the new standard of journalism.
I haven’t much been following the news, but so far as I can see the President told Mr. Comey he hoped he’d be finished with the Russian investigation soon. This was apparently gleaned from leaks of Mr. Comey’s notes. If there is anyone on this planet, including Mr. Comey, who was unaware that President Trump wished the Russian investigation, started as a distraction from the flood of leaks coming from the State Department, would soon be over, I would be astonished; and even in Mr. Comey’s notes, conveniently leaked, I saw no hint of a direct order or a command. If that is a high crime we have come to a sorry state.
There is much more like this, If we need a special prosecutor, what of the one crime that seems to have come from all this investigating: the unmasking of American citizen names as a result of FISA surveillance? Those names were bandied about the White House during the last year of the previous administration, and were even leaked to the Press; a black letter felony. There is no grand jury investigating this known crime.
This is very tiring. I am going to bed.
Proof of multiverses?
Since the Guardian is one of the more respected papers in Britain I have decided to forward this, despite that the article spends a good fraction of it’s length in irrelevant, snide political content and the “proof” of the existence of parallel universes, at least as expressed in the article, seems very tenuous.
The original Royal Astronomical Society press release contains the speculation repeated herein (https://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/2982-new-survey-hints-at-exotic-origin-for-the-cold-spot). However, they also note that models suggest that the “cold spot” (see links for detail) could have occurred naturally with 2% likelihood based on modeling today, so the absence for an alternate conventional explanation is rather meaningless.
Let’s not go crossing Einstein’s bridge just yet.
Subj: Proof of multiverses?
J
The Cold Civil War
Jerry
I think this explains much:
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-cold-civil-war/
It’s a middle-sized piece, but the main ideas are in the first few paragraphs. I can’t begin to do it justice.
Ed
more on The Cold Civil War
Jerry
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-cold-civil-war/
The ideas that keep haunting me: “The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests . . . Ever since Woodrow Wilson nearly a century and a half ago at Princeton, colleges have taught that ordinary Americans are rightly ruled by experts because they are incapable of governing themselves. Millions of graduates have identified themselves as the personifiers of expertise and believe themselves entitled to rule.” <snip>
There is much to contemplate here. We cannot rule ourselves; we need “experts”; only the experts increasingly sound like babbling idiots.
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
