Passing thoughts and images

Teachers and Books: I was watching Dave Letterman years ago when he was still Late Night, and he was going a bit called Library, or new books, or something like that. He stood in front of a small bookcase and held up one that he said was the latest from Stephen King, called “Why Don’t We Make a Movie out of This.”

I’ve noticed something odd, but my sample size is too low to be reliable. Our grandson in high school was assigned two books that I was aware of, and more of course. One was The Great Gatsby, and the other One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At our fiftieth class reunion I spoke with a former classmate who became a teacher …. I mean … educator. At one point she said “I taught One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to one of her high school classes. Perhaps in her teaching she got wind of the underlying reality, that the kids were merely watching the movie?

I don’t know how prevalent this practice is, but I wonder if the teachers, I mean, educators, in these classes are aware that the assigned reading are books that were made into easily accessible movies. And that most of the kids, and perhaps the teachers, I mean educators, have not read the material but rather just watched the video. That’s what I would do if I were in school these days. In fact, in a time when media was far less omnipresent, I remember being with several other students taking a Freshman college class, and we were busy listening to King Lear on a 78 rpm record. There was a test the following day. I’m pretty sure I absorbed none of it. Maybe, if it was a movie, if we had a projector, and could sit back and effortlessly absorb it, I would have done better on the test?

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The deadly spinoff virus

Yellowstone was a very popular series that lasted five seasons on Paramount. By my count, it has now engendered two spinoffs:

  • Marshals starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, a special forces veteran subject to flashbacks and who was once married to a Chinese woman (Kelsey Asbille) who pretended to be a Native American in Yellowstone. Unfortunately for the series, Grimes doesn’t project much charisma, unlike Keven Costner, star of Yellowstone, so I don’t imagine the series will last. But who knows. I also see that the series is set in Montana, and that US Marshals there (1) draw much of their employment force from the Hollywood model pool, and these models are excellent shots and skilled horseback riders who can also carry their own in fisticuffs; and 2) that they do most of their work while riding horseback. I had it in my mind that the internal combustion engine had replaced horses, but in Taylor Sheridan’s world, four-wheelers do not exist.

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Elvis (impersonator) turns 77!

Monday evening I spent time talking with Ab of Fakeologist and a man calling himself “Frank the Salt Guy”. Ab is from Canada and Frank from Australia. The entire conversation is on Fakeologist, and you can listen here.

We ranged far and wide, from Miles Mathis to Modern Monetary Theory. Frank is a smart, lively guy, and I was happy he was there to make it a three-way instead of two-way affair. Ab, as always, brings a dose of healthy skepticism to my wildest ideas about fake deaths and people who fake their deaths and become other people.

Part of what I want to write about in the days ahead is a set of photos brought to me by Tyrone McCloskey. Since I mentioned it on the Fakeologist show, I’ll talk about it here. Tyrone has found, in my opinion, the living man who once went by the name of Andy Kaufman,  the Man on the Moon himself, and the guy who did a mean Elvis on the Johnny Carson Show. I’ll show the Carson clip below, and I need to pick Tyrone’s brain about where Kaufman might be now. I haven’t checked his details, but someone said on the show that if alive, Kaufman would be 77 years old.

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A Day in the Life of poseurs

I wrote a piece about the Beatles yesterday, and ended up not liking it. In it I veered off course and suggested that the Intel entourage behind them is now busy sealing details, writing final chapters, and repairing any damage that might be done by Mike Williams, aka, Sage of Quay. I suggested some event had triggered this movement towards closure, perhaps the death of either Paul McCartney, the original, who would be 84, or John Lennon, 85.

Mr. Williams presents a contradiction, as it appears his mission is to promote the fictional character Billy Shears and to allege that the real Paul McCartney died on 9/11/1966. At the same time, Williams has done good work exposing the true nature of their music, offering a strong case that Rubber Soul, for instance,  could not be their music or instrumentation. (I suspect that none of the Beatles’ music, beginning to end, was composed by either Lennon or the McCartney’s,  and don’t know about Harrison or Ringo.) In this manner, Williams presents a contradiction. Ayn Rand said repeatedly in Atlas Shrugged that “There are no contradictions, only faulty premises”. She spoke truth. Williams does present a contradiction. The only resolution I see is limited hangout. He is not a stupid man, far from it.

I want to kick off this post, which I want to be a series of videos with limited comment, with a video currently on YouTube.

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The madness of crowds

The above video is 11:12, and do take the time to watch it. If you’re like me, you’ll appreciate not only the information given, but also the sardonic wit. Dr. Peter Ridd likens certain parts of the Climate alarmist crowd as witch burners, and repeats that theme throughout. He also references Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, an 1841 work by Charles Mackay that highlighted tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble, and other notable public exhibitions of madness. Climate Change is but the most recent.

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Bouncing off rocks, landing in a beautiful pool

I am going to talk about something that I’ve never written about before, but to preface the remarks, it’s not private, and though it was at that time of my life, it is not important.

It has to do with becoming a CPA, and what it takes. At the time I passed the exam, in the early 1980s, it was a completely bluebook pencil-driven affair. We answered multiple choice questions; we wrote essays; and solved long problems in a show-your-work style.

It was my understanding at that time that only five percent of candidates did as I did, and passed all five parts on first attempt. I’ll get that part out of the way, in the “what it says about me” department. One, it means I’m pretty smart, at accounting anyway. I’m not terribly smart in many ways. But more than that, it says that I knew how to take a test. I didn’t sweat it, never sweated tests in college, and yet, for sure, I did not ace them all, not even close.  I was not an A student. However, I was always relaxed, and on tests usually done before everyone else and busy checking and rechecking my work. Some people I knew sweated and panicked. Even though they were smart and capable they were not good at testing. That’s a shame. There should be a better way for those who study hard, have the knowledge, but do not test well. I do not know the answer there.

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Yellow highlighters and the art of memory maintenance

While we were vacationing in France, I had the pleasure of meeting Jan Spreen, an occasional commenter here. He allowed me to publish a couple of his pieces, here and here, while we traveled, and I have put his blog up on the blogroll. I advise caution, however, as much of his blog is written in French, and those French, as Steve Martin once reminded us, “have a different word for everything.”

Jan and I discussed books of importance, and I told him that I have a problem with retention, that I had read many book and that after I remembered nothing. This came to the fore this year when I put great effort in transcribing portions of the book Public Opinion, by Walter Lippman. I use 3m flags to highlight important passages, and then use a transcription program to read those passages into a Word file. I have accumulated scores of such files, and I occasionally consult them.

I have too many books and not enough space, and so was thinning them out and selecting many to give away to our local Community Nest. Or to toss. I came across another copy of Public Opinion. I had flagged that copy as I had the other, but had not transcribed it. I then realized that I had read and flagged the book twice, transcribed portions once, and not retained a word of it!

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Consensus in science can only mean no science is in the works

Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. There is no such things as consensus science. If it is consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. (Michael Crichton, 1942-2008)

I don’t know enough of science to say this with any certainty, but I do not think there is much real science going on anymore. It is discussed here on this blog frequently, how Moon landings, space travel in general, atomic bombs, nuclear power (which I suspect is real**) are all fake. I am a complete skeptic about geology and evolution. Weather forecasts are indeed reliable for a few days time – there is good work going on there. Bridges do not collapse, nor buildings, which look like boxes. That says that engineering is reliable, but that architecture is not very creative.

Crichton’s remarks above are aimed directly at the climate change regime, which relies on a fabricated “consensus” of 97% of scientists to sell itself as real. Never mind that the consensus was not real, even as then-president Obama used it in a Tweet. The idea behind it was to prevent questioning of the fabricated science that was underway. It has been used as a hammer, and “scientists” and researchers have been cowed into submission by brute force by the progenitors of this fake movement.

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Journalists: They put the ‘con’ in confidence

I can tell you from my viewpoint that spinning Montana’s newspapers was as easy as spinning a top. There’s precious little congressional news that is actually broken by a Montana newspaper. That works to the advantage of the politician. Absolutely. When you are free from a burrowing press, you pretty much have clear sailing. (Pat Williams, 1937-2025, US Representative from Montana, 1979-97)

The above quote was important to me at one time. For one, I was a Montana resident, and for another, I thought journalism was a real profession. The last book I read by Bryan Wilson Key, Subliminal Seduction, has an appendix devoted to the “Canon’s of Journalism”, which are as follows:

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