Maya, Maya, wherefore art thou Maya?

We are scheduled for a meeting tomorrow with our homeowners insurance agent, who works for State Farm. I’ve been busy gathering data, and it has taken me places I did not know I would go. I won’t give our personal numbers here, but the keys to our insurance are two: our location, and the “replacement cost” that is used to calculate the face of our policy and our annual premium.

I was first triggered by seeking a quote from Allstate, the only other insurer now operating in the front range, the so-called “foothills” on the eastern face of the Colorado Rockies. State Farm used the number $350 psf (per square foot) in determining our premium, Allstate used $240, and said we needed far less coverage than we were getting from State Farm. As insurance goes, that doesn’t matter much, as Allstate charges a much higher rate per 100K, but set that knowledge aside. The information we got from Allstate was useful. The difference, it appears, is that State Farm applies its $350 number to our entire square footage, where Allstate uses a lower number for basement footage, one-third of our square footage, which is far cheaper to replace.

That in mind, I got on the Internet yesterday to seek out some quotes, knowing we are redlined so that most insurers cannot write policies here. But they do not know that right away when we encounter their sales mechanism on the tubes, so they will, at the outset, give us honest numbers.

I came across Farmers Insurance, which does not write policies up here, and its agent blindly went through the data gathering process, and after coming up with a replacement cost of $285 psf interrupted the process and said, my words, “Hey, wait a  minute. We can’t write a policy for you. You’re in the fire zone!” I said yeah, I knew that, I told your person that. He advised have a nice day.

Why are so many people concerned with the kind of day I should have?

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Spahn and Sain and pray for rain

I recently came across a sports person on the radio who said that there is a “conspiracy theory” about that claimed that the LA Dodgers had tanked the baseball National League championship series to allow the Milwaukee Brewers to go to the World Series.  The reasoning behind it is that there is going to be a baseball strike in December, and stadiums may be closed to any games for a long period thereafter. Behind that looming strike is a dysfunctional game behind which a few wealthy teams dominate the sport while the rest subsist – not in poverty- but in minor league status. They only exist to allow the wealthy teams competition during the regular season prior to the fall extravaganza. What better way to counter that argument than to have two small-market teams in the 2026 Series!

Indeed, I am told, 2015 was the last time that a small market teams made the World Series, the Kansas City Royals. I had to look that up. I do remember the 2016 World Series, where the Chicago Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians, and I and others here have written quite a bit about scripted sports. To me, that series appeared to have been rigged.

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Climate “science”: All the Helen’s agree

This post is written with a mutually shared understanding, or perhaps not “mutual” or “shared”. The Climate Change movement is powerful, backed by unseen forces and controlling scientists, pundits and the media, a mass public relations apparatus, and Donald Trump. (Did you really think that a true “denier” would be allowed in that office?) Trump is allowing us a pause, to get dissidents (“deniers”) to relax while the PR machines is subtly spreading the message that the movement is in retreat. It is not, and while I don’t know the future, I suspect it will kick into full gear in 2028, when Trump is retired and a suitable replacement is enthroned by the presidential selection process. The means of achieving their ends remain, as always, coercive and violent, though a velvet glove is currently in use.

Dr. John Clauser won the Nobel physics prize in 2022, sharing the prize with others for work in “entangled photons.” First, since the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore in 2007, around the time of the infamous Hockey Stick, and also  to Barack Obama in 2008 for the mere act of getting his sorry ass (s)elected, the Nobel Prize has been sullied in my mind, making all selections suspect. Perhaps physicists are held to higher standards than those receiving the politicized Peace Prize. Secondly, I do not know what “entangled photons represent. Reading AI, it tells me that untangling them leads to very good encryption.

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Psychopathic authoritarians, or just mundane bureaucrats?

I have a practical outlook regarding the behavior of certain public figures. But first I want to quote from Joseph Sansone, M.S., PhD, a psychiatrist, who offered a statement submitted to a Dutch Court in the case highlighted in this link. It is a case filed in the Netherlands, and Bill Gates and many others are named defendants. They are accused of using the covid vaccines as a means of pushing hidden bioweapons. I’ve no doubt they are guilty. The problem is that we don’t have justice, so no court will find  them so.

I have my own outlook on lies and lying liars in the public sphere. Joseph Sansone, M.H., PhD, has filed what I think in our country would be called an amicus brief to the Netherland proceedings. He is not part of the lawsuit. He says that the defendants in this case are “psychopathic authoritarians”. That’s a name dreamed up by the psychiatric professions, probably listed in the DSM-5. I imagine members of his profession voted on it, with a majority of psychiatrists deciding by a show of hands what is a disease, what is not. By this means we also have ADHD, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, intermediate explosive disorder (which I would have guessed relates to diarrhea), and a host of others. All made up. But I want to quote Sansone on this:

Psychopathic Authoritarianism is the systemic elevation of power, control, and domination above truth, empathy, liberty, moral integrity, bodily autonomy, and human dignity. It is the collective manifestation of traits identified as the Dark Tetrad,  sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. On a systemic level, these traits operate together with fear and coercive control to produce obedience, conformity, and subjugation of persons to institutional authority and may include a callous disregard for human life.

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Mathis on Columbine

I have taken my time getting around to the work done recently by Miles Mathis on the Columbine event. I did a run-through this morning. I am going to offer a couple of very general observations, not intended to be criticisms, and with caveats:

I respect Miles and his work. This will not be a take-down by any means. From reading him I learned how to analyze photos, and these days watch them easily disassemble before my eyes. Even these days with so much AI all about, there is a too-smooth quality about fake photos. AI is going to get better at this stuff, and will soon learn to match the graininess, lighting and lines in earlier work. In the future, it will be nearly impossible to tell reality from fiction in photos. But when I did my work on Columbine, it was very easy. I first noticed that the supposed victims and grievers were actors, shedding no tears. They only grimaced for the cameras. Ah, amateurs! Then I noticed that the shots of kids (victims) were obviously staged, asking myself “Why was the photographer in that place at that time?” In other words, photos were done by professional photographers brought to the scene to record fake as real.

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Ashkenazi this!

Me: Is “Tokarski” in the Jewish registry of names?

 AI: Yes, the surname Tokarski is included in major Jewish genealogical registries, such as the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index (CJSI) and JewishGen databases.

  • Origin: It is classified as a Jewish (eastern Ashkenazic) surname, derived either as a patronymic from the occupational name Tokarz (turner/lathe operator) or as a habitational name from places called Tokary in Poland.
  • Registry Presence: The name appears in the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index, which aggregates data from 31+ Jewish genealogical databases.
  • Specific Records: Jewish burial records for the surname Tokarski exist in Argentina (e.g., Buenos Aires), and the name is tracked in the JewishGen Family Finder.

While the surname is ethnically Polish, its presence in these indices confirms its usage within Jewish communities, particularly in Eastern Europe and among diaspora populations.

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Angelina’s fool

I am not much for poetry. When in seventh grade, the principal of our school, Sister Angelina, assigned my class of 30 and others too the task of writing some verse, which I think was going to be used in some larger project. I surely I did my part, and probably scribbled some indecipherable nonsense. Later our teacher, also a nun, relayed Angelina’s disappointment that not one useful line had been generated by the brain power of the seventh grade class of Little Flower School, Billings, Montana, in the year of our Lord 1963. We didn’t have much of that.

I don’t get poetry. I’ve read it, but for the most part it does not register. It bounces. I know to ignore the end of a line and read the next as if the two were not disjointed. I was singled out for praise in high school for reading a poem in that manner when called on in class. And I once saw an advertisement, probably for some airline, about the White Cliffs of Dover, read by someone with a deep resonant voice, talking about “this land, this England”. (sic) Just reading words in such a manner often passes for greater intelligence than exists in the reader.  Thus do we honor Morgan Freeman as we do. He could read The Da Vinci Code and make it sound like Shakespeare.

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I gotta go!

[Operating in memory in writing this piece. Harper’s Ferry became “Fort Sumpter.” I’ve changed it and acknowledge the error.”]

I received in my inbox this morning the following comment:

I imagine those misspellings are British, and that we are dealing with a person from there.  It is a long thread  from earlier this year in which I offered a few comments on Mai Lai, the McCartney twins, Jane Fonda, etc. Here is the overall link, perhaps including this side-thread, perhaps not. I responded:

Wisdom is where you find it, and truth a slippery rascal. I am trying to understand this one-sentence comment in search of both wisdom and truth. I am not here to disrespect you or to merely dismiss what you say. But the comment to me seems to lack depth. Pattern recognition is part of truth-seeking, but not all of it. We can walk and chew gum.

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Bill of attainder in store?

Bill of Attainder: The Constitution prohibits laws that inflict punishment on specific individuals or easily ascertainable groups without a judicial trial.

A couple of years back we had a writer here, Steve Kelly, who had his own following and wrote about things unlike anything I do. I liked having him aboard for that reason, that he brought some breadth to this place that I cannot. He wrote about environmental issues, mostly about my home state of Montana. I won’t name the group he is/was a part of for reasons outlined below. When he left he told me he felt out of place here. I was sorry that bothered him, as it certainly did not me.

Back before that time I wrote of the group that Steve works for, naming it, praising the work they do, only to be chastised by its head honcho, and the tone was familiar to me. He did not want to be associated with this blog, as I go places that are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. Not everyone likes that, and the leader of a group with a reputation for solid work in environmental causes did not want association with us. For that reason, I distanced myself, removed them from the blogroll, and have not mentioned them by name again since. It was not because I was chastised, but only because I respect their work and want to respect their wishes too., even when snubbed. Continue reading “Bill of attainder in store?” →