Commercial without consistency

 At this morning's breakfast, I noticed this poster, which gave me a bit of cognitive dissonance:

The photorealistic fried potato strips are shown within the pictured^* device (although seeming to reach out of it).

The pixelated stylized fries are outside of the device rectangle^**.

The message apparently being that if you want fries, "there's an app for that"™, and it is in your smartphone (along with the fries). And you really should get that app now (and the fries).

A commercial doesn't have to be consistent with reality to be effective. 

Commercial without consistency.

^* You are looking on your screen at a digital photograph of a printed poster of a stylized smartphone frame around a photograph of french fries poking out of a stylized container with the golden arches on it. Which happens to line up with the stylized container sticking out from behind, etc. Talk about reality...

™ This quoted phrase has been trademarked (and copyrighted (I really hope this is fair use)) by Apple™.

^** My friend Doc Searls describes "rectangle bingo" as a game in which he observes people in his travels and "wins" if there is even one person not staring into a rectangle. As in the photo headlining his blog post on journalism which I guess documents a loss.

[ edited June 8, 2022 ]

This must be part of a campaign. This, this morning on their ordering screen:

Communication without consumption

 I am a writer with no readers.

Coalition without controversy

 When I think of division, I am reminded of the Grand Canyon.

One rim in the foreground, and the opposite rim in the distance. Ten or so miles away, as the crow flies, but hundreds by any effective road or a day or two of hiking down and then up.

Important question: Which side of the canyon is responsible for this great division? 

Of course, neither side could be responsible. It's obviously the river below.

But what's the answer for the ideological division from which we suffer more and more in this millennium? Who or what has caused it?

In the sixteen year of 42 and 43, our division was small compared to the massive gap of today. So, did 44 divide us (as some claim), or was it 45 (as others proclaim)? Conversely, could 46 pull us together, unite us? Neither and no.

A division cannot, by definition, be caused, nor can it be healed by either side. Division comes from some other force, something which belongs simultaneously to neither side and yet to both.

The answer is obvious for the canyon. For millennia, the Colorado River greedily sucked in the ground on either side of it, as it worked its way deeper and deeper, until it is a full mile below the two rims, which are separated by ten miles or more. The river itself belongs to neither rim, and yet is connected to both.

Does no middle ground remain? Certainly not in the canyon.

Standing on either rim, it's easy to think that this is the right place to be. The other side is so remote. And the cause of the division is itself no longer even in sight!

I believe this analogy is very apt. We cannot see the cause of our division. We can only sense the magnitude and depth of it. And it must have begun long ago.

As one who has tried to remain neutral, it is getting harder and harder. I am in the middle in the sense that I have friends and family firmly lodged on each side. I feel like Wile E. Coyote, standing on what was once the solid middle ground, confused, then looking down and seeing the void. For a moment, I will remain here. But my position is not sustainable. I am now looking at the camera and must fall.

It would be much more comfortable standing on solid ground. But it has eroded away here where I want to stand.

Sure, I could heed the call to unity from one side by going over and joining it. But then I would be too far away from my friends on the other side. And I can't just join the other side, for same reason.

My moment suspended over the void can actually last a long time, because the canyon analogy isn't the only one.

I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a knife. It's sharp and it hurts, but staying here keeps me from sliding down either of the two slippery slopes. And from here I can at least see all of the people I care about, even if I can't be rubbing shoulders with them.

Let's come together by focussing on our commonality. We are all products of our "Creator" (whether you believe this to be a personal God, some ineffable supreme being, or mindless random evolution), which is the origin of our "unalienable Rights [to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Do we not hold this to be self-evident? Do we not? We cannot let these rights be taken away by government (which was established to protect them), or any ideology, or any well-meaning international consortium.

Can we not create a coalition, leaving behind all this controversy? This post is a call to coalition without controversy.

Collapse without conclusion

 By request, I'm going to repeat here a personal story which I recently emailed to my sisters.

With only a couple of spelling and punctuation tweaks, repeated here exactly as written therein.

Also, I forgot to recount a very interesting experience that I had the Thursday before Christmas. I had volunteered to deliver treats to Sara's assigned sisters, but had procrastinated. It involved a cookie which was going stale, brooking no further delay, so out I went into the cold snowy night. The previous night had been clear and dry and the next one would probably be so too, but, as our Dad used to say, I had made my own bed, so now I had to sleep in it.

After leaving the first bag on a doorstep, having very carefully climbed three concrete steps, I walked the block to the final delivery point, dreading the two flights of three or four concrete steps each, without a guardrail, that awaited me there.

The paved back alley was slippery, but not as much as the sidewalk later, so I was walking just as carefully as I could. Suddenly, my feet went out from under me and I landed flat on my back. A perfect pratfall. That's how I reconstruct what happened. What it felt like was this. One moment I was making my way with great care along a slippery sidewalk with a slight downward slope. The next moment, something hit me very hard right in the middle of my back. Just as quickly my perspective was different. No longer was I looking down the length of the sidewalk and the two or three houses which separated me from those flights of steps. Instead, I was looking straight up into the dark sky.

Also, I noted curiously, because I was mentally totally calm, that my body had stopped breathing. It was the oddest thing. Not like holding your breath not breathing. Just not breathing. And, it seemed to not be inclined to breathe ever again. Very odd. Making a quick decision, I forced a shallow breath, an unfamiliar action, not something that I often have to do. It hurt like crazy, but that got things going again, and it got less painful. The back on the other hand just ached. 

My fur hat had projected itself three or four feet above where the head had landed, and the bag of goodies was just at the fingertips of my left hand. I carefully and gingerly sat up, collected the hat and package, and got to my feet. Then walked even more carefully, to the foot of the steps. So much time passed going up those steps, one at a time, then another and so on. At the door, I found a place for the bag and set it there, then turned and looked down to the sidewalk. It seemed a mile away. What to do? Ring the doorbell and ask for help? Not my nature. I could do it. Again, one step after another, but terrifying on the way down. Whew, the sidewalk, the slippery sidewalk. Felt unaccountably good to be there again.

Took a different way home, staying level, walking with such exaggerated care that when I reached the corner facing a very slight incline, that I feared, a car stopped. The driver reached over to open the passenger door and asked, "Are you okay?" I told him that I had fallen (using far fewer words that you have slogged through to get here, gentle reader), and he offered me a lift. I accepted gratefully, and painfully bent my body into the shape required by a small car, that normally I wouldn't have even given a thought to. He drove me the thirty or forty feet to the door into our garage. I wasn't going to risk the sidewalk to our front door. And the front steps!

I was so happy to be home. To be alive! You don't think about how good it is to be home until you think you might not see it again.

Sara gave me Bowenwork, and in a couple of days everything was back to normal, and I have mostly taken my blessings completely for granted since. How quickly we forget our troubles.

 Re-reading, I notice wryly that I couldn't resist pulling a moral at the end of the story. I suppose that even true stories and not just fables can be ended in such a way.

When I say, "the end of the story," I don't mean "conclusion." I'm still walking (well, at the moment of this writing sitting down actually, but still breathing).

A factual error (that wouldn't matter), and some omissions. The bag of treats fell into the gutter, so that it was near the end of my right fingertips. I was not carrying my cell phone. In fact my pockets were completely empty, as I had left home quickly for just a couple of minutes and would be within a block of home for the duration of a quick errand. So, not carrying any identification either. Had I expired, who knows how long it might have been before the body was discovered, identified, and returned home horizontally?

Further explanation. Because the panic of a declared pandemic had hit just a few days before our move into this home, we don't know our neighbors. And, symmetrically, they don't know us.

We live at the base of Y Mountain to our East, so the slope is generally down to the West in this bird's eye view (courtesy of a satellite and Google Maps, with annotations added in Skitch):

The green arrow points to the starting and ending point of the journey: the man door into our garage, on the lower level of our home (the front door (between the trees) is on the floor above, so one story higher). The red marker points at the house with the scary steps. The blue dots show the first leg of the journey, which Google Maps said was, "Mostly flat" and estimated at three minutes. Had all gone well, the whole errand would have been completed in well under ten minutes, which is why I didn't take time to load my pockets.

The return leg of the journey was the longer way back around the block* and the orange arrow points to the location where a gentle upward slope begins, and where the kind and perceptive driver offered me a lift. A lift. Laughing now at the thought of accepting a lift for such a short distance! He dropped me off in the alley right by the green arrow, seeming a little surprised himself at the shortness of the ride. But I was so grateful, since he had allowed me to avoid a slippery slope.

It may have been a collapse to the ground, but was not the conclusion of my life.

A collapse without conclusion.

Notes:

"... Sara's assigned sisters." We are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and minister by assignment to others in our Ward**. Normally, you pretty much know everyone in your ward (per Dunbar's number) but because of the isolation of lockdown, today we only know those we are assigned to know.

"Sara gave me Bowenwork," refers to a healing modality which my dear wife has learned (and in which she is certified) which is more effective the earlier it is given after an accident.

*As you can see, "the block" is not block-shaped, nor does the back alley (our 720 North "street") bisect it.

**The larger half of our block was just last Sunday excised from our Ward and assigned to another, non-contiguous Ward some distance away. It is now an island of sorts, ward-wise. And one of the few people we had met, who moved from the island of Oahu, lives therein. So they're once again on/in an island.

"The larger half" haha! an oxymoron, right? One half, by definition just cannot be larger than the other half. Nor can there be more than two of them, but that is a different joke. By "half" was meant one part of the block as cut off by the back alley, which in a normal block would divide it into two equally-sized halves. How flexible is the human mind! (Did you see the moral there?)

[added August 10, 2021] Another experience falling down while walking. More about walking. More near death experiences, one of them while walking.

Conclusions without consequence

 These are my conclusions about what is going on in the year 2020.

They are of no consequence, for many reasons. First of all, no one reads this blog. Second of all, even if someone did, it can be readily ascertained that I am an old, white male, cis-gendered and heterosexual, of western European descent, and a Christian. I am therefore pre-canceled, as falling in an intersection of categories (even though most of said categories are federally protected) that cannot credibly express an opinion.

On Friday, March 13, 2020 my world came to an end, and a new one came into being. I have already written of this.

At the time, I (and almost everyone in the USA) agreed with the necessity of a 15 day lockdown, to "flatten the curve," due to graphs like this one (from here):

But now, 15 days has turned into more than 7 months, and no end is in sight.

My first conclusion. This graph is inaccurate and misleading. The two curves depend on the R₀ value for contagion without and with "precautions" such as "social distancing." I'm willing to assume that the two curves are correct. But do note that the number of deaths is proportional to the area of the curve (not the height), and that the two areas are about equal. So, no matter what we had done, the same number of people would have died. The only thing at risk was a predicted collapse of our health care system if we took no action. People were going to die no matter what we did.

The problem is the horizontal line, whose vertical position shares the same y axis as the two curves. But, and this is a big "but," the health care capacity doesn't relate to the number of cases, but to the number of hospitalizations, which will be much much smaller. So the correct diagram should look like this:

I drew this on a whiteboard in my office building to explain this point to a colleague. I call it "the chart that couldn't" because a correct showing of the two curves and the health capacity could not have convinced anyone that we needed to choose the flatter curve.

The other thing going for the accuracy of the whiteboard sketch is that the numbers that give the heights of the two colored curves were wrong! They were too large by a factor of about 25, and came from a well-known error made by Dr. Ferguson of the Imperial College University.

Now, would you have agreed to a lockdown based on the second graph? I know that I would not have.

Conclusion: the economic collapse of the western world was completely unnecessary!

Add to that hospitals that virtually closed their doors to all but Covid-19 patients, resulting in furloughs for medical staff and thousands of people delaying treatment for other health problems. In the end, many more people have died because of the lockdown itself.

Who gains from the destruction of the western world, and of the USA in particular? Who? WHO? WHO, among other world powers.

It is the Fabian socialists and their genetic and philosophical descendants. Those who believe they, by right, should rule the world. Who should rule? Their answer, "the elite." And the big obstacle to their program is the USA with its constitutional republic, whose answer to the question, "Who should rule?" is very clearly,"the people." America has to go down.

Conclusion: the economic collapse of the USA (not to mention its retreat from the basic rights that ought to be unalienable) is necessary to usher in the new world order. So that elites can rule over all of us.

Second major topic. The SARS CoV-2 virus escaped (or was deliberately released) from a lab in Wuhan, China. At the time it began to infect humans it had already evolved to efficiently infect humans. The work of internationally known Alina Chan demonstrates this. Of her work, she says, "It is very difficult to do research when one hypothesis has been negatively cast as a conspiracy theory." Much has been vociferated about "science." As she points out, "The world of science is still a bit medieval in its power structure." So, her conclusions, however well documented, and however much evidence is marshaled, will likely be struck down by the emperors of science and the accepted way (acceptable to the elite).

Conclusion: the virus may very well have been deliberately engineered to take out the older people of the western world. Taking out the older people is a well-used technique of domination (e.x. Pol Pot in Cambodia). Less-developed countries (and even China) appear to have been largely spared. I do not believe that is accidental.

Not just the deaths, tragic enough in their own right, but the destruction of our economy, discrediting the free-market system, also benefits the global elite. Their immediate mission is to bring America down to the level of other countries so that there is little need for us to resist a single global government. What would we have to lose if American exceptionalism were no longer a thing?

Conclusion: we are being lied to and manipulated by greedy, power-hungry people, who want to rule. Who will not flinch at killing millions of people to reach their goal.

Those are my conclusions. For the record. So long as the Internet lasts. But really, of no consequence.

Consternation without Consolation

I am inconsolable.

Sorrow

I mourn the passing of our American way of life. It. is. gone.

I miss gathering with the Saints and singing the hymns of Zion.

I miss facing dozens of students in a classroom and watching them learn, and working with students one-on-one, and holding lab meetings.

I miss the possibility of traveling to Mauritius or France (or even Canada) to renew dear acquaintances, and a thousand other things which are no longer possible.

I miss being able to trust authority.

I am grateful to be able to be with my immediate family, and enjoy food and shelter, so the grief is not unmitigated.

Some enemy did this*

I believe that our way of life crumbled under an enemy attack.

I believe that we allowed this to happen because of fear.

America is no longer "the home of the brave," but now a country of the fearful cowering in their homes.

Even the military is afraid of holding "a 12 person, 45 minute meeting in a conference room," according to an informal survey conducted in Fairfax County, VA.

To see where we're headed, read the short science fiction story "The Machine Stops" published in 1909.

Our weakness as a people

America's greatest weakness: its people's fear of death.

Our way of life has been destroyed by some enemy preying on our greatest fear, the fear of death.

Two great experiments conducted by our enemies to test this: 9/11 and the corona virus**.

The outcome of the experiments confirm that, yes, the American people will fold and give up their way of life when faced with the threat of death.

A single unjust death can be used to enrage them to the point where they will burn down their own cities, unjustly killing many more people in the process.

I don't trust the numbers

The enemy is not just external. There are factions inside our country wanting to tear down our history and our Constitution. It is no longer possible to get accurate information. It is no longer possible to trust our leaders (whether elected or appointed) and our news media. An appeal to science is useless, as evidenced by headlines of the form "999 scientists agree that X" with ever escalating numbers, but contradictory conclusions. We are left to our own experience.

Within the last few days I have learned from trusted people whom I know personally that a) the illness is real and devastating, and b) that deaths are being wrongly reported as due to the illness when they are not. So, the threat is real, but the numbers cannot be trusted.

Personal fear

After 9/11, to prove that I would not succumb to fear, I took a flight as soon as possible, for no particular reason other than to demonstrate that I had not been terrorized. A very small thing but one that I felt very strongly about.

In the case of this corona virus, I am personally unafraid, but can't think of a big gesture. I do go about my life as much as possible as before. But I am met with disapproval. Fear has morphed into contempt for the unafraid.

I am no stranger to fear myself.

I am afraid to publish this point of view.

I feel the flood of contempt which would follow.

I fear that no one will actually even read this.

I fear that I will die without having had any positive impact on the world, and that that death, however it might occur, will be counted as a death from COVID-19.

I fear that the corona virus will get the last word (actually, a shout (right?)) in this post, hence this feeble sentence to prevent at least that.

Notes

*Matthew 13:28

**Freeze this video to see the outcome of this game of Risk ™. Not just America, but the entire industrialized world has been conquered. By a country which, if we can trust its own report (hah!), lost only a thousand of its own citizens.

Conduit without Constraint

As an elder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I am sometimes called upon to give a priesthood blessing for the sick or afflicted. This is in the grand tradition of early saints -- see James 5:13-15.

Often, also, an elder will give a blessing of counsel and advice to his children. This is called a "father's blessing," a tradition which extends back even further, into Old Testament times.

So, it was a bit of a surprise to me, when my own father asked me for a blessing. I and my siblings were all visiting our parents, sometime in the mid 1980's. Our father had suffered a stroke in 1978, and his recovery was very slow. Actually, less a "recovery" than learning to compensate for his diminished abilities and still enjoy life as it had become.

Some of the family took me aside for a serious conversation before I fulfilled his request. They pointed out that our father had lived a good life, but that he could no longer do all of the things that he had loved as a vibrant man. They suggested that I should take advantage of this opportunity to give him a blessing of release, allowing him to pass peacefully into the next stage of existence. There he could enjoy his full strength and vigor.

Well, with some experience holding the priesthood, one learns that the blessing doesn't come from the man, but from God. The man is but a conduit for the power of God and it is best if he does nothing to constrain it. Including have in mind some words or thoughts of his own.

We surrounded our father, seated in a chair. One of my brothers-in-law anointed his head with consecrated olive oil (James 5:14) and then I placed my hands directly on his head, with my brothers-in-law adding their own hands. I called our father by name, and by the authority of the Melchizedek priesthood, we blessed him.

One does this with a clear mind and no preconceived notions. When moved upon by the spirit, one begins to speak. Many words flowed through me, but the only phrase that I remember clearly was, "and you will yet live to be of service in the Church." I know that I was prompted by the spirit to make him that promise. Yet, as a mortal man, wishing him to continue living, this felt just a bit audacious.

And, those same family members again took me aside and gently reprimanded me for missing this opportunity to let our father go. It's not that I didn't take their point, but I could only utter words as given by the spirit, and it was not his time to go.

As it turns out, our parents were called to serve a senior couple mission, and worked for 18 months in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, labeling rolls of microfilm containing genealogical records. They moved into a little apartment in Salt Lake City. Every work day, after a devotional (which they simply loved), they were bused to the canyon. They made many friends, and enjoyed their work, and were grateful to be able to serve.

A short time after their return, we were again gathered as a family, and once again my father asked me for a blessing. Again, as you might imagine, I was taken aside.

I remember very clearly in this blessing trying to release my father to go on. It seemed as if I felt the Father chuckling at my consternation, and I was given a thought which I put into words like these, "Dad, the Lord is pleased with your life and you have finished your mission on earth, and when you desire it, you may go into the next life."

At the conclusion of the blessing, our father reached up with his left hand and pulled me closer, and croaked, "I don't want to die!" After some nervous laughter all around, I reminded him of the exact words, and as I remembered clearly the sense that was given me, but which I had had to put into my own words, I told him that he didn't have to die now, that it was up to him, and that he wouldn't die until he was good and ready. That phrase so suits our father's personality. Perhaps this explains a bit the humor of my situation, while searching for the words to express the thought that came into my heart with a heavenly chuckle.

Even though, at the time, I had been less than totally active in the Church, in both cases I listened to the spirit and served as a conduit for God's will without constraining it with my own thoughts and desires.

Many years later, our father passed away peacefully. I can only suppose that he was good and ready.

Our mother followed him less than three years later.