Monday, May 18, 2015

Thunderbird

I now notice the upper right wing tip is not filled in.
 Again, this is all procrastination because I think a hand embroidered Thunderbird on a shirt will not withstand machine washing. I'll probably hand wash it for a while but eventually it will go in a machine and be destroyed. The only way to do this is to pay a computerized machine embroidery shop to do it as the stitches will be solid and washable. Speaking of washable, I recommend using some fabric glue on the back side to reinforce the stitch. Fabric glue is washable. Glue a patch on the back loop side and that's all one can do to protect it.
I should frame this shirt and not wear it. But I don't really care. It's practice for an epic punch pin project that will be framed.

As I applied the final stitch the whole building shook like a bomb had gone off. 5.1 isn't very damaging but I did have about 8 seconds of wondering if I should jump out the window.

News or Spies?

"Shia militias are assembling east of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to prepare for a counter-attack against Islamic State militants who captured it on Sunday."

I've already had my say about this city of Ramadi being the one that was attacked by U.S. forces including sniper Chris Kyle, who killed all the opposition that the city now needs to defend itself. It's likely I'm missing some details to simplify the narrative; maybe the forces were building roads...while evacuating hospitals...and they needed sniper coverage because the locals were shooting at them. I don't know the whole story because I wasn't there and I can't trust most of what I read, except for the material I conveniently choose to criticize. For all I know the snipers that Kyle killed were destined to become ISIS militants. This is the tradition of self-delusion. Still, the facts remain that the city that was cleansed of militants per order of Bush Jr. is now in desperate need of militants. Make your own conclusions about that.

This comment is more about how BBC's war coverage may be interesting to read and, exciting to imagine, but aren't they actually undermining security efforts by not only writing that Shia militias are assembling near Ramadi, but they are assembling east of the city? Why don't you give their exact coordinates so any IS fighters with machetes know where to find them on Google maps? Photos of key landmarks would be helpful too. I guess if BBC knows where the Shia militias are then IS will also know, but they published a front page story about it to make sure.

This must be covered in the journalistic ethics classes that are probably brief and sparsely attended. Journalists report the news. Pundits spin the news. When pundits are mistaken for journalists then all hope is lost. So, when two militant groups maneuver and BBC can learn the exact details of the maneuvers then they will report that so anyone in the opposing group will immediately know the maneuvers of the other.  And they wonder why there is some military secrecy and silencing of Press in war-time. It's baffling. Or maybe BBC doesn't care because they don't have a dog in the fight. That's possible. What other time in history had military intelligence relayed via BBC online news to anyone with a smartphone?

Would you ever read this headline: "Enola Gay en route to drop atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Due to arrive at 8am, is traveling from south-south-west with 4-5 support crafts at altitudes around 35,000ft. Will be first of several planned Allied aerial attacks dropping atomic payloads on populated areas of Japan. In other news, the Red Sox split a double-header vs Cleveland."

Something like that might get the attention of the air force. Heck, they might even take it seriously. More observations of an old man.

Reevaluation

I've been setting new records on the depth of pondering I've been engaged in. Topics like, "What is education?" or "Is our tendency to try to understand what a movie is about applied to our own lives erroneously?" or "If a person goes insane, then will he not distrust anyone who tells him he has gone insane? And if he believes them, then doesn't that also make him insane?"

This culminated this evening with a few essays. One essay was about a complicated theory that I appreciate involving the prediction of eventual artificial intelligence, and it becomes hostile a la The Terminator, and then invents a time machine to punish people today who were not enabling the eventual artificial intelligence. Follow me? Now, that scenario doesn't interest me as much as the theory I have that autistic misanthropes are currently controlling the path of mankind and it's happening irrevocably and nefariously. This whole notion occurred to me around 2003 when someone mentioned the memory capability of computers was increasing predictably and I thought, "How can that be predictable when it involves research? How can something like that be guaranteed?"
The answer is a generation of people who are the opposite of ponderous Oggy. Where I philosophize about the nature of memory, they are automatically researching data storage. Do they ponder their existence, or at least their chose course of study and development? It's a simple question. We have to accept they are indeed flesh and blood, and have free will, and even if they are high functioning autistic whose brains act like computers, they still have the facilities to ponder their existence and the ramifications of their acts. But my suspicion is that, no, they don't ponder anything except development of memory storage. Everything else is irrelevant. So, they are acting like a programmed T1000 from Skynet and polluted lakes in China are unavoidable, predestined. This is hard to swallow because my whole approach to teaching guitar initially involves programming...but that contradicts the goal which is free-form expression. Why not start with free-form expression?
More embroidery

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.