Three Mid-East Blocs now. Israel siding with Saudis and the US nowhere to be seen.

Jonathan Spyer describes the post Pax Americana scene in the Mid East.  A quote from Turkey sets the scene:

“Turkish officials believe Saudi Arabia, along with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, are strategically working against the interests of two different regional blocs: Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Iraq on one front, and Turkey, Qatar, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood on the other.”

Bloc One:  Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah with Shia influence.
Block Two:  Turkey, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with Sunni influence.
Block Three:   The Arab kingdoms  (Sunni chiefly) with Saudis pre-eminent and Qatar absent.
      Israel is inclined to Bloc 3.  America is invisible.  Egypt is in limbo.  Russia is gaining points.
      All players are going to be making regional choices without worrying about "the west".

New Constitution FIrst party declared in China.

The good news: China may have a second political party.
The bad news:   Bo Xilai ( a Maoist, military-favouring corruptocrat in jail) has been declared "President for Life" of Zhi Xian Party which is pushing for a Maoist revival.  Although he is justly in jail and his wife appears to be a murderess, he crushed Chongqing gangsters and sounded good about being for the little guy.  This isn't about democracy, it's about payback and struggle for power.  Any time monolithic power is faced with competition, you get change, sometimes for the better.  Headlined information is from a larger article by WR Mead at ViaMedia.


I've not read China's constitution but it probably has the same feel good language as the constitution of the former USSR which sounded like it would work okay in Canada too.  It was not the real Russia.  To get a feeling of  life in Communist China under the Cultural Revolution that Mao and his wife unleashed, of how many millions of lives were snuffed or ruined, of how much of the land's cultural heritage was burned and smashed, read Wild Swans by Jung Chang.  You don't want a revival of Mao.   Oddly, Trudeau père and Trudeau fils seem to have thought well of it during its worst days.

An innocent in China

"Constitution first" is a battle cry in the US too.   There's a parallel school in some Christian circles: "Sola Scriptura".  (The Word of God in the original given language is infallible and sufficient to settle all important matters).

Why do statements of principle inspire but often fail?
Why is the uninspiring detail of daily politics like making sausages, something you don't want to know too much about.

Latest space news.

An asteroid is spinning off plumes of dust, changing daily.
Comet Ison has passed inside Earth orbit and as it emerges beyond the sun may put on a big show in November.  Unusually, there are three other comets passing through.
Two black holes merging at a galaxy core.
Sun spots reaching a low for the era.
India on its way to Mars for less than $75 million.
Earthly gold was  made somewhere else.
Link to four earlier scoops.

Are dreams important?

3 nights dreams 11/1975

Having remembered a couple thousand dreams, I say they matter as much as waking actions despite being published in a different medium.  Most of what we do is relatively unimportant, maybe all of it, and dreams are the same.

If you lie in the snow to make snow angels, a pattern forms in the snow and stops.  The same done in water has snow angel shape but swiftly spreads over the whole pool with rebounds and shore noises added.

Most waking action is like making a snow angel. The environment responds but settles down when you stop striving.  Most sleeping action is like the water angel and changes characters and landscapes in a make-believe land.  The changes are astonishing compared to waking life but generally mundane considering how plastic the dream medium is.


There are two corollaries:
Dream choices can be as important as waking choices, despite their odd settings.  I think the issue of character is at work both awake and asleep.  My father died when I was a teenager and later I'd occasionally dream he walked in the front door from work and the whole dying thing was a misunderstanding. Once in a dream, I got to thinking this had tricked me before.  To be very sure Dad was alive this time, I concentrated on lifting my dream leg and quietly opened my eyes, wide-awake, lifting my leg from the bed.  This is an example of a dream event that is also a character-shaping event.

The other corollary is:  If dreams are so similar to waking thought processes, despite the differing medium, the dream data of a lifetime must still be there in our memory.  Why do we forget so many dreams?   Memory is sometimes classified in three, a short term cellular one lasting less than a second, a longer one that lasts long enough to read and dial a phone number and longer lifetime memory.  Every dream I bother noticing gets into long term memory. I have a theory.  

Who we think we are determines what we remember.   What personality can survive the cognitive dissonance between our public life and our dream life which often has the same cast of characters?   Open affection, violence, exaggerated fear and courage, sex, disrespect, and floating through the air!        The memory stuff that won't fit a normal public life,  doesn't get access.  It's there in the database but marked "Do not use".

Mystery Airborne Rumbling Near Victoria Solved: It's the American "Growler".

Puzzling reports have piled up about a deep rumbling coming over the ocean from the south east of Victoria.  See linked story and the many comments.  Commenter "weirdorwhat?" reporting on some sleuthing by the CBC gives the explanation.  I'm convinced it's right:

(It's still happening.  I heard it around 9pm June 30th up in Saanichton near the water and about 150 people in the Victoria area clicked through to the first or second article the next day.)

weirdorwhat? 

(November 7 2013) Links to a post at kayakyak.

• −

"People from Oak Bay to Cordova Bay have been noticing a sound that has no obvious source. It’s an engine sound, low and rumbling, and it is HUGE.....The staff at the local station for CBC Radio tried to find the source of this sound that local people were hearing. Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt knew nothing, neither did the Airport at Pat Bay. Eventually, the CBC reporter got hold of Kim Martin at the US Naval Air Base on Whidbey Island, in Washington State.  Until they reached her, Martin and the base had no idea we in Victoria were hearing that huge rumbling sound. But she knew what we were hearing. It’s a military aircraft taking off.  The aircraft is the Growler, a big radar-jamming plane. So, what we’ve been hearing is the Growler taking off, from time to time, for the last couple of years. There's more than one of these aircraft at the base. The reason we’ve been hearing it more frequently lately is because the US Naval Air Base on Whidbey is doing runway repairs to two of their four runways. There are only two runways in use these days. Depending on the wind direction, it’s a lot more likely these days that they’ll be using the runway that points the planes in the direction that carries the sound forty-five kilometres across the strait of Juan de Fuca right across from us.

Are military jets louder than commercial jets? Yes.  The Growler (EA-18G) like other fighter jets uses turbojet instead of turbofan engines. The latter are efficient and contain noise in a sheath of forced air but they add weight.  The earliest commercial jets were once this loud but no longer. Whidbey Island residents are suing to get some sleep at night as the Navy practices touch and go landings.  As one resident, Paula Spina, says it is "destroying our lives" and the accompanying story in The Whidbey Examiner explains that Navy planes are practising pretend carrier landings, especially at night.

Sound envelopes

How loud are jets?   Depends where you measure from.   This downloadable chart shows relative ranges (It's a comprehensive spread sheet of all flying machines and the tab called Military Aircraft Averages has the image.).  This chart shows the sound envelope at takeoff is directional and varies from second to second.   Every ten decibels is roughly a doubling of perceived volume at the ear.

Relative sound volumes of flying machines

"Privatize everything" - John Stossel

Add the profit incentive to everything from kidney sales to cleaning city streets and watch black markets and featherbedding be displaced by better service.   Are you worried the fire truck from Ace Fire Suppression won't come when the alarm bell rings?  Does someone selling their second kidney with the state's permission put your undies in a knot?     John Stossel observes

"Private companies did brilliant Internet work for President Obama's election campaign.  But when it came to his health insurance website, the president put government in charge.   We saw the result.  Markets aren't perfect, but they allow for a world where prudence is rewarded and sloth punished, a world in which more people take risks and innovate."

There's a lot more at John's link.

Obama, Lerner and Sebelius - what's up with chins up?

Or noses up?

Corruption 101

Give me a break from braying newshounds nipping at senatorial heels.  Senators, clean up your act, and hounds go tree cats or something useful.  BC Blue has the right attitude, publish pictures of reporters drinking the party's booze, to tone down the hypocrisy.

Left leaning reporters want
their side more prominent.

Here's what corruption 101 looks like:

-Your leaders have unexplained sums in their possession measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars and sometimes in the billions.  Hello Putin ($40 billion in Gazprom?), Iranian Supreme Leader Al Khameini (billions and a BMW dealership), hello to the late Gaddafi (90 billion unaccounted for)  and Arafat, (more than a billion stolen), hello to the humble Castro brothers  ($900 million at least), hello to the late Chavez (Over 1 billion) , hello Mubarak family ($700 billion?).
-All friends and relatives of your leaders have cushy jobs, unexplained cash and live largely.
-Most big industries of the land are somehow being run by generals and politicians as in China and Russia and all those other places.  (The richest top 50 Chinese politicians have amassed some $95 billion in wealth, nearly 100 times more than the collective assets of the 50 wealthiest members of the U.S. Congress,)
-Their is no auditor general doing a decent job.  You can't even get an accurate number for what goes through the treasury.
-People who disagree with leaders are routinely beaten up, fired and disappeared.

Folks, this isn't happening in Canada and not in the Senate of Canada either.

So, I'm a hypocrite.
Don't shoot me.

Senatorial sin is cheating to save tax or running close to that line and $90,000 is the largest sum mentioned.  (Compare Greece where two thirds of all  the doctors claim to earn less than 12000 euros per year) These bad behaving senators are afraid of the Canada Revenue Agency! They actually expect to pay taxes! They sometimes fudge the rule of law but pay ardent lip service to it! That's why I prefer hypocrites to tyrants.



Footnote:  Taxes are often not black and white and need legal opinions. My dear and late uncle John Woodworth went to the accountant after his very first year in business as a professional.architect. He rounded up all the invoices and bank books in a box and with a little bravado announced he was there to pay every penny of tax.  The accountant looked up and asked this one question: "Do you want to be taxed on the same basis as everyone else?" (Of course).  "Then take every deduction you can, because rates are set on the assumption you will try to keep hold of as much of your money as possible. If you don't push back, you pay too much tax, more than the government expects."

Who is my neighbour?

When you stand for "O Canada", will you be counting your American colleagues, on-line scrabble partners, and facebook friends from around the world as Honorary Canadian citizens?

Your neighbour was never the whole world, just those who come into our life, and The Good Samaritan had compassion on all of them.  That circle has changed, exploded in fact.

My sweetheart is on Vancouver Island while, during the work week, I am in the Okanagan.  By touch she is hours away.  By voice and sometimes sight she is milliseconds away.    My neighbour is any kindred spirit within a second or two at the speed of light.  Kindred may just mean we see mutual advantage in association.  Radio and light that travel 400,000 km/second mean everyone on earth is potentially my immediate neighbour for voice and sight but not touch.

Are you my neighbour?

This has implications for the structure of governments.  Economic and social alliances are still chiefly based on geography but competition is rising from world-wide interest groups that are not of a single nation, language and currency.  This tiny blog you are reading had 3 readers from the Ukraine, 7 from Saudi Arabia and 13 from China yesterday.  You won't find me espousing one world government but I see competing speed-of-light ad hoc alliances that will outrank some armies and nations.  It gets complicated.

Slow TV catches on fast in Norway

Nine hours of knitting!   Most of Norway tuning in.
Why didn't I think of that?   NRK2 started with knitting knowhow, brought in a live sheep to shear.  Seven spinners and knitters will team spin their own thread and aim to enter the Guinness world records for knitting a large men's sweater sweater in less than 4 hours 51 minutes.   The action part is continuous camera, not jumping around.  (The show started airing November 1st and I don't see any after reports yet.)  h/t Drudge.

The last slow TV was a coastal cruise of Norway.  60% of the population, including the Queen of Norway,  tuned in, according to the linked article.   Before that was a special on firewood cutting and stacking it with advice on how best to do that and whether bark should be up or down.  Other hits:  Opening night of the salmon fishing season, Train ride from Bergen to Oslo.

I'm in.  Most shows have too much editing for my taste.  Show me
an all day high definition trip around the earth, filmed from the space shuttle, passing over my corner of Canada every ninety minutes.  I would buy a 48" display screen for the living room and leave on the Earth Revolving day and night.

There's some nice little bits of space video out there but I'm greedy for the whole thing.

Germany 1 Russia 0. Ukraine Free Trade deal about to reshape Europe. UPDATE

ViaMedia: "The Story That Should Be Dominating The News".

"What Putin called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” starts to look permanent. Germany will have replaced Russia as the dominant power in Europe, Poland will shift from the frontier of Europe toward its heart, and Putin will go down in Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine."

Look for the deal to be signed later this month. Despite Russia's fury, the only roadblock may be the EU's insistence that former PM, Yulia Timoschenko, be freed from jail.  As Mead wrote: "If (the Ukraine) moves toward the EU, the old Russia of the tsars and the commissars is dead".

"Largely missed by the mainstream media, is the continuing rise of unified Germany. With Russia crippled by the failure of Putin’s state building project, France in sharp decline, Britain divided against itself and unable to develop a serious European policy, Germany’s position in Europe is startlingly strong."

I believe a sub-theme to this story is new pipelines out of the Middle East through Turkey and Syria which make Russia's power to put Ukraine and the EU in the cold and dark less fearsome. The first pipeline is in place and the second is on hold pending outcomes in Syria.

UPDATE: Ukraine stopped importing gas from Gazprom, counting on stockpiles, the EU deal and new pipelines to let it survive a punishing cut-off from Russia. It also stopped paying its gas bill which was the highest in Europe @ $400/M cubic meters.  From viamedia.
UPDATE November 21st: Ukraine's president blocks agreement to release Tymoschenko.

Gas comes in from Russia and on to the EU.

Is a post-Assad Iraq-Syrian mega-pipeline in the works? 
Link to supporting story.

New Yorker cartoon: What could possibly be wrong with Obamacare rollout?

From the New Yorker, a funny way of illustrating the theory that Obama's signature plan is clueless but possibly well-intentioned.  The A drive, the retro phone.

Sudden shifts will appear as Obama unplugs America's strength.

America has been the elephant in the room.  Until it decided where to sit, nobody else took their seat.  Obama has been turning the elephant into a good-natured pet internationally, at ease with dictators but whacking small revolutionaries and whistleblowers.  

Canadian lefty politicians will tone down their love affair with the US donkey. Formerly cautious nations will use violence to get their way.   Putin will get more respect than the American President.  New alliances will form that disregard America's idea of a tidy world.

He hit the RESET button a few times and is now being ignored.  The hardball players of this world are getting on with their game.  It's not going to be a love-in.

Update:  Israel bombs Syria again and experts see a new pattern.

Every man for himself.

140 year old cartoon nails Obamacare on opening day

Update the hats and striped pants, add a lady, and you have it.

A cartoon from 140 years ago seems remarkably apt for Obamacare day one.   (Today we learn that six      (s - i - x) out of 4.7 million unique visitors signed up in day one despite an army of would-be facilitators.)

Mons parturibat,
erat maxima expectatio,
at ille peperit murem

The mountain went into labour and there were great expectations.
A mouse appeared.

Obama spied on the Pope. "I didn't see me do it".

A story coming out tomorrow in an Italian magazine says the NSA was tapping phones in the Vatican too.
(Rumor and detail  posted by Zero Hedge). To save you reading tomorrow's news, Obama says he didn't do it, didn't know about it, and already told them to stop it.

One of my kids had a line when trapped in a lie:  "I didn't see me do it".

Did I do that?

Default ain't happening. Spending cuts that terrify US lawmakers would be next up.

Yes, Obama lied about the government defaulting if the debt limit weren't raised.
Doing nothing simply triggers spending cuts.
What a simple way to be Conservative.

John Hinderaker of Powerline explains:

"There is no threat of default.   ..   The federal government must pay its debt obligations, both principal and interest, even if that means prioritizing debt service over other government spending. So the question is, if Congress does not raise the current debt ceiling, will the federal government run out of money needed to pay its existing debts? ..   Interest on the $16 trillion in debt is covered by a factor of about 10x by revenues! That puts the federal government deep into AAA land. Revenues would have to fall by a staggering 90% to jeopardize interest payments.  ..  So what will actually happen if Congress doesn't increase the debt ceiling..? The government’s debt obligations will be paid, but reductions in other spending will start to become necessary. .. Leaving the debt ceiling as is would function as a spending cut. This is why the Democrats hate the idea so much. They know there is zero chance of default, but they are horrified at the prospect that voters and taxpayers may find out that there is a relatively simple way to bring about spending reductions that would create, in effect, a balanced budget."

My take is that Republicans want spending up too, just not quite as lofty.  The lawmakers' power base is the ability to direct wealth to those they favour.  In Canada, the same logic applies to NDP, Liberal and Conservative.    Our consolation is that the current deficit spending is slowing.

How many people believe ending the deficit means the debt is gone?  Dreamers and in the majority, too.

Added:  Being conservative doesn't mean spending cuts and may mean spending increases to protect future benefits but in today's debt-loving politics, spending cuts are a great place to start.

Cure for the common cold a giant step closer.

Professor Ann Palmenberg.

Half of kids' colds are caused by the C version of the rhinovirus.  Most research however has been on the A strain. All cures start with getting through the virus' armour and we finally know why cures based on A didn't work on C.  The armour (protein shell called a capsid) is different.  See picture from Science Daily News. This is a giant step closer to a total cure of the common cold.

"Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have constructed a three-dimensional model of the pathogen that shows why there is no cure yet for the common cold."

A's shell on the left, C on the right.

"rhino" means "nose" in Greek.

Lumber's up. Thank you China.

You've noticed the price of lumber has gone up and is staying up as we head into fall?

Ian Leask.

In June, July and August, China amped it up and bought 300 to 400 million board feet per month and took it across the Pacific.  That the same as 200 Super B Trains per day.   Buyers who waited hoping prices would fall, are scrambling to put lumber back in their yards.   This is gleaned from a phone call today with Ian Leask of Lignum.

For reference: The North American market in 2005 was about 75 billion board feet of all types of wood but when the unsold cushion is gone, prices jump.

That's one.

That's two.

What if we forget dreams and forget being a baby for the same reason?

What if we forget dreams and forget being a baby for the same reason? What if the problem isn't memories but the lack of an operating system upgrade to retrieve the memories?

Babies are learning like crazy and remember stuff and talking too, but when they are older, most of the memories before some age like four seem inaccessible.  I think the development of an "I" or personality is what triggers the ability to recover and use past memories.  Before that, memories are just there being an influence.

Dreams are also full of memorable events and long term memory tracks are being laid down.  As evidence, consider how a dream is sometimes recalled hours after waking. The dream tracks are presumably all still in place from our youth but only the few we happen to have remembered upon waking can be revisited.

Our personality has less capacity than our mind and hasn't found a way to integrate knowing what we have dreamed with knowing what we have done awake.  The dreams are faded daily. If you want to be bothered, you can recover a lot of them and visualize them thereafter.  As a young man, I collected several thousand dreams but it was a lot of work and they generally didn't make much sense or seem important.  

What kind of personality will be capable of remembering all the pretending of the night and its feelings and actors and stay sane while dealing with related feelings and some of the same actors by day? It's not yet known but don't rule out the possibility. With the right upgrade, the last twenty years of your dreaming may suddenly pop into active memory.

(Is that a RAM upgrade or a REM upgrade :-) )