"Well, even a cracked pot is right twice a day -- or something like that."
-- Scott Bieser, in LeftLibertarian2.

I can't help but admire someone who can speak the Alice-in-Wonderland language equally well as I do.

Or badly, as the case may be.

Please don't laugh too hard. I haven't done this kind of drawing since high school -- and I still had the full use of my fingers. This is my first mouse drawing project.

When I was just waking up today, I composed this poem in my head. Unfortunately, due to my fingers and other joint problems, I can't just jot things down when I think of them. So, now that my fingers have loosened up enough to type a little, I've been trying to recall the exact words:

Bubbling foam of fractal-froth
In the tide-pool's primal broth;

Stews and stirs, ice and rime --
Ginnungagap and Muspellheim.

I haven't written much rhyming verse in the last few years. I hope more of it comes.

There are people to whom I owe replies, and others to whom I would like to offer comments; unfortunately, that shall have to wait until my Inclement Finger Time is over. I apologize to those whom I've been neglecting, especially rubashov and gatcko. IM is out of the picture now, too. It might take a week or two for me to be back in business here, so please be patient.

Phoenix made this flash icon showing Teen Adolf morphing into my 10th. grade ID card photo:



Portrait of the artist as a young man.. er, woman.... Freaky, huh?

Another odd thing is that the transition in the middle looks a lot like my best friend from college.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part — perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
– Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)

For those with the imagination to see them, there will always be giants in the world -- whether they be stone giants or gas giants.

What can the meteor say to the dinosaurs?

Only this: you will become stone.
Enduring bedrock, sheer mountain's rampart,
Foundation of plains and mesas,
High pediment and apex of piled aeons.

While I, heaven-soaring rock,
A mere hole, a hollow sink,
Only a declivity in the future's sands.

-- Ethel Leona

Okay, I've been tagged by two different people already, so I'd better do this before I forget.

1. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
2. Tag seven people to do the same.
3. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag "whoever wants to do it."

1. I often rock back and forth while talking on the phone, standing in line, etc. I know I've been doing this for years because I can distinctly remember swinging back and forth while holding on to a shopping cart a few years back. Do people stare at me when I do this in public? Not as far as I can tell. Generally, they don't even notice. They probably have more important things to look at than me acting like Adi weird.

2. I also do it while sitting down. Does that count as a separate item?

3. I love rubbing noses with cats, or rubbing our faces together. Both my cats like to do it, too. Nothin' says lovin' like a cat nose rubbin'.

4. When I draw, I mainly look at the thing I'm drawing rather than the surface I'm drawing on. I trace the shape I'm looking at with my eye movements, and my hand automatically follows. I can do this with a mouse, too (in fact, since I developed severe finger trouble, I can only use a mouse.)

5. I have to wrap my fingers in cloth in order to type. In fact, my index fingers get sore just from waving them around, so sometimes I have to wrap up my fingers even if I'm doing nothing but gesturing. (I wouldn't exactly call this a "quirk", exactly -- more like a "fact", I guess.)

6. When I was a kid, I built a dinosaur habitat in the basement. I took a large metal tray, filled it with water, then built a land mass out of spongy yellow packing material. Then I put my toy dinosaurs in it, the land dinosaurs on the land and the aquatic ones in the water. Unfortunately, the water gradually soaked into the land, turning it into a swamp. I had to take out the sponges periodically, squeeze them and put them back in. That was my first lesson in ecosystem dynamics and the art of terraforming. (Of course I'd come up with a grand lesson to be learned from it, wouldn't I?)

7. I sleep on an old camp cot that used to belong to my mother. Why? Because I currently have no other object in the house that I can sleep on, especially with my lousy joints. At first I was afraid that I would fall off of it because it's so small and narrow, but I adjusted to it within one night. The only real inconvenience is that my cats keep climbing on even though there's really no room for them.

And now, I have to tag seven other people (that's the "Pyramid Scheme" part). Lemme check my Mutual Friends list...

Okay, here are the next seven lucky winners:

dictator88
erynn999
immortalrite
mumbalo_jack
sovi_polina
righnasidhe
eviltenet

I chose people whom I know are frequently active. If you find memes like this excessively annoying, feel free to ignore. Otherwise, please do satisfy my curiosity.

The Zeitgeist likes me BUNCHES today.

My previous post, on September 10: On Coexistence.

Article, World Science, September 13: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.

I would post the article itself, but the format doesn't copy very prettily. It contains, at any rate, pretty much the same theory I came up with a while ago: namely, that different cultural groups can coexist well in areas that provide either strong boundaries between their individual subregions, or a shared set of ground rules. The Lex Romana of the Roman empire is a classic example of the latter. The US "melting-pot", during the times and occasions when it was actually successful, also used this principle: the "base attractor" of "mainstream" American culture was able to assimilate new immigrants (albeit, in many cases, with a certain period of "hazing the newbies" which strikes me as rather similar to a fraternity initiation ritual.)

The current "multiculturalism", on the other hand, is a muddled mess because it rejects both segregation and assimilation, trying to achieve some in-between compromise which, in the end, pleases no one. It reminds me of that old story about the two guys with the donkey who tried to please everyone, and ended up only making fools of themselves.

This, by the way, is one reason why I do not identify as "White Nationalist". Although I do believe in Freedom of Association, and sympathize with those who want to preserve their culture, I also cannot ignore the empirical evidence that successful mixed social units do exist, at all levels of scale. There are mixed marriages that are stable and happy. There are mixed families whose children grow up healthy, strong, and intellectually competent. There are communities where people of different ethnic groups live together in harmony. There are cosmopolitan agorae where people from all over the world come together to peacefully exchange goods and ideas. And, insofar as these associations are actually successful, they have as much right to exist as anything else.

One the other hand, many people are also positively assortative; they prefer the company of their own kind. And that, of course, is perfectly fine too. Chacun a son gout.

Both sides, multiculturalists and separatists, have become morally polarized, each claiming that their vision of an ideal society is absolutely right; when, ironically, both sides are actually advocating for diversity: diversity of different kinds and on different levels. A preference for mixture is still a preference; a mixture is a particular kind of thing. Human beings cannot live without any preferences at all; such a state of being may be possible in Nirvana, but not on Earth.

This essay introduces an idea which many will find controversial, disturbing and even "offensive". Most of the people on my Friends list are capable of thinking like grown-ups, however. Others should be forewarned.

( Subjugation as a Means of Evolutionary Survival )

Whether different things can coexist within the same space depends on the properties of that space. First, its size; how large it is. Secondly, the way it is structured and organized, its pattern of boundaries, means of provision, transport and communication, and the like: mountains, rivers, plains, roads, walls, carpeting, the local convenience store, and the like. There are some office environments in which people can barely coexist while ostensibly trying to do the same job. Conversely, a person who likes loud music and one who prefers silence can coexist quite well in a building with thick walls and good acoustics.

This factor is often ignored. Coexistence is sometimes touted as a universal ideal regardless of the logistics thereof, whereas it is dependent upon very specific local and particular conditions. Sometimes it makes sense not to coexist, but to get the hell out (or, if you were there first, refuse to accept additional entrants.) Heresy, perhaps, nowadays.

It is astonishing that people ignore such obvious things; or maybe not so. The current mentality tends to moralize everything: when there is a problem, the knee-jerk reaction is to look for somebody at fault, somebody to blame. Looking at something as emotionally-neutral as the physical environment does not get people into a moral frenzy (unless, of course, it is turned into a buzzword: "The Environment", which has a become a shibboleth as big as any other in some sectors.) What is needed is calmness, logic and genuine tolerance: tolerance for the entire panorama of facts and interactions, the simple, nonjudgmental accepting of what is. But this is not something that comes to most people by default; it is a skill that requires quite a deal of learning.

"You can never step into the same stream twice, because effluents are always pouring into it."

This one just came to me today. So far, I haven't been able to find a better title for it.

(  The Important Thing  )

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance."

" No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance".

"Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; tends to true union as well as greatness."

"The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all."

"...if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

"A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.".

Guess I'm not the World's Scariest Lookalike anymore...



(found on lol_nazis)

Has anyone noticed that the US government seems to have hired George Orwell as a publicity agent?

Consider the following official terms:

* North American Free Trade Agreement  (Free trade = slave labor)

*  Homeland Security  (Yes, it really makes me feel safe at home.)

* The Patriot Act  (George Washington would have loved it.)

And, of course, the doubleplusgoodest one of all....

* Operation Enduring Freedom (which was, believe it or not, originally called "Operation Infinite Justice".)

Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. And sometimes it is fiction.

I aligned the heads as closely as I could, greyscaled my face and adjusted the brightness, and oriented the faces so that the eyes are on the same level. If you scroll past the top or bottom of the window, you can see that the midlines of the eyes, nose and mouth are identical.

Interestingly, we seem to look more alike in large scale than small. I think that's because our features are more alike than the overall face shape. Adi was skinnier for most of his life than I have usually been.

Damn, why did I get the fat genes? I want a refund!

I think it's because females tend to have more fat genes in general -- a little historical relic of the time when the Willendorf Venus was considered hot. Some of Adi's female relatives have round faces, too.

With regard to which -- I'm down to about 145 lbs. now, as far as I can tell. The scale is not a very reliable instrument for keeping track of my weight loss, because my weight can vary as much as ten pounds within a single day. I've got about 20 lbs, left to go to reach my "goal" weight, which should take about 4-5 more months. Once I actually look good, I will post some current pictures. As for what my adult bone structure is like -- oh, I don't want to spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say I actually almost fainted recently, when, for the first time in my adult life, I saw a photo of myself without glasses. (My physical condition causes me to feel faint at times, so it wasn't entirely melodrama.)

It's rather odd, isn't it, that I could reach the age of 40 without having a clue about what I really look like? I have very few pictures of myself as an adult, and not a single one is any good: I'm always either overweight and/or wearing glasses, and nearly always have my face distorted in a fake, artificial smile. Now, one could say that this is just because I'm a dog. =) However, there've been times when I looked good. I was just never photographed during them.

It's like I wasn't meant to know...