One year ago today: November 18, 2015, NWO map (New World Order)
Five years ago today: November 18, 2011, driving the red scooter.
Nine years ago today: November 18, 2007, an epidemic of smartness.
Random years ago today: November 18, 1982, remember Crazy Liz?
MORNING
Before we go one millimeter further, here is the turkey, fresh out of the oven. To those who doubted, feast your eyes, ha-ha. I learned lots and next time won’t be another fifty years. I stayed nearby the full three and a quarter hours to monitor the process.
Here’s an interesting map of what the world looked like before 600A.D. Except for Europe, invading Muslims destroyed most of the civilizations in the central area. Note the number of Kingdoms in England. I spent my day off in the library writing a letter to an old friend about computers, or more accurately, about computers and society. You see, I’ve been personally warning those that I love or like since I was in grade school to not neglect activities that you can pursue later in life.
I chose the obvious one at the time. Music. There are others, such as computers and to anyone who says so what, I would point out that in the 1970s when I first programmed, there was no popular notion that anything would ever amount from computers. Unlike today’s brats, it was not the computer that chose me. Another example is my hobby of traveling just to explore and most recent readers know that I got into microprocessing in early 2011.
My point is that choosing a hobby is not enough by a long shot. One has to keep current with education and this is nigh impossible if you are a TV watcher. The hitch there is that TV convinces people they are on top of what’s happening in the world. But in every case, no exceptions, where I’ve seen such people try to pick up a worthwhile passtime (and you’ve heard me on this before), they (like my family), have fallen so far behind that they can’t grasp anything new. They can use a computer, but not as a tool.
That’s what set me to this topic early this morning. A pal of mine called unable to access his email because he had accidentally deleted the short-cut on his desktop. Here’s a guy that has had a computer for fifteen years. I walked him through it and every step was evidently unfamiliar to him. (He was unaware how to go into his mailbox from his ISP home page. I had to explain what the home page was.) Yes, he’s one of those guys who owns a $2,500 Toshiba laptop.
Occasionally, like today, the person is an old friend. I’m going to explain something that will cause some of you to smile, others to frown. My friend grew up in a world where most disciplines could be studied and even mastered in isolation. That would include most workers in a cubicle who are over 35. An example would be inflation and banking. Sure, everyone was aware the two are somehow connected, but you could take separate courses in economics and finance and graduate with all you needed for a career in either field. But along came computers.
Information was instant and it was no longer good enough to take an annual seminar or two and learn all that was needed about the new pace at which things became interconnected. You’ve heard me gripe about textbooks that leave out important parts of the topic, but I never pinpointed that I blamed the old-school mentality. These jokers were experts in their own fields in a world that needs people who can spot how things now mesh at blinding speeds.
Spotted Lake, Canada.
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NOON
What do I find out? Telling a few people about the post office refusing to deliver my mail because the last digit of the zip code was different than the zip code emblazoned across the front of the post office four blocks from here. This is an important distinction, they could have delivered it, but refused. There isn’t anybody in town by now that doesn’t know the new guy with the sidecar bought the famous old mayor’s mother’s house. Today, I get an e-mail from California. The test letter was returned to sender. The post office would rather ship a letter back across the entire country than deliver it to a well-known address. WTF?
I’ve remarked before how the local post office is around five times larger than justified by the community. So it was pretty obvious their insistence on the postal code went beyond their explanation. Because I know a lot about databases, I recognize this as a tactic to ensure that standardized data is recorded in each field (sub-component of a record). It is called “normalization” and you do not need any more proof that the government is developing a massive database of to whom every person in the land sends or receives letters. Even hand-addressed personal mail like what I use (by choice).
There is no other logical reason to reject delivering mail to a known good physical address right down to the local level. They're being asinine. It was also pointed out to me that at the local post office, all personnel above the clerks and mail carriers are never hired from this county or state. I hear my detractors saying there could be other reasons for this behavior—yes, but are they logical? It’s not cheap to be a bunch of assholes on a national scale in an operation that already has such a tarnished reputation.
Continuing from this morning, my friend is one of those who specialized and now is hitting some rough patches near the end. She asked me how Bitcoin worked and was dissatisfied the standard pap-answers you can get anywhere. That’s because, putting it gently, it is expected the listener is familiar with electronic currency. And most of you are aware I am no fan of the “you’re-supposed-to-know” crowd.
I confess, I don’t know how Bitcoin works, but keep reading. Like most people, I know how to read enough directions to set up an account and conduct transactions, but that hardly passes for intelligence. Every other day I hear horror stories of somebody in a jam because they they were using a system but didn’t have a notion things were going wrong. So I looked into the theory of Bitcoins and the results are in today’s addendum.
Now, this friend, I know, and she was just not asking how to do something. She wanted twenty years of lost time compressed into a few paragraphs so that she actually understood what’s happening. Hence, I gave a paragraph each on encryption, modular arithmetic, and public/private keys. I know this lady and in her crowd, she is now the expert on Bitcoin. You won’t get from me the best way to comprehend Bitcoin, but it works with the same principle of a public key. When you spend a Bitcoin, it’s serial number goes public. To receive it, you must have your private key. Who remembers that guy who lost $7.5 million because he lost his private key? Or so he says.
Pause for a little trivia. A pencil will write a line 30 miles long, while a stick pen will run out of ink after 2 miles. And people wonder why I don’t usually date brunettes. That reminds me of the old adage when I was growing up that ‘gentlemen prefer blondes’. Ha, buddy, so does every body else. For that matter, there is a stop at nothing demand for the rapidly decreasing numbers of pure blonde women left in the world. They are trophies and the Internet has spread the word.
NIGHT
Seeking some entertainment, I drove south to the country music club. The clientele is a little older than I’m used to rubbing elbows with. Hey, I’m not putting in a plug for my own youth, but emphasizing that I have never in my born days met a person my own age who knows enough about computers and such to carry on a decent conversation. And this has been true for an awful lot of my life. This didn’t happen suddenly when I hit forty, type of thing.
The band was that outfit that was advertising for a bassist back in August. I recall the ad, something about their old guy moved away or died. I know a few bass players who died and went to heaven, mind you, not before they stopped off for thirty years in New Orleans first. The hesitation was the band has two lead guitarists, hardly an ideal environment for a bass player. However, I gave them a damn good listen tonight and you know, they’ve put themselves in a position where neither of them could fake the bass without “losing” to the other guitarist. And if I know guitar players . . .
I talked to the one guy and got some contact information. They are well known locally and I think may be rare in that they play so often they could be making a living at it. No drummer, just two guitars and another guy who spells on everything from harmonica to fiddle. The same one guy says they have a lot of bassists (he mentioned the number ten) but that they are looking for someone who can commit. Aha—means to me the lot of the other bassists are damn failed guitarists. So, I’m thinking.
Two things. One is the cardinal that is most common at the birdfeeder is not the original mom & pop, but definitely one of the juveniles. I think it is a young female because the markings are darker, or an artist might say more subdued. She is also smaller in stature, but will spend double the time at the feeder than the others. Two, I have finally learned a generic lead break on the bass. Yes, I’ve played breaks before, but they were customized to fit a given song. This one is a lick based on theory, the country pentatonic. So I can adapt it.
Here’s a tablature of the beginning of the break, but don’t conclude what I’ve done is so simple. Well, heck, you can try to play this if you want and you’ll see what a challenge it is. The tablature is guitar and you can’t play more than three octaves on the bass. Also, this does not show the theoretical “patterns” that must be adapted to transition between chords on the bass, an instrument that does not really play chords.
With luck, in a week or so, I should be able to adapt this break to a dozen of my songs by changing the syncopation to something I already do well—capture the essence of each tune and play the riffs the guitarist necessarily has to leave out if he is strumming. Stick around for the show.
ADDENDUM
I am reminded that I once said I would look into Bitcoin long ago but never followed up. To spend a Bitcoin, you must find somebody else willing to accept it. This is a highly misunderstood system and it does not help that you can’t get a straight answer out of anybody. There are constantly sources trying to put a dollar value on Bitcoins, but generally people who do that are lackeys of the banking system trying to discourage the use of Bitcoin.
You see, Bitcoin has no dollar value, but like any commodity it is subject to supply and demand. The hardest part to understand is that neither do any of the bills in your wallet or digital numbers in your bank account have any value either. Modern “money” only works because people believe it has value and the legal system is arranged to protect that belief, or in the alternative to prosecute those who do not. So, you are lucky, I’ll explain Bitcoins. Go get a cup of tea, you idea of money is about to get a beating.
The biggest hurdle is understanding that your paper money has zero value except that others agree to accept it. This is the same with Bitcoin, except Bitcoin is not paper “printed up” by any nation’s central bank. You must understand this to grasp Bitcoin. Right now, the US Fed and the Bank of Canada and others print up millions of dollars every day to “pay” their bills. These dollars are created out of thin air and eventually cause rampant inflation. More dollars chasing less goods always causes inflation.
The evil part of all the existing monetary (Rothschild) system is that central banks are NOT obligated to inform you or ask permission to continue printing up more and more worthless bills. They never have to show you “the books” or let you see what is inside Fort Knox. The Bitcoin operation is the opposite. Everybody in the system can view every transaction. Nearby is a picture of one of the “data farms” located in Iceland. Six times an hour, it counts every Bitcoin in existence to make sure they are all accounted for—by everyone.
It is a system where the books are public. In 2008, some programmers devised a program where every “dollar” in the system had to have a unique serial number and the total number of these digital “dollars” was published on-line. If anyone, anywhere, tried to create a fake or a duplicate even one “dollar”, millions of people would spot it instantly. Because it is in their own interests to do so. Anybody can look on their computer to see how many Bitcoins are out there at any instant. (What they don’t know is the identity of the parties.)
However, don’t get the impression that Bitcoin is anonymous. There is a permanent record kept of every transaction and it would only be a matter of time for a determined investigator to track down illegal activity. The other problem is what is called “double-spending” or something like that. A person with a serial numbered Bitcoin may try to spend it several times, but here is how Bitcoin addresses that problem.
It requires around ten minutes to spend a Bitcoin. They publish the transaction on-line and it is only processed when every node agrees the serial number belongs to the spender and it blocks that number from being used again and decrements the spenders account by that amount. (You can spend as little as one-billionth of a Bitcoin, called a sashoti(?).)
[Author’s note: I’m not sure, but I think a unique serial number is generated each time a Bitcoin is “spent” so the authorities can’t track individual units. It is only a matter of time until the US tracks dollar serial numbers.}
So, Bitcoin works like a decentralized bank, with millions of people watching the ledger. If anything funny goes on, somebody will spot it right away. Last I heard, there were something like 21,000,000 Bitcoins out there. The way the number increases is each new user is issued 25 Bitcoins when they establish an account, or to that effect. The number of coins issued to each new user falls by half at certain intervals. After that, I’m not sure how it operates, but that is separate issue. This discussion is limited to how the “money” part of the system works.
The next move is to establish an account. My long-term readers know to keep checking back to see how that goes, because I always wind up being first and acting alone. Right? Ask yourself, who in my vast spread of acquaintances in this world could I ask for advice on how to do this? I know programmers, consultants, investment analysts, and software engineers—even geniuses who write school bus schedules—who between them could not tell you what I just did about Bitcoin.
Last Laugh
Meanwhile in Russia . . .
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