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Better Daze

The man of the system seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

“Long before our own time, the customs of our ancestors molded admirable men, and in turn these eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears. Our age, however, inherited the Republic like some beautiful painting of bygone days, its colors already fading through great age; and not only has our time neglected to freshen the colors of the picture, but we have failed to preserve its form and outlines.

“For what remains to us, nowadays, of the ancient ways on which the commonwealth, we are told, was founded? We see them so lost in oblivion that they are not merely neglected, but quite forgot. And what am I to say of the men? For our customs have perished for want of men to stand by them, and we are now called to an account, so that we stand impeached like men accused of capital crimes, compelled to plead our own cause. Through our vices, rather than from happenstance, we retain the word “republic” long after we have lost the reality. ” – Cicero, De Re Publica

The Surprising Beauty of Gentle Giant Moths

The LDS Church Uses Pencils –   I was in the temple* yesterday and it occurred to me that we were still using pencils and paper. To get in, we show a piece of paper; to participate in an ordinance, we use a piece of paper; when the ordinance is complete, we show that with a red checkmark from a pencil. I think there are a few reasons for this. 1) There isn’t anything distracting about a piece of paper and a pencil. This allows focus to be placed elsewhere, while still ensuring accurate record keeping. 2) There are few points of failure in the system. If the paper arrives at the recorders desk with a red checkmark, then it is recorded as complete. If not, then it isn’t. Paper also never runs out of batteries. 3) If a failure does happen, it is obvious. If a patron proceeds through the ceremony, it will quickly be apparent if they don’t have the paper, in which case the ceremony can’t be completed for them. There isn’t any ambiguity, it provides a binary situation of success/failure. 4) There is no delay in transmission. It is as fast as reading what is on the paper and verifying the checkmark.

Why fake miniatures depicting Islamic science are everywhere |    Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The telescope was known in the Middle East after Galileo developed it in the 17th century, but almost no illustrations or miniatures ever depicted such an object. When I tracked down the full image, two more figures emerged: one also looking through a telescope, while the other jotted down notes while his hand spun a globe – another instrument that was rarely drawn. The starkest contradiction, however, was the quill in the fourth figure’s hand. Middle Eastern scholars had always used reed pens to write. By now there was no denying it: the cover illustration was a modern-day forgery, masquerading as a medieval illustration.

The Celestial Atlas of Andreas Cellarius (1660)   Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660), an atlas of the stars from the Dutch Golden Age of cartography, maps the structure of the heavens in twenty-nine extraordinary double-folio spreads. We are presented with the motions of the celestial bodies, the stellar constellations of the northern hemisphere, the old geocentric universe of Ptolemy, the newish heliocentric one of Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe’s eccentric combination of the two — in which the Moon orbits the Earth, and the planets orbit the Sun, but the Sun still orbits the Earth. 

California’s Almond Harvest Has Created a Golden Opportunity for Bee Thieves –    “What we had here was a chop shop, but of beehives,” Torres said. “You had some beehives that were alive, and you had some hives that were dead. You had hives that were basically cut up: Tops of boxes were over here on this side of the field, and the other parts of the box are on the other side.”

The 1939 New York World’s Fair Invents the Future: Welcome to ‘The World of Tomorrow’ – 

Caterpillar of the Tailed Emperor butterfly

The Horseshoe –    Schweska began with an old-school steak platter: a steel oval plate surrounded by an iron or wood trivet (the raised border served as an important spud balcony). On top, he placed two pieces of bread, lying side by side, and a slice of ham cut directly from the bone in the shape of a horseshoe. Then came his iconic cheese sauce. Although it was based on Welsh rarebit sauce –which uses cheddar cheese, milk, butter, and beer –because it was 1928, and therefore during Prohibition, Schweska made his first Horseshoe sauce using nonalcoholic beer. After a good smother of creamy liquified cheese, the chef decorated the platter’s perimeter with freshly cut baked potato wedges, creating the ‘nails’ of the horse’s shoe.  

Mitchell Domes  Milwaukee, Wisconsin –   The botanical garden holds over 1,000 different plant species, with each of the three domes displaying a different theme: the Tropical Dome, the Desert (Arid) Dome, and a floral Show Dome with rotating seasonal or holiday displays. The unique design of the glass orbs allows 85 percent of available light to transmit to the plants, and large fans are used to draw out heat in the summer so the domes don’t overheat. The aluminum tubing on the structures expands and contracts along with the temperature, and visitors can hear it clicking as they walk through the gardens.

Macro Photography Reveals the Dazzling Scales and Multi-Colored Hairs That Cover Butterfly Wings

Scientists Slowly Reintroducing Small Group Of Normal, Well-Adjusted Humans Into Society

HOW? – Birds Aren’t Real It is believed that the initial plan for killing all of the birds and replacing them with flying cameras was thought up one weekend in May of 1956. Dulles and his team hated birds with a passion, and were heard on many occasions calling them,” flying slugs” and,” the scum of the skies,” as they would often poop on their cars in the parking lot of the C.I.A. headquarters, and quite frankly- all over the D.C. Metro area. I believe this was one of the driving forces that led Dulles to not only implement robots into the sky, but actually replace birds in the process. They did not need to kill all of the birds, and could have launched a quarter of the robot birds that they did, but the pigeons in D.C. at the time were absolutely ruthless… they were eating very well, as American moral was high- people were feeding them much more in public parks and on the street

1st, 2nd and 3rd Place in the Miss Correct Posture Contest pose with trophies and their X-rays (1956)  

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • OneGuy February 24, 2021, 2:55 PM

    Someone needs to hook the LDS up with Dominion voting machines to replace those pencil and paper records. Come on man, get into the 21st century.

  • Stargazer February 24, 2021, 3:23 PM

    Soooo. Xrays can expose pubic hair? Hmmm!

  • Kevin in PA February 24, 2021, 5:29 PM

    “Top researchers confirmed that it was already far too late to halt the country’s dominant breed of humans—assholes—from spreading uncontrollably to every region on earth.”

    Are we certain this was from The Onion?
    It just seems so accurate.

  • sn] February 24, 2021, 5:55 PM

    Stargazer,
    We’ve all seen pubes, easy man. Also, we all (me included) need to stop habitually starting sentences with the word “so”. Try “therefore” for fun, and check public reactions.

    As for environments, jungles an ecosystems….a few years back I hired a contractor to tear out my Dad’s VERY old redwood deck and replace it. Mr. Contractor did not show up and no phone call. THEREFORE I put myself on the job, tearing out the old redwood. I took measurements to perfectly recreate what was torn out and made a mechanical drawing that Ghost would appreciate. I was not making any modifications, just redo what was done 20+ years prior. After peeling off all the deck top and getting into the frame I noticed that the dirt below the deck contained rotting leaves, shiny lizards, snakes, spiders, roaches , crickets, ants, etc. etc. This 10’X10′ top covered its own special and private ecosystem. A small world living just outside my parent’s house, largely unmolested and out of eyesight, at least until my deck rebuilding effort. My guess is that it is all back to normal down there now.

  • Casey Klahn February 24, 2021, 8:48 PM

    I just watched The Year of Living Dangerously. Remember that one? Sig. Weaver was super hot, and young Mel Gibson was the leading man. The take away I got from it was: the commies need to prep the country they want to take over. Indonesia was ripe for take-over in the 60s, but in the events of the movie they failed. Does America look ripe for a commie take over to you?

    Not in my estimate. They can Covid us, take the presidency, the congress and the SCOTUS, and we still are not ripe for their revolution. Good luck with your revolution, Che! Signed: America. Fuck you!

    Here’s to Better Daze. I am: hopeful.

  • gwbnyc February 24, 2021, 10:52 PM

    man. what a motherlode of interesting thought-provokers, thanks.

    I see a snake heads in profile on the moth’s wingtips.

  • Kevin in PA February 25, 2021, 3:32 AM

    I think you raise an interesting question, Casey. While I share your sentiment toward commies and their dreams of a take over, I also see the nation very divided. America the heartland is not ready or willing for a commie take over, but many of the cities seem to be willing to go in that direction.

    I too am hopeful, but I don’t see how the country moves forward without a bloody fight over these fundamental differences between liberty minded traditional Americans and the wave of commies clamoring for “social justice”.

  • ghostsniper February 25, 2021, 4:42 AM

    Casey sed: “Does America look ripe for a commie take over to you? Not in my estimate.”
    ========
    You’re right! Like all naturally good things, when you taste freedom it impossible to settle for anything less. However, necessity for freedom can be bred out of a people. As old people die out and young people are indoctrinated in communist ways, in time, the change will occur. I believe this is cyclical, natural, and unalterable, as it is built-in to human nature. Sort of a 200 year ebb and flow sort of thing.

    100 years from now, after everyone alive now is dead, will be a much better time to be alive. Currently we are still on the downward dive and will not hit bottom for a few more years. Then things will be very difficult for a couple decades then slowly get better, all over again. My only advice is to live this life likes it’s the only one you’ll ever own and treat today like it’s your last because when it comes right down to it it’s how you eat the meal rather than what the meal is. IOW, “If you can’t get out of it, get into it.” –gs, 2099

  • Casey Klahn February 25, 2021, 5:30 AM

    Kevin and Ghost, just thinking out loud on cuppa coffee number 2… Reagan said once America is gone the whole world enters a millennium of darkness and we had the template for that in the Middle Ages. It could happen, and no lesser authority than Ronaldus Maximus himself said something very profound there.

    How would you extinguish America? Like Ghostie says, once the idea of freedom arrived, in the form of the United States, that idea is hard to extinguish. I heard first hand from a guy who was in the prison camp in Norway, held by the Nazis for being a young suspected collaborator. The conversation he & I had was so intense, you could cut the air with a knife. For my part, I am real good at listening to WW II era witnesses and they do spill some cool stories if you ask the right questions and then shut up. He said that when the Nazis surrendered, they stood in the camp yard and tried to sing the Norwegian national anthem, but they were so fukn emaciated by hunger they couldn’t wind their lungs to sing. Before the liberation of his camp, they also made up songs about how America was going to come and rescue them.

    Pause for effect.

    Indonesia, in my movie from last night, Russia in 1917, Cambodia; the list is very long. You need to prep the political battlefield very carefully. You need crushing conditions, poverty, unrest and essentially crazy people in more numbers than thoughtful people. You can’t convince a normal man to give a state all of his wealth and freedom for any GD reason. It’s irrational and ludicrous. You have to get inside his game and screw his head so badly that he’ll die to have his own throat cut.

    Watch that video of the Sturgis bikers and cops walking the Antifa pansies out of town last summer. That’s the psychic scape the Left is up against. Also Mom and Pop AR-15 and handgun vs BLM in their yard.

    Biden, sounding very much like Obama, the other day shat on military veterans and LEO veterans by saying we are the hotbed of White Supremacy. All he’s trying to do is divide us, piss us off, and then waltz in and take the country. I am watching the NG and the military very carefully. Biden’s admin is politicizing the military like no time in America since the Civil war. That move is so fraught with danger, for him (!) that the whole enterprise is one big roll of the dice for Lefty.

    Fun times ahead. Really fun.

  • jd February 25, 2021, 6:13 AM

    Such an interesting array of links and comments.
    Thank you!

  • jwm February 25, 2021, 7:39 AM

    My brother, ex-pat in Thailand, sent me a picture from his travels in SE Asia. A pushcart vendor had a five gallon glass crock filled with every reptile imaginable: snakes, lizards, chameleons. These critters were soaking in ethanol, and a few coins could buy a shot of this elixir which, no doubt, was good for anything what ails ya’. Now, that Komodo Dragon soaking in Everclear? Bottoms up!

    JWM

  • gwbnyc February 25, 2021, 7:56 AM

    everclear or not I’ll have no truck with a komodo’s bottom.

  • James ONeil February 25, 2021, 10:40 AM

    Better Daze are coming soon
    er or later.
    Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to spring, which is only around two months away up here on top of the world.

  • Joan of Argghh February 25, 2021, 10:56 AM

    RE: Moral Sentiments

    “‘I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.’
    ‘I suppose I am dull about many things,’ said Dorothea, simply. ‘I should like to make life beautiful— I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.’
    ‘I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,’ said Will, impetuously. ‘You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy— when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight— in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery?’”
    – George Eliot

  • John the River February 25, 2021, 5:29 PM

    “Artisanal Firewood”. You laugh, but I was on Martha’s Vineyard two years ago and in a small island store that catered to the ‘off Islanders’ they were selling a roughly two pound plastic bag of firewood for about $12.
    While we were waiting for our order of Lobster Bisque I asked the clerk if they sold many bags of that ‘firewood’. I think he noted the local accent before he laughed, grinned and said “Yup, a few here and there”.