Sailing across the sky

Tom Heany's Sailing across the sky, brought to life by Tom and Lara Schuler, is a a gentle and whimsical look at love, life and companionship. Enjoy.

21T & Counting ...

Tech audits are really important when one does not know how a given system operates as dollars cannot be properly assigned to said system unless one knows how said system operates, a situation yours truly finds absolutely astounding when it comes to the Pentagon and it's amazing ability to not be able to account for 21 trillion dollars, a rather large sum, especially when one calculates the size, weight and volume of the Benjamins that would be required to cover the loss in question, an amount slightly larger than the 2017 20 trillion US debt that will expand to ever greater heights thanks to the 2018 passage of Trump's massive tax cut that will help the rich in ways that truly boggle the mind.

So he went and looked at the inspector general’s report, and he found something interesting: It was trillion! It was fucking $6.5 trillion in 2015 of unaccounted-for spending! And I’m sorry for the cursing, but the word “trillion” is legally obligated to be prefaced with “fucking.” It is indeed way more than the U.K.’s GDP.

Skidmore did a little more digging. As Forbes reported in December 2017, “[He] and Catherine Austin Fitts … conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.”

Let’s stop and take a second to conceive how much $21 trillion is (which you can’t because our brains short-circuit, but we’ll try anyway).

1. The amount of money supposedly in the stock market is $30 trillion.

2. The GDP of the United States is $18.6 trillion.

3. Picture a stack of money. Now imagine that that stack of dollars is all $1,000 bills. Each bill says “$1,000” on it. How high do you imagine that stack of dollars would be if it were $1 trillion. It would be 63 miles high.

4. Imagine you make $40,000 a year. How long would it take you to make $1 trillion? Well, don’t sign up for this task, because it would take you 25 million years (which sounds like a long time, but I hear that the last 10 million really fly by because you already know your way around the office, where the coffee machine is, etc.).

The human brain is not meant to think about a trillion dollars.

And it’s definitely not meant to think about the $21 trillion our Department of Defense can’t account for. These numbers sound bananas. They sound like something Alex Jones found tattooed on his backside by extraterrestrials.

Read the rest of Nation of Change's astounding piece after downloading the IG office's PDF detailing this FUBAR if you dare. 

Newspeak 2018

Going beyond the mangled syntax of our beloved POTUS is the administration's push to censor, eliminate and codify words along the lines of Newspeak, the official language of 1984.

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." (1.5.23, Syme 1984) 

34 year later ...

Consider us officially in an Orwellian world, though we only half realize it. While we were barely looking, significant parts of an American language long familiar to us quite literally, and in a remarkably coherent way, went down the equivalent of George Orwell’s infamous Memory Hole.

Since then, the language of an America that the president and his associates reject has been under constant attack. Some of those acts of aggression were to be expected, given the campaign promises that preceded his election. Take climate change, which Donald Trump called a “Chinese hoax” long before he filled his administration with rabid climate deniers. The Department of Agriculture was typical. Its new officials excised the very word “climate change” from their website, substituting “weather extremes,” and changed the phrase “reduce greenhouse gases” to the palpably deceptive “increase nutrient use energy.” Across the board, in fact, .gov websites replaced “climate change” with vague words like “resilience” and “sustainability.”

It might be worth reflecting on the words of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Hitler’s Nazi Party. He had a clear-eyed vision of the importance of disguising the ultimate goal of his particular campaign against democracy and truth. “The secret of propaganda,” he said, is to “permeate the person it aims to grasp without his even noticing that he is being permeated.”

Consider this a word of warning to the wise. Perhaps instead of hurling insults at President Trump’s incompetence and the seeming disarray of his presidency, it might be worth taking a step back and asking ourselves whether there is indeed a larger goal in mind: Namely, a slow, patient, incremental dismantling of democracy, beginning with its most precious words.

To realise English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the Party created the controlled language of Newspeak to ensure universal orthodoxy of ideology and politics among the populace.

Seen below is a partial list of Newspeak works. 

• artsem – artificial insemination
• bb – Big Brother
• bellyfeel – a blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea
• blackwhite – to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary
• crimestop – to rid oneself of unwanted thoughts, i.e., thoughts that interfere with the ideology of the Party. This way, a person avoids committing thoughtcrime
• crimethink – Thoughtcrime, thoughts that are unorthodox or outside the official government platform (or the crime of thinking such thoughts)
• dayorder – Order of the day
• doubleplusgood -Replaces excellent, best and benevolent
• doubleplusungood - Replaces terrible and worst

Addendum: The Trump administration is planning to instate a rule that will bar recipients of federal family planning funding from educating women about abortion options, making referrals to doctors that provide abortions, or providing abortion care. Conservatives have cheered the move as a way for the federal government to partially “defund” Planned Parenthood without requiring an act of Congress.

In essence the ... New Trump Administration Rule Will Force Doctors to Stop Saying “Abortion”?

Any questions about this version of the Memory Hole circa 2018?

Success :)

Not as good as the original but not bad, not bad at all. :)

An Existential Question ... & then some :)

Lesson learned, right? :)

Thank you for sharing ... :)

On Camus, Language & reaching 2600 ...

Reading Camus is a zen process as his writing is spare, direct and disciplined. One is with the arrow when reading his work as his take on reality and life is that of wary positiveness & dry humor that also comes equipped with enormous cost as per his Myth of Sisyphus essay where the never ending process of pushing the rock up the hill is obviously absurd yet remains a worthwhile endeavor when facing the enormity of an existence we will never fully understand. For Camus, the role of the artist is to educate and inform on the human condition no matter what the cost may be, an act fraught with danger and uncertainty when the creative act exposes the inner most feelings of the individual in question creating the art.

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence. In the midst of such din the writer cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue the reflections and images that are dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining aloof has always been possible in history. When someone did not approve, he could always keep silent or talk of something else. Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications. The moment that abstaining from choice is itself looked upon as a choice and punished or praised as such, the artist is willy-nilly impressed into service. “Impressed” seems to me a more accurate term in this connection than “committed.” Instead of signing up, indeed, for voluntary service, the artist does his compulsory service.

It is easy to see all that art can lose from such a constant obligation. Ease, to begin with, and that divine liberty so apparent in the work of Mozart. It is easier to understand why our works of art have a drawn, set look and why they collapse so suddenly. It is obvious why we have more journalists than creative writers, more boy-scouts of painting than Cézanne's, and why sentimental tales or detective novels have taken the place of War and Peace or The Charterhouse of Parma.

For yours truly, language shapes one's view of reality and different languages cause man to view reality keyed to the specifics of that given language. When reading Camus in French, the poetic clarity of his thought process comes through undistilled as translation, no matter how good, is never a 1 to 1 process but rather an approximate mapping of one language into another. When reading about the Sapir -Whorf hypothesis, this relativistic approach to language rings true, especially when the syntax of one language differs drastically from the other, i.e. English to Chinese or interestingly enough, Chinese to Japanese where the pictographic (Mandarin/Kanji) alphabet is largely the same while the spoken language of each country is anything but.

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined to include two versions. The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories, whereas the weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.

And this ...

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible. - Camus

On reaching 2600, in conjunction with Camus and language, is a good thing without question. :)

The ultimate embed

Embeds, you know, whenever you see a video or a gif like the one above, it's called an embed where said media is inserted into a web page via a url or direct placement depending on where the content resides. In terms of subliminal, the image or audio is not detectable, thus putting the person(s) in the path of such an operation at a rather distinct disadvantage depending on the severity of the subliminal action being perpetrated.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

“We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy,” said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C. Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors.

Reassuring is it not?

The 3rd Rail issue regarding Israel ... is finally ending

One small but significant benefit regarding Trump's stupid move to back out of the Iran deal is in finally ending the 3rd rail issue of Israel and it's entangled alliance with America.

BREAKING: Donald Trump, spokesperson for US President Benjamin Netanyahu, announces pullout from Iran nuclear deal.

This represents a breakthrough because in defending the deal and making its destruction a political issue, as they promise they will, Democrats will have to take on Israel and the lobby. Yes, they will cover their behind by saying what J Street and Nancy Pelosi do, lots of former Israeli security chiefs were for the deal. But that’s a figleaf. There is a powerful rightwing Israel lobby, and Netanyahu is the leader. These are the same forces that pushed for the Iraq war 16 years ago to such ill effect for the Middle East, and they are sowing destruction once again.

During the Iraq debacle there was a reluctance to call out the Israel lobby for its role. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer were smeared for stating what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson said was “obvious,” that the war probably wouldn’t have happened without the lobby. To this day the Democratic Party is afraid of that analysis–surely because it could divide the base and endanger campaign fundraising.

But that analysis seems inevitable today because the politics are now so envenomed, and Israel’s influence is so transparent. Netanyahu is one of the most hated figures for the progressive Democratic base, and the hate temperature just went up, a lot. Dylan Williams of J Street puts out Netanyahu’s crazy speech recommending the Iraq War to Congress 16 years ago, and J Street is vowing revenge. “All of those who have sought to undermine the agreement by spreading fear and misinformation about it will bear their share of the culpability,” it writes. Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer better keep their heads down.

Payback's a bitch.

PM Netanyahu with the conclusive proof of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program

Channeling Rumsfeld :)

Channeling Rumsfeld. :)