Work Book p.3 (after: Masud Khan | MMRK)

Go go computer crash

+2021.06.08b. Return to WorkBook #2!

+2023.10.09. I think I have figured out what In-ter-sec-tion-al-i-ty is: It's a 7 syllable (septasyllablc) word for a simple notion. Because it's got 7 syllables it can make simple people feel sophisticated and "with it" (aka: "woke") to vocalize it. It looks like it comes from simple Venn diagrams. You have a bunch of sets, each of which specifies an "identity" class: "Person of color", "Sexual orientation other than missionary position heterose=xual", "Gender", "Raligion other than mainstream Christianity", "Where your anscestors came from (preferby a former colony of a European nation):", you name it as long as it is not European white Christian male. For each such set you claim yourself to be a member of, add one point You are an interesction(sic) of all those sets! The more points you get the more entitled you are to reparations, with those white males (whose telos is to become: "dead white males"), who have zero points having not just no value value but owing you reparation (Even if you parents are tenured Harvard professors or corporate executives or celebities with more money than God). Are you instersectional? (It's apparently not one of Baskin-Robbins now over 1,400 flavors of sexual orientation typo: ice cream, or is it? Are you an intersectual? My biological progenitors were anti-sexuals but they must have managed to copulate somehow despite themselves unless they maybe ordered me from a Sears Roebuck catalog viw Stork Express from The Netherlands?)

+2023.10.20. Petty people need to stop causing trouble. Hypothetical example: A commercial airplane gets shot down killing 200 people. It looks like Saudi Arabia might be resonsible. The relatives of the victims DEMAND the truth about the crash even if it would cause Saudi Arabia to wreck the world economy by cutting off oil. The survivors want to know what hapened to their relatives and if the price is the destruction of civilization they do not care: they want to know what happened to their relatives. Such petty people need to stop being selfish and stop causing trouble for others who do not share their petty obsession. This is not to say that efforts should not be made to try for a good compromise which leaves nobody happy (Larry David, "Curb your enthusiasm"). But if not, the living should not suffer for some people's grudges about the dead, who are, precisely: dead, and nothing can be done to bring them back to life.

+2023.10.21. A possible advantage to beoing "an only child": You may see yourself as an individual, a monad who enters into contingent relationships with others, not as a homogenized part of a group. This of course, is seen as a disadantage by those persons who like "teamwork", and it may be a disadvantage under misfortunate conditions, like being thin can be a disadvantage if you are in hospital and don't have fat reserves if they cannot provide you with sufficient alimentation. In misfortunate times it is misfortunate to be what is fortunate in fortunate times. Orchids v. weeds.

+2023.10.21a. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a big fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men,
each looking as hard as he can,
couldn't find all the pieces
to put Humpty back together again.

+2023.10.29. The cardboard cutouts of propaganda. But are some persons really just cardboard cutouts: Joseph Robinette Biden Junior, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, Donald John Turmp, George Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, Virginia Nuland, Boris Johnson....?

+2023.10.30. "Sexualization of children"? Is LGBQWRTYism really pro orgasms or pro something else? Pro orgasms wouldn't be popular but I don't think that's what's going on. I htink it's some people trying to get a free lunch. "Would you rather be a girl (boy)?" What does that have to do with orgasms? Or of a boy doesn't want to play football or a girl wants to be a special operations soldier. Fine. Let's get rid of all puclic nudity: no more "lockerrooms" (except for homosexuals, maybe).

+2023.11.30a. Col. Douglas Macgregor said that when the King knighted Isaac Newton, Newton said that if he had seen further it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. If I have not seen far it was because I was dumped out of a birth canal into a sinkhole. 1000 + 100 = 1200. -1000 + 100 = -900

+2023.11.91. John Mearsheimer has said the average Hasidic woman in Israel has 7 chldren and their men live off welfare and as we know, they don't serve in the IDF. They are a sociopolitical melanoma. The hasids need to stop reproducing. Ditto the Islamists in France. Everybody who does not assimilate and become part of "The idea of Europe" as self-accountable humanity. Anybody who believes God created them and that they should obey Him, not that they created God, and therefoe can improve on Him, is part of the problem, a potential Abraham who just obeyed orders to murder a innocent civilian.

+2023.11.08. Proposal to kill two neocon birds and a Biden domestic problem too, with one stone: Problem #1: Mr. Netanyahu wants to get rid of all the Palestineans (over half of whom are under age 18). Problem #2: Mr. Zelensky has killed most of the young Ukrainian males and many others have fled his country. Biden domestic problem: Immigarnts at the U.S. southern border. Solution: Relocate all of them to Ukraine! Ukraine: The neocons' trash can.

+2023.11.08a. I am not protesting much about ht enew paletine war because, unlike ht Ukraine war, other people are [protesting against it]. But imagine this: "I'm calling from Israeli intelligence. We have the order to bomb. You have two hours" (Alice Cuddy, BBC News, Jerusalem, No date) Recipient, a Palestinean dentist, asks the caller to fire a warning shot to verify authenticity. Shot heard. He askes for another. Shot heard. The dentist races to save everybody, and then watches 3 apartment towers be bombed to rubble. Then same thing again.... "'It is an order from people bigger than me and you, and we have an order to bomb,' the voice added".... And on and on it went. This is exactly what I have dreamed of doing to the perp(sic) school I attended. But this actually happened, +2023.10.19.

+2023.11.10. "Modernization is Westernization" (Vlad Vexler) was the traditional notion for 2 centuries starting with The Enlightenment. He is referring to expansion of "liberal democracy" as Fukuyama's "end of history": i.e.: [now my (BMcC[18-11-46-503])) interpolation:] late capitalist formal democracy, not material democracy, which is also Western (e.g., Prof. Richard Wolff, industryatwork.info). He says modernization is also compatible with autocracy, and we now have a messy world of shifting, conflicting, pragmatic alliances (not even John Mearsheimer's relatively stable multipolar world order): "fragmentation", multiple fronts in a loose global war (Ukraine, Taiwan, Palestine) playing out in a world without a world order. His suggestion: here.

+2023.11.10a. Dr. Jordan Peterson on the LGBQWERTY+ problematic. He believes the traditional heterosexual family is the ideal. He says, regarding those on the fringes, there needs to be "something like an informed and humble tolerance", but not allowed to destroy his ideal: "live with the tension between the ideal and the fragments that surround it". Well, couldn't that work? If I as a teenager could have had an appropriate loving peer intimate partner (and also not be tested, not be graded, not be haircutted, not be circumcised...), I would not have tried to prevent everybody else having their preferred form of living including virginity-fetishism and gender apartheid schools with public pubic nudity (aka: locker) rooms and "body contact" athletics, and so forth; just tolerate me to have the form of living I needed and would have wanted, too.*

+2023.11.11. I just thought of a biblical story that may be relevant to the current Palestine/Israel war: The two women fighting about who owned one baby before King Solomon. The Israelis and the Palestineans are the two women; which is which I will leave open the the reader's imagination or lack thereof. Solomon proposed cutting the baby in half and giving each of the two bickering women one half. The real mother said no! let the bad woman have the baby instead of killing it.

+2023.11.13. "Franklin Roosevelt knew that the United States needsd to get into the Second World War in order to get the country completely out of the Great Depression." ("MOST CORRUPT III: Franklin D. Roosevelt - Part II", Forgotten History)

+2023.11.16. «Did Aristotle really exist? The provocative question, which was the topic of a viral video by nationalistic Chinese scholar Jin Canrong, has launched yet another battle in the narrative war between China and the West.... Mainstream historians have criticised Jin's argument as superficial and flawed, noting that similar questions could be raised about China's ancient philosophers such as Lao Tzu. But Jin's statements reflect a growing trend among some nationalistic intellectuals who argue the world needs a new, less Western-centric version of history as China rises on the world stage and engages in a "war of narratives" with the US and its allies. Western scholars have raised their own doubts about China's claim to 5,000 years of history - a history China's leaders have invoked to inspire "cultural confidence" and pride in the country's modern development path.» (South China Morning Post, "Aristotle becomes latest casualty in China's narrative war with the West as scholar questions philosopher's existence", Story by Dannie Peng, +2023.11)

+2023.11.18. "Behaviorism: the human infant is a blank slate shaped by reward and punishment." My difference: the human infant has a faculty of judgment that is destroyed and replaced by reward and punishment.

+2023.11.18a. Supply chains in business. "In inventory we trust."

+2023.11.19. "Al-Araj argued that the fight with Israel cannot be measured with body counts. The Israelis will be able to kill far greater numbers of Palestinians. Resistance movements, he wrote, always suffer disproportionate losses. In the independence war in Algeria, between 1954 and 1962, upwards of 1.5 million Algerians – or around 10 percent of the population – were killed by the French. In the airport in Algiers, the country's capital, is a huge sign that reads: 'Welcome to Algeria. Land of a million Martyrs.' We are far more capable of bearing the costs, so there is no need to compare or be alarmed by the magnitude of the numbers," he wrote." (The Chris Hedges Report, +2023.11.19, "The War According to Hamas – Read by Eunice Wong", quoting the person who wrote the Hamas war strategy book)

+2023.11.21. Contra Thomas Hobbes question mark: In a state of nature, can a Leviathan: a Big Boss, be avoided by freely negotiated contractual agreements? I think Henry Kissinger would say that nations can be counted on to keep agreeements which they feel are in their own [selfish] best interest. I agree to not machine gun you if you agree to not machine gun me, and we will watch each other to make sure neither of us cheats, but why would either of us want to if you have a skill I need and I have a skill you need so if either of us kills the other we will hurt ourself as well as you? A big problem is that some people want a free lunch out of others. In the state of anarchy which existed between my parents and school teachers and me, they never broke any agreemtns becuse they never even tried to make any, unless me agreeing that I understood that if I did not do what they ordered me to do they would harm me can be considered an agreement.

+2023.11.21a. Do females biologically have more fulfilling orgasms than males? Is the analogy of a person throwing a baseball and a person catching it relevant? There are similarities, yes?

+2023.11.22. If I htink I'e had so many bad breaks in life and never been in a social surround of peers, how do I know if it's true ofr not? I do know that the two times in school that I did ge ta chance to put up of shut up I succeeded. 2-0. Maybe I proved my inadquency by no generating more games to play in? Could it ha be been 20-0 or would it hav been 2-18 or what? A big fish in small pond? There certainly hav ebeen a lot of small fish. Ther is nothing wrong with persons being stupid or ignorant so long as they do not try to pretend othrewise. And if you are better than me, at lest I can do second best and recognize it. I'm not Hermann Broch and I'm not Edund Huserl. See? But who knows? Nobody cared. And in one instance I did mmess up, but nobody tried to explain the sitation to me. I have tried, not as well as I might have but not as badly as I could have. If we learen from mistakes I knew I could not risk making even one mistake, Or else!.

+2023.11.28. Identificatarianism: Wanting to be the same as each other in bieing different from some others. E.g.: "Gay pride": Being proud to be the same as other homosexuals but different from heterosexuals. Neo-tribalism with cellphones. ~ If I was sexually attracted to men I would seek a body-and-soul mate and keep it private. I would not want to stir up unnecessary trouble, e.g.: with male chauvinist pigs. I don't like people in large numbers in any circumstance: 4th of July parades are as bad as Gay Pride parades: both are flashy and noisy. I would like being "different" only in feeling I had better taste than "them", whatever them is, white, black, polkadot or any other secondary quality. Actually it would not be pride but revulsion and disappointment that not everyone each one was "like" me in shaping their own life not being like anything or anybody. Sure I'd like to be "like" Edmund Husserl or Marcel Duchamp: a ground-breaking sui generis creative person. Or I'd like to be like Michelangelo Antonioni in having a lucious wife and creating revolutionary films. I'd also like them to have not deprived me of the end of my penis. I was deprived of part of myself by them. Damn them.

+2023.11.29. Let war be left to those superannuated elementary school "boys who will be boys" who had no interest in learning, who itched for the recess bell to race out to the playyard to exercixe their still growing little fists on each other.

+2023.11.30. I am not inerested in being different from others just to be different from them, and I am opposed to being the same as others insofar as they want ot bbe the same as others in wanting to be the same as others.... I seek peers who will let me be me and me let them be them and maybe we can find something to collaborate on as individuals. Groups are bad unless formed to defend agains harm to individual(s) and then they are misfortunate. "Look, mom! I'm a Boy Scout" "Lool, dad! I'm a man just like you! I pee standing up unlike girls who sit on the toilet to do it. I'm a man, just like you, dad!"

+2023.11.30. Mr. Socrates preac!-- hed temperance to his fellow citizens. That's probably good advice for gluttons. I would have liked temperance: sexual and other satisfation not involunary celibacy and privation. Yes, Mr. Socrates, temperance is good: Can we agree that too little is equally bad as too much, you self-satisfied paunchpot!

+2023.12.01. Let's suppose the evil Communists had been trying to subvert The United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave. If all Americans loved their lives what would the subverters have likely accomplished: "You want me to give up the life I love? Get lost!" It's easy to bribe with food a man who hasn't eaten in 3 days; harder if his stomach is full and his larder overflowing. So Americans had to be reminded how great their lives were here because they may not have figured that for themselves based on personal evidence, and as the clincher, to be warned: "You don't know how good it is 'till you eat some place else." (Ponderosa Steak House ad slogan) "Yes. mommy. Please don't abandon me, mommy! I love you, mommy!" "Psst, kid. Over here...."

+2023.12.06. This was a goddamned pain in the ass to do, when it should have been fun:

SLOW
HOPE
EVEN
DENT

+2023.12.12. Most male humans look like what their biological destiny is: to be the expendible gender (ref.: Walter Ong): workers and soldiers. Lumps of flesh. Look at a picture of Ludwiw Mies van der Rohe. How could that body have a creative idea? Or my father who I think weighted over 180 pounds at 6 feet tall. And many males don't, including, of course, most of my teaches at infamous St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for pubsecent male virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks, that white collar workplace for some really mean-spirited small-minded men, and, of course, meles lack clitorises, too (Is that a correctable design flaw for Male Human Release 2?). But obviously some men do have ideas, items: Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Edmund Husserl, Louis Kahn and Mies. And a few even has pretty faces like America's otherwise useless Secretary of State: Anthony Blinken. Why do women want to risk their physical beauty to entirely unnecessarily make hemselves sick: here? Of course physical beauty is not everything but why waste a precious natural resource? My guess is that blondes with PhDs in humanities fields do have more fun or at least can if they are not prudes, possible example: Georgia O'Keeffe who painted flowers as vulvas.

+2023.12.13. In college I took a course titled "Sociology of the family". It was a waking nightmare for me: how to generate wordcount to get a good grade. Would I have to go around doing a survey of families in the ghetto and maybe catch tubercuosis from them? I was scared. The woman teaching it was unempathic. I guess the purpose of this kind of sociology was studying how familises deviate from the ideal of "Ozzie and Harriett" (right)? I wished I had not had to take the course; I must have taken it as a forced least worst choice? Later I learned about "sociology of the family" as study of how family relations have evolved since the Middle Ages including such things as one scholar's assertion that teenage peasant boys in the Middle Ages did not know about masturbation and other things about what that or another scholar called: "the dark continent of childhood" (or maybe the word was: "childrearing"), and then Alice Miller on how normative childrearing harms children "for their own good". How exciting that all has been for me! A stark contrast: (A) Bourgeous apologetics versus (B) critical exposee of the structural atributes of bourgeois life. May I be delivered from #A and unto #B! I did not like the callous bitch that taught that awful course, either: better to imagine that woman from the back side going away from me than the front side.

+2023.12.13a. That rosebud red lipstick women like the vapid bitch in the immediately above picture and my intrusive mother put on their lips is really gross. The thought of kissing such a freak-of-nature thing is repulsive. It was/is part of "The American Dream", what Donald Ttrump praised as: "our beautiful and successful suburbs" ⇒ our beautiful and successful suburban housewives' mouths.

+2023.12.13b. A one act play:

Them:	"	Do not waste your time dwelling on the past." [Unsaid: "Do not think about what we have done to you that has hurt you. We don't like you doing that."]
Me:		[Unsaid: "?"]
Them:	"	Think about the prospects the future offers!" [Unsaid: "What we have in store for you to do that will please us. We will like you doing that."]
Me:		[Unsaid: "?"]

+2023.12.18. Nobod should have to work "for" I.E.: UNDER anybody else. Person should be encourged to work WITH one another. If you need "help", figure out how to do this or do without; if you are smart enough to make a billion dollars surely you are not so stupid as not to be able to appeal to a fellow person to freely want to cooperate with you for mutual benefit, or are you?

+2023.12.28. A social form starts out as having a meaning; the meaning gets lost but the form keeps being reproduced. Maybe that's where the thing about young girls' chastity comes from: In the Middle Ages, young a girl's hymen was an internationally negotiable financial instrument for the elite to certify inheritance of assets by the big man's blood son.

+2023.12.29. If "The Holocaust" cannot be compared to anything else, that lets everybody off the hook. Whatever you are doning, it can't be like "The Holocaust". You are not like Heinrich Himmler and Adlof Eichmann and some others, no matter what you do, because "The Holocaust" is sui generis. How convenient for bad people everywhere. But I read somewhere that Elie Wiesal, a Holocaust survivor, said: "Don't compare. All suffering is intolerable." That sounds better to me: Don's compare anything to "the Holocaust". Don't compare anything bad to anything else bad or other. Don't mouth the Ponderosa Steak House slogan: "You don't know how good it is until you eat some plac else." It's good or it isn't. Period. And if you do want to compare, did all Holocaust victims suffer as much as some of Dr. Mengele's human guinea pigs, or as much as a person burned at the stake for heresy in the Roman Catholic Inquisistion? "It's no big deal, Brad." How convvenient for my childrearers.

+2024.01.14. This tranformation seems to go beyond the capitalis reduction of all use value to exchange value. It would apply as well to an egalitarian(sic) socialist society.

Medieval society		Total labor society
Estates (vertical structure)		Functions (horizontal structure)
The nobility, the clergy and the commoners. A knight was a knight day and night; he paricipated in all the different activities of life as a knight. If you were a priest, you were always a priest. We still today see vestiges of this when a person is shown deference for his (her, other's) occupation. If a police officer enters a diner in uniform he (she, other) may be given a free cup of coffee because he is a policeman. In the military, officers and enlisted persons are treated differently in many ways. I would not be surprised if a physician still when I was a child in the 1960s might have treated a priest and not charge him.		Each person a homogenous "individual" (aka: enumerable social atom). A lawyer at work is just a dad at home. Whoever you are, when you seek any social service, you take the next place in line. It's (at least theoratically...) non-discriminatory, which means nobody cares who you are. You are just the next instance to be serviced by the particular func­tion. "I an Dr. Smith." "What is your badge number, Sir?"
Society	The cosmos	The citizenry	The universe

+2024.01.18. Young persons in the nineteenth century and earlier had tutors not schools. Yes they were privileged. But why was I put in a school and not provided with a tutor? The purpose of schools is mainly to provide a mass work force that can read and write to carry out orders (like a computer can be programmed...) in a high tech society.

After computer crash; trying to recover myself

+2024.01.21. Something happened to my computer and everything was slowing down and then slowing down more and Lenovo ended up having we erase all my files and reinstall Windows 11 and now I have to put Humpety Dumpety back together again. I feel helpless and victimized and hate "everything" a lot more than I just theoretically did before yesterday (+2024.01.20) afternoon when this suddenly started happening to me for no apparent reason. And now lots of configuration is messed up and also the screen is wrong with windows only using part of the monitor space with black stripes on both sides, and I had a lot of trouble reinstalling Norton Antivirus.

+2024.01.24. More fallout from the computer mess 4 days ago now (+2024.01.20). My daily reoutine had been "a house of cards". I feel helpless, despairing, depressed like no/everything I had been doing had no value. I don't want to do anything; no appetite. The last job I had had no value either, but it was destoying my mind. Yesterday I even took a nap in the morning I was so weak and went to bed early and took another nap when I got back up this morning. Where to go from here? I do feel less bad this morning (but not "up to par") and I have done a couple things: figuring out a problem in one of my computer scripts I had given up on yesterday, and calling a merchant about a missing credit card. Wlll my spirit return?

+2024.01.25. I've got my computer back today probably as good as it's going to get which is not as good as it was. A hardware technician came yesterday and replaced the motherboard and that did not help but finally another technician did find the solution this morning and it was there all along in a Windows software setting. I'm bereft of all my old passwords and that kind of thing. I feel helpless and diminished. It's not right to have my attitude dependent on something I cannot understand or control but until the problem now 5 days ago I was imagining things were better than they were. Now I've "crashed". I did at lest drive the car to the pharmacy and back safely. This is not good. I didn;t know my whole daily routine which was very engrossing was "a house of cards".

+2024.01.26. I am finding it hard to do anything; no motivation (before the computer disaster I ws full of motivation). I was not previously taking things seriously. I was like building a beautiful structure on an island in the midddle of the ocean that nobody cared about but it looked pretty to me and then a storm smashed it and I am faced wtih it had no value for anybody. Nights used to be too short. Now I wonder how I will keep myself busy until dawn but then what? Even writing this, so what? If it ware not for Covid, I think I should find some part time "work" that would be enjoyable and mean something to somebody but I do not eant to catch Covid. So Covid really did mess things up.

+2024.01.28. Yesterday was another depressing day for me. There was also a very discouraging article in the NYT about how the British people, both left and right, are gung ho to support the anti-Russia war in Ukraine. They fear if Russia wins it will attack them presumbly like Hitler in the 1930s. But also: They see the Zelensky regime as like themselves: a plucky freedom loving people standing up to a brutal juggernaut, and perhaps worst of all, since they are not themselves being attacked, they can relish the fantasy of fighting Russia without experiencing the cost. It's Churchill again for them. It's ANTI-PATRIOTIC to not support Zelensky who, as a consummate showman, can leverage these fantasies to the utmost. For them it's not Mr. Biden's wr to weaken Russia but The Battle of Britain all over again, which is much more INSPIRING. i.e.: arousing to be fisticuffing ("Everybody has to stand up ad fight!") and not subject to rational resolution. What the Russians are trying to achieve, while ratioal, is i no way "inspiring".

+2024.02.01. I am not an influencer so nobody will read this. (Am I wrong here bradmcc@bmccedd.org?) Two kinds of persons who cause trouble and should not do what they do: (1) Settlers in Israel, and (2) Influencers on Social Media. There seem to be two kinds of "settlers" in Israel. Apparently sometimes the govenment either itself builds or allows to be built substantial housing. Middle class persons take advantage of the opportunity to hve more square feet for a lower monthly rent than in Tel Aviv. Those "settlers"probably would not be there if the government had notmsde it convenient for them and they may not hate Palestinians. The other kind of settlers are zealot barbarians who attack Palestinians and have an active agenda of extremism. They proactively seek to offend and harm Palestinians. "Influencers" lead huge numbers of gullible persons astray, mainly young persons? Maybe things like Home Shopping Nework and Infomercials were precursors or these persons? All these persons need to be shut down.

+2024.02.02. I have never related to "enthusiasm". I have never appreciated or understood why persons get enthusiastic about anything. And they even often seem to be enthusiastic just about becoming enthusiastic.... What's going on inside them? Is this "Asperger's" syndrome on my part? It looks to me like they are "out of their minds"....

+2024.02.04. I don't even want to look at pictures od Mr. Zelensky: He is so disgusting. He was a selfish nacissistic little man. He made a living as a comedian who got applause for his s[c]htick which inflated his ego. He saw an opportunity to run for President of Ukraine in 2019: It was an empty space to why not try to fill it? He won and everybody keeps applauding him, futher confirming him in his image of his greatness. He has no reason to not keep going on with it, dragging everybody down with him. He has no reason to act responsibly so long as people let him get aways with it which they still are.

+2024.02.05. It's a Monday, two weeks after my computer messed up and my "house of cards" daily routine crashed along with it. I did the Monday New York Times Crossword Puzzle. I haven't tried to do a crossword puzzle for more years than I can remember. I solved it (after one correction). Monday puzzles are EASY. Then I read a BBC article about a woman who exercised so hard that she became a world-class body builder and unintentionaly put her body into perimenopause at age 30. She was suffering enermously but it was apparently will over biology. She paid dearly for it. People should not "push" themselves into risky territory.

+2024.02.05a. Ever since the computer problem, the weather was at best "cloudy" and sometimes raining, until 2 days ago. (The worst problem with the computer had been that until 5 days after I restored the operating system, the computer was showing only on the middle half of the screen with largs black areas on each side which felt like "making ship model in a bottle".) Two days ago the weather finally cleared. I walked down the hill and back once the first day and twice yesterday, once near dawn and once at noon. Today I once again was able to start the day with a successful walk down the hill and back. I worry that either my legs or my lungs will not be up to it. But curiously it seems I am having less trouble doing it now than sometimes before the computer crash. The hill does't seem quite so long. I think maybe the reason for my successes is that I carefully FOCUS on what I am doing and pace myself. Focus. Focus. Focus.

+2024.02.06. With a lot of effort I tried Tuesday's NYT Crossword Puzzle. I get close to completing it but short about 12 squares. So Tuesday's puzzle is really more difficult than Monday's and I'm not good enough for it. Obviously Wednesday would be hopeless.

+2024.02.08. Wednesday (yesterday) I went around noon for an extended walk; up both the hills near my house: down the first, up the second, back down the second "recharging my batteries" and finally back up the first. It seems I have more physical energy to climb these hills than before the computer crash which weakened my spirit so much. Back before then sometimes I felt I could hardly make it up the bigger hill but now the hill seems a little less big than before. I don't see what's happened, except maybe I FOCUS more now. Crossword puzzles, sure enough, hopeless. OK: I did a mid-day "double hill" walk again today. It was easier than Wednesday because it's warmer; the weather was close to optimal. Hill #2 is probably the lesser of the two, but it also has no "hard" markers so I can't say: "Stage 1 done. Stage2 done...."

+2024.02.09. Listening to something President Biden was saying in a short video clip on the NYT website I saw this image which I am hypothesizing will be the NYT's symbol for the presidential contest which will consume a lot of energy this year.

+2024.02.09a. Would the computer crash have had such a big impact on me had I not been stuck with the "shrnken screen" for 4 or 5 days? [Todo: remove all the «» attributes in header tags? Also " hte(m|y|ir|re|se)? " mis-spellings] Doing anything on te computer eats up a lot of time, such as replying to a Quora question. So once I engaged with anything on the computer that would have taken up a lot of time.

+2024.02.9a0. Listening to the 2 hour interview between Tucker Carlson (+2024.02.08?) and Vladimir Putin: here, but that no longer seems to work, so try here: here. Dena卐ification. What President Putin said seemed to me tobe pretty much just the historical facts we already know from persons such as Columbia Univ. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. The Zelensky hotheads are very angry at Tucker Carlson, but the "best" I've seen thrown at him is somebody calling him a: "Tokyo Rose".

+2024.02.10. Would things maybe be better today had Al Gore won in 2000 instead of George W. Bush? But it didn't happen.

+2024.02.12. Another day of successful walks yesterday. Really, not much has objectively changed, just my attitude which before the computer crash was obsessively focused on the wars and my website.

+2024.02.12a. Example of how I am often my own roadblock. I have long lamented that in updating my website I had to type in each changed file separately. This also meant that if I changed say 100 files, I would upload all 500 or so files to avoid typing in 100 files. I always hoped for the upload equivalent of downloading files from the website with HTTP "get", but this is hopeless because of security protection. Then sort of suddenly this morning I wondered if if I put all the "put" statements in a file with a new line separating each from the next, if that would work. This was suggested by the computer asking me if I was sure I wanted to paste text that had a new line in it onto the command line. I tried it and it works! Why didn't I ever think of trying this before?

+2024.02.13. Surprise yesterday: When I came back from taking Zara to the vet, by chance I caught Northern Westchester Hospital leaving a message on the answering machine that my colonoscopy was moved up from March 20 to February 21 (Wednesday a week). Surprise! And lucky to catch the call. Snowstorm today (Tuesday). I completed the Tuesday NYT XWord puzzle but don't realy deserve it.

+2024.02.14a. I keep thinking about the conundrum: "Gun nuts" say that guns do not kill people but that people kill people with guns. True. "Anti-gun people" say if people don't have guns they can't kill people with guns. Also true.

+2024.02.14. Yesterday's snow storm proved not as bad as it might have been. No electric power outage! The snow was very wet and heavy and there was maybe 8 or 10 inches of it: a fair depth. But the temperature was warm, maybe above freezing, so the thick snow pileup came off the car like big chunks of a glacier due to the base of it being wet not frozen. ("This is heavy, wet, 'heart attack' snow. Great for snowman making. Terrible for shoveling." -- The Weather Channel) So I was able easily to push almost all of it off the car in big slab. I concluded it was time to quit before I hurt myself just about at the same time as I had got almost all the snow off the car. Very lucky.

+2024.02.14a. Got maybe half or a little more of Wed NYT XWord puzzle, including several guessing mistakes.

+2024.02.17. I did the NYT Medium Sudoku today, constantly checking as I went and making one misake the puzle software caught (writing in a number that wa already used in a square). Another snow that was easy to push off the car, fortunately.

+2024.02.19. Came close but off by 2 chars to finishing Monday NYT XWord puzzle. Challenges for this day: Took Magnolia Cat to the vet. Got gas for car so the tank will be full for Wednesday. Tomorrow is colonoscopy prep day.

+2024.02.28. One week since my colonoscopy. Two days until Alexei Navalny's funeral in Moscow. Today I solved the NYT Medium Sudoku puzzle whereas yesterday I got nowhere with it, which may show their "Medium" puzzle varies in difficulty from day to day or my ability to solve it? It is supposed to rain all day today but the weather showed a pause bwetween 6 and 8 AM so I did a quick walk at 6:30AM. How to occupy my time since I lost my pre-computer crash "spirit"?

+2024.03.02. Chris Hedges Report "Private Equity Funds" horror stories: One of these firms bought a nursing home company and sold the land under the nursing homes so now the hursing homes had to pay exhorbitant rents for the property they were on. The property sales paid off what the Hedge Fund had paid to buy the company so it was all gravy for them after that. It ended up a huge Medicare fraud.

+2024.03.04. BBC article about Nissan going to drop support for some software in their early "Leaf" all electric cars: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68426263. Next time somebody gets all excited about some new technology, remember the question: "Who would ever have imagined?"

+2024.03.12. I dreamed that somebody's personal computer had been hacked and the screen showed an image of a creature laughing maliciously. I was concerned for my computer but I could not find the anti-virus software launch button to run a scan. I wondered if the malicious agent had disabled my antivirus. Aside: Looking back on Jan 21, I am not sure I ran a scan when the computer started its dramatic slowdown. Did I miss something very important there and call Lenovo before running a virus check which might have fixed the problem and avoided the catastrophe??? Also would the problem have affected me so badly if after I reinstalled the operation system the screen had not been misconfigured???

+2024.03.12a. "We" should not take unnecessary risks. Comsider the Space Shuttle: One damaged tile could be catastrophic, causing reentry heat to enter the vehicle and destroy everything. This is a different problem from the management egotism which caused the Challenger to launch in subfreezing temperature. Nor should "we" be planning to send people to Mars.

+2024.03.13. I am gullible. What "sucks me in" is the bad person getting me into some detailed matter in depth. Yesterday I had an example: A person phoned saying my wife had spoken with him a couple months ago and said he should call her back like now, about some home repairs she wanted. Well, she does want some home repairs. The person went on and on about wanting to talk with us and I explained my wife was the go to person but she was not available because she was working but if he would leave his phone number I would have her all him back. He kept persisting and asked if he could stop by. He was very persistent. I said I'd be home at 2 PM but my wife would not be available. He said his insurance required that all owners be home so that was OK. That should have made me suspicious. But I was all worked up about one specific home repair and I mentioned that to him and he said he could do that and I got into details abou it. He said he'd come by at 2 PM and I asked him to call when he was on his way. He never called or came. I mentioned him to my wife and she could not remember any such person and that she never used the phone number he called on. But she did remember a similar person from a couple months ago who had said they would come over but never came. I should have been very suspcious about the odd insurance requirement thing. As said, he never came back. Fortunately I had not revealed any compromizing information to him. But I had been sucked in, just like when my computer broke on January 21 and somehow I got involved with a scammer in trying to contact the computer vendor. Why am I gullible this way?

+2024.03.14. Some of the pro-Zelensky people are so anti-Russia that when I said that a peace treaty was almost signed at the end of March 2022, one of them baldly asserted there was no such thing. This person also baldly pointed out that I made an error writing "M" instead of "Mr", and they corrected my putative ignorance that the person was not French (see here). I've seen this kind of "nit-picking" previously, as if pointing out a typographical error would help Kiev to win by proving I was totally ignorant. But if they do acknowledge any of the history, they dismiss it all on the Absolute Principle that every country is (not: should be: declarative not hortative...) free to do as it wants without regard to its neighbors, in particular if that neighbor is: Russia.

+2024.03.17. I need a hobby? Maybe answering Quora questions is a hobby?

+2024.03.27. I just now remembered the phrase "piping hot". People get all excited about eating food: "piping hot". Why? Is this a marketing ploy to get people excited about unexciting food, specifically: industrially processed food with either little or blatant flavor, so instead of savoring the nuances of flavors, they get all excited to buy it to be able to eat it "piping hot" (facilitated by commercial cooking appliances or other "consumer products")? Then the person goes through the ritual of "cooling it down" or burning one's tongue and the roof of their mouth or even esophagus, which further enhances the experience (more etc.).

+2024.03.28. Professional athletics are like welfare checks: Farmers produce food. Physicians produce health. Athletes product nothing; but the fans pay for tickets and paraphernalia which transfers their money to the athletes like taxes transfer money from the rich to the poor. Social welfare programs also pay the salaries of ancillary activities such as social workers, like the athletics pays for all the ancillary activities such as building stadiums and printing tickets.

+2024.03.30. A "Sophie's choice"? Suppose I was (you were?) given the choice between ending th Gaza war or the Ukraine war? Ending the Ukraine war seems obviously "historically" the better choice since it could more easily lead fo thermonuclear World War III and has a greater impact on global politics. But the human suffering in Gaza is far worse: A petty criminal is intentionally starving to death and bombing over a million persons because he wants all of Palestine to be a playground for his powsy-wowsies, etc. In Ukraine it's soldiers killing each other; in Gaza it's a big bully torturing innocent people.

+2024.03.30a. Looking at The White House website this day before Easter with its little decoration of The White House logo, it dawned on me what President Biden LOOKS LIKE — not IS LIKE! — at this stage of his life: The Easter Bunny.

+2024.04.25. --Song I struggled to remember at 2AM and finally found it: "The war on drugs", "I don't live here any more". I couldn't solve Wordle tonite ("INTRO").

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