— Anything, not everything, but lots in-between | Pratamnak Hill, Jomtien-Pattaya, Thailand | March 26, 2023

Banking meltdowns; How Trump got pawned on the Covid response; For the love of Thai pork; Kitchen tip for leftovers storage; Member section (AI stuff)

Banking meltdowns

Are we at the stage where everything is half false, or is everything only half true?

“This is as good as it gets, folks,” (said the pessimist).

So which are you? Probably, you’re optimistic about some things, pessimistic about others. Same me.

Where hard cash is involved—and not just the ability to spout a line of absolute bullshit at no conceivable cost—I’m optimistic. For the latter, I’m pessimistic, but it doesn’t really matter. The path through history is littered with the corpses of the smart and stupid alike, but the stupid lived in Pollyanna bliss (until they didn’t). Largely, most of what people like to “think,” is utter bullshit and most of the time, mere regurgitation, calculated to get head-nods—because everyone else is just as fucktarded, so someone blathering on with the same old slogans and bromides counts as confirmation. It’s OK to be wrong, so long as everyone else is, too.

Misery. Plenty of company.

Modern discourse and critical thinking is that pathetic and banal. It’s not a new phenomenon and no, it’s not TV and the Internet “dumbing down” society. It was always dumb. There are simply increasing means and opportunities for self-exposure…and for the conscientious and smart and curious and inquisitive to expose it all, especially in iconoclastic fashion, for the pure pleasure of all the laughs to be had.

Mel Brooks spoke the oft-quoted line in a film way back, “it’s good to be King,” but that only applies…to Kings, and as despotic as they may be, there are but few of them. Society is a modern equivalent, where, regurgitating football-bat goofy shit gets a room full of glancing-around, head-nodding, and uh-huhs. … One imagines someone bellowing out, “It’s good to be Stupid!” getting the same response and reaction from the agreeable crowd.

It’s all in the delivery.

It’s an awful trait in humans…the tendency to put more weigh on the validity of something owing to the number or percentage of others who believe it, rather than the plain plausibility of it, in itself.

And it goes way back. How far? Well, at least this far…

That’s a long way back.

Yea, there was a day when close to 100% of people believed in their hearts that the earth was the center of not only our solar system, but of the entire universe. Everything revolved around us. The evidence was right before their very eyes in the clear night sky. Great idea. Only, it was entirely false. It wasn’t even a little bit right. Still, to a man and woman, everyone believed it wholeheartedly.

It’s excusable to have believed it when there was no knowledge about it but what sensory perception appeared to show. But then came knowledge. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno…even Aristarchus of Samos, as early as the 3rd Century BC…proposed various astronomic models of the earth revolving around the sun and our solar system part of a galaxy, which is part of the entire universe in rotation.

… And yet, it wasn’t until around 1758 that the Catholic Church removed various publications about the heliocentric model from the “Index of Forbidden Literature” (wherein previously, authors, publishers, distributors, and readers all risked “inquisition”). So you had ignorance, which is fine. Then hints and words get out as to the truth, a few smartypants run with it, risking their lives. Courageous, smart people whisper.

And still, from first knowledge 300 years before Christ, it takes a fucken ONE THOUSAND YEARS! for the plain truth to out and everyone gets the A-OK from the shepherd-master to go ahead and baa baa baa the actual truth and get baa baa baa nods and agreements in response.

The question you can ask yourself is, did real knowledge of reality actually change in most people, or only knowledge of what’s acceptable to say and believe, with reference to authorities, and what everyone else “thinks” and says?

… And so we circle back around to optimism, pessimism, and banking.

Everything that can be said and written about the SVB (and other) bank failures has been. I offer noting new in that regard, only perhaps a different or modified perspective, dot-connect, integration, synthesis.

What’s this really all about? Because rule #1 goes: if everyone is saying it, it’s automatically wrong.

You can bank on that.

See the foregoing, and understand why I introduced this section in this particular way. The causal chain is this:

Various elites and nomenklatura have interests —> those interests go against people’s natural proclivities and resultant actions —> falsehoods, lies, frauds, and scams are crafted and weaved into “good-sounding” stories and narratives —> gullible and stupid people—i.e., most humanity—take them up, regurgitate, spout and shout them —> everyone else glances around, nods in agreement, and breathes uh-huhs, because “yea, I heard that before.”

This is a cycle that repeats endlessly and always has; still persists over nearly everything, and so-called Enlightenment didn’t even slow it down and may have even enhanced it.

You’ll see this again, as the header image to another post in draft, for Members.

So where is any cause for optimism, then?

I’ll tell you: timeframes. Timeframes that are shortening, and at an accelerated pace.

If it’s a given that everybody is fucken stupid, everything is wrong, everybody believes and acts on—to their own detriment—a bunch of stupid shit that serves masters…if that’s the given and the terrain…and nothing can be done about that…then of supreme interest is how long it takes to be exposed.

… And from that glass-half-right perspective, there is high cause for optimism and celebration. Back when the earth was flat and the universe turned, your great-great-grandfathers & mothers believed that, and so will your great-great-grandchildren…and many generations after.

The CIA’s and Secret Service’s complacency and/or complicity and/or activity in the JFK Assassination in 1963 took 60 years to kinda sorta probably get to half the actual truth.

We live in an age of frustration over elite, corporate, political, institutional, and media lies, manipulation, fraud, mayhem, and murder for the self-serving aims of power, influence, and money…not fully realizing that the good news is that we know about it.

That’s a new thing.

It wasn’t long ago where nobody even knew there was an issue. They lived in ignorant bliss. Then, there was the Age of Enlightenment, but all that changed, really, is that knowledge of the bullshit came after the fact, in most instances.

Today, we get to learn more and more about anything and everything in real time, such that we’ve passed a sort of “singularity,” a term coined or popularized by Ray Kurzweil, describing a convergence of various technologies that together and integrated, surpass human capacity. Right now they’re all still tools and integration is sparse and challenging (but wait until my final section on AI), but accelerating at an increasing rate.

Just look at how society has been rocked time and again over the past years. I call Brexit and Trump 2016 the watershed moment when the Left understood they were losing; so one possible perspective is that we’re enduring centuries worth of major scandal bullshit, happening on a global scale, all in the space of several years.

And consider the banking crises of 2008. Nothing about it suggested anything as the root cause, other than the numbers (housing bubble, bad mortgage loans, securitization of bad mortgage loans…solving the problem of crap by consolidating it into a big huge pile of crap…like solving the problem of losing money per unit sale with more volume).

In other words, the banks were playing fast & lose because greedy, it caught up with them, a big correction happened, the too big to fail got bailed out. Move on.

This time it’s different. Very quickly; and whole lot of information is being exposed while shit is still fresh, happening, and ongoing. You’ve got serious revelations and discoveries being posted online about the breaking news before some parts of the globe have even had morning coffee.

And it’s not only about the numbers, this time. It’s also the “get woke, go broke” phenomenon being identified and integrated. This is just one recent example, from Jeff Childers’ Coffee & Covid newsletter.

Fucken hilarious.

And bullshit was called real quick of the bailout of depositors. SVB was an elitist bank, 97% of its deposits in excess of the $250K cap for FDIC insurance…a drop in the bucket towards the near half a billion Oprah had on deposit. … Or, even the reported millions that professional victims Cuck Harry and his Cunt, Megan, had in there.

And finally, the whole bullshit about SVB being bailed out because it represents “systemic risk” to the banking industry if allowed to collapse was quickly called bullshit upon.

In terms of the US banking industry, SVB is a small fry. But it was a big fish in terms of the movers, shakers, influencers, and people with seats at the table who had lots of cash on deposit there.

And that’s why the American suckers people will bail it out, yet go straight to the voting booths next time around to once again…have the audacity of hope.

UPDATE: Low & behold, fortune stuck this morning and I stumbled upon this 1988 interview of Isaac Asimov by Bill Moyers, where Asimov explains this timeframe of change concept, above. Two minutes.

Take it to heart and never forget it.

How Trump got pawned on the Covid response

This is a striking and essential read by Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute.

Have you ever always wondered, “WTF, Trump?” in reference to his not only going along with Covidiocy lockdowns, but ordering them himself? Always seemed incongruent to me. Here might be your answer.

That’s the gist of it, and it’s plausible. Read the whole thing if interested in additional nitty-gritty.

If true, then damn him for not coming clean with it; not only then, but now. … His still spouting the utter bullshit about “saving millions of lives,” and “terrific vaccines.”

The “problem” with lies is that they are always a slippery slope all the way down to the truth.

… For extra credit, dive into Dr. Pierre Kory’s long piece, which is actually penned by “A Midwestern Doctor,” and covers [mostly] a Newsweek opinion piece by Dr. Scott Atlas. Got that straight?

I could quote a million different things. The atmosphere and working of the “Coronavirus Task Force” headed by VP Mike Pence was really beyond belief. Incompetent buffoons. That’s all I can come up with. It’s shocking.

Then reality hit me. The vice president had some papers in his hands. With great pride, he excitedly showed me a printout that had just been handed to him. It was a very simple, frankly crude, chart documenting the increasing number of PCR tests administered by the day in the United States. “Congratulations!” I replied, feigning excitement. But inside, I realized something far more significant was being revealed.

The White House was looking at the simplest indicators—rudimentary numbers without detail, without context, without any concept of what actually mattered. The total number of tests was far from the critical part of the situation. We were already more than six months into the pandemic. What should have mattered was who was tested, when they were tested, what the testing revealed about contagiousness, and what positive testing meant in terms of action. That was my first “OMG” moment.

https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-media-is-finally-beginning-to

The piece ties right in with my first section, above, and is appropriately titled, The Media Is Finally Beginning to Come Clean about COVID-19.

For the love of Thai pork

Let’s get quickly to food photos. I’m eating pork loin every day, mostly. Not the tenderloin, which is available. That’s the portion at the end that’s about 2″ in diameter, on average. No, I’m talking about the big-ass part.

According to thekitchen.com, pork loin and pork tenderloin are not cut from the same part of the animal, and in fact, look really different — pork tenderloin is thin and small, while a pork loin is wide enough that you can cut steak-like pieces from it. How you cook it, though, is the main difference. Pork loin is wide and thick, with a sizable fat cap running along the top. Pork tenderloin, on the other hand, is narrow and thin, with little to no visible fat. They also cook differently: One is better suited for quick, high-temperature cooking, while the other is better for slow roasting.

Bing AI Chat

So, yea, I can get both, the tenderloin costs only a little bit more, but the bigger loin is so cool to work with. I can cut big 2″ thick steaks and cook them medium-pinkish and juicy in the air fryer, I can do thin cutlets and pan fry them, I can go in-between like a chop. I can also thin slice a bunch, mix up a home-made BBQ sauce, and sandwich it up.

Most typically, I’ve gone from normally doing the 2″ thick steaks, to doing 1/2″-1″ chop style, usually for breakfast.

Take this morning. Went to bed about 21.00 last night, woke up at 02.15, said what the hell, and began scribbling this here issue of [my] Sunday Scribbles. I also read a lot, researched some more stuff for a secret project… Anyway, by 06.30 I was ready for breakfast, and I’ve been experimenting with big-protein breakfasts early in the day (I like it, though it seems weird).

And don’t forget, I make those fried potatoes from raw to like that, in under 10 minutes. Here’s the more detailed and long version. Watch those. They could change your life. I haven’t done fried potatoes any other way in many months.

Here’s an example of how I do them as a thick steak.

Another way to use it is cubed and slow cooked it in a dish, like massaman curry, for instance.

I also make American Style Country Sausage with minced (ground) pork.

So how much of that pork do I eat daily, and how much is my fortune being dwindled?

I eat around 500 grams daily between my various ways. Some days may be on 300, no days are none. I always have it in the fridge.

In Phuket, it was about 180 baht per kilogram. Here, at Makro—a carbon copy of Costco…actually Costco is a carbon copy of Makro, founded in 1968, 15 years prior to Costco—it’s 140 THB/kg.

So, for you Americans who won’t get off-ass and deal in metric, 500 grams is 1.1 pound (2.2 pounds in a kilogram), so a pound—see how easy? So, this is costing me dearly at 70 baht per pound.

That’s $2.06. Look at those photos again. Frankly, I don’t hardly even think about beef anymore. A good black Angus rib-eye imported from Australia is at least 30 bucks per kilo. So, is it worth it when it’s more than 7 times the cost for the same weight?

Uh, maybe a couple of times per year. It’s readily available, but I get my beef fix from minced (ground) which is anywhere from about 6 bucks per kilo for Thai minced beef to 12 bucks per kilo for Ozzie.

I’ve learned how to mix great seasonings so that I get the Thai beef burgers tasting awesome.

A preview and I’ll give you the recipe next week? My mix will make any burger mince just more awesome. It has one special super-secret ingredient that I learned from old Vietnamese ladies, ensuring that it has to be good. Old Asian ladies don’t fuck around, and they always mean business.

Kitchen tip for leftovers storage

When I moved out of my place in Phuket, one thing I tossed a lot of was my old socks plastic storage containers. Heh, I was thinking socks, because that’s what they become like in your pantry. Containers without lids, lids that fit zero of your containers (WTF?).

I have solved this problem once and for all, and it’s still going great.

Well, I’m over 3,000 words, so I’ll save the Members Section for the next couple of posts that are in draft. One’s about invention vs. revolution (per the image, above), with a non-sequitur section on Andrew Tate if you’ve followed that saga at all (piece of the puzzle in relation to the 1st section herein).

The other is my mind-numbing deep dive into AI, language models, chatbots, even a bit of image creation stuff.