Truth and Power

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

– Garry Kasparov, Russian dissident and former world chess champion

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

– Hannah Arendt

https://weeklysift.com/2016/12/19/exhaustive-methods/

Thining About Thinking, Thinking About Living

I want to bookmark this review of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/12/22/how-dispel-your-illusions/

this comes form reading Michael Lewis' book The Undoing Project and then looking online for reviews.

It is understandable that Kahneman has no use for Freud, but it is still regrettable. The insights of Kahneman and Freud are complementary rather than contradictory. Anyone who strives for a complete understanding of human nature has much to learn from both of them. The scope of Kahneman’s psychology is necessarily limited by his method. His method is to study mental processes that can be observed and measured under rigorously controlled experimental conditions. Following this method, he revolutionized psychology. He discovered mental processes that can be described precisely and demonstrated reliably. He discarded the poetic fantasies of Freud.

But together with the poetic fantasies, he discarded much else that was valuable. Since strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled, Kahneman’s method did not allow him to study them. The part of the human personality that Kahneman’s method can handle is the nonviolent part, concerned with everyday decisions, artificial parlor games, and gambling for small stakes. The violent and passionate manifestations of human nature, concerned with matters of life and death and love and hate and pain and sex, cannot be experimentally controlled and are beyond Kahneman’s reach. Violence and passion are the territory of Freud. Freud can penetrate deeper than Kahneman because literature digs deeper than science into human nature and human destiny.

Behavioral Economics Exmple #1

I happened across this when Goggling Behavioral Economics, and I didn't want to forget it.

Another example of how easy it is to be unaware of being manipulated


 What are some examples of the real-world use of behavioral economics?

One of the primary questions in this particular study was how do purchase quantity limits (ex. Limit of 12) influence consumer behavior? Cans of soup were marked down from $.89 to $.79, and three grocery stores offered a different purchase quantity limit:

1. No Limit
2. Limit of 4
3. Limit of 12

The study shows that the purchase quantity limit affected the number of soup cans the customer purchased.

1. Customers that saw "No Limit" on average purchased 3.3 cans
2. Customers that saw "Limit of 4" on average purchasedand 3.5 cans.
3. Customers that saw "Limit of 12" on average purchased 7.0 cans.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-the-real-world-use-of-behavioral-economics

Kafka; The Brother I Never Knew

Strangely I have never been able to get "into" Kafka. But this quote attracts me in an uncomfortable way.

Thanks to J Store for having such cool stuff like Franz Kafka and Animals by Peter Stine

http://www.jstor.org/

Movie Editing Tips : Part 1

For quite a few years Ive been using Magix Movie Edit MX which I think is now call ...Pro. Anyway, when I first starting my amateur video making  10 years yeas ago I was fortunately gifted a fully functioning Adobe premiere package from a software salesment. But when I switched to HD the version was too primitive to handle it.

I probably could have found a cracked newer version of Premier but ended up purchasing a Magix Movie Edit MX from Amazon. For my purposes it is as good if not better than the Adobe thing.

Anyway, I don't use it all that often so this it to remind myself how to do a few tasks. Rather than pay a ton of money to have my in-laws box of 8mm films transferred to digital I found if you have a variable speed 8mm/Super8 projector you can speed it up enough so the flicker disappears whne you simply record to a digital camera recording the projections.

The upshot is you can't get a perfect screen projection ration to recording area AND the motion is too fast.

Here is what you have to do to remedy that.


To change frame to compensate for recording from projection on wall.

effects
video object effects
Motion effects
Section (NOT Size and Position)

To compensate for having to remove 8mm projection flicker by increasing projector
film speed by 10 to 15 %


-----

effects
video object effects
Motion effects
Speed
Factor
move slider to left to slow down speed to it roughtly matches orginal
factor of .84  so...

Ode to Trumpland, the land where I reside...

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

- - - - - - - -

This part intrigues me...

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Emotional Unpredictability

Sometimes I wonder about myself. From one view I suffer from emotional apathy where I just don't get why people get so upset about such little things, or big things..I mean as some point the Sun will consume our earth so all is doomed in the end.

Then I read a poem and I am a weepy eyed little girl.

Here is the poem that overpowers me...

---

Traveling through the Dark
By William E. Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car  
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;  
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,  
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;  
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;  
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,  
then pushed her over the edge into the river.