MY INNER SCHIZOPHRENIC

This is Thursday morning May 29, 2009, Sergeant Pepper day. You know, if this place were a restaurant they would long since have gone out of business. We had Raison Bran for breakfast with grape juice - - and after a protracted wait, pancakes and sausage. But there is this twenty minute or longer wait when you are just twiddling your thumbs. Marcus Blackwell once made the remark, “He who steals my time does me a grave injustice”. And yet around here all time stops while you wait for others to do their jobs like last night in the medication line. One longs for the scenario in Coocoo’s Nest where you each line up and are given your medication in ten seconds or so and the line moved on. Around here you wait a couple of minutes per person while whoever is in charge either looks for your medication they misplaced, or they get into arguments about when they can have their pain medication. Last night I had a dream about Gene Scott and the theme was “Pursuing the fight of Faith against all odds”. Many times, as in one of Gene’s sermons, Faith is like the case of Michelle, or something - -one of David’s wives, and David had ordered the deaths of five of her sons to satisfy a demand of Jehovah, so that it says “The five bodies hung before the Lord” and the mother would come by and look at the rotting corpses long past any rational point hoping they would be resurrected or something and she’d brush the flies away and chase the birds of prey away that would perch on the bodies. And finally King David was so impressed with a mother’s devotion that he ordered the bodies be given a proper burial. But this is what it’s like with your Faith sometimes. Like the whole snail mail thing was kept going despite it being an almost solo act on my part. In another part of this dream, and I’ve often dreamed something like this, I’d be writing a letter but something would be wrong. Either the pages would get wet on the way to the mail box, or in this case I ran out of ink in the typewriter ribbon and I would be pounding away at that last key sentence, that formed the keystone of the letter. Of course my snail mail letters (we’re leaving out Mark Campbell’s name for the purpose of this illustration) felt like a solo effort sometimes. But even when you’re alone, I guess Gene Scott would say you aren’t really alone but have God’s power with you. In this dream Gene told how he had to drive in a “Satanic direction” (in this case West) in order to go to church every Sunday, and what an obstical it was for him to overcome. Our snail letters went from weird to weirder in 1982 when we began using imagery from “Satanic Magesties Request” and there was a focus on just the two small “Red Birds”, which were like red Marinatha Doves, and the two stood for “The adequate witness” according to Gene Scott. And the “red birds” stood for Federation War Ships. There was writing which borrowed from Gene Scott’s teachings. These ranged from the book “Holy Blood Holy Grail” starting in September 1982 on through stuff about the Great Pyramid, to astrological stuff where Gene Scott taught there were 48 constelations and 12 zodiac signs each with three “attending decans”. And the whole Zodiac was designed to tell “God’s Story” to the world. But then the station Gene was on went off the air on May 24^th. 1983. But we wrote stories on various themes. There was that “Sheep” Pink Floyd parody where I was transported to what I thought was Heaven, or maybe it was Hell. There was stuff on the mystic symbolism of the waterfall and once I wrote a story about how Christ and his Desciples went into a drug trance beneathe a waterfall at Ceceria Philipi. There was the “Stoned Imaculate” zone of the Universe, which featured a drawing done in bold purple ink of those “squares” from Blue Oyster Cult’s first album. And there was stuff involving black holes going back to at least 1981. When we bought the Rush album with Cygnus XI on it, there was a lot of dissertation on that, how a black hole could transform you. Those of you who have seen our rock compilation of “Going Retro” will note that Cygnus XI is about going back to the period of Greek Mythology. There was still the Zachary stuff but that was being choked out. Then in the summer of 1983 I began to write allegorical stories about being transported to the East Coast in sort of a mirror realm. There was stuff about looking at the crescent moon just above the ocean, and the impending Rapture. In the fall of 1983 I again started talking about a possible Rapture of taking away of the faithful. In the summer of 1983 there was new stuff about elements of the I Ching and the “eight directions” and that number theory and the 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5 - - progression and all the numerological mysteries waiting to be unlocked. There were then introduced elements from the Stephen King books, “Christine” and “Pet Cemetary” at the turn of the year 1984 and it just gets weirder and weirder. It’s a whole treasure trove of writings just waiting to be rediscovered at my parent’s house.

After mulling over my dream for a while I went out into the real world and talked to Wally and Richard and I realized “I’m among sane people now; I have to act sane now and can’t tell them the insane musings I’ve been having”. This is part of the problem when I moved into my apartment in July of 1988. I was in “fantasyland” for years and years dealing with people with a tenuous grip on the real world. Of course I no longer have the book “Flashbacks” by Timothy Leary, and a lot of others. When you’re living with a person who’s even more insane than you are you tend to withdraw. But even Clark Kent must from time to time have doubts about the “Double Life” he’s leading where he goes to a boring nine to five job you can almost sleep-walk you way through. (Not exactly, but you know what I mean) After the fall of 1987 I felt myself forced to start thinking about reality and my own future again. Much as it would be an adjustment I had to climb out of that Philip Kiriacus vault I’d been reposing in. Now it was time for me to start dating again. I could buy new clothes, but how was I going to get a new mind. Of course at my apartment I mistook the crowd for College Students since there was a College nearby. In reality they were young married couples, often with newborn babies, who were truckers, utility workers and other redneck occupations. They liked to get stoned on weed and party but they tended to be very clannish. My Romulan friends felt very uncomfortable and warned me I shouldn’t have moved in. Aside from the obvious things I’ve mentioned, there were allusions to possible Satanic activity.

Then we come to Gail Mc Nally’s poetry “My Inner Schizophrenic”. I am dedicating this Blog posting to her. What is poetry written by an insane person? I’m waiting with baited breath to get my hands on a copy of her book. Is it any different from poetry written by a person not diagnosed? You know, it’s been my experience that genuinely insane people really aren’t that creative. They usually get stuck in one groove- - often the “I’m OK but everybody else is an idiot” kick. Quite often, genuinely insane people, like Born Again Christians, become very authoritarian. Look at Marcus Blackwell. He regarded the upper patio as the deck of a ship and he was the commanding officer, and we were all his subjects. If I had the whole Marcus thing to do over again I would have stood up to him and challenged him a lot more. People tend to think of insane people having vivid imaginations when in reality this just isn’t the case. If a person is creative, he is probably sane. People think of Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass as being the ultimate in insanity. All this shows is a vivid imagination. Compared to the snail mail letters I used to write, my blogs are the epitomy of rock ribbed Sanity. I guess sometimes I’m curious about where the whole Timothy Leary drug crowd hangs out. I guess the problem is that- - this is a pattern since child hood with me- - - I want to bring other people into my insane world- - but often I show little interest in recripicating and going into theirs. Some say insanity is illogic. Paul Mc Cartney once though his line of “I go back so far- - I’m in front of me” would be a line John Lennon would love. I’m not so sure. John Lennon used imagination but it had a point to it. If you sat down and had him explain it to you it would all have a point. Even the one liner statements Bruce makes are reminiscent of the sort of one liners that Jim Morrison would come up with. They would be off the wall declarative statements to reflect and meditate on. Even when John Lennon said “Imagine there is no heaven - - no hell below – above us only sky” his point was isn’t it sad that religion has us so brainwashed that to a lot of us Hell is real and pursuing us every day, isn’t it sad - we have to only imagine a world without spirits and demons and heaven and hell. It’s too idealistic of a world to actually exist.

THE SHAPE OF NUMBERS

If you are like me perhaps you've found the whole field of statistics intimidating. All you know is that there is some magic percent that you can measure from a sample and somehow get a picture of the macro reality. One might infer that the greater the volume of sheer numbers, the smaller of the percentage of a sample you need take. There are no doubt mathematical formulas on this but I want to narrow the topic a little. I want to talk about the herolded "Bell curve". Once I did a program in BASIC where I had the computer spit out random numbers- - and in my model I used the "pile of sand" or the conical model rather than a bell curve. In my model I had the varience from the mean dependant on the square of the different of a number- - in this case a random number between zero and six. What this meant was that the "mid point" where half of the numbers were closser to the mean, would be at nine above the mean and nine below the mean. In other words this means that the middle eighteen points (in this case of IQ scores randomly generated) would comprise exactly half the scores.

However statisticians don't use the "middle hald and two end quarters" number. Instead they use a number two thirds the way out to the two extremes of the score. That is, two thirds of the numbers are between these two lines and one sixth is to the far right, and one sixth to the far left. In this model Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh would be to the far left, if you catch my drift. These two lines are collectively known as "standard deviation". It is best to speak of a standard deviation line or set of lines rather than the oft heard "standard deviation curve".

Now that you understand what "standard deviation" is, I can go on to say that it needn't be always the same number. Obviously it will vary by what you are sampling. For some things it will deliniate a wider range and for others a more narrow range. One might imagine for measuring things like blood PH I would expect a very narrow range, or for human temperature, a narrow range. But there are a few other aspects to the curve you need to know. First there is the right or left "skew" of the numbers, if any. A "normal" distribution of numbers is not supposed to have any "skew". For certain things like personal income- - a rightward "skew" would be assumed. One way to define a "skew" is to the extent that the mean average is to the right of the median. As I may have said before, when you use "median" you are talking about human beings, the domain of the liberal. When you are talking about things like worker efficiency or energy usage or production, then you would use the mean. These are the sort of things conservatives are more interested in. Is this concept now clear to you?

There are two moremore dynamics I want to fermiliarize you with first and that is what I call the amptitude. This is merely "how high is your bell curve"? You can think of it as sine waves. If you turn up the gain on the ociliscope, the sine waves will become more vertically elongated. But this is a dynamic of "projection" of you will, of the image, and says nothing of the "nature" of the wave itself. Moving on - - a large sample of anything will generate more numbers than a small sample, so on the same graph marking or "projection" or one might say "calibration" the bell wave will look taller the more sampling that you do. These things are taken into consideration when you draft the chart. There is another "projection" you should be aware of. And often you hear of a "logarithmic chart". These can either be horisontal or vertical progressions. The key thing to remember with that these charts is that they are proportional, and also that you never reach zero no matter how low the readings go. There are places where logarithmic charts are and are not appropiate, and I think I went into this recently, and let me give you a simple illustration right now. If you bought a hundred dollar stock and it goes down to tem, you are all but wiped out for you have lost ninety. So a logarithmic chart isn't relavant. If you however wait till the stock is at ten to buy it, now the logarithmic chart is relavant. Because it can continue in your eyes to plumet sharpely. People like to use straight linear charts to show a stock's rise. But if you just bought a stock when it about to reach its peak- - a logarithmic chart would be more relavant to you. The first investor may have baught the stock at ten, so if the stock goes up ten now he's doubled his money. But if you paid a hundred and it goes up ten, you've only made ten percent on your money. Capish?

Now we come to the most difficult concept, at least that I am going to discuss here. There is a quality called kurtosis. I became fermiliarized with this word in wolframalpha.com. What it is, to put in simple terms, is the "pointiness" of a Bell Curve. A high kurtosis will be "pointy looking" whereas a low kurtosis will be "more blob like". What I also need to stress here is that the standard deviation curve needn't change for the kurtosis to change. In fact, kurtosis is best illustrated where the standard deviation number or "point spread" as I call it, does not change. Let me next tell of an excell thing I did lately. I took four quarters of a circle. Think of a black line circle on white cardboard pieces. Now take the pieces are rearrange them so that they form the shape of a "Bell", with the high point in the middle. Now, this is what I refer to as a bell curve with "trigonometric logic". This curve had a peak to standard deviation line ratio of 1.409. This number is close enough to the 1.414. square root of two that there may be some connection, since I was not that exact in my "construction of the model". In this model I did it was as though there were some gymnasium with a bell shaped roof, and you had the people file in and stand on the line on the floor which represents their IQ score, or highth or whatever I am measuring. From here it was simply a matter of "counting noses" to see how many were on the node or peak line of the "Bell" and how many were on the two-thirds line and taking the ratio of the numbers. I say all of this because what I'd like to do is recalibrate and simplify the whole "kurtosis" computation process. First you have to know some things about statistics. Reality isn't what you'd logically think. If you have a class room and Chaquille ONeil walks in to the room, his presence throws the standard deviation for height curve way off. Computing the standard deviation doesn't take into account "flook" or isolated numbers. Their motto is "where there is one, there will be more". If the tallest person in the room is six one - - statistical sampling will just tack on a half an inch assuming there are people you didn't count. But it gets a bit freakier than that. I wondered what a "flat" Kurtosis number was. One might suppose it would be a number like One, or perhaps Zero. But it isn't It's the square root of three. But here's another freaky reality. Not all straight lines are equal. You've heard there are certain words you should never use the adjitive "vary" with, such as "pure" or "unique". To use such adjitives here is to diminish the primary word. Are all Straight Lines created equal? No. Longer straight lines are more "pointy" and short ones are "more blog like". So a flat series of numbers counting at some regular intervle, like an Excell copy command, will render different kurtosis figures depending on the length of the line. I discovered that a line of numbers PI length, or 6.28 - -which is twice pi - - will render a kurtosis with the square root of three. My version of kurtosis would have this as ONE. How I would compute kurtosis is to divide the number they give you by the square root of three and take THAT number and SQUARE it. So the "normal" kurtosis of three would remain unchanged. This three would mean (I think) that the node of peak of the curve would be 1.732 - - times the "two thirds" hash marks, as we'll call them. In my model as you know the hash mark reading was only 1.409. So what accounts for the difference? Here is is: The difference is the peak or tightness of the curve of the line at the top of the bell verses the curviture of the line as the ends of the bell. Is this is a higher ratio or difference, then your kurtosis will go up. I'm thinking a scenario where the curvature is equal or "trigonometric" model - - this would have a Kurtosis of 1.96 or roughly two. In case you are wondering I have never seen a kurtosis number lower than one, and these may not exist but don't hold me to that. Even a chart spread with a "hole" or "U" formation of scores, will still have a curtosis number of 1.2 or something. OK, I think you're up to speed now.

CALIFORNIA COURT UPHOLDS GAY MARRIAGE AMENDMENT

The California State Supreme Court today voted six to one not to overturn Proposition 8, the so called anti-gay marriage initiative. It was an amendment to the State Constitution. The State Supreme Court last May voted to legatamize gay marriage in a contraversial 4 to 3 decision, which was unambiguous in its stridency for rights for all of the people. Now the court has changed it's tune. What is so perplexing about today's ruling is that it says that the 18,000 gay couples who got married in the "window of oppertunity" last year, are legally married and every state in the union has to recognize these 18,000 as such, according to a provision in the US Constitution. This indeed creates a strange situation where the Court is saying "You eighteen thousand have this inailiable right that's guarenteed; the rest of you don't". Many have questioned the logic of this decision and I am one of these. I never in a million years thought they would vote the way they did because this Court has a record of overturning the sovreign vote of the people on a lot of issues. The thing is that if this were officially to alter the state constitution, then it should have been first been passed by 2/3 of the state legeslature. This did not occur. The reasoning according to some if "Well, the court used the passage of an illegal amendment to justify their current actions that didn't exist last May". But in my oppinion this is engaging in circular reason, if hot "short-circuited" reasoning. I still am against gay marriage, but I'd like the issue be dealt with in a fair and above board fashion. Now the pro gay people are just going to get another initiative on the ballot and try it again. And this time, I have the feeling, they will succeed, because momentum for this gay marriage issue is growing.

Sylvia Sottomayer - - a Hispanic woman, has been picked for the Supreme Court Justice left open by justice Sutor's retirement. This lady is known for her thoughtful rulings, which on occasion have opted for the conservative side of an issue. I see no reason why she shouldn't be approved. Nobody really fought that hard about approving Roberts or Allito. If the Republicans try to be too obstenate in opposing this nomination they will only bee seen for what they are, and that is - obstructionist. Sylvia Sottomayer has been to all the Ivy League colleges and has served as both a trial judge and a prosecutor, among other things. My only reservation is that sometimes "What's in a person's heart" can be relivant. It's relavant for a husband or wife to be. If you don't love the things your husband loves and want the same things he wants, if you only give out a yawn when he pours out his heart and says what he'd really like to accomplish in this life, then such a man or a woman is not a very goot marital candidate. Personally, I don't like family members who show this kind of apathy. But you know what they say. You can pick your friends but not your relatives. Often when I show I'm really interested in a certain subject, there is a yawn apathy that rises up in them, like I'm talking to the fence posts. If I say, "You know, I'm going to spend some of my stimulus check on eating more snacks that I've been missing the past three years" I'm not looking for a lecture on how bad sugar is. I'm saying all of this because in our personal lives we're looking for empathy. If we have a Pastor we talk to, we would like him to care if we expressed concern for the physical health of a loved one, or if we'd just been fired or had debt problems, or worse were arrested in jail. It's classic Christian compassion to care about such thing and if a pastor doesn't do this he isn't doing his job. But in a Supreme Court justice, I don't want feelings, I want objectivity and fairness and a "rigerous legal intellect" and all of that. I want my candidate to have some respect for what "settled law" is. I would like to get to the other issue I wanted to raise and this is the idea of "Liberal activist justice". Statisticians have pointed out that Clarence Thomas has voted to overturn more laws than any other justice at 69% or higher. Justice Kennedy is in at second and Justice Sculia is in at third at 56% Justice Bryer has only a 29% rating when it comes to voting to overturn a case. So the great liber myth is showned to be a falsehood because Clarence Thomas is the most "activist" Justice we have ever had. Personally I don't like activist justices. Capish?

The US Supreme Court today in one of their famous five to four rulings with "the usual suspects" decided that cops have the right to continue to badger and question a suspect clearly after they have indicated they wish to say nothing untill their attorney arrives. While this ruling may seem proper on "technical" grounds, in the real world it doesn't wash, any more than Plecy verses Ferguson will play in the real world Blacks have to live in. You know as well as I that cops are authority figures and the suspect by the very nature of being in the presence of a uniformed officer feels compelled to so whatever the police officer tells them to do, and in real life that means continuing to answer questions. You know how cops don't take kindly to lying to them, because they have the power to let things ride or else to slap on more charges depending on how you, the suspect cooperates. Here is definitely a case where real life personal experiance would come in handy. But as it is now, this is just one more dimuation of personal Civil Liberties.

People are saying now that the Swine flue will be returning in the fall with a vengance. They say that in the epidemics of 1918 and also in 1957 that there was a virus in the summer time but it was dying out and in the cast of 1918 came back in the fall, of that year, and that's when it killed so many people. Some say that if a virus could think, it would never mutate into a fast acting virus because that way it would kill off its host and die out before it could be spread long enough to perpetuate its kind. But the answer may lie in the fact that the virus now has a short incubation period. If a virus had a long incubation period it could still be deadly but be spread for perhaps two weeks before the host had any symptums that could be tested for. At any rate those in the know say this virus will be coming back as more viralint than it has been to date.

I'd like to discuss for my final subject the Soap Opera. OK, the Soap Opera it is. In that one of Victor's sons named Brady, who is really a grandson, turned traitor and called the cops and fingered the other son, Philip, and interfered with a "hostage exchange" that was in a delicate state of negotiation. Of course the Salem PD can be counted on to muck anything up they get their hands on. Another son of Victor is the police comissioner, named Bo Brady, who has let his contempt for his father and his father's chosen profession, become rather obvious over the years. Meanwhile the other principal in this "hostage negotiation" is Elvis Di Mira. He has an employee who is a screw-up named Owen who goofed up deliverage of their kidnap hostage, a young woman named Stephanie. This put Elvis Di Mira in an embarrising position. In the end I think the king pins on both sides could have "worked the whole situation out" perhaps with a few thrown fists, but still worked out. But with the police involved it's a whole different story with a lot more complicating wrinkles.