Windows to Russia

Four a.m. and Boza needed to go outside. He was kind of feeling bad (Sluggish and slow or was that me feeling that way?) and I went out with to sit with him as he did his doggy business. By then since the cold had crept into my bones, I made coffee and stayed up. To be truthful I had some issues also and as I rubbed out a leg cramp that sneaked up on me. I decided that today will be a rest day for Boza and I…

I basically finished the gate yesterday, I still have to adjust the small gate, but I literally did not have the available energy to do it and do it correctly. Boza was worn out and I was worn out and we decided to stop since the daylight was almost gone. Today is much colder and we decided to rest today, just because we want to and can… 😉

* * * * * * * * * *

While I am feeling rough today, my blood sugar this morning was 5.7 mmo/l and that is fine for me. I am down to only two sugar pills a day and that is from a high of six a day just a few weeks ago. Now I will watch carefully and watch my diet even more carefully and see how I do. I am trying to get to full diet control and not have to take pills…

* * * * * * * * * *

I still plan on going to the Big Village tomorrow, as long as it does not snow and the freeze they say is coming, comes, I will do fine. Looks to be cold tonight… Brrr!

Vova left last night to go to his girl in Majara, he then gets his pension money and he will party, party and party some more. Boza and I went up to say Hi to Mia, for she was barking and whining at her daddy being gone. She was happy after that and calmed down. She likes Boza…

* * * * * * * * * *

Two days ago was a Boza bonanza day; Boza found and chased four cats. All different and all during the day. It was a perfect Boza day as cats seemed to be growing in the weeds everywhere. One cat he chased all the way into the woods. Nothing in life is better than when a cat runs and then the chase is on. Boza will leave a mean cat alone, but to chase at the fastest that you can run, is a Boza day. Four times is heaven…

Never seen such fat cats run so fast… 🙂

* * * * * * * * * *

I want to thank several people who donated to WtR. It is very much appreciated and very much helpful in keeping this old grouchy bear going in Russia. What I am doing is really significant in importance. I an American live in the rural of Russia and work, play and study right along side of everyday Russians…

I am proof positive that Russians will not eat your soul and cook your brain for breakfast, as they try daily to attack and take over your country. ~SARC~

I am starting to worry about a few people I know in the USA. Things are getting kinda thin in places and clashes are starting to swell. The elite will drive one group against the other, just as they do in other countries and people in America just ignore that when it happens. Well you just saw a perfect example in the US, of Soros funded trash, trashing…

Donations are the life blood of this project in The Tiny Russian Village. Every donation has a place and purpose to live among the natives, so to speak, in Russia. 😉 I am first hand watching Russia through not rose colored glasses, but clear untainted glasses. Even if those glasses are dirty at times, I just clean them with water and keep going…

I can promise you that Russia is not what the western media wishes you to see, read, think and know about. It is a thousand times better…

Maybe that is what scares the west? Russia is a great country, great people and a freedom filled wonderful life…

WtR

Looks like a bunch of snow later in the week and Monday will be -3 or so and Monday night -8 or so. That means Tuesday morning is my only chance to get out of here and go shopping at the Big Village for at least a few weeks. I will leave at 7 a.m. and try to get back before 9 a.m. I can not be caught in any thaw or I will never get the car back home. Tuesday afternoon is going to be +3 or so…

I am banking on the fact that it will get very cold and no more snow. Then I can run across the surface of all the bad stuff in the way… 😉

* * * * * * * * * *

I finished the entrance section to install the gate. I am now trying to design a gate. I have decided to make a two part gate with one side long and the other side a person gate. I will install a removable center post to allow a vehicle to use the gate also…

Now just trying to figure out what I need to do it and how to do it with my borderline skills. Do it I will and it will be sturdy, if not ugly when I am done…

* * * * * * * * * *

I am feeling really good!

I have halved the amount of sugar pills I take and so am stabilizing at a nice plateau. I still wake up in the morning very early and am under 4.00 mmo/l and that is not good. I am trying to wake up in the 5 to 6 range. Seems to be eluding me so far…

I have lost some more weight and definable have reached my first goal weight of 110 kilos or 242 pounds or 17.3 stone. Now it is time to get to 100 kilos or 220 pounds or 15.7 stone…

That weight I will stay at and be happy with. For at 220 lbs I will be thin at my body height and structure…

* * * * * * * * * *

I sum up my thoughts today about the American Political System with, “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!”

Have a nice day, I have work to do and Boza has to watch…

WtR

Sveta a few months back had bought us a weather station for the village. It was extremely reasonable in price and included everything to function and build it. I supplied the two screwdrivers and one pair of pliers and a lot of mental anguish as I deciphered the Chinese to English instructions…

Finally, as you see my straw boss in the background, I have my weather station installed and running…

That is a wireless weather station and I made it so that I can remove it when the weather gets to the point of destroying the device. It has a light meter, rain gauge, wind speed, wind direction, humidity, forecast and all this plus more; plus it does this inside and outside for conditions…

Yesterday, I found myself passing a kidney stone, now you know why I woke up rough that morning. I didn’t know and or realize it until hours later and lucky for me, it was small. Vova and Svetochka were worried and I just did not care as the pain is horrific with these episodes…

Therefore, I did light duty work and built my weather station. Silver lining in every cloud, my grandma would say…

The image to the right is showing the graphical interface by software for my Windows PC and the screen to the right of the big monitor is the pick up unit for gathering the data that the station creates…

All this data is able to be stored and used in a way that interests me. I want to get connected to a weather service and send the data to them.

I wanna be a weather station… 🙂

You can be a weather station to…

* * * * * * * * * *

Notice in the image above…

Snow, still snow and more snow. I guess people in Moscow think winter was easy this year. I always thought winter was easy in Moscow. They have 20,000 trucks and 50,000 people cleaning the streets. So yes winter is easy there…

But, ask anyone in the villages around where I am at and no one will say that winter was a piece of cake. We spent weeks at -25 and colder and the snow was deep and we still have snow. Next week is going to be frozen down to -10. We can’t even get the damn road plowed properly, so that I can get out to go to the store… 😉

I always say, “It is all in your perspective!” and or experience at the moment…

It is cloudy and going to snow today… How is that for a forecast?

* * * * * * * * * *

The soap opera called, “As America Turns!” Is reaching a boiling point, just as the game players desire. As I said, America is the land of chaos and the people in charge think that is the way it should be. The peons all seem to just go along with it and no one seems to care what happens past their nose at any given time. We even have a hand held device that keeps your attention centered around the end of your nose and in a few generations, we will all be nearsighted and if we look up the world will be a blur…

The problem in America is that there are just too many wannabe dictators and they all wannabe now…

WtR

by John Stanton

In 2007 I wrote and presented a conceptual paper to an international studies group in Portugal. The subject matter was, generally, the use of Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (ECN) to manage humanity. That paper would eventually finds its way, remarkably, into Rebecca Costa’s seminal The Watchman’s Rattle.

I said back in 2007 that America’s ongoing obsession with national security and the enormous funding necessary to soothe a national psyche of fear and war was a key driver for enhancing security thereby eliminating the uncertainty of daily living. I suggested that ECN could generate predictive and diagnostic biotechnologies to reduce tension. Such a development could eliminate much uncertainty and concomitant drama in human affairs by providing leaders with assets to manage the complexities in brain-behavior relationships. To get there though, reliable data on human beings, as they function as interconnected consumers, warfighters, enemies, refugees, diplomats, criminals, and citizens of their respective nations would need to be collected and assessed.

I went on to say that a comprehensive knowledge base of planetary ecosystems and how humans interface with those ecosystems would have to be constructed and meshed with the findings of brain-behavior functions. The dissection of the individual and global organism may lead to unprecedented forecasting capability with the ultimate outcome the creation of biomachine systems that suggest procedures and diagnostics with which to anticipate and/or minimize a wide range of human problems. Biomachine tools might become available that could suggest courses of action such as military intervention, diplomacy, containment, stability and consequence management operations, economic aid, covert operations, etc. I also briefly mentioned that one of the dangers in such a pursuit would likely be the development of neuroweaponry.

In just under ten years, the topics alluded to in my 2007 paper have taken the form of four converging and accelerating movements that seem likely to usher in drastic change in the human condition: The digitization of human behavior; cracking open the brain through neuroscience; the engineering and manipulation of human and non-human genomes; and the proliferation of the Internet of Things, which is code for the sensorization of the human/non-human, home, work, school, automobile, street, global commons, etc.

Is it any surprise that the Anthropocene is upon us?

What Happens Next?

Shoshana Zuboff, in the article, The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism, thinks that humanity will become mentally displaced, perhaps disembodied, as behavior becomes totally predictable and free will vanishes.

“The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital breadcrumbs,”…These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like “heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,” “primitives,” “vassals,” or “rebels.” On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations, legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and Monarchy. We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of our behavior. For those who wondered about the logical completion of the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and sold.”

Radar Love

Social Radar has been a goal of the government and business for some time. Its applications are legion: Predictive behavioral algorithms to ensure consumers are directed to the right product to ensure steady profits; underlying predictive mathematical models that allow the military commander a quantitative, geospatial view of open or urban terrain with humans moving predictably like aircraft on an air traffic controller’s screen; and the creation of a predictive reality in which the masses believe they are “free”, but are, unknown to them, being behaviorally shaped for the larger system. These notions can be found in military doctrine and a host of academic and marketing organizations. It’s all there out in the open if anyone cares to look.

Consider The MITRE Corporation’s development of Social Radar. In Social Radar for Smart Power, Mark Maybury writes: “Conventional radar requires signatures for different kinds of objects and events: it needs to be tuned to different environmental conditions to provide accurate and reliable information. Analogously, a social radar needs signatures, calibration, and correlation to sense, if not forecast, a broad spectrum of phenomena (e.g., political, economic, social, environmental, health) and potentially forecast changing trends in population perceptions and behaviors. For example, radar or sonar enable some degree of forecasting by tracking spatial and temporal patterns (e.g. they track and display how military objects or weather phenomena move in what clusters, in which direction(s) and at what speed.) A user can thus project where and when objects will be in the future. Similarly, a social radar should enable us to forecast who will cluster with whom in a network, where, and when in what kinds of relationships…Public Opinion Polling by Proxy (POP/P) [is] an exploration of the ability of social media (e.g., Twitter) to serve as a proxy for traditional opinion polling methods to overcome their latency, expense, and invasiveness.”

If We Kick the Ant Hill, Where will the Ants Go?

The US national security community’s dream is to have a Social Radar–like the one described above by Maybury—that would allow military commanders to lord over other countries. The Pentagon’s Sociocultural Behavior Research and Engineering in a Department of Defense Context contains this statement: “Mastery would mean that U.S. forces would have the data on indigenous populations and the training they need to move easily in those populations; could see the parameters of culture and society and integrate those with conventional mapping of the physical terrain; could detect often complex and dynamic networks, where adversaries and civilian populations are intermingled; and would possess non-kinetic tools as well as the ability to anticipate both the near-term and long-term impacts of applying those tools.”

It’s easy to pick on the Pentagon on these matters, of course. But the insidious reality is that for profit, commercial enterprises with global reach—and the many lobbyists and non-profits who work on their behalf to distort regulatory regimes designed to oversee their activities—must modify human behavior in order to control/corner global markets, turn a profit and survive. These are the new colonialists who now brandish the US military as a tool for their own ends.

If Zuboff is correct, then Google–and corporations colluding with them or like them—are engaging in a type of intellectual property theft from unwitting customers. The thoughts, feelings, the sense of individual uniqueness of a human being (or his/her genetic structure) ultimately ends up getting copyrighted, trademarked or patented by corporations. It is the Internet of Sensors, Neuroscience, Genetic Engineering and the Digitization of Earth in the techno-dictatorial hands of corporate boardrooms and financiers that may well prove to be apocalyptic for all life on Earth.

Unfortunately the leadership of the dangerously privatized US military has become an extension of this techno-corporate collective and the governing civilians the collective owns. Indeed, so much so that US military leadership, while on “active duty”, emulates its mentors in the corporate world because (a.) rampant internal privatization has distorted the US military; and (b.) the private sector is where US military leaders long to be when it’s retirement time. It’s all about networking for the big payday in the private sector, or developing networking diagrams to see who the bad guys affiliate with in some remote corner of the African continent.

So it is no surprise that “…the worldview that governs the U.S military’s approach…is one where populations are de-coded as networks. To see like the twenty-first century US military is to see a world of networks. This world of networks is a secular cosmological vision derivative from the human-machine assemblages where US military personnel and institutions are imbricated. These human-machine assemblages have been violently extended…through new technologies like iris-scan biometrics devices and data-base management…many new twenty-first century technologies, like big data mining and computational social network analysis, are rooted in colonial practices.” (The Afterlives of Counterinsurgency: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and Afghanistan 2006-2012 by Oliver Christian Belcher)

John Stanton can be reached at captainkong22@gmail.com

Sipping a cup of coffee and deciding what to write. I am not sure I want to go at what I did yesterday again today. I am sore and need a rest. I am rebuilding the double gate on our land and tore it all the way out. Then I started to dig holes to install new heavy posts. Now I start the plan to build a double gate or a large single gate. The opening is wide enough to allow a very large truck to deliver cow manure or wood and such. It is not for parking and normal use. It needs to be very heavy and durable, for long periods of non use…

Most likely I will continue on the gate today and at least complete the left side that you see in the image. Then I will look over the wood I have and decide; do I need to cut some more or can I accomplish the gate from what I have?

Sammy the Volga’s parking spot!

I have a second gate to finish, but I still have too much snow in the way and it will have to wait. I may dig the hole to install the gate post though. This gate is smaller and is the home for Sammy the Volga…

Thus, one big post, dug deep, will suffice…

The image is from the fall time before snow…

The ground is still frozen and I have to take a heavy breaker bar of steel and crack the ground. Then once I get about a foot deep, I can use my post hole digger. Then it goes quick. Though this morning I feel the effects of digging four holes yesterday. The shock of hitting frozen ground with a steel bar is showing this morning. I can hardly clinch my fists…

* * * * * * * * * *

I woke at 5 a.m. with a 3.6 mmo/l; That is okay for me, for my body is adjusted to it now, but I still am struggling to get stabilized on sugar issues. I need more starch in my diet to help the peaks and valleys and Vova told me to come up today to get a bag of potatoes. That will help in small portions to spread the effects out over a day. Right now I either have extremes of all protein or too much sugar to stabilize properly…

* * * * * * * * * *

It is so beautiful out this morning. The sun is shining and the birds are singing. George my favorite bird was out on our apple trees this morning and singing to beat the band. He says he is looking for a girlfriend to build a home with. He also said that a bunch of little George’s would be a good idea, since he has found a good home spot…

I agree…

Oh and a cute Chickadee couple has taken to the lilacs bushes and it looks like they soon will build a nest…

Boza is watching and kinda does not know what to think, except birdbrains, that is what they are…

* * * * * * * * * *

-4 this morning, but the water birds are coming back, the bugs are coming out and Boza and I are working. Just as if it was much warmer. It is all a state of mind and if the spiders can get out and work, so can we…

* * * * * * * * * *

We are still snowed in and or I should say, still held by melting and freezing water and snow. The roads which are passable early in the morning, become terrible and scary mud baths. While getting to town is possible early, getting home as it warms up, becomes another world completely. The Fish Village is working on dams and roads and they have sufficiently created a pathetic mess out of the road system. The guy in the road grader and the guy on the bulldozer says, They look a okay to them! What ever…

* * * * * * * * * *

Have a nice day…

Time to get to work and or maybe not… 😉

WtR

I sat up in bed and felt like a brick wall had hit me last night. I over did it yesterday, but it is time to get things done. The weather was perfect and I spent the day, dragging logs, fixing the fence, walking for four hours total, rebuilt a sled I borrowed, writing a couple of posts, working on the internet store and dancing a jig… 🙂 Plus a few more things… The dancing jig part maybe stretching it a little bit…

Thus, today I have already walked Boza and he is sleeping again, while I write this article. The coffee is talking to me, as the steam wafts to my nose and the nutty smell of the odor is so enticing…

First thing I did when I sat up this morning is take a sugar reading and my blood pressure. Sugar was 4.9mmo/l (88mg/dl) and BP was 100 / 55… I consider that pretty good, but I seem to have a sinus infection and that made me grouchy. But how can you stay grouchy with vital readings like that. On the same line as vitals, Svetochka has found a oxymeter that goes on the finger tip, to tell me what my oxygen readings are. My last doctor in America was concerned about that situation and he was going to run a bunch of tests. I think he may have been on to something and I will start the process of elimination to determine if I have a low oxygen issue. There is medicine to help me if I do and I will be watching that closely. As soon as she gets back to our village home…

Oh for those who wonder about sugar stuff tidbits; for a diabetic, hypoglycemia worry point is 4 or below, hence the phrase “4 is the floor”…

For a diabetic, the first time that you actually get blood sugar under control, is sometimes a scary thing. Your body has no idea what correct levels are and it takes time to allow the body and your mind to gather and assimilate the data to understand what is happening. I have seen people go into hypoglycemia at 6mmo/l, just because they have never been near that low before or at least for so many years the body forgot what it is like…

One thing that I have found is that newer doctors seem to not be inducing hypoglycemia in a patient to allow the person to feel what it is about. My doctor did this while I was in his office and could control the situation. It is important that before you start taking medicine, you know what to expect. I watch people freak out at 6mmo/l to 7mmo/l because they have never had readings that low and some think they will die or something. The body does react strange at first and the mind definitely reacts strange…

* * * * * * * * * *

The day started out great and then Mother Nature decided that we did not deserve more sun and sent the sun away. Then she added insult to injury and start it to rain…

Oh well, you take what you can get…

WtR

Today with the sun shining all day; it is laundry day and serious laundry day on top of that…

Except for the sheets, everything has been washed if it is clothing and it took me three hours to get this all done. The machine helps do larger amounts. But everything is still squeezed out by hand and has to be rinsed. Everything wearable was washed, inside out and then outside in. It took me 10 trips to the well to get enough water for all this laundry. Because even things I have washed by hand had to be be done today. By hand is not the same…

Winter has been long and it looks like it will come back in about a week, but I am taking advantage of the situation and getting the stuff clean. I also was able to finally do some sweeping on the front walk and everything is looking good… 😉

Another couple of days like this and I should be able to get to the Big Village. Cross your fingers, for that will be a treat for Boza and I. To get all the items that I need to start working on the place and pick up more dog food. Boza has 12 boxes left and at 24 X 12 box = 288 / by 15 (1.5 kilos) a day = 19 to 20 days left. Holy Toledo Batman, Boza has eaten about 50 boxes of food so far, since I was able to last buy it…

Not sure what is next, but I have to get my hands unfrozen before I do anything. Ever typed with numb fingers. I am right now and just realized that I better thaw them, because trying to type is hilarious right now. What fingers?

WtR

Sunshine in a Russian wintry day is rare and when we have it, Boza and I enjoy it. It went to -5 last night, but the sun is out and is beautiful. It will be +6 today and lets hope the melt continues…

The gurgle of a creek, even if there really is no creek, is a wonderful sound. Our road near our home is babbling and talking. It really is wonderful and I can sit at the picnic table and listen, just like there is a real creek running by our home…

Life is good…

WtR

The world is not coming to an end, just an old friend, who is just slowing down. Wars and depressions come and go but here we are, still standing. Every person in America and or the world will still be doing all the other activities that constitute an economy, just at a much reduced level. This is good for us and has to be, to grow a stronger next generation. For weakness in society will destroy us, when our enemies do not…

Us old guys know too much now, we see that much of what we believed was lies and we see that the culture has grown jaded making it difficult to be optimistic. But life will go on. Children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren too, will all still be here, doing something for their lives, for their jobs, their education and for their happiness. That’s the most important thing for me now is to help the world understand despite the imperfection of their world, it is still great to live life in whatever circumstance we find ourselves…

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is available even if it all falls apart and your iPhone’s battery dies…

Time to support some hardship and start it all over. Time to build a new foundation, for this foundation we are built on now has been eroded to the point of crumbling, with the weight of a few crushing the goodness from our country…

Time to be brave and time to ignore being scared…

WtR

Half of what Vova brought…

Vova made pancakes today…

It is pancake week you know?

Well if you do not, read the link above…

Vova brought a huge platter of pancakes down and him and I gorged ourselves upon the tasty treats. These were what I call real pancakes and not the thin blini that are common in Russia. I knew guys knew how to make pancakes, it is just a natural thing to make huge, big, fat, delicious and mouth watering pancakes…

Oh and yes Boza got a pancake for himself. That was one happy doggy…

Another link for pancakes in Russia…

Maslenitsa, I Miss Real pancakes! (Blini)

Guess what? I got real pancakes today… 😉

* * * * * * * * * *

The sun came out for exactly 10 min…. I could see something other than drear and drabness and I found something growing in the back yard…

It was so beautiful and alive, a plant that is alive and green…

Vova said that he will be down as soon as the ground is thawed and he will bring his rototiller to till up the garden. This year, we will have a big garden and after digging out under the house this summer, we will have lots of good safe storage space for roots. A root cellar is what I have in mind…

I just added this small post to complete the day and while I have gotten very little done, because of the wetness, it has been a good day nonetheless…

Tomorrow is suppose to be sunny all day and I will take pictures if it is. The world is still full of snow, but it is slowly coming to life around here. I can not wait for spring to get going…

Have a nice day…

WtR