Knocking on the Mind

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis once suggested that his fellow doctors might be contributing to the death of newborn babies and their mothers.  This notion was denigrated and unpopular, as you can imagine, among the doctors with whom he brought it up.  Lest this letter get too long, I'll leave you to consider and/or research the rest of that story.  The story itself is in no way denigrated, but it isn't nearly as popular as I'd like it to be.  It is the story of a hero.

Florence Nightingale wrote a lot.  Some of her notions were denigrated and unpopular, but her father had encouraged her to study mathematics and writing.  In fact, her 1852 essay "Cassandra" and the Greek character from whom she took the title both touch on the denigration of women in general.  She asks, "Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity - these 3 - and a place in society where no one of the 3 can be exercised?"  Seven years later, after tending to wounded British soldiers in the Crimean war, she published Notes on Nursing, still highly respected today in the profession that she founded.

I hope this essay has helped make you feel that you're ready to entertain a notion which might save babies or found a whole new profession or do some other fantastic thing.  If someone asked you to read it, and you have found value in it, let that person know.  Give them a sign that you won't write them off for suggesting something as outlandish as "Doctors' hands can carry disease" or "Women can be valuable medical professionals."

Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale

[Full disclosure: My wife is a nurse.]

WHY HAVE WOMEN PASSION, intellect, moral activity—these 3—and a place in society where no one of the 3 can be exercised? Men say that God punishes for complaining. No, but men are angry with misery. They are irritated with women for not being happy….

"Suffering, sad" female "humanity!" What are these feelings which they are taught to consider as disgraceful, to deny to themselves? What form do the Chinese feet assume when denied their proper development? If the young girls of the "higher classes," who never commit a false step, whose justly earned reputations were never sullied even by the stain which the fruit of mere "knowledge of good and evil" leaves behind, were to speak, and say what are their thoughts employed upon, their thoughts, which alone are free, what would they say? …

When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind—with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them? …

Women often strive to live by intellect. The clear, brilliant, sharp radiance of intellect's moonlight rising upon such an expanse of snow is dreary, it is true, but some love its solemn desolation, its silence, its solitude — if they are but allowed to live in it; if they are not perpetually baulked and disappointed. But a woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her "duties," forbid it. Her "domestic duties," high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through) forbid it. What are these duties (or bad habits)?—Answering a multitude of letters which lead to nothing, from her so-called friends—keeping herself up to the level of the world that she may furnish her quota of amusement at the breakfast-table; driving out her company in the carriage. And all these things are exacted from her by her family which, if she is good and affectionate, will have more influence with her than the world.

What wonder if, wearied out, sick at heart with hope deferred, the springs of will broken, not seeing clearly where her duties lies, she abandons intellect as a vocation and takes it only, as we use the moon, by glimpses through her tight-closed window-shutters?

The family? It is too narrow a field for the development of an immortal spirit, be that spirit male or female. The chances are a thousand to one that, in that small sphere, the task for which that immortal spirit is destined by the qualities and the gifts which its Creator has placed within it, will not be found….

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work.

And it is a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

Women dream of a great sphere of steady, not sketchy benevolence, of moral activity, for which they would fain to be trained and fitted, instead of working in the dark, neither knowing nor registering whither their steps lead, whether farther from or nearer to the aim….

How different would be the heart for the work, and how different would be the success, if we learnt our work as a serious study, and followed it out steadily as a profession! …

In every dream of the life of intelligence or that of activity, women are accompanied by a phantom—the phantom of sympathy, guiding, lighting the way—even if they do not marry. Some few sacrifice marriage, because they must sacrifice all other life if they accept that. That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by man. Behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be only his complement. A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in 9 cases out of ten. Some few, like Mrs. Somerville, Mrs. Chisholm, Mrs. Fry, have not done so; but these are exceptions. The fact is that woman has so seldom any vocation of her own, that it does not much signify; she has none to renounce. A man gains everything by marriage: he gains a "helpmate," but a woman does not.

The intercourse of a man and woman—how frivolous, how unworthy it is! Can we call that the true vocation of woman—her high career? Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage—the noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect union—probably does not exist at present upon earth….

And then it is thought pretty to say that "Women have no passion." If passion is excitement in the daily social intercourse with men, women think about marriage much more than men do; it is the only event in their lives. It ought to be a sacred event, but surely not the only event of a women's life as it is now….

Women dream until they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone and they cannot recall them. And they are left without the food either of reality or of hope….

Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of man, raised them by this sympathy, to be ministers of God. He gave them moral authority. But the Age, the World, Humanity must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action….

The ideal life is passed in noble schemes of good consecutively followed up, of devotion to a great object, of sympathy given and received for high ideas and generous feelings. The actual life is passed in sympathy given and received for a dinner, a party, a piece of furniture, a house built or a garden laid out well, in devotion to your guests—a too real devotion, for it implies that all of your time—in schemes of schooling for the poor, which you follow up perhaps in an odd quarter of an hour, between luncheon and driving out in the carriage—broth and dripping are included in the plan—and the rest of your time goes in ordering the dinner, hunting for a governess for your children, and sending pheasants and apples to your poorer relations. Is there anything in this life which can be called an Incarnation of the ideal life within? …

Was Christ a complainer against the world? … Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer.

Finding Bad Programs in Good People

I have a very mild form of cancer.  My body makes too many platelets.  So I have an oncologist.  He asked if I had gotten my flu shot.  I said that I wouldn't get one because I think they would do me more harm than good.  He asked why, so I asked if he was aware of any graph showing a significant amount of history of disease prevalence both before and after a vaccination or other immunization was introduced.  I interrupted his pondering this after a few seconds to blurt out that there aren't any.  I told him my theory about why there aren't any: that such a graph would show that immunization is far less effective than advertised.

He mumbled something about conspiracy.

I chuckled at him a little and asked (disingenuously, I admit) why he brought that up.  I knew, and soon admitted it, that he realized that the prevention of such a graph would require a conspiracy. What made me chuckle was seeing that he, like myself and most other people who pay the least bit of attention to the world outside their immediate circumstances, had been successfully programmed with a mental trap door.

That was about a month ago.  Tonight I spoke with my father on the phone.  He just returned from an educational cruise on the Columbia River, on which he learned about the Lewis and Clark expedition.  I asked if he learned about any conspiracies, since conspiracy is what makes history interesting to me.

By now, you should have an idea of what I'm getting at, though it isn't because you're really smart.  It's because you've been programmed too. You may judge me as someone who tends to be bored, or that I have problems with authority.  You'd believe these things because a particular class of human beings has been studied in depth in recent years and found to have these traits.  As a matter of fact, I rarely get bored, and I recognize both reasonably justified authority as well as fake authority.  Of course I have a problem with the second kind.  Who wouldn't?

There's a word you may not have consciously recognized running around in your head right now, confusing you, perhaps.  It denotes an assertion about reality which may or may not be true.  It is the term used for that which scientists develop in order to come to an understanding about the evidence they have collected through experimentation.  It simply means "Maybe this is what's going on."  That word is "theory."

We can qualify the word "theory" in various ways to limit the scope of what it addresses.  For example, a "gambling theory" would suggest a way that a gambler could earn a profit.  A "scientific theory" would be an idea about how things work that scientists would offer.  A "fantasy theory" would be one that involves magic or other unreal things - things that are fantastic, or outside the realm of reality.  A "conspiracy theory" doesn't mean what we think it means when we fall into the trap. The trap says "conspiracy theory" means "LIE."

After I told my dad that history is full of conspiracies and that they are what makes history fascinating to me, he immediately re-phrased what I had said using the term "conspiracy theory."  I noted that he added the word "theory" and pointed it out to him, and asked what he meant by it.  He said that he doesn't believe in conspiracy theories.  We agreed that he meant to use "conspiracy theory" to mean "something that isn't true."

"Conspiracy" denotes a plan held in secret by a group of people, usually because if word got out, those people would be in trouble.  If the prosecutor in a criminal conspiracy case does his job well, he will prove that some group of people conspired to commit a crime.  This prosecutor must entertain a "conspiracy theory" and prove to the jury that it's true.  Sometimes, the theory is wrong, and sometimes it is right.  The assertion that it is right is what the term "conspiracy theory" means.  Every criminal prosecutor must be prepared to entertain conspiracy theories in order to do his or her job.

Contrast the denotation of conspiracy theory with what it means to the common person, and you can see the trap: The supposition that a group of people have cooperated in secret is the denotation.  Perhaps they did, and perhaps they didn't.  The commonly understood (programmed) meaning is "a fascinating but untrue story that tricks some people into believing false things."

Why do I call this a trap?  If you work in a courtroom, and you recognize the prosecutor's work as "putting together a conspiracy theory" and you describe it that way to others, you will see them become a little confused.  They may challenge you thus: "Why do you have to call it that??"  You are perceived as "accusing" the prosecutor of something bad: creating a deception.

The trap has a special mechanism created by the popularization (the author of that article seems to confuse origination with popularization) of the term "conspiracy theory" by the CIA in response to theories that grew out of the JFK assassination, and later by the movie Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson.  How does that mechanism work?  The popularization of the term has created a word association between "conspiracy" and "theory."  The compound term, conspiracy theory has been presented in mainstream media in a way that has caused most people to misinterpret it as lie instead of theory that a group secretly cooperated.

So if you have a theory that a group has secretly cooperated, or if you actually know of a group that has secretly cooperated, you will probably feel like avoiding the best term to describe your theory.  However, because there is no way to describe any such theory without triggering your audience to think "conspiracy," and thus setting the trap for them to add "theory," making "conspiracy theory" and thus comprehend LIE, the trap can easily prevent you from spreading potential knowledge about this small secretive group.

Was this trap created intentionally?  What, are YOU a conspiracy theorist now??

SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE: certificate verify failed

Sorry for spamming my blog with technical info, but this is a good find for the geeks out there like me.

We found a references on StackExchange to this test, which can be run on any Linux system that has curl installed (which is generally how you get the titular error):
curl -v https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/oauth2/token

This informed us that:

* successfully set certificate verify locations:
*   CAfile: /usr/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt
  CApath: none

We have specified the CAINFO curl_opt in our PHP code, pointed it to a file, but when we tried to curl to Paypal's SSL server, it told us "error setting certificate verify locations: CAfile: /etc/apache2/...".  We concluded that, at least on our system, we'd have to use whatever curl was using as the default.

We copied the newest bundle.crt file into
/usr/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt and that fixed the problem.

Some other things we had tried that didn't work and were unnecessary:
1.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CAINFO, '/etc/apache2/...
2.

Updating ca-bundle.crt in other places (we found two!)

This was while we were trying to get our CC payment system working after, as Paypal puts it themselves, "We will be performing the G5 and SHA-256 upgrades to payflowpro.paypal.com on October 13, 2015." which broke our system.

If this info helped you, please leave a comment so I know (not so important), and check out the other stuff I've written into this blog (very important!).

Thanks!

Exploring the Planet with Google Maps

I have been looking at Google maps.  I started because the folks at Anarchapulco owe me money and have offered free registration for the event to pay some of it off.  Acapulco is about 2/3 the way to a building I own on The Cacao Farm in Nicaragua.  I began zooming out and exploring Google's map and found places where the borders are all screwy, like west of China where a bunch of "-stans" are located.

The border between Uzbekistan, Kyrgistan, and Tajikistan looks like a corkscrew, and that's probably just a best-guess approximation by people at Google because those countries argue about who owns what.  And constantly on my mind is what that means - for a bordered region to have a name and a border which is screwy and contentious.  Why is that so?  Because authorities want to do stuff there that other authorities don't want them to do.  It's like children laying down duct tape in a public park...  But they kill each other.

Then I moved over China and examined the east coast of Eurasia.  I saw Nagasaki and my heart fell.  I had to enter "Hiroshima" into the search box to find it.  I thought about how all the people here in America felt in August of 1945.  The 70th anniversary just passed, unnoticed by most, I guess.  I dwell on it as it makes tears well up in my head.  I let the grief overtake me.

We have this instinct as children to blindly trust whoever gets us a nipple or picks us up, and it's justified because as adults we have this instinct to care for and love tiny versions of ourelves.  But somewhere between those two instincts, one is supposed to give way to the other.  The human brain is magnificent, but when something causes it to stop caring about other creatures of the same species - to stop so much that killing hundreds, thousands, or millions seems like a reasonable policy decision - that magnificence putrefies into a malevolence.

It would be ok if the rest of us recognized the means through which such a malevolence could magnify the suffering it causes.  If we recognized its source as ourselves, we could cease to be its source.  But income taxes in the 30s were small and everyone knew they didn't apply to very many people.  On the other hand, the public schools had been under the control of human farmers for decades, so it wasn't too hard to use WWII as a pretext to make the tax more widespread and publicize that horrible lie that connects death and taxes.

So I've been sitting here pondering the borders, the laws, the governments, and the severe shortage of well-developed consciences these things have produced.  I cried a couple times.  I'm getting old and I will die in the next several decades, but I see hope for the human race to get out of this mess.  It starts with people like you and me if we can recognize that we ought not to blindly trust someone who seems to succor us, and that if we are to do right by what children we might have, we have to teach them to grow up as well.

Polylang: Identical page names in different languages

The problem: The links in a menu on a translated WordPress page should point to the translated destination.  PolyLang accomplishes this by adding a language specifier to the URL.  In our case, the URL uses directory names to specify stuff (like the language), so, for example, adding /es after the domain name would provide the Spanish version of a page.  The problem was that our menu items would add the "/es" twice.  This seemed to be a result of using both PolyLang and Enhanced Custom Permalinks.

WP appends a dash and a number (-#) to any slug that is already in use by a page in the same "sub" so that when it is used to build a permalink, it is different for each page in that "sub".  I put sub in quotes because whatever appears to be a subfolder in the URL helps make the URL distinct, but the language specifier doesn't count as one.  WP code wasn't written with the foresight that the same page might get multiple (distinct) URLs from some plugin (like PolyLang), so it enforces the rule that every page in the same "sub" (or in the root) must have a unique slug - even if there's already a unique language specifier in the URL.

But what if you want to preserve old URLs that would require the same slug?  For example, if you had different languages specified by having a language identifier in the URL, you won't want to add the -# (and you don't need to - because there is a language identifier already in the URL).

A client of mine ran into this problem which I've worked on solving using three methods.

The first method was an edit to the PolyLang file called links-directory.php so that the last line of add_language_to_link in links-directory.php massages the incoming $url.  Note that PolyLang code uses "$slug" to mean the language identifier.  My change replaces any existing occurrence of "/$slug" or "$slug/" with just a slash:
return str_replace($this->home . '/' . $this->root, $this->home . '/' . $this->root . $slug, str_replace(array($slug.'/','/'.$slug),'/',$url) );

 This seems to have fixed some of the problems but the menu items still had "/es/es" in them.

The second thing I did was to add some code from a post at Wordpress.org of the same name as this blog entry.  This didn't seem to have any effect, but I left it in place.

The last thing I did was because I noticed that one item in the menu didn't have this problem and I wondered why.  The reason was that the slug for the default language was misspelled (acapluco instead of acapulco).  Since it didn't match the slug for the Spanish version (correctly spelled, acapulco), the default permalink for that version contained the correctly-spelled slug and no -# (unlike all the other pages which did have -#).  The permalink for the default language had been manually corrected, so it was non-default.

When the permalink matches the slug, it's grey to indicate that it's the default permalink on the page-edit page (as if disabled, but you can still click it to change it).  Also when they match, the permalink code doesn't bother altering the URL and therefore doesn't trigger PolyLang to alter it (again) by adding a second "/es" which would otherwise break the URL.

Since the English version did have a non-default permalink, the code did massage the URL to add the language specifier (twice, I imagine), but since it was the default language, the specifier was the empty string and you can add that all you want without changing anything.  So the default language version can use any slug and a manually entered permalink and the changes that Enhanced Custom Permalink and PolyLang make to it don't matter.

That's pretty complicated, so here is the fix in simple steps that you have to perform on each page:

1. Edit the default language version of the page.
2. Change the slug to something you don't want to use (for example, change "contactus" to "contacus").
3. Change the permalink so that it uses the slug you DO want to use (when you change the slug to "contacus" it will use that misspelling in the default permalink, so fix it back to "contactus").
4. Click the pencil by each (non-default) language to edit those versions.
5. Change the slug to what you DO want to use. (I think this will only work if you have ONLY one non-default language because when you change the slug for the second non-default language, it's going to match the first non-default language, so WP will add the -#.  I think)
6. Change the permalink so that it matches the slug (and make sure you add the trailing slash).
7. After clicking update, verify that the permalink is grey (indicating that it matches the slug).

At this point, all your internal links should point to the translated URL for the destination (with the /es or /ru or whatever) in it.

Some evidence of Norton's link to the NSA

A question on Norton's website asks "Is Norton/Symantec doing NSA things??".  The thread is locked so that no one can contribute an answer.  The question points to another issue in which the same question is posed.  One of the answers to the new question (asked because the earlier version was also locked) points out that threads get locked automatically when there is no activity for a while.  This seems reasonable.  The last reply to the new version of the question was made over six months ago in November of 2014 and it has been locked.

I had the same question, so I was using Google to search Norton NSA and found this other post, also on Norton's community forum.  It is not locked, and it's last reply is from over 18 months ago.  How old does the activity have to be for the thread to get locked?

The second "Is Norton/Symantec doing NSA things??" thread was locked when its last activity was at least eight months younger than the last activity of the still-not-locked "NSA's Malware Methods Outed in Latest Leak" thread. The replies from SendOfJive and Nikhil_CV in no way deny that Norton is "doing NSA things". To me, this strongly suggests that Norton/Symantec is doing NSA things.

It may be the case that the Rootkit found by orangedog using Avast! was just enough of Norton's legitimate "debris Norton files," to trigger a false detection, but if they put it there, why can't they remove it?  Has Norton mentioned any efforts it is making to clean up the mess it makes when it gets uninstalled so that other security software doesn't get false alarms?  Why are the threads locked?

My strategy for dealing with all the spying is to assume that they are collecting what I write.  This causes me to hide significant portions of myself, making myself far less knowable to them than they want.  This is apparently tolerable to them, for they wish to control me and don't realize that what they lose by snooping is worth far more than what they gain by it.  Some clue in, switch sides, and have started helping the cause of liberty.  If you're one of them, well done!