Good morning, Neo! I am now mostly confined to the house with a husband on crutches following knee replacement, and awaiting home PT, which is a blessing. I suppose your son has departed for points west. Here’s hoping your ex is doing all right.
Interesting video; the images shown are really amazing.
Only when viewed from a specific perspective, can one see the reality.
Unless, of course, one is a liberal progressive demonkrat. Upon initial viewing their mind is already made up what the object really looks like and any subsequent viewing from different perspectives are totally ignored or dismissed.
God bless, Kate. The only thing I know about knee replacements is how much it freaks me out that people are up and about in no time. Hopefully same for your husband.
Thanks, Mike Plaiss. He had the other one done five years ago. This time, only four days post op, he can get up from bed and chairs, and down again, without help. Taking Tylenol and Celebrex and no other pain meds. We think the robot-assisted surgery helped.
Speaking of illusions-
A new word has officially entered our vocabularies, “delulu” i.e. being delusional.
Linked below is an article describing a prime example of such delusion, the 21 year old black woman, who says she was abused by her family, and who fled to Scotland with her one year old child to join a lost African tribe in the supposed “Kingdom of Kubala,” located in a Scottish forest, where she has taken the title of “Asnat, Lady Safi of Atehene,” and become the handmaiden and second wife to “King” Atahene (a PR agent and Opera singer from Ghana formerly known as Koffi Offeh, and his Queen Nandi (formerly known as Jean Gasho.) who, according to the article linked to below, are trying to “restore a lost (African?) Hebrew tribe.”*
Reminds me of all the people who were reportedly calling travel agents, trying to book trips to the “Kingdom of Wakanda,” after the film “Black Panther” came out.
Will the Maryland man be deported to Wakanda when he looses his final law suit?
Close enough uganda is geographically near where wakanda is set although for reasons unclear they speak the xhosa dialect of south africa
Yeah that was all sorts of crazy
Africa south of the Sahara has generated civilizations and other accomplishments, but a lot of it involved slavery and what’s now called “settler colonialism” if European-descended people are involved. Hence leftists have to invent African civilizations that never existed, like Wakanda, or try to claim North African civilizations like Egypt.
Back when the baseline essays were popular in the curriculum i looked into them notably the songhai and ashanti as well as popular monarchs like mansa musa guess what they had in common
Of course that element is downplayed meanwhile the likes of baden powell who finally put an end to the ashanti well they are treated as villains same with mohammed ali the original albanian born founder of an egyptian dynasty that lasted till 1952
The scots were the advance team of colonialism so its ironic they are being colonized now
Kate:
Sounds like your husband is coming along nicely, which is great.
My ex is improving slowly. But he’s still driving me crazy after all these years! 🙂
All of the illusions “work” for me except the dress (I can only see the white and gold one, which is kind of creepy), and the moving pulsing pictures didn’t.
Here’s a person actually making an elaborate eye-fooling construction, although it’s not technically an illusion like the ones in Neo’s video. I binged on the Nerdforge videos for hours on Sunday.
The optical drop-off idea was used to discover when children began to get depth perception. The initial hypothesis was that babies would crawl happily across a glass floor with the illusion underneath, until suddenly they wouldn’t. In fact, they can detect the appearance of a drop-off very early, as least as soon as they are able to crawl.
Africa south of the Sahara has generated civilizations and other accomplishments,
==
In the highlands of the Horn of Africa (during the Mediterranean Late Antiquity) and in the Sahel (during the European High Middle Ages et seq). Not a whole lot else.
== but a lot of it involved slavery and what’s now called “settler colonialism” i
==
The Bantu peoples pushed the Khoi-San peoples out of the way pretty thoroughly. Last part of Africa dominated by the Khoi-San was in what is today Namibia, Botswana, and the Western Cape in South Africa.
@Art Deco:Not a whole lot else.
I think Great Zimbabwe counts. But there’s never many unique or original civilizations on any continent.
Well, Neo, I wouldn’t dream of asking for too-private information, but there were reasons for the divorce and you’re still the same people. I have been fortunate to be happily married for 54 years, but still sometimes he drives me nuts, like this week. He’s somewhat better, bored to tears, and driving me nuts. It will pass.
The difference in surgical technique and treatment in only five years since the last knee is amazing.
Glad to hear of slow improvement for your ex.
This incident raises the question of “how do we know what is true?”
After all, so many of the things that our government has told us–these last several years in particular–have turned out not to be true.
Then, of course, there were all of the supposed medical and other experts–many of them who were apparently covering up what was going on behind closed doors, their inside, very lucrative deals and ties to various drug companies–and feeding us various lies about COVID, it’s origin, about prevention measures, and about various medications.
How about the recent spate of reports of many hundreds of supposedly peer reviewed “scientific, research papers” having to be retracted by various Journals, because they were found to have contained fabricated research?
And, now, with the advent of AI, how are we to truly know if any of the images on the Internet and elsewhere have been either manipulated, or made up out of whole cloth?
Thomas Jefferson once wrote something to the effect that he would not believe anything he read in so polluted a source as a newspaper, suggesting that the only way to be sure if something was real/true or not was to be on the ground and observing it as it happened.
But, we can’t all be on the ground at exactly the right time, and in view of the object in question, can we?
I guess my idea is that you first have to start out with a very good, broad education (but how can someone in the position of a student easily tell if they are being fed the truth—and that, in it’s entirety–or a slanted, tissue of lies?), especially one rich in History to make you aware of what has happened, been tried in the past, and what the results were. Then, philosophy, politics,science, geography, literature, languages etc.–the usual content of what used to be a classical Liberal Arts Education.
Then, I’d say an exposure to all sorts of people, situations, and ideas, with the aim of developing the all too rare “common sense.”
Perhaps, with all of this as background you would be much more able to discern where the truth lies.
Of course, in the end, it all also depends on what you might want to be true, as opposed to the hard, cold reality of what might actually be true, doesn’t it?–See Wakanda.
@Snow on Pine:“how do we know what is true?”
What you’re saying adds up to, you can’t outsource your critical thinking to anyone.
I’d say the most common pathologies I see on the right are:
1) Playing “Opposite Day” with legacy media, and thinking that’s more likely to be true. (The far-right fringe is especially prone to this–for example a lot of them think Iran defeated Israel and the US a few months ago.)
2) Choosing particular sources and trusting their takes without checking up. (Commenters on right-leaning blogs do a lot of this.)
3) Gell-Mann amnesia.
There was a period of time roughly coinciding with the 50s through the 80s where most people outsourced their critical thinking to what we now call “legacy media”, and it was biased but not actual propaganda. This was easier but created a lot of bad habits.
for reasons unclear they speak the xhosa dialect of south africa
Speaking of the Xhosa, I ever tell the story from Michener’s The Covenant? It’s crazy, and from what I can tell, largely true. Here goes.
By the 1850’s the English were very active in South Africa, and they were pretty much the bane of the Xhosa’s existence. They (the Xhosa) were on the wrong side of several lopsided battles against them. Evidently a story could go viral even the 1850s and that’s exactly what happened with “The Charge of the Light Brigade” – you’ve likely heard the phrase, but are unaware of the details.
It was a hopeless battle by English forces vs Russian forces in the Crimean war. It became so famous that even members of the Xhosa heard it. It’s probably safe to say there was not a Xhosa alive who could point to Russia on a map or even tell you what a “Russian” was, but what did that matter? Whoever they were, they’d beaten the English.
A young girl had a vision – that the Russians would come and wipe out the English for them, but only if the Xhosa proved themselves worthy. How were they to do that? By killing all of their cattle, the primary food source – so important they were used as currency.
A holy man backed her up and so the tribal leaders saw to it. Paramilitary units were formed and sent to villages to make sure none were hoarding cattle. All, or nearly all, were killed. Tens of thousands of people starved to death and many believe the only reason there are any Xhosa around to talk about is that thousands took refuge on English farms. Told you it was crazy.
Well rorkes drift seem to balance things i did read the covenant as with some of wilbur smiths novels about the same period in rhodesian history against the zulu michener was more a wide eyed american liberal whereas smith a more chastened south african one
As I believe I’ve written here before, the professor who taught the class I took on Chinese Communist Ideology pointed out that the Chinese communists based all discussions about education starting with the firm belief that all teaching was based on ideology i.e. you couldn’t teach everything, and you only had a certain amount of time available for each course of instruction, thus, you had to make choices as to what to teach, in what depth, and what to leave out, which is where ideology came in, because it was on the basis of your ideology–what you thought was both true and important–that you made these choices.
You can see ideology in action today, for instance, in many libraries all around the country, as each librarian tasked with book selection decides which books to order for their collection.
Given limited budgets, they order a supposedly “representative sample” of the books available–and, wouldn’t you know it–looking over the collections in a number of libraries I have used, apparently very few conservative books end up being selected for purchase.
I think Great Zimbabwe counts.
==
It’s one building.
@Art Deco:It’s one building.
It’s a complex covering almost three square miles, and the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, and thousands of people lived there, and it’s called “Great” because there are hundreds of smaller ones in the former kingdom.
No more “one building” than Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan.
A new series of Unforgotten has started on PBS. British detective serials are generally engaging as you watch them, but often have contrived and unsatisfying resolutions and introduce too many characters. In the last dozen years, they’ve also developed some predictable shticks.
==
1. It has now been revealed that the victim was a British white male. Wager: he will at the conclusion be revealed to have been asking for it. (His occupation has yet to be revealed. He might be let off by the screenwriters if in life he was a social worker, legal aid lawyer, or a special ed teacher).
==
2. His killer will be revealed to be his wife (white, bourgeois, British), the autistic /retarded character introduced (white, British), or the autistic / retarded character’s mother (white, British, impecunious, and rude).
==
3. The autistic / retarded character will be revealed to be the deceased’s ba*tard son.
==
4. The clutch of Afghans will fall under suspicion but will be revealed to be unadulterated good guys by the end.
==
You heard it here first.
Extremely cool stuff on that video.
Mark Levin talks about his #1 NYT selling book “On Power” – Video
Good morning, Neo! I am now mostly confined to the house with a husband on crutches following knee replacement, and awaiting home PT, which is a blessing. I suppose your son has departed for points west. Here’s hoping your ex is doing all right.
Interesting video; the images shown are really amazing.
Only when viewed from a specific perspective, can one see the reality.
Unless, of course, one is a liberal progressive demonkrat. Upon initial viewing their mind is already made up what the object really looks like and any subsequent viewing from different perspectives are totally ignored or dismissed.
God bless, Kate. The only thing I know about knee replacements is how much it freaks me out that people are up and about in no time. Hopefully same for your husband.
Thanks, Mike Plaiss. He had the other one done five years ago. This time, only four days post op, he can get up from bed and chairs, and down again, without help. Taking Tylenol and Celebrex and no other pain meds. We think the robot-assisted surgery helped.
Speaking of illusions-
A new word has officially entered our vocabularies, “delulu” i.e. being delusional.
Linked below is an article describing a prime example of such delusion, the 21 year old black woman, who says she was abused by her family, and who fled to Scotland with her one year old child to join a lost African tribe in the supposed “Kingdom of Kubala,” located in a Scottish forest, where she has taken the title of “Asnat, Lady Safi of Atehene,” and become the handmaiden and second wife to “King” Atahene (a PR agent and Opera singer from Ghana formerly known as Koffi Offeh, and his Queen Nandi (formerly known as Jean Gasho.) who, according to the article linked to below, are trying to “restore a lost (African?) Hebrew tribe.”*
Reminds me of all the people who were reportedly calling travel agents, trying to book trips to the “Kingdom of Wakanda,” after the film “Black Panther” came out.
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/08/supposedly-abused-texas-woman-flees-scottish-woods-her/
Will the Maryland man be deported to Wakanda when he looses his final law suit?
Close enough uganda is geographically near where wakanda is set although for reasons unclear they speak the xhosa dialect of south africa
Yeah that was all sorts of crazy
Africa south of the Sahara has generated civilizations and other accomplishments, but a lot of it involved slavery and what’s now called “settler colonialism” if European-descended people are involved. Hence leftists have to invent African civilizations that never existed, like Wakanda, or try to claim North African civilizations like Egypt.
Back when the baseline essays were popular in the curriculum i looked into them notably the songhai and ashanti as well as popular monarchs like mansa musa guess what they had in common
Of course that element is downplayed meanwhile the likes of baden powell who finally put an end to the ashanti well they are treated as villains same with mohammed ali the original albanian born founder of an egyptian dynasty that lasted till 1952
The scots were the advance team of colonialism so its ironic they are being colonized now
Kate:
Sounds like your husband is coming along nicely, which is great.
My ex is improving slowly. But he’s still driving me crazy after all these years! 🙂
Good news
https://mxmnews.com/article/2bcdc80e-7ba1-49df-acf4-d8137a328f0d?cashless-bail-ends-today-trump-to-pull-plug-with-executive-order
https://instapundit.com/740245/
All of the illusions “work” for me except the dress (I can only see the white and gold one, which is kind of creepy), and the moving pulsing pictures didn’t.
Here’s a person actually making an elaborate eye-fooling construction, although it’s not technically an illusion like the ones in Neo’s video. I binged on the Nerdforge videos for hours on Sunday.
“I Built an Entire Fantasy Street in my Bookshelf”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXY_kLNr3y0
The optical drop-off idea was used to discover when children began to get depth perception. The initial hypothesis was that babies would crawl happily across a glass floor with the illusion underneath, until suddenly they wouldn’t. In fact, they can detect the appearance of a drop-off very early, as least as soon as they are able to crawl.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/visual-cliff-experiment.html
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-visual-cliff-2796010
Africa south of the Sahara has generated civilizations and other accomplishments,
==
In the highlands of the Horn of Africa (during the Mediterranean Late Antiquity) and in the Sahel (during the European High Middle Ages et seq). Not a whole lot else.
==
but a lot of it involved slavery and what’s now called “settler colonialism” i
==
The Bantu peoples pushed the Khoi-San peoples out of the way pretty thoroughly. Last part of Africa dominated by the Khoi-San was in what is today Namibia, Botswana, and the Western Cape in South Africa.
@Art Deco:Not a whole lot else.
I think Great Zimbabwe counts. But there’s never many unique or original civilizations on any continent.
Well, Neo, I wouldn’t dream of asking for too-private information, but there were reasons for the divorce and you’re still the same people. I have been fortunate to be happily married for 54 years, but still sometimes he drives me nuts, like this week. He’s somewhat better, bored to tears, and driving me nuts. It will pass.
The difference in surgical technique and treatment in only five years since the last knee is amazing.
Glad to hear of slow improvement for your ex.
This incident raises the question of “how do we know what is true?”
After all, so many of the things that our government has told us–these last several years in particular–have turned out not to be true.
Then, of course, there were all of the supposed medical and other experts–many of them who were apparently covering up what was going on behind closed doors, their inside, very lucrative deals and ties to various drug companies–and feeding us various lies about COVID, it’s origin, about prevention measures, and about various medications.
How about the recent spate of reports of many hundreds of supposedly peer reviewed “scientific, research papers” having to be retracted by various Journals, because they were found to have contained fabricated research?
And, now, with the advent of AI, how are we to truly know if any of the images on the Internet and elsewhere have been either manipulated, or made up out of whole cloth?
Thomas Jefferson once wrote something to the effect that he would not believe anything he read in so polluted a source as a newspaper, suggesting that the only way to be sure if something was real/true or not was to be on the ground and observing it as it happened.
But, we can’t all be on the ground at exactly the right time, and in view of the object in question, can we?
I guess my idea is that you first have to start out with a very good, broad education (but how can someone in the position of a student easily tell if they are being fed the truth—and that, in it’s entirety–or a slanted, tissue of lies?), especially one rich in History to make you aware of what has happened, been tried in the past, and what the results were. Then, philosophy, politics,science, geography, literature, languages etc.–the usual content of what used to be a classical Liberal Arts Education.
Then, I’d say an exposure to all sorts of people, situations, and ideas, with the aim of developing the all too rare “common sense.”
Perhaps, with all of this as background you would be much more able to discern where the truth lies.
Of course, in the end, it all also depends on what you might want to be true, as opposed to the hard, cold reality of what might actually be true, doesn’t it?–See Wakanda.
@Snow on Pine:“how do we know what is true?”
What you’re saying adds up to, you can’t outsource your critical thinking to anyone.
I’d say the most common pathologies I see on the right are:
1) Playing “Opposite Day” with legacy media, and thinking that’s more likely to be true. (The far-right fringe is especially prone to this–for example a lot of them think Iran defeated Israel and the US a few months ago.)
2) Choosing particular sources and trusting their takes without checking up. (Commenters on right-leaning blogs do a lot of this.)
3) Gell-Mann amnesia.
There was a period of time roughly coinciding with the 50s through the 80s where most people outsourced their critical thinking to what we now call “legacy media”, and it was biased but not actual propaganda. This was easier but created a lot of bad habits.
for reasons unclear they speak the xhosa dialect of south africa
Speaking of the Xhosa, I ever tell the story from Michener’s The Covenant? It’s crazy, and from what I can tell, largely true. Here goes.
By the 1850’s the English were very active in South Africa, and they were pretty much the bane of the Xhosa’s existence. They (the Xhosa) were on the wrong side of several lopsided battles against them. Evidently a story could go viral even the 1850s and that’s exactly what happened with “The Charge of the Light Brigade” – you’ve likely heard the phrase, but are unaware of the details.
It was a hopeless battle by English forces vs Russian forces in the Crimean war. It became so famous that even members of the Xhosa heard it. It’s probably safe to say there was not a Xhosa alive who could point to Russia on a map or even tell you what a “Russian” was, but what did that matter? Whoever they were, they’d beaten the English.
A young girl had a vision – that the Russians would come and wipe out the English for them, but only if the Xhosa proved themselves worthy. How were they to do that? By killing all of their cattle, the primary food source – so important they were used as currency.
A holy man backed her up and so the tribal leaders saw to it. Paramilitary units were formed and sent to villages to make sure none were hoarding cattle. All, or nearly all, were killed. Tens of thousands of people starved to death and many believe the only reason there are any Xhosa around to talk about is that thousands took refuge on English farms. Told you it was crazy.
Well rorkes drift seem to balance things i did read the covenant as with some of wilbur smiths novels about the same period in rhodesian history against the zulu michener was more a wide eyed american liberal whereas smith a more chastened south african one
As I believe I’ve written here before, the professor who taught the class I took on Chinese Communist Ideology pointed out that the Chinese communists based all discussions about education starting with the firm belief that all teaching was based on ideology i.e. you couldn’t teach everything, and you only had a certain amount of time available for each course of instruction, thus, you had to make choices as to what to teach, in what depth, and what to leave out, which is where ideology came in, because it was on the basis of your ideology–what you thought was both true and important–that you made these choices.
You can see ideology in action today, for instance, in many libraries all around the country, as each librarian tasked with book selection decides which books to order for their collection.
Given limited budgets, they order a supposedly “representative sample” of the books available–and, wouldn’t you know it–looking over the collections in a number of libraries I have used, apparently very few conservative books end up being selected for purchase.
I think Great Zimbabwe counts.
==
It’s one building.
@Art Deco:It’s one building.
It’s a complex covering almost three square miles, and the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, and thousands of people lived there, and it’s called “Great” because there are hundreds of smaller ones in the former kingdom.
No more “one building” than Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan.
A new series of Unforgotten has started on PBS. British detective serials are generally engaging as you watch them, but often have contrived and unsatisfying resolutions and introduce too many characters. In the last dozen years, they’ve also developed some predictable shticks.
==
1. It has now been revealed that the victim was a British white male. Wager: he will at the conclusion be revealed to have been asking for it. (His occupation has yet to be revealed. He might be let off by the screenwriters if in life he was a social worker, legal aid lawyer, or a special ed teacher).
==
2. His killer will be revealed to be his wife (white, bourgeois, British), the autistic /retarded character introduced (white, British), or the autistic / retarded character’s mother (white, British, impecunious, and rude).
==
3. The autistic / retarded character will be revealed to be the deceased’s ba*tard son.
==
4. The clutch of Afghans will fall under suspicion but will be revealed to be unadulterated good guys by the end.
==
You heard it here first.
Extremely cool stuff on that video.
Mark Levin talks about his #1 NYT selling book “On Power” – Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/08/mark-levin-talks-about-his-1-nyt.html