INTELLECTUAL PSEUDUCTIONS

The most common portrayal of the use of alcoholic beverages in the US media was in TV advertisements. In these snapshots we learn that humans never drank alcohol. They held la-de-da parties to celebrate selecting wines that were either upscale or cheap or allegedly both; beer ads showed unpudgy youngsters posing with, twirling, & fondling beer cans — and laughing healthily at the spectacle of opening them and pouring the contents, lingering over this inexpressibly beautiful experience with closeup slomo clips. But the participants in these advertisements never drank the stuff. As a result, they were all youthful, potless, & nonstop-smiling. Curiously, the alcohol industry paid billions to network TV for the incessant visual portrayal of this connection between healthful happiness and nondrinking.

While propane tanks were widely rumored to be intended for supplying heat, we know that their actual purpose was: blowing up buildings. Virtually all press accounts mentioning propane tanks describe explosions, not heating.

Over 99% of film of the sex act surviving from US civilization is what were called “X films”. From viewing these (we're told…), one learns that the normal sex act always ended in male withdrawal from the vagina, followed by the expression of seed upon some other part of the female. Since this was clearly the standard reproductive act, we conclude that sperm fertilized the human female's body anywhere but through the vagina. Anywhere.

The most Christian man in the history of the US (the most Christian of nations) must have been that exemplary person whose name was chosen (from all the hundreds of millions of US citizens) to be first placed in celestial preservation, for time eternal, on the first plaque left (1969) on the erosion-free Moon. This saint's name: Richard Milhous Nixon.
We thank our childhood friend, the late Richard Lee Smith, for suggesting this item.

From cinema “entertainment” dramas, we learn that almost no ugly wrinkled people smoked — though smooth, healthy, young, attractive people smoked incessantly (with nary a cough) in popular films. Just like in the other cigarette ads.

Further Inductions:
Evolution of the Specie:
From our records of late 20th century academe, we conclude that nothing refined a scholar's creativity and ethics better than: touching and counting money.
[DR aside: O Gingerich has made the unintentionally-revealing observation that certain Hist.astron volk are now confusing the words “principle” and “principal”…. Ah, these revealing capitalist slips. I note that, after explorer-hoaxer R.Peary became a millionaire & stock investor c.1910, his correspondence occasionally uses the word “cheque” when he means: verify.]
Or being a publisher: usually the same thing. Academic publications in such emotionally secure fields as History of astronomy (Hist.astron) were filled with scholarly articles and reviews which went out of their way to extol the omniscient wisdom and exalted character of the businessman-scholar archons who peopled review committees and-or ran these very journals — or otherwise controlled the financial wellbeing of the scholars writing the articles that worshiped archons. The only mystery here is why these archonal paragons were not canonized to a man, since, according the consistent Hist.astron journal record: [a] No editor or society officer ever did anything more sinful than misspelling. [b] They were the brightest of the bright, not to mention generous, inspirational, rigorously fair & neutral. [See, e.g., the Van Helden review cited at DIO 1.2 [1991] n.3 [p.96] [& sorta-admired at DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 n.18 [p.95].] (We know that all such characterizations were true, because — being selfconfident models of academic competence — these journals would not embarrass themselves by printing mere flattery.) [c] No society officers or editors were ever censorial or vindictive. Or even cross. (Though they bore one. See under DIO, below.) It is still unclear what chemical was increasingly being added to 20th century currency, that made the much-touching of it so salutary to character.

Sad to say, at the very dawn of the Third Millennium, the above-cited otherwise-unruffled chorus of praise was — obstreperously and always erroneously — interrupted by the persistent dissent of an odd & trifling journal calling itself DIO. Happily, all intelligent scholars (i.e., those that spent time counting money, in reality or in dreams) agreed that DIO was never actually right about anything — and should be renamed Diatribe. (That the publisher was beyond all reason was notorious: e.g., if power-archons suppressed & secretly slandered heretics — which sacred duty is, after all, their privilege & prime Earthly mission — well, DIO would actually criticize this. Out in public, mind you. Who can fathom the folly of it?) Happily, no copies survive; and DIO is now almost exclusively known through the sparse remains of a flood of refutations, which — by a remarkable coincidence — burst forth immediately after the scurrilous publisher's sole archonally-approved feat. (Death was presumably hurried by his fanatical refusal to partake of the wellknown health benefits of cigarettes.
[Another theory has it that the DIO publisher's demise was related to a reputed motto of his, a printable version of which is: “Never kiss a jackboot. Especially if it's trying to neck.”]
These refutations are almost exclusively by lower-echelon castrati. But their accounts of his work, being as accurate as the rest of the output of the handsome reputable Hist.astron journals of that day, are to be trusted implicitly, and the refutations built upon these accounts are completely convincing. Another amazing coincidence: we now know that the positions taken by the publisher (whose very name is lost) were quite frequently “almost correct” (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡3 §C15 [p.33]) e.g., he (almost) discovered such now-accepted positions as: [a] heliocentrists' work underlay all sophisticated ancient astronomy, [b] sph trig existed by the 2nd century BC and differential sph trig by the 2nd century AD, [c] Tycho faked ten stars of his Catalog, & [d] R.Amundsen was first to [each of] the Earth's Poles. However, in every case — yet another amazing coincidence — the reasoning produced by DIO was found wanting (see likewise at DIO 1.2 [1991] n.58) and so the discovery-credit very properly (ibid §H2, n.127 & n.148 [pp.124-125 & 130]) went elsewhere…. According to a controversial scholium (incompletely-erased, unfortunately), which for a time mischievously confused several naïve idealists (each happily enlightened since), DIO is said to have claimed that, in all such cases, those parties now receiving credit for the discovery had published material ignorant-of or (usually) outright-opposing it — right up until DIO produced evidence which changed opinion. But the admittedly fragmentary now-extant record supports not a bit of this transparent grumbling. Discovery [a] has long since been assigned to its lifetime supporter, N.C.Swerdlow; [b] went to math genius G.M.Toomer, [c] to 0 Gingerich & J.Evans (who pointed out alternate spellings of Hven & Wandsbeck, sloppily ignored by DIO), and [d] to National Geographic, which (according to the newspaper of 2100 AD) had always held that Amundsen was first to the N.Pole in 1926 and that R.Peary had just innocently dreamed his 1909 claim.
[Throughout the 21st century, newspapers' numbers had varied in roughly inverse proportion to the number of people on the planet. And, by 2100 AD, it was realized that, given the commendable uniformity of viewpoint in newspapers, no one would lose anything of value if the world (which was now so packed that it was one big city) got efficient — so the whole Earth became a one-newspaper town. (TV 'snews had already effectively made the US a one-newspaper nation even before 2000 AD.) This was obviously not regress but progress. Like unto the triumph of monotheism in the 4th century AD.]

Historians' Inductive Logic:
Inducing the astronomy of the ancients from the paltry leavings we possess of their writings is a favorite DR intellectual pastime. Critical to DR's approach is the working theory that the best known and most enduring ancient science writers are not the most central or reliable figures.
[DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡1 §B1 [p.6], ‡7 §G3 [p.73] DR's essential logic was set forth in Queen's Quarterly 91.4:969 (1984) pp.984&985.]

Fortunately for posterity, my historian-of-astronomy opponents in the attendant ancient-astronomy controversy are much smarter than I in such matters.
[For confirmation, just ask any modern defender of the faker C.Ptolemy, whose magnificent Almajest  so dominated publicly-accepted astronomy that it finally drove out of existence virtually all of the data & astronomical treatises of Aristarchos, Apollonios, & various other merely-honest scientists.]
They will set the record straight. The unerring trustworthiness of their approach is testified to by the examples that follow. These enable us to predict those verities which equally brilliant future historians will induce (from the ruins of our putative civilization), by depending upon the most widespead (& thus survivable) accounts:

This concludes the material from DIO 2.1 [1992].

What follows is fresh folly.

Why does Irish racism get a pass? E.g., look at the promotion of Irish spirit, pluck, spunk, etc in Gone With the Wind — a myth which naturally attracted millions of dollars in backing and propaganda by a determined Irish producer, David O'Selznick.
[Like Harry Truman, Selznick faked the middle initial. Thanks.]

Virtually everyone in the US takes the “art”-racket completely seriously. Whyelse would 99% of all media commentary on the subject, be promoting it with a straight face? Whyelse would 99% of films of the contemporary US depicting offices & homes, show walls covered with “modern” art? — and nothing but.
An ongoing free ad? Hmmm. How much is free in Hollywood?
(DIO 18 [2014] n.54 [pp.50-51].)

All actors are phone company employees.
Proof: all phone numbers in films have the same prefix, 555. But (as anyone who dials such a number quickly learns), all such numbers connect to phone company lines.

One of the finest works of Christopher Marlowe is “Shakespeare's” Hamlet — but, gee, there's a cliché a minute.

The conclusion of the 1981 film So Fine justifies the whole film. Jack Warden, a magnificently uncultured US businessman-nouveau (the sort who lives by the oldie: money isn't everything, but what it isn't it can buy), is being taken leisurely by gondola through Venice's canals, to view the antique beauties of the city. He looks about, pauses, & then asks in puzzlement: “How long the streets been [f'd] up like this?”

Only a small percentage of streetcrimes survive “live” on films or videos. However, we have inherited from the US a vast library of popular film & television “action” dramas, as well as a few “local news” video libraries. From TV's action films, we learn that virtually all muggers & rapists were white. From the local news record, we find that a suspiciously high proportion of people arrested for urban streetcrime were black. We are forced to the regrettable conclusion that there was a national racist conspiracy to arrest blacks for crimes wellknown to be almost entirely perpetrated by whites.

Royalty is the least trustworthy bunch on Earth. It's so bad that: no one ever turns his back on a monarch.

One may analogously prove that: the most trustworthy figure in history was the Medusa.

In some traditions, worshippers never go into church without covering their heads. They evidently see god as a big pigeon.
[Possibly an escapee from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety.]