Posts by Dr. Boli
TEMPORAL CUBISM AND THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT.
This Magazine has run more than one article on the Voynich Manuscript, and in particular about the cranks who have left comments on the Internet Archive scan of the manuscript explaining how they have figured it all out. Whether the fact that Dr. Boli enjoys mocking the cranks so much means that he is a crank himself is a question he will leave the cranks to debate.
Every so often someone stumbles across one of those articles and leaves a comment explaining the Voynich Manuscript, or explaining one of the previous explanations and why it is actually on the right track. It happened just recently with our article “The Voynich Manuscript: Now Even More Figured Out.” One of the many explanations of the manuscript we had quoted was this one:
It’s a little bit religious and astronomical, but it’s main subject is biology. There are numerous ancient books in eastern world that mixing religion and biology, also they mixed religion and astronomy. So my opinion is that the book is describing plant’s biology with many exemplifications and associating them with religion and astronomy, and totalizes them with the help of woman characters to understand them.
Our commenter wrote:
I actually think the fifth interpretation here, that the VM is at least in part a coded reference to “Eastern” (a term I generally dislike but is probably somewhat appropriate for the late medieval period the VM arose from) philosophy and religion, is not totally unreasonable. Diane O’Donovan at voynichrevisionist.com has argued similar things.
The site in the link, incidentally, seems to be remarkably free from obvious crankery, and even shows a considerable respect for scientific method and evidence, both of those observations making us think that perhaps Ms. O’Donovan would not have been as kind to the explanation quoted as our commenter was.
But what arrested Dr. Boli’s attention about the comment was the commenter’s email address, and the commenter is invited to explain it here. The address is the words “Time Cube,” plus enough added characters that no one could guess the rest from the information we have just given out. It is quite clear, however, that the address is meant to refer to the Time Cube theory; and we are now going to follow that rabbit into its hole, because the mere mention of the Time Cube caused Dr. Boli to wallow in nostalgia for the good old days of the early Internet.
The empire of crankdom is a blotchy and disorganized country, like the Holy Roman Empire, with its member states constantly at war with one another as well as with the nations outside the borders. Nevertheless, even in such a mess of an empire, there has to be one emperor; and until his still-lamented death eleven years ago, the emperor of all cranks was Gene Ray, whose site first appeared in 1997, and who at various times offered a thousand or ten thousand dollars to anyone who could prove his Time Cube theory wrong.
Many cranks have done the same. There is no proving them wrong, of course, on the usual grounds that proof against the conspiracy is proof of the conspiracy. The flat-earther knows that the earth is flat; every bit of scientific evidence to the contrary merely shows that the conspiracy to keep the truth from us is all-pervading and nearly omnipotent.
But there was a fundamental difference that set the Time Cube theory apart from most of the other crankeries. When you argue with a flat-earther, you can understand his assertions: the world, he says, has this shape, not that shape. The idea of a flat earth is comprehensible. Likewise, the man who believes that the world is secretly run by a cabal of reptiles from another planet may be right or wrong, but he is making an assertion that, in itself, can be understood and affirmed or denied. And so with all the other cranks: whether they believe that they have discovered the one root vegetable that cures all known diseases or that the emperor Constantine wrote the New Testament on the back of an envelope, you can argue with them. You won’t win the argument; the crank will shake his head sadly at your naivety and pity you for being such a dupe. But when the crank makes an assertion, you can deny it, and explain why you deny it.
With Gene Ray and the Time Cube, you do not have that luxury. His theory is so incomprehensible that you cannot even deny it. You can only read or listen and say, “Huh?”
Like many cranks, Ray put everything he knew about everything on a single Web page, all centered, with long passages in all caps and many different sizes and colors of text. In time it grew to sequential pages, but all in the same non-format. The site was constantly under revision, but here is how the last version of it began when Mr. Ray died in 2015:
In 1884, meridian time personnel met in Washington to change Earth time. First words said was that only 1 day could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day bible. So they applied the 1 day and ignored the other 3 days. The bible time was wrong then and it proved wrong today. This a major lie has so much evil feed from it’s wrong. No man on Earth has no belly-button, it proves every believer on Earth a liar. Children will be blessed for Killing Of Educated Adults Who Ignore 4 Simultaneous Days Same Earth Rotation. Practicing Evil ONEness – Upon Earth Of Quadrants. Evil Adult Crime VS Youth. Supports Lie Of Integration. 1 Educated Are Most Dumb. Not 1 Human Except Dead 1. Man Is Paired, 2 Half 4 Self. 1 of God Is Only 1/4 Of God. Bible A Lie & Word Is Lies. Navel Connects 4 Corner 4s. God Is Born Of A Mother – She Left Belly B. Signature. Every Priest Has Ma Sign But Lies To Honor Queers. Belly B. Proves 4 Corners.
Well, perhaps that is not the best introduction to his theory, since it seems to assume that we already know what it is. But there are many places in the page where Ray does try to summarize the truth in terms that even stupid people like us can understand.
Hey stupid – are you too dumb to know there are 4 different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth? Greenwich 1 day is a lie. 4 quadrants = 4 corners, and 4 different directions. Each Earth corner rotates own separate 24 hour day. Infinite days is stupidity.
He even gave us diagrams:
This diagram was redrawn from the fuzzy original on the Time Cube site by a heroic Wikimedia contributor with too much time on her hands.
And yet we persist in our culpable incomprehension!
The one thing that we can understand about Ray’s theory is that, whatever is evil in the world, the Jews and Blacks are behind it. The Jews began the 1-day lie; the Blacks are using it to oppress White Americans. It made Mr. Ray very angry.
And that is another thing that distinguished Ray from the ordinary run of cranks. Most cranks simply pity you for not seeing the truth. Ray hated you and told you in no uncertain terms that he was going to kill you when he got the chance.
Since I have informed you of Nature’s Harmonic Time Cube 4-Day Creation Principle, your stupidity is no longer the issue. For now, the issue is just how evil you are for ignoring Life’s Highest Order, and just how long the Time Cube will allow you to plunder Earth before inflicting hell upon you.
And one principle he taught to the young ones, over and over, for the whole time his site was on the Web (as we see from a 1998 capture of the site), was this cheering dogma:
Children are justified in killing adults “refusing” to know Nature’s 4 Day Time Cube Creation Principle.
Now, what has all this to do with the Voynich manuscript?
The only answer Dr. Boli could come up with was the principle of crank magnetism. “Crank magnetism,” says the site FlatEarth.ws, “is the tendency of ‘cranks’ to hold multiple irrational, unsupported, or ludicrous beliefs that are often unrelated.” The idea that essential knowledge is being deliberately suppressed opens one’s mind, in the same way that stepping on the foot pedal opens the rubbish bin in Dr. Boli’s office, and anything can be tossed in.
Incidentally, is it an exercise in crankery to build up a site with dozens of illustrated proofs that the earth is not flat, or is it simply a necessity to belabor the obvious in the age of social media? Here is your essay topic for the day. Meanwhile, Dr. Boli will get to work on his new pro-science site, “GRASS IS REAL,” which will refute the unfounded theory that the existence of the family Gramineae is a botanical hoax foisted upon us by members of the Bhutanese royal family as part of their centuries-long plot to deprive us of the knowledge of the carefree ground-covers used by our ancient ancestors. He was thinking of putting all the information on one page, centered, using multiple sizes and colors of text to emphasize salient points.
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: Your essay about the penny and the nickel (“Where We Went Wrong with Pennies,” Apr. 27) was heartening as far as it went, but it did not go nearly far enough. Stopping the minting of pennies was a good first step, and stopping (as you suggested) the minting of nickels would be a good second step. We must not, however, be afraid to take the third step, and the fourth, and the steps after that, canceling dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and all the denominations of paper currency: in other words, all the forms of exchange collectively described as “cash.”
As president of the Steamfitters & Phrenologists Federal Savings Bank, I believe I speak with some authority on matters of money. Cash transactions, to be blunt, are nothing more than theft. When a payment is made in cash, it enriches no one but the recipient of the cash. No banker receives any remuneration from the transaction. We are cut out entirely. Have your readers ever stopped to think that, when they make a payment in cash, they are taking food out of the mouths of my wife and my children and my mistress?
My father, Algernon Steamfitters, worked tirelessly to make sure that every transaction that went through his bank accumulated a fee, even if it were only two or three per cent, because he was a true patriot, and he was inflexibly opposed to socialist giveaway programs like cash transactions. It was a proud moment for him when he persuaded the county government, merely by force of logic, to stop accepting cash payments for services like registering deeds and accepting bribes. I have built on the firm foundation he left me, and I am proud to say that I have found opportunities for fees my father never even dreamed of.
I am a charitable man at heart. I believe that most ordinary people, when they make an underhanded payment in cash at the supermarket or the massage parlor, are thinking only of their own narrow self-interest, not actively trying to undermine the capitalist economy. Nevertheless, they must be educated to understand that they are playing into the hands of our enemies. We cannot have a strong nation without a strong banking sector, and we cannot have a strong banking sector if people keep finding ways to weasel out of paying bankers their due on every financial transaction.
But education can do only so much. Even if most people are fundamentally honest, some are not. There will always be those who will take advantage of the loophole left open by cash transactions, and they will continue to press that advantage until cash itself ceases to exist. Therefore I say to the governing powers: You have won the first victory. Now continue the battle until we have won the war against cash.
Sincerely,
Robert Z. Steamfitters,
President,
Steamfitters & Phrenologists Federal Savings Bank
WHERE WE WENT WRONG WITH PENNIES.
The penny question has agitated many of Dr. Boli’s acquaintances. On the one hand, some thought the decision to stop minting pennies was long overdue, since it cost much more than a penny to make a penny. On the other hand, some thought it was the Beginning of the End. The latter have been more agitated than the former, and thus more vocal.
Now, Dr. Boli does not follow social media, and he has been meaning to catch up on the news but still seems to be stuck somewhere about the Eisenhower administration; so for all he knows everything he is about to say has been said over and over ad infinitum, and you might as well just go look at pictures of flowers.
Dr. Boli perfectly understands the people who feel cheated by the disappearance of pennies. Your bill comes to $19.82. You hand the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. You get a dime and a nickel back. Where are my three cents? your well-trained capitalist mind is screaming.
But let us take a long view of the question and see where we stand in history, and then perhaps Dr. Boli’s solution to the problem will seem obvious.
American currency is decimal, ascending by powers of ten:
mill ($0.001)
cent ($0.01)
dime ($0.1)
dollar ($1)
The “eagle,” a ten-dollar gold coin, is often mentioned as one of the original basic units, though the Coinage Act of 1792 specified “that the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths.”
You will note the presence of “mills” in the list—a unit still in use in property taxes and gasoline prices, but one for which no coin was ever minted, on the reasonable grounds that it would be silly. Most prices have always been expressed in cents as the lowest unit; in other words, with two digits after the decimal point, not three.
The value of money went up and down through the nineteenth century before settling on a remarkably steady downward course after the First World War, and of course the things we buy now are greatly different from the things we bought in 1792; so it is a little hard to make exact comparisons. But it would be very reasonable to say that a half-penny, the lowest denomination authorized in 1792, was worth more then than a dime is now.
And that brings us to our obvious and straightforward answer to the penny problem, which—as we hinted earlier—is mostly a problem of psychology. The difference between what we paid and what we owed is eighteen cents, and we get only fifteen cents in change. We’re being cheated!
Do you see where we went wrong? Our error was not in eliminating pennies. It was in keeping nickels.
We have already learned to do without the third place after the decimal point. Simply cut off the second, and the psychological difficulty disappears. Remember that a dime now is worth less than the smallest possible denomination when our currency was established.
As long as we have nickels, we need that second digit after the decimal point. As long as it exists, sales taxes and suchlike percentage calculations will cause that digit to mock us with numbers that are not multiples of five.
But take that digit away, and the nickels with it, and the mockery goes with them. Once again we have a coinage that perfectly matches the bills we pay with it. Instead of $19.82, the price you owe, if it is more than $19.8, is $19.9. Your change is one dime.
Doubtless millions would rise to defend the nickel instinctively, unable to face a future in which the face of Thomas Jefferson would not wink at them from their change purses. But if we can weather the penny protests, the nickel protests should be simple. Tell your congressional representative that we need to shave one decimal place off the usual expression of monetary value. Explain the mathematical principles involved if your representative is a bit fuzzy on them. And then relax in the knowledge that you have done your duty as an informed citizen. You may even take credit for the idea if you like; Dr. Boli has nothing to gain from it, and offers it only as a public service.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
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THE ROYAL ROAD TO ESPIONAGE.
You probably have to work up a cover story, order a fake ID from the Section of False Documents, put on a disguise, travel to the site, worm your way in somehow, and surreptitiously take several rolls of 16-millimeter film with your little Minox.
Wouldn’t it be more convenient if you could just sit in your comfortable government-issue desk chair and see, without going anywhere, exactly what was going on at those coordinates?
Of course it would be. And there’s wonderful news! Thanks to the science of Coordinate Remote Viewing—or CRV, as it is known to the cognoscenti—you can do exactly that. You can sit in your own chair, psychically tune in on those coordinates, and see and hear eight people slumped in their chairs snoring loudly while a ninth drones on about the substandard materials used in the resurfacing of the 1400 block of Beechwood Boulevard, because those are the coordinates of the City-County Building, and Pittsburgh City Council is in session.
How do you learn this wonderful remote viewing? It’s really quite simple. And because the CIA produced a working paper in 1985 outlining the training method, you can follow along at home and be a CRV professional in just a few easy steps.
We begin, as we did above, with just a set of coordinates.
In Stage I the viewer is trained to provide a quick-reaction response to the reading of geographic coordinates by the interviewer. The coordinates are expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds when possible. The response takes the form of an immediate, primitive “squiggle” on paper. This “squiggle” is known as an ideogram. The ideogram captures the overall feeling/motion of the gestalt of the site (e.g., fluid/wavy for water). This response is kinesthetic and not visual.
These ideograms are accompanied by (A) a “feeling/motion” and (B) an “automatic analytical response.” Or perhaps more than one of each, as in this sample illustration:
As you see, we’re already getting somewhere. Our site at these coordinates is either land or water or rock. Already we have eliminated the possibility of void.
Dr. Boli will not presume to teach the art of CRV when the CIA’s manual is both thorough and accessible. But the potential of the technique should be obvious. Your enemies cannot keep a secret if your agents can simply sit in their offices in Langley and see any arbitrary location in the world.
By Stage VI of the training, the viewer trainee is ready to be issued his modeling clay (or cardboard, or whatever he prefers to work with) and can start constructing a three-dimensional model of the site, using mostly the sense of touch.
That was the stage the research had reached by the time the working paper was produced. But the eye-opening Chapter 10, “Future Stages,” reveals the full brilliance of the scientific minds behind this program (even if they couldn’t spell “affect”).
STAGE X REMOTE ACTION (RA) Stage X would be mind-over-matter, also known as psychokinesis (PK). We have very little understanding of PK, but we do know it exists. If Stage IX is telepathic signals which effect people, it is logical the next stage would be RA signals which effect “things”.
STAGE XI ALTERING THE DIMENSIONALITY AT THE SITE This is the most difficult stage to understand. Time is considered another dimension, but there may be many more. Mathematically it is considered that there are infinite numbers of dimensions. Stage XI would be broken into at least two phases:
PHASE I would be altering time at the site. Time could be frozen, moved forward, or moved back. The implications of this are mind boggling. I believe this is the first stage where we could truly effect (alter) the future (as well as the past and the present).
PHASE II Maybe by the time we reach Stage XI we will understand enough about alternate dimensions to use this phase. I believe there would probably be an additional phase for each additional dimension we discover.
“Mind boggling” indeed! Yet, if you can believe it, the unpatriotic spoilsports in the Clinton administration canceled this mind-boggling program, simply because (according to Wikipedia) “evaluators concluded that remote viewers consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence information.” The super-secret training techniques for CRV were actually released to the public, so that our enemies now have as much information about it as we ever had.
Still, there is a silver lining. If our government gave up on the program, the release of the working paper at least gave private individuals a chance to pick up where the CIA’s research left off. Using the techniques he learned from the working paper, Dr. Boli decided to try an experiment. At the moment this working paper was being compiled in the CIA, what was going on in the KGB? Having looked up the coordinates of KGB headquarters, he used the most advanced techniques to project himself back to those coordinates in February of 1985, and he began to receive strong impressions almost immediately of a man in his early thirties convulsed in his chair with uncontrollable laughter. There was also a sound associated with the vision: something like poutine, which may refer to something the man had been eating, or may be related to the man in some other fashion.
IN THE NEWS.
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NOW IN PRESS.
The Dilliad, by Irving Varnderblock-Wheedle.—Dictated over the course of one drunken weekend at the author’s country estate, this epic in 24 books celebrates dill and other herbs of the family Umbelliferae. “We may truly say that this latest work is equal to Homer’s in the number of books into which it is divided.” —Journal of Classical Herbal Studies. “The book devoted to Conium maculatum made my hair stand on end.” —Armitrage Bittle, author of Little Poems for Little Minds. “I will never look at fennel the same way again. In fact, I may never look at fennel again at all.” —Johnny Carawayseed, host of “Johnny’s Apiaceae Garden” on YouTube.